Ramesh Balan

My friend and former colleague Dr. Muhammed Nasser Shoukany is no more with us, gone to where he had long ago accepted as an “inevitable and interesting prospect” considering his tall and uncompromising stand as a Muslim. It was not uncommon for Dr. Shoukany to get his hackles up over phrases like good Muslim and bad Muslim, or good Taliban and bad, which would slip in now and then from agency copy. The Muslim stereotype was his enemy, “created by the Orientalists” as he was wont to remind you time and again over a sumptuous weekend dinner of grilled lamb and tiger prawns served always as his favorite main course. And there sprawled out on the carpet every time we gorged on the goodies served in his home library, he would build up his case, taking Fukuyama on, tearing Huntington apart, bringing up Conrad, damning extremist thought and generally getting all worked up over the number of overworked translators we as an English newspaper had on board to help him in his avowed mission of countering Orientalism with the wealth of Arabic literature available to make a convincing case.

Dr. Shoukany’s thesis for his Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Texas at Austin was titled "Orientalism and the Arab Literary Responses: Studies in Ahmad Faris Al-Shidyaq, Charles M. Doughty, Joseph Conrad, Jabra I. Jabra and Tawfiq Yusuf Awwad." The hardbound volume was the culmination of his long and rewarding stay in the US for his college degree and doctorate, a time when, in his words, "I began to better appreciate where I came from and where I should be going." It lay there among a scattering of hundreds of books in his wall-to-wall library at home. Some had sticky notes on and in them, some were gathering dust and some were brand new and unread, stacked up high to seemingly weigh down heavily on his shoulders as he sought to strike a balance between his jobs at the Gazette and at King Abdulaziz University’s Faculty of Arts & Humanities where he was assistant professor at the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature.

So it was with an Edward Said frame of mind that Dr. Shoukany would approach his newsroom responsibilities as Deputy Editor-in-Chief of the Saudi Gazette. Suspicious of agency coverage and analyses of the various conflicts in the region and the Muslim world, he would often bring in his sharp eye for “Orientalist spin” as he would called it, and get the translators all in a tizzy over having to dig up counter reasoning from the vernacular no matter what their deadline was to put the edition to bed.

Dr. Shoukany also edited Nawfidh, a translation-focused periodical on world literature, for several years from 1997, the year before he joined the Gazette and went on to spend over a decade there. Translation was his forté. In fact, it always amazed me how he would get to the beef of a lengthy text in Arabic all at a glance. Such was his grip of translation that his exasperation would often show over verbose and ad verbatim translations done true to the original Arabic style. “That’s why the Palestine issue never gets solved,” he once famously remarked to chuckles all round the frenzied newsroom after killing a scheduled translated story and leaving a huge hole in a special page for the Gazette’s Diwaniya weekly cultural supplement on print day. Diwaniya was his baby with which he raised the bar rather bravely on Saudi cultural discourse in the English press.

Shoukany’s den also had a wall full of books in Arabic. Coming from an Abha family of religious scholarship, he was well read on the faith, and it showed in his inclusive approach and tolerant attitude to life. Many a time when the Gazette had a brush with the notable scholars of the day, on issues trifle and terrifying, it was Shoukany’s cool reasoning that saved the paper. True to his faith and uncompromising in thought and action when push came to shove, Dr. Shoukany was in many ways ahead of his time and perhaps a shade too idealistic for the Saudi newsroom of the troubled decade ‪after 9/11. But he must have gone a contented man for having had a glimpse of the social transformation in the Kingdom that he had assiduously sought for the Saudis and Muslims like him, the likes of who the Orientalist world has yet to appreciate as the majority voice of Islam.

Dr. Shoukany was firm to the end about where he wanted to go, I am told. He had said to his brother Abdullah before he underwent open heart surgery that he either “recovers fully or goes to heaven – I have faith in Allah.”

Rest in peace my trusting friend. Inna lillahi wa inna ilaihi rajeeoon.

– Ramesh Balan worked with Dr. Shoukany in the Saudi Gazette newsroom from 1998 to 2009.