Muslim-influenced fantasy can take us everywhere from re-imagined versions of Al Andalus to Mars. And this week, Matt Ruff arrives with a new novel, The Mirage, that takes us somewhere else entirely: a world where the United Arab States is the dominant superpower, the state of Israel is located in Central Europe, and a devastating attack by Christian terrorists on Baghdad led the UAS to invade America and try to bring democracy to a country torn between warlords like Donald Rumsfeld, David Koresh, and a mysterious man known as the Quail Hunter. But something strange is happening: as Homeland Security agent Mustafa al Baghdadi and his team interrogate terrorist suspects, they tell a story about a world where everything is reversed. A Baghdad gangster named Saddam Hussein is buying up odd artifacts, including a pack of playing cards where he and his henchmen appear as government officials. And Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Osama bin Laden keeps sending out agents of the Al Qaeda security forces to intervene with everyone else’s work.

In other words, The Mirage is a provocative, timely, fascinating intervention in the way we think about not just the post-September 11 world but about American power and popular culture. The novel is full of funhouse mirror details like a television show with the tagline: “Shafiq: he’s Sunni. Hassan: he’s Shia. They fight crime,” where “episodes typically offered one or more moral lessons, the most common of which was ‘Respect the other People of the Book—even if you don’t like them very much.’” It’s an incredibly effective way of both exposing our debates and politics as ridiculous, and of forcing us to put ourselves in Muslims’ shoes by letting them stand in the footwear of the mostly white, mostly Christian cops, politicians and criminals we see on American television. And the magic, when it comes, is wonderfully lovely and inventive, the result of Ruff having researched not just geopolitics but fantastical belief.

I spoke to Ruff yesterday about breaking out of stereotypical images of Muslims in popular culture, how we decide which terrorist attacks to excuse and which to condemn, and how our beliefs about our ability to change history can lead us astray. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

I’d be curious how you decided which cultural phenomena would survive—or develop naturally—in your alternate history. Personally, I’m glad to hear that Oded Fehr’s still a huge star in the world of The Mirage.

For me, it wasn’t so much a matter of what to include but what to leave out. I’m a huge pop culture fan, so I had tons of ideas that I could have included. It was more a matter of picking and choosing things that were either short and clever and wouldn’t disrupt the plot, or would support it in some way. One obvious case was the Invasion of the Body Snatchers in an alternate version…it was a way of introducing the fact that Samir [one of the Homeland Security agents who works with Mustafa] is fighting his homosexuality…Another idea I had come up with that I didn’t use was the infamous Star Trek mirror world episode. I had thought to have that on TV in the background, the difference being that the Evil Spock would be clean-shaven.

I was also wondering if you could talk a bit about the decision to set the novel in Baghdad instead of, say, Saudi Arabia, and to marginalize oil politics in the novel. Are those resources democratized in the UAS?

There were a lot of specific nuts and bolts questions like that that I left unanswered becuase they didn’t fit what I was doing. The very first incarnation of the book, I had thought to set it in Riyadh. Riyadh became the federal district, it became the alternate Washington, DC, and to have it serve as New York didn’t work. What I wanted to do was offer central roles to people who suffered the real brunt of the War on Terror, so it made sense to make Baghdad Ground Zero because that is Ground Zero of the U.S. response to the War on Terror. These were the folks who I wanted to be in the center of the novel and have their turn on the other side of the looking glass…you’ve go the South representing the more religious vision of what Arabia should be, and then you’ve got Egypt as an alternate, more secular vision but they have lost out on the competition for where the capital should be.
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When I was writing yesterday’s post about dictators and culture, I was reminded of how fascinated I’ve always been by the women who the partners of authoritarian or repressive leaders. They’re a fascinating reminder that second-wavey ideas about women being more peaceful or nurturing than men can be entirely and terrifyingly untrue. And they’re a great way of examining the moral choices that allow such regimes to thrive.

1.The Director: Jiang Qing. I should have mentioned this former actress as a perfect example of the dictatorial effort to set up the government as a source of joy by dominating culture, and you could tell a fabulously scary story about her through a look at a single production. She interfered with the Beijing Opera, interfered what she called “revolutionary plays” ran the film section of Communist China’s propaganda ministry, and even discovered Joan Chen. Glee and Smash would have absolutely nothing on her in a story that could be about both the coercive power of government and the tyranny of people who are convinced they’re artistic visionaries.

2. The Escapee: Malyamu Amin. To a certain extent, The Last King of Scotland is an exploration of the life and death of Kay Amin, Idi Amin’s youngest wife, who is said to have had an abortion go wrong. But the movie isn’t from Kay’s perspective — her mutilated body is the means by which an arrogant young Scottish doctor comes to consciousness. And wouldn’t it be fascinating to see a tyrant through the eyes of his first wife, to try to understand what it must be like to see your husband become a monster — and to watch her make the decision to get out?

3. The Mother: Sajida Khairallah Talfah. Gillian Darmody and the other nightmare mothers of antihero television have precisely nothing on Saddam Hussein’s first wife in terms of producing deeply messed-up. One of her sons, Uday Hussein, was apparently a serial rapist and killed the man he believed introduced Saddam to his second wife at a party for another authoritarian leader’s wife, Suzanne Mubarak. He also ran a nasty little sideline torturing Iraqi athletes who underperformed in world competitions. Her other son, Qusay, managed to keep his crimes at the level of the state, wiping out the environment that was the home to the Marsh Arabs and rare bird species, and cracking down on dissidents. Her husband may have also murdered her brother. What can it be like to be the widow to such a man? The mother to such dead sons? She does play a role in House of Saddam.

4. The Pretender: Magda Goebbels: In a sense, she was the closest thing Germany had to a first lady, because Adolf Hitler hid his relationship with Eva Braun to avoid putting anything in the way of German women’s fantasies. A wealthy divorcee when she married Goebbels, she was humiliated by his affairs (though she had her own) and asked Hitler for permission to divorce his propaganda minister. Ultimately, they stayed together, and Magda supported the regime even though she privately doubted it, made no move to save her Jewish stepfather from death in a concentration camp, and helped kill her six children before killing herself with her husband. Again, it’s not as if there haven’t been portrayals of her on film before. But it would be fascinating and dreadful to see the story from her perspective, to see Magda go from bourgie flirt to participant in a genocidal regime.

5. Eva Peron, again. Sure, we’ve got Evita. And yes, her husband is nowhere near as bad as the spouses of the other women on this list. But in some ways, the more interesting story about Eva Peron is what happened to her after she died. Her enbalmed body was supposed to go on display in a monument that would rival the Statue of Liberty. Instead, it vanished for 16 years, and she ended up buried under another name in Milan. Tomás Eloy Martínez’s Santa Evita turns the mystery into a macabre and fascinating horror, complete with wax replicas and corpse desecration. But either way, it’s a fascinating illustration of how an even more restrictive regime tried to erase the memory of the one that followed it, and to dismantle a cult of personality.

As many people have noted, there’s something fitting about the fact that Vaclav Havel, the playwright who became a liberator, and Kim Jong-Il, the tyrant who used his power to force people to produce movies for and with him, died on the same day. Kim Jong-Il’s movie mania may seem like just another hokey obsession and claim to greatness in a life full of them. And while one of the characteristics of repressive governments is that they crack down on free speech and on artists who produce “subversive” works, he’s hardly the only dictator to seek validation through art he produced himself or through relationships with artists.

There’s Hitler’s collaboration with Leni Reifenstahl on Triumph of the Will, of course — he collaborated and starred in the movie, and was an executive producer. Who needs the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and mawkish watercolors when you can participate in the creation of a groundbreaking work of cinema? Stalin, too, dabbled in movies, keeping an eye on the production of Sergei Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible movies. He also made socialist realism the official artistic movement of the Soviet State with a declaration entitled “On the Reconstruction of Literary and Art Organizations” in 1932. Saddam Hussein wrote cheesy historical romance novels that were meant to be metaphors for his own reign. Ferdinand Marcos hired actress Dovie Beams to play his love interest in a movie about his war exploits, had an affair with her that produced a sex tape scandal (which became an excuse to crack down on his political opposition). Before he ruled Egypt, Hosni Mubarak apparently cameoed in an Egyptian movie, Farewell at Dawn. A critical point in Juan Peron’s rise to power in Argentina was the fundraising efforts he lead in relief of the San Juan earthquake, which happened in collaboration with the country’s creative industry.

Cracking down on artists, and treating their speech as if it functions in the same way as other political speech is a first-level realization for tyrants. If you truly acknowledge and appreciate the particular power art has, of course you want to exploit it to your own ends. And if you’re creating a cult of personality or a cult of the state, it makes sense that you want your people to believe that joy and uplift emanates from the Leader and from the state. This is a reason that dictatorial art is bad, or sentimental: because it’s premised on an idea that isn’t true, that isn’t even really plausible.

Making movies about your own greatness, your historical roots, your role in upholding distinctly Filipino values, doesn’t actually make it so. Providing temporary distractions from the miseries you cause your people doesn’t ameliorate those miseries, or cause them not to matter. Vaclav Havel’s art worked in the opposite direction, becoming a crucible for refining the ideas and principles that informed his dissent, and later his governance. Unsurprisingly, truth makes for more humane politics, and for better art.

Perhaps this is just a game design thing, but I’m intrigued that a new game about the Iranian Revolution starts you out as a diplomatic translator coming into the country with Americans, an invading Iraqi army, or the Taliban, and later as a student protester who is opposed to the Islamic elements of the revolution, rather than letting you play as an Islamic revolutionary. I understand there’s a lot more game play you can get out trying to free American hostages than than you can out of defending an embassy. And that decision makes sense given that the man behind 1979, Navid Khonsari (a Grand Theft Auto director) and his family fled Iran for Canada. But I do think it’s interesting that we’re at a point where it’s more acceptable to have a character team up with Saddam Hussein’s troops than it is to have a character who fights on behalf of the Ayatollahs. Geopolitics are funny. And as a side note, I’d love a narrative game based on Persepolis where you have to figure out how much lipstick you can wear before the Guardians crack down on you.