From world politics to the most intimate story: in search of what touches at Writers Unlimited '15

Writers Unlimited's Friday night kicked off with an Islam debate. In no uncertain terms, religious historian Karen Armstrong argued that Islam and jihad are not the same thing. There are only 41 jihads in the entire Quran, most of which are the peaceful struggle to help the poor when one is destitute oneself. But after the Paris attacks, Armstrong often seems to be asked about violence and faith. In rapid succession, she denies the connection, starting with the Crusades, in which Christian violence was met with extreme restraint and ending with 9/11, turning point in thinking about Islam. 93% of Muslims disapproved of those attacks from a religious point of view. 7% approved of them, mostly from a political point of view. Her conclusion, briefly, violence is politically motivated, not religious.

That political context is what worries her. Freedom of speech is a canonised concept in the West where we invoke the Enlightenment, about which she notes delicately that not everyone could enjoy it directly. Slaves and the original inhabitants of the Americas, for example, were property and could be treated as such. So our idea of freedom is grounded in inequality and fuelled by our colonial past. Mix this with geopolitics in the Middle East and you have and toxic and explosive mixture.

Armstrong solution sounds simple but impossible: recognise that the West is not the only victim of Islamic terror, but da the Islamic world itself suffers the most. But more importantly: secularise. Only in a secular world, where faith and power are separated, can peace exist.
In the discussion to her lecture, Armstrong was firmly questioned by Paul Scheffer, whose answer is not secularisation but citizenship for all. But actually the Egyptian writer Muhammad Aladdin had the only real answer: address us as human beings.

Tear Down the Wall

A few minutes later, the younger guard (Muhammead Aladdin again, accompanied by cartoonist Leela Corman and Nina Weijers) notes that they have actually grown a little tired of Charlie Hebdo. What they need now is silence, incubation time. They need that to make sense of the world and to create art out of everyday things. When asked whether they need to explore their own boundaries to write about that, an unequivocal no comes. The good thing about being a writer is precisely that you can explore worlds behind your table without exposing yourself to them. Weijers and Corman confess that their inability to do other things has to do with their authorship. Weijers is not a visual artist but had wanted to be one. In her debut novel, she explores personal boundaries of conceptual art. And Corman would rather have been a guitarist. But now she is a cartoonist and belly dancer. Seems like a close second to me anyway.

Two men with an opinion

Actually, the best part of the evening was a two-way conversation between Maxim Februari and Martijn Knol. Two men on a stage talking to each other about what they think is beautiful literature. February files a favourite book of Knol's by exposing the piled-up grandiose metaphors as the work of the brightest boy in the class and contrasts it with an excerpt by Virginia Woolf. The opposite of hyperbole. How small it can be. And it is precisely in that intimacy that they get to the heart of the matter. Good literature lifts you up. Or,as Knol describes it, it changes something about the wiring of your brain, it changes your perception.

The kumpulan on Saturday morning goes back to the core of the festival, which began in 1995 as Indian Winter Nights. A kumpulan is a get-together, often with family or me friends and usually with food. A host of Indian writers and 1 Indonesian writer talk about their kumpulan and read from their work. Uprooting and food go hand in hand. Adriaan van Dis is a master storyteller and lets us look into his family album, the source of his authorship. Karin Amatmoekrim tells a wonderful story about how family stories are created for her. Dinar Rahayu shows us what kumpulans are like now: tasting all kinds of coffee with friends and telling ghost stories.
Nadja Hupscher and Bodil de la Parra are hostesses. They close with Burning Sand. The audience sings along gratefully.