Posted by Editor
The angry poet.
« Today Islam has been reduced to a soulless ideology of Islamists »
A 18 years old Danish citizen of Palestinian descent, poet and self-proclaimed atheist, has prompted the largest debate on religion in Denmark since the Westergaard cartoon.
Hassan Yahya has been a frequent guest on television programs where he debates other young Muslims, and his willingness to bluntly criticize them in front of outsiders has earned him many accolades from the media. Yahya sold 11,000 copies in the first 24 hours it was available, and over 100,000 have been printed total, making it the most popular Danish poetry publication of all time.
He has been literally attacked by his detractors. the poet was assaulted by a radical Muslim who had previously been convicted of terrorism under Danish law. Later that month he did a reading in Vollsmose, a poverty-stricken suburb of Odense that’s home to many Muslim immigrants. The authorities had so many concerns about the event they gave Yahya bodyguards and made all of Odense a no-fly zone.
The son of Muslim Palestinian immigrants, he grew up in a religious environment but has abandoned religion. He dropped out of school at thirteen but developed a love of literature on his own. His poetry is popular and admired. One professor of literature, Tue Nexo Andersen, described Hassan’s longer works as “almost Walt Whitman-like.
In this short interview where are going to get closer to Hassan’s story and views:
Expressing your views and opinions via poetry is such a unique way to communicate with others. What made Hassan Yahya choose poetry to express his thoughts to the world?
When I was a child, I used to spend a lot of time reading. When I did something stupid, my father used to beat me and lock me up in my room, and that’s how I discovered literature. When I was 13 years old, some rap schools were established in my neighborhood, so I started writing my own texts and rapping them, but after a while I felt like there was something wrong with that form of expression.
I felt like I had to pretend I was a gangster, and rap about beating people up and party stuff. When I wrote something personal, or something more lyrical, the producer would refuse it.
So that was the beginning. I spent a couple of years rapping, and then I just continued to write without rapping. I wrote short stories and such while at school. I started to attend a writing club once every week.
That’s where I was introduced to serious literature and poetry. I read a lot, and Karl Ove Knausgård, a Norwegian writer, made a big impression on me. He writes about his life and his relationship with his father, and I could see a lot of the same things in my relationship with my own father, the violence, the restrictions and so on… the rap thing was the beginning; maybe it had been a journey to find the best way to express myself. From rap to short stories, and other genres, it ended up with poetry.
How do you see people from your generation in Denmark, who have the same background as yours (Muslim family…), and what do they think of you? Did any of them support you?
Most of them are pissed. They feel I discriminate against them, make generalizations about them, and paint a picture which shows that all Muslims are bad people. But of course, I know many Muslims are good people. In Denmark, however, we have many of these areas where many Arabs live. They came from a refugee camp from Lebanon, like my parents, others from Syria or Jordan or another Arab country, but all from refugee camps, and it seems like they have created their own refugee camp here. These people have poor education, and the only thing they know is religion; well they think they know, but the truth as I see it, is that these people are strongly indoctrinated. My parents’ generation, which has indoctrinated mine, had been indoctrinated itself by my grandfathers’ and so on. It seems like the same primitive mindset is reproduced generation after another, but with worse results. If you look at my generation, most of them can’t read or write Arabic. That makes it difficult for them to acquire knowledge about their own religion and history. So they only know what their parents have been told, that the later themselves tell them.
You have been dealing with death threats from Islamists. Most of the Muslims in Denmark received your poems with anger. In your opinion, why do Muslims always react with violence and threats to other people’s opinions?
Every religion thinks that it represents the only truth, especially Islam. So most Muslims think that Islam is the Truth and that other lifestyles are of lesser value, that Muslims are going to heaven while all other human beings to hell. They have a hard time accepting and respecting people who are different from themselves. They count themselves as Muslims, but most of them don’t really pray; they can only kneel insincerely. They love the Eid, but they don’t fast. They don’t practice but they preach to everyone. They only know Al-Fatiha surat (the first chapter in the Quran). They don’t understand the Quran, only some outdated interpretations. They can only comprehend the bad parts of the religion: you are either a believer or an infidel; things are either allowed or forbidden, halal or haram; heaven or hell; they are completely intolerant.
And hypocrisy is everywhere. In those areas that I described earlier, there are crimes, social fraud, and violence. Boys of my generation go to Friday prayer, and the rest of the week they steal, drink alcohol, smoke weed, and fuck Danish girls, until they can get married to some Arab girl.
You mentioned in some of your interviews that Islam needs a reformation. How do you think that would be possible?
Today Islam has been reduced to a soulless ideology of Islamists, a religion of laws mainly dealing with rituals, with permissions and prohibitions, which I think weakens the spiritual message. Is Islam based on rituals or spirituality?
I don’t think any Muslim loses faith in god just because they don’t pray. Both Islamophobic Westerners and Muslim fanatics agree that Islam is a religion of laws, but other aspects of Islamic culture have been overshadowed by rituals and laws. Muslims should not let Imams and religious institutions define their religion, and have such power, driven by political agendas, to speak in the name of God.
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