Muslim P.C. in Cincinnati

By the standards of the pre-September 11, 2001, world, that was hot stuff. But we no longer live in that world. For the Playhouse’s 2003 spring season, Bert Goldstein, the director of educational programming, sought a drama that would bring home the stakes of terrorism and the “effects of war on children.” He suggested O’Malley work from one of the most widely read Newsweek cover stories in recent years. It told the story of the March 2002 suicide bombing carried out by 18-year-old Ayat al-Akhras, a young woman living in the Dehaishe refugee camp, near Bethlehem, that killed (among others) 17-year-old Israeli Rachel Levy, out shopping for sabbath dinner. It was a grisly incident, but as Goldstein would later say of the play’s intended high school audience, “the kids are not babies.” The work was to be called Paradise.

Stern, a New Yorker, has always courted “controversy.” The Playhouse has staged shows by Tim Miller, whom Stern calls “the nation’s leading gay performance artist”; it is showing this season Stephen Sondheim’s Pacific Overtures, which, Stern says, “raises questions of American imperialism at a time when they are again becoming relevant.” This is a city whose arts community looks at the politics of free expression as a struggle between light and darkness: between the cosmopolitan activists who defended Robert Mapplethorpe’s posthumous exhibit at Cincinnati’s Contemporary Arts Center, which included a photo of the artist with a bullwhip jammed in his anus; and the embarrassing galoots in the sheriff’s office who were unsophisticated enough to have it raided. The Playhouse was comfortably on the side of the cosmopolitans.

Of course, one man’s bold experimentation is another’s political correctness–and a cynic might suggest that the Playhouse would be a most inhospitable venue for a play that, say, lauded American imperialism, or made fun of “the nation’s leading gay performance artist.” Such cynics are likely to be more numerous after what happened with Paradise. Because when a dozen hard-line Cincinnati Muslims decided to protest O’Malley’s play before he had even finished writing it, the theater’s leadership quailed, its donor base panicked, the city’s anti-racism bureaucracy began to meddle, its school system scampered for cover from threatened lawsuits, and Paradise collapsed like a house of cards. That’s when Ed Stern called Glyn O’Malley.

O’MALLEY, 51, is an Edward Albee protégé who has built a solid career directing works by Albee and A.R. Gurney, as well as his own plays. He has his fans and his detractors. Verdicts on his work range from “shapeless” to “sweetly affecting.” He knows his way around political controversy and genuine artistic danger. In the mid-1980s, with Albee, he visited Vaclav Havel in Czechoslovakia, at a time when Havel, briefly released from prison, was dividing up his manuscripts and hiding parts of each in separate villages so that Communist authorities could never seize an entire play. O’Malley has since been active in PEN’s Freedom to Write project.

But even for a playwright as seasoned in political drama as O’Malley, it was a tricky assignment to write a work of art that is also “balanced” enough to provoke serious discussion of current events. It was, in fact, a fool’s errand. O’Malley had been given a journalistic and an artistic imperative, and the two were at war. Considering the characters he was meant to describe, he had two choices. He could hug the shore of journalistic reality–to tell the story of a killer and her random victim–which risked offering very little in the way of artistic complexity. Or he could tease out “the other side of the story,” by perversely presenting the case for suicide bombing in a way that would “make people think”–which, while a perfectly defensible artistic course, risked taking the story far enough from reality that it would be too slanted to serve as a basis for discussing current events.

The second course is the one he took in early drafts. “Fatima,” the bomber, is an attractive character. The first thing we learn about her is that she earned a creative writing prize. Like Milton’s Satan, she has the best lines, turning her invective against the Israeli army, and arguing that Jewish victims have turned perpetrators:

“Terrified of the sounds of engines in the night as they bulldoze home after home crushing grandmothers and babies into the rubble. . . . How can you do this? You! You, who know camps and humiliation and hate and death. You know IT! You have suffered it! How can you do this to a whole people? . . . My only answer is that IT has . . . become . . . you.”

The victim, “Sarah,” by contrast, appears as a dippy California JAP, disconnected from her surroundings (“And here is so . . . so . . . different! It’s like, old . . .”). She doesn’t seem to belong in the Holy Land, and is interested only in snapping pictures of hunky guys.

And O’Malley made choices that he clearly hoped would defuse any political controversy. For one, he took religion out of it, to show characters “driven by psychological, physical, emotional factors, not by religion.” When the suicide-bomber recruiter tells Fatima, “Allah in His Mystery locks our brief lives to His service when we submit,” the girl replies: “This is not about Allah!” For American teenagers, O’Malley de-exoticizes the Palestinian cause, transforming a struggle that contains a large component of religious warfare into a more accessible–and possibly more sympathetic–political and socioeconomic one. What’s more, he moves the scene of Rachel/Sarah’s murder from Kiryat Hayovel (a working-class Jerusalem neighborhood near Mount Herzl and Yad Vashem, well within the armistice lines of 1949) to a fortified West Bank settlement protected by security goons. As O’Malley put it: “I’ve worked to show the hard-line point of view from both sides of the conflict.”

This didn’t please everyone. Says one Jewish leader who’s read the play: “I’m annoyed at O’Malley. Without an understanding of jihad and martyrdom, it just seeks to solve everyone’s uncomfortable political problems by removing the content from history.” It must be stressed, though, that these are artistic moves on O’Malley’s part. He is not anti-Israel–either viscerally or ideologically–and as the scandal over his play erupted, he lashed back at those of his opponents who denied Israel’s right to exist. Still, any reader without a parti pris would see the play that emerged after O’Malley’s fifth draft as one slanted to the Palestinian side.

Stern and Goldstein decided to get “input” from some people who knew about the Middle East. Just to make sure there were no egregious or insulting errors of fact or emphasis. And it was at that point that trouble started.

THE PLAYHOUSE sits in the middle of Eden Park at the top of a winding driveway in Mount Adams, an island of century-old townhouses and alleyways and coffee shops almost completely cut off from the rest of Cincinnati by highways. Towering over the city, it is like a chunk of Berkeley that somehow got stranded in the Midwest. Stern and Goldstein hoped to have three or four people come up to the Playhouse on the evening of December 16 to a read-through and discussion of the play.

Goldstein invited his rabbi, Robert Barr, of Congregation Beth Adam; and Elizabeth Frierson, a professor of Middle Eastern studies at the University of Cincinnati. The two were invited for expertise, rather than to represent any “side.” Barr is one of the least sectarian rabbis in the United States. Beth Adam, in fact, is so liberal that in 1994 it became the first congregation to be refused admittance to the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, the national umbrella organization of Reform Judaism.

Frierson is a National Endowment for the Humanities grantee who specializes in Turkey but is also familiar with the Holy Land, and knows Arabic and Hebrew. The Playhouse sent a letter to the Islamic Center of Greater Cincinnati requesting a representative to attend for consulting purposes. The letter stipulated that the play was a work in progress.

A few tables had been pushed together in a rehearsal room in the Playhouse basement for an intimate discussion. Barr and Frierson were already there when the members of the “Muslim community” began arriving. Eventually they would number around a dozen. They were led by Majed Dabdoub, a Palestinian-American structural engineer employed by the city, who was until last November president of the Islamic Association of Greater Cincinnati. There was Dabdoub’s son, two engineering professors from the university, and a few students, two of them girls wearing head coverings. There was Jad Humeidan, the executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) in Ohio, who grew up in the West Bank town of Ramallah, and drove down two hours from Columbus. (Humeidan, who according to news reports has spent much of January urging Muslims resident in the United States not to register with the INS without an attorney, was probably the most level-headed and approachable of the delegation, the non-Muslims agreed.) There was Sharmella Johnson, a Muslim who teaches at the University of Cincinnati’s extension school, who worships with Dabdoub and had been invited to the meeting by Humeidan (although Dabdoub would represent her in a “fact sheet” later presented to the Cincinnati Human Relations Commission as having been invited by the Playhouse). “It was clear there was going to be a really harsh attack,” recalls Stern.

Dabdoub says the Playhouse had been forewarned that a large delegation would be coming. Goldstein says the warning came just minutes before. “Why would you bring 12 people to a reading of a play in progress?” Goldstein asks. “Ask them why they had to do that. It intimidated us. It intimidated the playwright.” Dabdoub thinks the Playhouse is being unreasonable after the fact. “If they didn’t want us, they could have said look, get out.” (In Cincinnati, where political correctness still blows at the same gale force it did elsewhere in the country around 1991, it is unlikely any delegation claiming to represent an ethnic group could be ejected from anywhere without rousing a five-alarm public protest.)

When the reading of the play was over, Stern asked that comment be delayed until after a 15-minute break. (During which O’Malley said to Stern, “I don’t want to go back down there.”) And when the attendees returned, all hell broke loose. Dabdoub talked for 10 or 15 minutes, followed by one of the professors. Of the contentious and often loud back-and-forth that followed, Elizabeth Frierson recalls, “It wasn’t a discussion, it was a Palestinian speak-out, to judge whether the play was acceptable.” (Frierson, according to several present, was interested primarily in soliciting the views of the college-age Muslims, saying to Dabdoub at one point, “I think we’ve heard from you.”)

Almost all of the Muslims present agreed that the play (which, it bears repeating, slants the particulars of the suicide-bombing incident in a way that favors the Palestinian side) was “Zionist propaganda.” Several present say Dabdoub complained that Fatima was portrayed as a “whore,” in that she had a boyfriend. (As Dabdoub later put it, having a boyfriend “is not permitted in Islam.”) One man (curiously, for a Palestinian living in the United States) objected to the portrayal of this boyfriend as wanting to immigrate to the United States, which made him a “traitor”; while others called him a “coward” for urging Fatima to avoid politics. O’Malley was called a racist. At times, the complainants seemed to fault him for not himself following Islamic law. Dabdoub was angry that O’Malley had named the impresario of the suicide bombing “Kafir.” (From Dabdoub’s subsequent memo: “A kafir is one who has rejected God, i.e. the opposite of a Muslim, and no one has the right to call anyone a kafir unless that person has openly declared rejection of God.”) They found the name Fatima objectionable for three reasons: “It is a very common name, it is the name of one of the most loved and respected women in Muslim history, it is a name that is used in a pejorative sense by Israelis in regard to other Israelis who work with Palestinians for peace.” Sharmella Johnson said the play was not appropriate for 7th and 8th graders.

“Another gentlemen scared the s– out of me,” said O’Malley, referring to one of the Cincinnati professors. “He despised it. Very smart man, very decided positions. He concluded everything he said by implying that an adult male strapping bombs on a kid is like Patrick Henry saying: ‘Give me liberty or give me death.'” One character’s offhand description of Middle East violence as “insanity” infuriated another attendee. Some in the group were miffed that O’Malley did not make Fatima spend the day before her suicide bombing praying in a mosque, as they claimed al-Akhras had. More than one witness described the attitude toward Ayat al-Akhras prevailing in the room as “reverent,” and O’Malley noticed that, too. “There was a desire for an idealized version of a suicide bomber,” he said. “I’m not a Muslim. . . . I can’t write that play. I can only suggest that Mr. Dabdoub write it himself.”

“You could see the level of hate in the room,” said Stern. The subject of Zionism kept coming up in pointed ways. According to one Muslim participant, the delegation that came to the Playhouse on December 15 was so large because a rumor had been spreading in the community that the Lazarus Fund–named after the prominent local Jewish family that owns Federated Department Stores–was a “Zionist organization.” At least one person present noted the Jewish surname in the name of the troupe (the Skilken/Brown Touring Company) reading the play. But the odder twist was the belief that Bert Goldstein was somehow the mastermind of every aspect of O’Malley’s play. The kernel out of which this idea arises is the fact that Goldstein suggested the topic to O’Malley. As Rabbi Barr says, “I wish I had the kind of power they’re assigning to Bert.”

Was this anti-Semitism? The Playhouse didn’t say it was, but they believed it was. And yet they gave in. On January 9, Stern wrote in a memo to his trustees:

“Originally, Bert Goldstein was scheduled to direct Paradise. While I am confident that Bert would have given the play an objective staging and presentation, following the reading it was my recommendation that Bert remove himself from the project to avoid any potential appearance of Hebrew bias.”

By the next day, Goldstein thought this was a good idea, too, but both acknowledge that those they sought to placate were implacable. Sitting at his desk in an Irish-knit sweater the following month, Stern granted, too, that such actions could put one on a slippery slope–that this same type of pressure could be used to, for example, reduce the number of Jews at newspapers or networks. “They mentioned at the Playhouse that the leadership of the theater was Jewish,” he recalls. “I talked to Bert the next day and said, if they’re going to talk about you as a Jew . . . If leverage was going to be used this way, I thought, let’s pull that prop out from under them. [He thought,] I can give Bert another project, have him do something else. I just wanted to make this as evenhanded as possible.”

“YOU NEED TO UNDERSTAND,” said Majed Dabdoub over lunch in Cincinnati’s Netherland Hotel, “that when we read the play I was offended as a human being, as a Muslim, as a Palestinian.” This was towards the beginning of one of the odder interviews I have conducted in my journalistic career. Dabdoub had arrived with two unannounced guests–Cecil Thomas, a sympathetic member of the Cincinnati Human Relations Commission, and Zeinab Schwen, the Palestinian-American communications director of the Islamic Center of Greater Cincinnati. When we sat down, he said, “I think it better if we tape-record this interview.”

I apologized and told him I generally just took notes, and didn’t carry a tape recorder. “We can use mine,” he said, and plunked it on the table. Since I was making his acquaintance in the first place precisely because of his attempts to keep a piece of writing from seeing the light of day, and since, often in the course of the Playhouse incident, when two people have given an account of an event and one of them was Dabdoub, the accounts have differed, I quote him here only sparingly.

He was conciliatory. He took back the criticism of O’Malley as racist, preferring to think him “misinformed.” He continued to believe that O’Malley was given the names of his characters by Bert Goldstein. He resented the talk of anti-Semitism that had arisen since the December reading, saying, “A play that will degrade the Jews, we will be against it, and we will be the first to defend them.” He noted that last summer, he and other Palestinian families in Cincinnati (including Schwen) had sponsored visiting kids from Israel.

One thing had been bothering me about the entire Playhouse scandal. How is it that Dabdoub and his fellow protesters were livid about–and even sniffed a conspiracy behind–a play that more or less took their side? It will be clear to anyone who reads through his “fact sheet” on Paradise that Dabdoub–an accomplished and quite possibly brilliant engineer, who has lived in the West for decades now–simply does not understand what literature is in any Western sense. There is a scene just before Fatima decides to blow herself up in which O’Malley shows Israeli soldiers acting like totalitarian ignoramuses, roughing her up and asking her if her father had “bought” her a husband yet. Israelis will be (properly) appalled at this portrayal. One would think Dabdoub would be delighted, since it provides the closest thing to a “rationale” for Fatima’s act. Not a bit of it. The Dabdoub fact sheet calls this scene “objectionable.” Apparently, it demeans a Muslim woman to be placed in this position, even in a work of literature.

And especially by a non-Muslim writer. Dabdoub, Schwen, and Thomas have a lot in common. All three are dogmatic in their “ethnic essentialism,” their belief that only a person of such-and-such a race or culture can understand matters pertaining to that race or culture. This came up again and again at lunch. Thomas, who is black, is of the opinion that non-blacks cannot really understand the black experience. Schwen says that she is “the only one who has a right” to say what her culture is. And Dabdoub seemed to believe that you have to live in occupied Palestine to have an opinion on it.

It’s clear from this that the Dabdoub group has a very different understanding from the other participants of what happened at the December 16 read-through. Dabdoub’s differences with O’Malley can’t be fixed by any amount of editing of his text. The play is an inaccurate–an illegitimate–portrayal of Muslims by the very fact that a non-Muslim wrote it. And if Dabdoub feels bad about having an American literary work prescribe actions for a fictional Israeli infantryman, how must he feel about having a Westerner portray the mind of a suicide bomber?

It was implied–and said–that much of this unpleasantness could have been avoided if O’Malley had simply consulted the Muslim community before deciding what story to tell. Dabdoub is insulted that the Playhouse worked on the script for four months before asking Muslims for input. Schwen suggested an alternative story: that of Asil Assli, an 18-year-old Israeli Arab who belonged to an interfaith friendship group called Seeds for Peace. (Jad Humeidan of CAIR also made this suggestion, although adding that he wouldn’t mind if the Assli story were told alongside the suicide-bombing one.) Assli came to the United States and had a Jewish friend. According to Schwen’s telling, Assli, back home on the West Bank, got caught by accident in a peace march, which Israeli forces were repressing. He ran into an olive grove. Israeli troops shot him in the head at point-blank range while he was still wearing his Seeds for Peace T-shirt. Now, that . . . that’s a story that’ll give you the reality of the Middle East!

Later on, I mentioned that perhaps a study guide along with the play could clarify one of the more contested points. But someone had said that the study guide was going to be written by Bert Goldstein. “Is Goldstein going to bring that up?” Dabdoub asked rhetorically, as Schwen and Thomas nodded an anticipatory no. “I don’t think so,” said Dabdoub.

Why not? The question answers itself.

What is noteworthy, though, is how neatly this racial obsession fits with the peace-love-and-understanding rhetoric of the American diversity movement. At one point in my notes, I see:

. . . find commonalities…

D. “. . . Since September 11, we’ve been working very hard . . . to show that we’re not different. . . . We’re the same. . . . Let’s focus on what we have in common . . .”

Z. “. . . Let’s work to build the community . . .”

D. “. . . We’re doing this for the sake of the children . . .”

Ethnic essentialism sounds a lot like p.c. niceness. “When freedom of speech goes beyond the limit of insulting other people and attacking other religions based on their ethnicity,” Dabdoub has said, “then we have to be very careful.” You can see the end point of p.c. come into focus, and why people of this persuasion are so comfortable with it. If the target of a potential comment is the final arbiter of whether it’s an “insult” or illegitimate, then we live henceforth in an indefinite state of emergency in which freedom of speech is, de facto, suspended.

BUT THERE IS ANOTHER, more constitutional-looking way to press the very same issue. As Jad Humeidan of CAIR points out, there is taxpayer money involved in the Playhouse school program. The school system provides a particularly weak link for those seeking to impose hidden agendas, since the students who make it up are minors. After having approached the Playhouse as an angry Muslim, Dabdoub approached the Sycamore school district as a concerned parent.

The Sycamore school district is prosperous, and among the metropolitan area’s most multiethnic. Dabdoub’s children attend it. (As do Schwen’s.) And in early January, Sycamore High School principal Keith Kelly called the Playhouse to announce he was canceling Paradise. To an interviewer in the Cincinnati Post, Kelly said, “I had enough parents in my community here who felt [the play] was not appropriate and not sensitive to their culture. . . . I thought their arguments were valid.”

But that was not the story either the complainants or the school district wanted to tell as time went on. When I called Kelly, I was rerouted to an extremely savvy school district spokesperson (and former journalist) named Christa Ramsey, who tried to recast the cancellation as a public-health matter. “There were issues in this play that,”–and here Ramsey rolled out her rhetorical H-bomb, “especially in this day and age of Columbine, we have to be aware of. . . . They were proposing that we end this on the note of a teen suicide and send kids back to math class.” But, asked who had raised the complaint, Ramsey replied: “Community members . . . I don’t know if I can identify them.” Kelly’s story is that he heard (from an assistant superintendent) about a complaint from one parent. He said the parent was not Dabdoub, but refused to give the name. (Dabdoub, however, says Kelly called him at home.) Kelly didn’t succeed in contacting the Playhouse. He didn’t air the decision in a public forum. And he didn’t read the play. But he canceled it all the same.

Fear of teenage violence is a perfectly good reason to cancel a school play. But in this instance, it’s a fallback reason and a post-facto rationalization. Sycamore was selling its cancellation of Paradise to the non-Muslim public on the grounds that teen suicide was a mental-health problem. But it was doing so at the behest of at least one parent who just days before had argued that suicide bombing in the Middle East was treated by the play with insufficient respect.

THE RADICALS who showed up at the Playhouse to denounce Paradise on December 16 are to be blamed for their immoderation and for cultural boobery worthy of a Mencken essay. But it must be granted, too, that they could never have achieved so much without the wishy-washiness of the Cincinnati arts, educational, and political establishments. So little was the Dabdoub group challenged that they never even had to prove they represented the Islamic community at all. There are 15,000 Muslims and seven mosques in Cincinnati, according to the Islamic Center, but few voices were heard either applauding or denouncing the attempt to suppress the play.

When Dabdoub took his fact sheet to the Cincinnati Human Relations Commission on January 9, denouncing the play as racist, Bert Goldstein and Playhouse executive director Buzz Ward went along to represent the Playhouse (no Jewish representatives were present, the Jewish Federation of Cincinnati having been given only a few hours’ notice). But there was little brouhaha. Art Shriberg, the Massachusetts-born diversity trainer who is the commission’s chairman, says: “The question of where the Islamic community is is one we were asked. I have not got calls from people who usually call. It’s not like there was a massive complaint.”

The Muslim community was like the dog that had caught the bus. It was only after its hardliners had succeeded in blocking a play about suicide bombings that Cincinnati’s Muslims at large began to realize they were scaring people. And as a community that since September 11, 2001, has been quite scared itself, they began to see the political coup achieved in their name as a kind of crisis.

“The irony,” said one Cincinnati Christian leader, “is that many of the individuals in this community are Americanized. They’ve made it. Ten years ago, they were in some ways more American than they are now.” A counter-Dabdoub tendency began to emerge at one mosque. Inayat Malik, president of the board of trustees of the Islamic Center of Greater Cincinnati, gave an account of the runup to the December 16 meeting that did not jibe with Dabdoub’s. The huge group that answered the Playhouse’s invitation to the reading had presented themselves as Muslims. On January 28, Malik wrote a letter to Stern explaining that, when their invitation had arrived at the mosque, it was viewed as a political matter and directed to Palestinians. “As you are aware,” Malik wrote, “we are a religious organization and not a political one.” He made clear that he viewed the controversy as one between Palestinian-Americans and the Playhouse, not between Muslims and the Playhouse.

But by then the horse had long since left the barn. Parents were threatening to sue the Sycamore school district. Dabdoub, in his appearance at the human relations commission, had threatened to sue if any harm were done to his daughters (who wear head coverings) as a result of the incitement in the play. Stern, fearing for the future of the Playhouse’s educational programs, canceled production of Paradise, scuttling temporarily what he calls “our attempts to do something more than The Little Engine that Could.”

This left Stern in a nearly impossible position. He was getting calls from trustees who believed he had commissioned a racist play, and calls from other trustees who believed he had knuckled under to anti-Semites. He was unable to defend O’Malley as if he were a Mapplethorpe–given that the play was written as an educational tool, by definition subject to political control.

But at just this moment Dabdoub submitted to the commission his “fact sheet” accusing O’Malley of racism, and in so doing left the playwright decidedly disinclined to drop the matter. (“The fact that I was called anti-Islam is very dangerous,” O’Malley said. “People get killed for that.”) So O’Malley began to spread news of what had happened to him. “I have been fatwa’ed,” he wrote in an open letter. He contacted the Drama Guild. He contacted his friends at PEN, who wrote a stinging letter asking Stern why he was backing down when a play announced as “controversial” had provoked controversy.

Stern has decided to hold a public reading of the play on February 18. He and O’Malley will address the audience in the Playhouse’s main 626-seat space, but there will be no open mikes, only written questions. This is a good solution, and necessary for the Playhouse’s self-respect, but it does leave all concerned in an awkward position. O’Malley is going to read a play that is still unfinished. It is a play that has no literary reputation yet, either good or bad, but an enormous political import for Cincinnati. So it risks turning into a piece of ideological performance art.

“We made one tactical decision,” says Stern. “We’re not going to have Muslims and Jews on the stage. We’re not going to turn this into an interfaith dialogue. For me, the play got lost in the politics.” Stern reminds us that this production started out billing itself as a tool to provide dialogue. Dialogue. This is another name for an amoral politics, a politics where two interests clash, and in the absence of right and wrong, the weaker party, or the party less willing to use intimidation, says, “Aw, gee, well, shucks, when you look at it that way, it doesn’t seem to be so unreasonable after all.”

“You know,” says Ed Stern, sitting in his office on a snowy morning, “a friend of mine told me this situation itself would make an interesting play. And I said, ‘I know. It already is. It’s The Crucible.'”

Christopher Caldwell is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.