Omar Episode 3

[Francesca Cruiz]

FaroukOmar is a historical Arab series co-produced (2012) by MBC1 and Qatar TV and directed by Hatem Ali, which is based on one of the best companions of Prophet Muhammad (Peace be upon him) and the 2nd Caliph of the Islamic state, Umar Ibn Al-Khattab (May Allah be pleased with him) .

A 30-episode series showcasing the various events during the life of Umar Ibn Al-Khattab (May Allah be pleased with him) from his pre-Islamic days till his assassination. The series depends solely on established historical facts hence didn't face criticism in terms of its content as past movies on similar subjects did.

The series commences with the 23 year of Hijra at Makkah, where the Muslim pilgrims have come together for the Hajj. In midst of them, we can see Umar Ibn Al Khattab (May Allah be pleased with him) supplicating to the Lord while doing the Tawaaf around the Ka'abah. On the return journey to Medinah from Makkah, they pass by a group of people tending to their camels in the desert. Umar (May Allah be pleased with him) reminisces his past days, when he used to tend to his father Al-Khattab's camels in the desert, and how his father used to work him to exhaustion and beat him up if he slackened.

However, now after his embracing Islam how life has changed for him with no one to stand between him and his Lord. The series then takes you on a historical ride as memories come gushing back to Umar (May Allah be pleased with him) about the various events that happened during his lifetime.

Molly (00:00:26) - If you've heard our previous two episodes with James Bradley and Ruthanna Emrys, you'll be familiar with what Ramanan and I do. We invest in technology companies with a climate focus, but outside of work, we discovered that we are both avid readers of climate fiction, and this podcast is where we get to geek out and talk about it and hear from brilliant climate fiction authors.

Ramanan (00:00:46) - And let me state here and think it's especially pertinent today. Molly and I concluded a while ago that all fiction written in the modern age is climate fiction. So when we say climate fiction, it doesn't always have climate tattooed on the forehead. And we're going to get to that in a bit. But this kind of storytelling does help us visualize our planet's future.

It allows us to understand realities that many of us, particularly those worst hit by the climate crisis, which is often not in the West but many of us face today. And these might be relegated to the far ends of our consciousness, but are crucial for us to pay attention to.

Molly (00:01:24) - Today, we are thrilled to have with us Omar El Akkad, an Egyptian Canadian journalist and author whose novel What Strange Paradise, tells the story of people who are effectively climate refugees. Omar is now based in the US but started his journalism career during the war on terror, as they call it, and over the following decade has reported from Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay, and many other locations around the world. His work has earned him a National Newspaper Award for Investigative journalism and the Gulf Penny Award for young journalists.

Ramanan (00:01:52) - He is also a talented fiction and nonfiction writer, and his work has appeared in many newspapers and magazines, including The New York Times, The Guardian, and GQ. He has also won and been nominated for numerous awards for his debut novel, American War.

Ramanan (00:02:14) - Thank you. And I'll kick us off with the biographical question. You graduated from Queens University in Canada with a degree in computer science and then went on to start an incredibly successful journalism career. Not unlike my co-host, Molly.

Omar (00:02:52) - Yeah. I mean, the only thing I've ever been halfway good at is writing. By which I mean that a). I'm terrible at everything else, but that writing is the only thing that even when it kicks my ass, I keep coming back to it, which is, you know, the example I give is that a few years ago I tried taking up guitar playing.

I was like, I'm going to learn how to play the guitar. I learned two and a half chords. I learned A minor and E minor, and it was just too difficult. And I gave up almost immediately. And there's a guitar collecting dust in my closet. Now. Writing is the only thing where even when it kicks my ass, I go back to it. So I knew that from an early age, this was all I wanted to do with my life.

But I come from a particular cultural background where, and I'm sure many kids of immigrants know this, you don't become a writer, you don't become a painter, you don't become a musician, you become an engineer. You become a lawyer, you become a doctor. There's a particular kind of expectation as to what it is you are going to do with your life. And if you enjoy that other stuff, that stuff you do in your spare time. you know, Egypt's most successful author, the guy who has sold more books than anyone else alive in Egypt right now is a dentist and he's a practicing dentist.

Even though he's made millions and millions of dollars off of his books, it was hammered into him from a very young age that writing is this thing you do in your spare time. And he's internalized that to the point where the guy could quit tomorrow and it would make absolutely no difference in his life. But you don't do that. So anyway, when I got to Canada, I was 16. We moved from the Middle East to Canada, and I thought of computer science when I was applying for university as this thing that might be able to split the difference, where programming seemed creative enough and would allow me to flex that muscle in a way that would still meet the obligations that my parents and my sort of upbringing had sort of imposed on me.

And within about two classes, you know. SISK 100, which was the class you take if you were too dumb to take SISK 101, which was the introductory class within about two classes, I realized that I was useless at this, but I was too lazy to change majors.

So I just stopped going to class and instead spent all of my time at the student newspaper. That's where I got my education at university. And I was fortunate enough when I graduated to land an internship at the Globe and Mail, which is the biggest newspaper in Canada and I stayed there. It's the only real job I've ever had. Stayed there for ten years. So I got very, very lucky in that regard because there was no way I was ever going to land a job in computer science. That was never going to happen.

Omar (00:05:53) - Yeah, absolutely. I mean, almost everything I've written in my sort of published fiction age has been influenced in one way or another by my journalism career, not just in the sense of the storylines.

My very first day at the Globe and Mail, this guy, Greg O'Neil, who used to be the dean of the back desk editors, he was the guy who ran the editing operation throughout most of the globe. He sat me down and he said, Listen, kid, I'm going to tell you what I tell every reporter who comes into this building in The Globe and Mail. All reporters are gods and all editors are atheists. And it was his way of explaining to me what was about to happen to my copy. You know, one adjective too many. You try and get a little bit purple with that, and then we're going to slash the hell out of it.

And so you read, for example, my first novel, this book called American War. That's a deeply purple book. Like it's got way too much of that, too much description of what the sky is doing at any given moment. And that's after ten years of having those people beat the purpleness out of me, you know, So you can imagine what I was like at the beginning of that process, right? So just as a writing education, journalism had a huge influence on me.

And also the idea of what the first draft of history looks like. You know, being there on the spot and knowing that a historian is going to make so much more sense of this in a few decades time, but that's not your job. Your job is not to make sense of it in some kind of holistic way. I've had 20 years to think about this kind of sense, but rather to get it down on paper because it's important to get that first draft down.

That's influenced the way I think about a novel, which is almost the exact opposite. So in a weird way, it's like the antagonistic muscle I built up, the antagonistic muscle of reflex, immediate reflex. And it has allowed me to be, I think, much better at the other muscle of the long term, deep thinking approach to something. So I think without journalism, I would have still been writing just as much, but I think it would have not been nearly as useful. The writing would not have been nearly as useful without my journalism education.

Ramanan (00:09:06) - I'm going to dig us into the book. And, you know, before I do that, just to elevate up a little bit, you know, I could describe the book for our audience, but I think they want to hear the author describe it.

Omar (00:09:21) - Yeah, What Strange Paradise is a story of a child refugee who washes up on an unnamed western island somewhere off the coast of Europe. I think of it as a repurposed Peter Pan. That's the story of Peter Pan reinterpreted as the story of a contemporary child refugee. And it's very much about the idea of what we do to the people we consider to be subhuman and how necessary it is in contemporary society to have a growing class of human beings that we consider to be subhuman. But at its core, I think of it as a reinterpreted fairy tale. The story of Peter Pan retold as the story of a contemporary child refugee.

Ramanan (00:10:04) - That explains the puzzling epigraph. So we would note that. An observation, you know, both Molly and I obviously read the book, loved the book, would encourage everyone listening to this podcast to read it for multiple reasons. But you know, we can start with it's just great writing. An observation from the book is, you know, the individual characters seem they just seem very autonomous in an isolated way, unhappy, a sense of emptiness, a longing for something more, not just in a concrete material sense. And we connected this with American ideals around individualism and the damage that can cause.

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