The Salon Interview
Robert Stone: "History has come for us"
The novelist whose book "Damascus Gate" dealt with the clash of faiths in the Middle East discusses terrorism, apocalyptic religion, military culture and the Islam bomb.
Editor's note: This is the first in a new series of Salon interviews with leading political and cultural figures. These interviews will focus on the meaning and ramifications of the Sept. 11 attacks and the events that have followed.
By Andrew Leonard
Nov. 19, 2001 | Somewhere in the Hindu Kush, a Robert Stone character is wandering about -- a journalist, perhaps, with ties to intelligence agencies and a tortured conscience. Or an Afghan freedom fighter who has lost his faith in both Allah and his local warlord, and isn't quite clear just who he is supposed to be aiming his AK-47 at. Or a U.N. aid worker, mixed up in a wild plot that involves tons of opium and a terrorist training camp. And a mystic epiphany. There are always plenty of mystic epiphanies in Stone novels.
We might not know the exact details, but if Stone is involved, we can take a pretty good guess as to how the bigger picture will look: Men and women will be wrestling with faith, politics and the quest for life's deeper meanings. In his novels, which have taken readers from Vietnam, where Stone was a journalist in the 1970s ("Dog Soldiers," 1974, winner of the National Book Award) to Central America ("A Flag for Sunrise," 1977) to Hollywood ("Children of Light," 1985) to the wide-open sea ("Outerbridge Reach," 1992) and, most recently, to the Mideast ("Damascus Gate," 1998), Stone has always given us reluctant heroes caught in the midst of huge contradictions: the messes created by superpower politics, holy wars and personal betrayals. Afghanistan seems tailor-made for Robert Stone.
In "Damascus Gate," the canvas is the clash of millenarian faiths, of Islam and Judaism, in the Holy Land. American proselytizers, Mossad secret agents and intifada warriors conspire and collaborate against a backdrop of passions dating back thousands of years. To the lead character, Lucas, a journalist, "sometimes the entire field of folk seemed alien and hostile, driven by rages he could not comprehend, drunk on hopes he could not imagine. So he could make his way only through questioning, forever inquiring of wild-eyed obsessives the nature of their dreams, their assessment of themselves and their enemies ..."
It is not difficult to see today's current events -- today's "wild-eyed obsessives" driven by rage -- as natural elaborations of the frictions and fault lines working themselves out in "Damascus Gate." As Osama bin Laden hints that he has nuclear weapons, and warlords blitzkrieg down upon the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar, "Damascus Gate's" fantastic plot, which features both a terrorist scheme to blow up Jerusalem's holiest temples and a complicated drugs-for-guns smuggling operation, seems less and less implausible with each passing day. It comes as no surprise that Stone has been paying close attention to the news from Afghanistan.
Are there any resonances between what is currently going on in Afghanistan and what you have been interested in as a writer?
Oh, certainly. Certainly in terms of what "Damascus Gate" is about, which is apocalyptic religion. For a long time it seemed to me that some form of militant Islam was going to challenge the West and particularly the United States. It seemed to me that Arab nationalism -- secular nationalism -- was failing as a vehicle for the Arabs. More and more they've turned to Islam.
And Islam is so severely challenged by Western culture and the current situation. According to the Quran, Muslims are not supposed to tolerate the political rule of infidels -- subjugation to armed infidels -- which tends to be how they view the troops in Saudi Arabia or anywhere, and Israel as well. In fact, they tend to see Israel as the last of the colonial enterprises in Islam. This is the way the people in Hamas talk: They talk of a pure continuous crescent of Islam where Christians and Jews can live; they can be there, but they are not supposed to be in charge of anything. And I think there is some talk about restoring the caliphate, so that there would be a unified Islam ruled by sharia [Islamic law], at least a unified Sunni Islam. I think that something like that ideology is what a guy like bin Laden would have, that the caliphate could somehow be restored and all these kings and dynasties that are post-colonialist and tools of America could be overthrown and America at least forced out of the Middle East as a prelude to the universal spread of Islam.