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About Dr Max Malik
Although Dr Malik has always had a creative soul and spent his early years listening intently in awe to memorable stories and fairytales from his mother, it was a career in medicine that lay ahead for the start of his working life. A strong academic, Dr. Malik was the first pupil to pass his 11-plus in his inner-city school in Birmingham in the school’s 100 year history. He went on to study medicine at a Scottish University and achieved great success in hospitals and then as GP. But it was the allure of creative writing that made the fire roar inside him and after a brush with death in 2004, Dr. Malik knew it was time to put his writing passion into practice and take a break from a successful and prosperous career in medicine to pursue his writing dream.
‘You dirty f***ing Paki,’ says Bruce, as he throws my satchel across one of the busiest roads in Birmingham. I dodge the cars and gather my dirtied books from the tarmac and my satchel from the other side of the dual carriageway. I have no choice but to wait in the same bus shelter, not to shelter from the rain, but I have to get to school. There is no other way. I know what Bruce will do next. He is huge, almost a grown man and I am an eleven-year-old skinny sparrow of a boy. He grabs my blazer collars and shoves his face into mine. ‘Get out of my country, you dirty f***ing Paki!’ Then he hawks and spits. Thick spheres of saliva. Into my face and onto my glasses.
I wake up trembling, fumbling for my spectacles. But Bruce is not a nightmare. He is the reality of my everyday morning, my Weetabix reality that I regurgitate behind the bus stop when he follows the spitting with metronomic flurries of punches to my stomach. He is my morning salutation to the sky as I lie on my back holding my midriff; he is my cross that I carry for being one of only three non-white boys out of more than six hundred in my school. For daring to pass the exam, for daring to attend a selective school.
I did not wonder at that time why Bruce thought this was his country and not mine. Why colour mattered so much. All I knew was the overwhelming disgust a reviled feeling of loss, worse than rejection, sub human, subsumed into disgrace. I was a failure.
I remember one of the happiest days in those years was realising Bruce was sick, and not attending school for a few weeks. In fact, my English master asked me why my books were not so muddy as before. And why I had stopped writing him poetry. Bamber, my English master would give me after school appraisals for poetry because I had shown an interest. He never did ask me why I wrote poetry and if he had I would not have been able to answer him. At that time I could not say why I wrote poetry after being battered and spat on. How the poetry would come after the abuse. I would get my English exercise book out and write. It was not only the books that were dirty. The rabid bite of racism leaves its inevitable scars but I hope it did not alter my aspiration to humanity.
On that note I saw an emergency patient today. He said he did not want to be treated by a non-British doctor, so I nodded, without verbalising that of course I was as British as he was, and stayed in my seat. Then he said he did not want to be treated by a non-white doctor. So I got up and left, only to be called ten minutes later to be informed by the nursing staff that he was in agony. He would accept me as his doctor because I seemed to be a ‘civilised sort of fellow’.
I wish I could say that story about Bruce and the patient are ones I made up because that is the job of the writer. But they are not stories. They are the truth. From a long line of stories that I have never told before. I do not believe in a blame culture or a helpless victim mentality. I believe the focus and ability to control and so change our lives is anchored within us. Responsibility does not lie with anyone else. Perhaps what Bruce was demonstrating with his eloquence of action was the individual product of the Clash of Civilisations.
At the Battle of Arsuf September 7 1191, during the Third Crusade, when Richard lost his horse Saladin sent him two as replacements. When King Richard I of England was sick with fever Saladin sent him fruits and snow. When Saladin died he had one gold piece and a few pieces of silver. He was buried in the mausoleum outside the Umayyad Mosque. Seven centuries later, Emperor Wilhelm II of Germany, donated a marble sarcophagus. This lies empty. To this day Saladin lies buried in the wooden one. Richard the Lionheart had taken command of his own army when he was aged sixteen. Before he died he forgave the man who deliberately shot him with a crossbow.
There seems to be a determination on both sides of the divide to continue the Crusades, to ensure that the Clash of Civilisations lives on. In Iraq, Afghanistan, and it is no accident a war that epitomises barbarity is unfolding in one of the citadels of historical civilisation, in Damascus, the burial place of Saladin.
I remember I was working as a RAF doctor in 2001 when George Bush so infamously made his comment about the crusade and war on terror.
‘’I am driven with a mission from God. God would tell me, ‘George go and fight these terrorists in Afghanistan’. And I did. And then God would tell me ‘George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq’. And I did. And now, again, I feel God’s words coming to me, ‘Go get the Palestinians their state and get the Israelis their security, and get peace in the Middle East’. And, by God, I’m gonna do it.” Sharm el-Sheikh, August 2003.
As Osama bin Ladin said, ‘I’m fighting so I can die a martyr and go to heaven to meet God. Our fight now is against the Americans.’
Killing with a sword in battle is hard. It requires courage to conquer your fears and even more to taste the spittle of your enemy before you plunge the blade through the pulsing heart of another human. It requires extreme conviction to look into their eyes as the embers of life are extinguished. But pushing a button does not. A child can push a button, a drone can bomb thousands of miles away and kill hundreds with one strike and the child would feel not even the buzzing sensation he gets with his video game.
At the extremes the extremists become of one hue. There is no difference discernible between midnight black and jet black of midnight. The circle must converge.
This story of the Clash of Civilisations, ‘Us and Them’ has been on-going for centuries, it has been watered by the politics of hate, fed by the fires of fear so that is has become the justification for the invasion of Iraq, the war in Afghanistan and Tony Blair has publically said that Iran should be attacked, all under the same premise.
Is there a Clash of Civilisations? Are the Crusades still alive today? Is there an inevitable ‘Us and Them’?
George Bush does not represent me and Osama bin Ladin represents me even less. I do not have to be with you or against you, George. Almost all thinking people of any creed, who aspire to represent the essence of humanity, do not believe in the destruction of another race or religion.
I believe there is another way. In my view there is a third way, a thinking man’s way. What is the Third Way? Ceasefire and reconciliation.
Civilisation, in fact, has been a continuum, sometimes one may attain superiority and then the other may have the ascendency. There can be no zenith without a nadir. Both grow and depend on each other. There can be no meaningful Europe without the Moor. There is no meaningful modern life without the civilisation of America. As Sebastian says in my novel, The Butterfly Hunter, there really is only one civilisation, the civilisation of humanity. I write because there is something to say. Not just a story to tell, which is inevitable for a writer. But an imperative, a driving force that makes the pen furious over the page. The description, the language, the nuances, and the poetry all that is fine and sometimes even beautiful. However, primarily and ultimately I want my words to change attitudes and feelings and so behaviours. To change lives.
Race, culture and religion are simple excuses to perpetuate the insider-outsider mind set. Perhaps because we evolved living in caves and then villages, we naturally viewed anyone from outside the cave as different, a threat and therefore to be never accepted, to be treated with hostility and basically to be killed to ensure the survival of the cave dwellers. Later when village life became possible, the village and its laws and systems had to be protected to ensure its survival. Anyone who threatened this undermined the integrity of the unit and survival of the individuals.
Civilisation, for all its great achievements: the beauties of fine art, the brush stroke of Michelangelo, God’s communion with man, Mozart moving the soul to tears, or literature of Shakespeare that continues to examine better than any psychoanalyst the true motivations of people, despite all of this we are in infantile period of social human development.
The barbarity of civilisation: there may come a time when to exploit, kill and invade other countries, or to demean, enslave by proxy or abuse a people and their resources by military means becomes abhorrent. I do not think that history will be kind to the perpetrators of the Iraq war, or drone attacks or the subjugation of the Palestinians. And history will be even more condemnatory to the suicide bombers of Al Qaida and their mullah masters: the high priests that have surmounted the highest pagan ziggurats of inhumanity
The insider-outsider mentality no longer applies because we do not live in caves and insular villages – if attitudes and behaviour towards racism and homosexuality can change so drastically then why cannot attitudes towards religions and nations change? We are still in the foetal stage of development; in the infantile fearful selfishness of civilisation – economic and technological evolution has far outstripped social development.
Is there really a clash of civilisations, if there is, must there be one?
After being beaten up I hid myself from my friends and started writing. Poetry. I did not know why. Or understand. It was not cathartic. It was not healing. It was necessary. I had to write. Maybe Bruce was result of centuries of passed down hatred as a result of the Clash of Civilisations. Maybe Bruce did not see it that way. But down the generations his parents imbibed this attitude into him.
These experiences and the lessons of my life distil into The Butterfly Hunter. That’s why I write. Because I have to write. The imperative to tell a story that matters is overwhelming.
I wish in some ways what follows was a neat coincidence, dreamed up by a writer, to prove a convenient point in a novel. But this is the truth.
Some years ago I started running a writing group. It was small but it was good and it was honest. One day I received an email from a man saying he was a poet telling me that he had heard about the group and it was his dream to be a writer. Although it was a closed group, but there was something about his tone made me think that I should allow the poet in. And so I discussed it at the next meeting and we agreed to accept him.
The poet has now been coming to the group meetings for seven years. I no longer write poetry, not to read in public anyway, but every time I read anything the man sits up, he leans forward and stares at me, unblinking. This man, the poet writes only poetry. After every reading of his verse his gaze burns with antediluvian fire, unevolved, simian. He has a fuel that combusts in his eyes when he reads.
I never criticise his poems. They are too raw, passion like pomegranate seeds pour red and stain my soul.
He knows why I never say anything.
He knows that I know.
That is why he looks straight at me when he reads his poetry.
The poet is Bruce.
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Dr Max Malik is a medical doctor and an award winning writer, as well as an established expert on ‘The Clash of Civilistions’ and also a commentator on international relations between the West and the Muslim World.
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