Top honour for Amin Maalouf

Beirut: Amin Maalouf, the prolific French-Lebanese writer whose opus The Crusades Through Arab Eyes (1983) provided rare insights into his analytical skills, was formally elevated to the status of an “immortal” by the prestigious Académie Française on Thursday.

The Académie’s 40 members, whose primary duty is to defend the integrity of the French language, was created by Cardinal Armand Jean du Plessis, better known as Cardinal Richelieu, in 1635.
As King Louis XIII’s chief minister, the clergyman was far more than a man of the cloth, effectively becoming the world’s first Prime Minister. To serve his multi-faceted objectives, the Cardinal used the Académie as a centre of power and, over the years, 719 individuals were entrusted with such authority that undeniably influenced French society. Its more renowned members included Voltaire, Victor Hugo, Louis Pasteur and Alexandre Dumas (Jr).

Very few foreign subjects were granted the prestige of joining the immortals. Before Amin Maalouf, the first Arab to sit at the Académie, the President of Senegal, Léopold Sédar Senghor (1983-2001) was granted the honour.

Maalouf used Arab accounts in many of his writings as he highlighted the clashes that confronted Eastern and Western cultures. He relied on his rich background to create lasting images. In the first chapter of The Crusades, for example, Maalouf quotes Saladin who said: “Behold with what obstinacy they fight for their religion, while we, the Muslims, show no enthusiasm for waging holy war.”

Traumatic encounters

The conflict between Christianity and Islam, consequently, took on dramatic characteristics both in the author’s writings as well as in real life. Yet, inasmuch as Maalouf argued it was from the Crusades that the West in general was associated with the forces of progress, Arabs became identified as “victims” due to traumatic encounters with alien cultures, the pain of which lingered throughout the centuries.

Amin Maalouf was born in Beirut on February 25, 1949, to a Maronite mother and a Greek Catholic father. After French Jesuit schools, followed by advanced degrees in sociology and economics, the young man dabbled in journalism, entering An Nahar newspaper when he was barely 22.

He travelled widely, to India, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Somalia, Kenya, Yemen and Algeria, covering conflicts that eventually engulfed his native land.

In 1975, a civil war opened permanent wounds in Lebanon, which led Amin to emigrate with his wife Andrée and three children to Paris in 1977.

Denied peace and success in his own country, Maalouf settled on a literary career that earned him fame and fortune. In 1993 he received the Prix Goncourt — usually awarded to the author of “the best and most imaginative prose work of the year”— for The Rock of Tanios, a novel set in 19th century Lebanon in which Shaykh Francis, a Christian Arab, and his illegitimate offspring, Tanios, confront demons that engage both men with “local myths, worldwide political games, treachery and love.”

In 2010, Maalouf received Spain’s esteemed Prince Asturias Award in Literature, further recognising his borderless reach.

Inspiration

In fact, while the Arab native writes in French, his books have been translated into more than 20 languages. Interestingly, Maalouf seeks his inspiration in the Channel Islands, where he writes his novels in a little fisherman’s house.

Dressed in the Academician’s richly ornate “green coat” — a dark blue or black coat embroidered with green and gold olive branches, hence the name — and carrying a uniquely manufactured sword adorned with the candidate’s preferred symbols of his double culture, Maalouf’s most recent choices revealed his genius.

On one side of the blade, he asked that the beginning of a poem written by his father Rushdi, be inscribed: “My God, I ask on their behalf... [“Rabbi, sa’altukah bismihinna…”], along with the names of his children: Rushdi, Tareq and Ziad.

On the outside sleeve of the sword, engraved medallions of the majestic Cedar, the threatened symbol of Lebanon, and an image of Marianne, the national emblem of France and an allegory of liberty and reason represented in the face of a woman, were also engraved.

The guard of the sword encrusted a sculpture representing the rape of Europa and at the very top, a turquoise that belonged to his mother, Odette.

By paying attention to such details, Maalouf honoured those who were closest to him and the two countries — France and Lebanon — that allowed him to excel. Yet another tour de force.