FOREIGN PARTS

has a soft spot for the pan-Arab ideology consigned (as he acknowledges) by everyone else to the proverbial trashcan of history – cannot but shine a stark light on Nasser’s disastrous long-term legacy.

It becomes obvious that Nasser’s many short-term accomplishments are, in retrospect, far outweighed by his penchant for crushing all opponents and surrounding himself with sycophants. Moreover, he eradicated parliamentary democracy, slaughtered and therefore radicalised the Islamist opposition, outlawed the free press, and established a military dictatorship that would provide a role model not only for his successors but also for the likes of Colonel Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein. At least Nasser was not personally corrupt. But it does tell us something important about the Arab world, even if Osman does not discuss the issue, that the only twentieth-century Arab leader who clearly enjoyed the overwhelming support and love of his people never considered standing for election.

The consequences for Egyptian society of Egypt’s 1967 defeat to Israel have been well documented: the emergence of Anwar al-Sadat, who instigated neo-liberal economic policies and, as a counter to the left, championed the Islamists; and a turning inward by an Egyptian populace whose hopes and dreams were betrayed by Nasser. Osman’s best chapters are on the resulting Islamicisation of Egyptian society and the consequent marginalisation of the once culturally embraced and economically crucial Christian minority (all of which he links to Egypt’s diminished role in the Arab world and the rise of Saudi-funded Wahhabi Islam).

Again the contrast is with pre-Nasser Egypt, when progressive Islamist thinking merged with the best of Western intellectual traditions to create a special kind of Egyptianness. By contrast the modernisation of the 1970s and 1980s, Osman writes, ‘unintentionally blended plain Wahhabi Islamism with Western, especially American, popular culture, coexisting in an artificial comfort zone that numbed minds and discouraged courageous examination and intellectual scrutiny’.

There is a famous Egyptian joke: at every fork in the road Nasser went left, al-Sadat went right, but Mubarak says, don’t move. The neo-liberal agenda carried forward under Mubarak’s inert rule, Osman asserts, has vastly increased the number of poor, while lining the pockets of f amilies with t ies to the militar y elite. Meanwhile, the country has lost political direction. The majority of the population, the young, who have never known any leader but Mubarak, inevitably will determine the country’s future. These voices close this well researched and closely argued book. True to style, Osman concludes that things could go either way: a popular upr ising or a kind of creative chaos out of which emerges an Egypt that might once again make its people proud, and be a worthy leader of the Arab world. To order this book at £11.99, see LR bookshop on page 10

JOHN KEAY

LORE OF THE JUNGLE WHERE HORNBILLS FLY: A JOURNEY WITH

THE HEADHUNTERS OF BORNEO

★

By Erik Jensen (I B Tauris 282pp £20)

RITUALISED HEADHUNTING, THOUGH often reported by nineteenth-centur y explorer s , was l ess f requently authenticated. In Asia it seems to have been limited to the Nagas of north-east India and several forest peoples in the south-east Asian archipelago; it probably sold more books than it claimed lives. There was something about healthy young heads being removed as heirlooms and displayed about the house, like family photos on the mantelpiece, that both fascinated and appalled the reading public. Western morality piped up against the practice, rather in the manner of Flanders and Swann’s bolshie young cannibal who was adamant that ‘eating people is wrong’. Whether the victim was killed in battle or foully murdered mattered little. What rankled was treating the human cranium as a trophy, to be cured, shrunk, carved with arabesques and hung prominently. Along with other macabre customs – widow burning, human sacr ifice, infanticide and cannibalism itself – headhunting provided the perfect justification for those civilising interventions that might, perforce or perchance, be prolonged into colonial rule.

This is roughly what happened in that part of Borneo that formed the Brooke family’s raj of Sarawak. As an Iban warrior once explained to a Brooke functionary: ‘White men read books; we hunt heads.’ It was a cultural matter, part r ite of passage, part affir mation of identity. Any malice was almost incidental. Far from dishonouring their trophies, headhunters revered and treasured them. Custom enjoined the practice, and necessity dictated it: individually and collectively, the survival of the Iban was reckoned to depend on the assertion of their retaliatory prowess.

The Brookes thought otherwise. Their swashbuckling enterprise in Sarawak had been officially condoned on the understanding that they were eradicating piracy. Landlubbing predators deserved equally firm treatment – and they got it when fair-haired heads found their way into the hang ing baskets dangling from longhouse rafters. Suppressing headhunting replaced the suppression of piracy as the raison d’être of Brooke rule; armed officialdom probed ever further upr iver; and in the 1920s the Iban joined the third Brooke rajah for the ritual slaughter of a magnificent boar, thereby sealing a treaty that officially ended headhunting in Sarawak. ☛

13

LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2010 / Jan 2011