Boreal

FAREWELL POSTINGS

Her Renaissance Man

December 26, 2024

It was shortly after Amazon informed us that, what would grow into a layman’s guide to the Koran encompassing the entire book was now available for sale, that a beaming Lucette told me I was her Renaissance Man. I asked her what she meant by that. She said that, when I lost my job with the government I learned how to prepare and submit legal arguments and appealed my dismissal to the Federal Court and then the Supreme Court of Canada.

After that setback, I learned a new computer language and built the Boreal Shell, and now I had taken on the Koran. She said that, like men of the Renaissance, I did not limit my interest to just one thing and she admired that in me. Her unheralded Renaissance Man, I might add, for which my loving champion blamed the media.

ONLY IN CANADA

I would greet her most mornings with a kiss and a cup of coffee before checking my emails. This Canada Day morning was to be like most mornings, except that we would again have something to be thankful for in living in a country that could be so much more. Eye surgery, necessary due to Sjogren syndrome, had actually improved her vision. No muss, no fuss, no cost; thank you, Tommy Douglas. If only that was enough.

The kiss and coffee were often followed by the same one-word question: "Anything?" 

“No,” I replied.

“Maybe you should just give up,” she said. “You will never get their attention; it’s pointless.”

“If I don’t get their attention then I have failed. In everything I have tried to do, I have failed.”

I expected the usual encouraging words, “No, you have not. You should be proud of what you have accomplished,” and so on and so forth, but not this morning. She paused for a few seconds. “Only in Canada,” she said, “could someone uncover a bunch of thieves and the thieves get to keep the millions they stole, and their jobs, and you lose yours. In any other country when you fought, on your own, because we could not afford a lawyer to try to get your job back, and the Supreme Court granted you a hearing, someone would have noticed.

“In any other country,” she said, “anyone who spent ten years of his life writing what may be one of the best, if not the best book on the Koran, the [mainstream] media would have at least mentioned it.”

The people who demanded an end to my career, and the diplomats who had signed off on my firing—including Ambassador Chrétien, who reluctantly set the process in motion after meeting with his boss, Deputy Minister and future Liberal Minister Marcel Massé—were not your run-of-the-mill petty thieves.

As to the media not believing that a layperson could write a definitive book on the Koran that contained the entire text, I, too, would have found that hard to believe. Yet I agree with her: the media had a responsibility to at least investigate the possibility, considering the importance of the book.

When my Lucette said this, money had become an issue. We had hoped to find a publisher for Pain, Pleasure and Prejudice but that turned out to be an exercise in futility.

Oxford University Press did go as far as promising to submit it to a “jury” until they found I did not have a PhD. In a subsequent email they apologized, but, lo and behold, they had just discovered that an Oxford scholar was completing a manuscript along the same lines as my Layman’s Guide, therefore Pain, Pleasure and Prejudice was no longer in the running.

 A publisher actually sent me a contract to sign, but there was a catch:

Reads well, but shops would be very reluctant to stock something on this subject that isn't by a scholar or authority of some kind or other. If you could get some endorsements.

I immediately thought of Tarek Fatah, author and one of the founders in 2001 of the Muslim Canadian Congress and serving as its communications director and spokesperson until 2006. I had seen him interviewed during the debate over the introduction of Sharia tribunals in the province of Ontario and was impressed.

He was having a book signing at the National Library on Wellington Street. I drew him aside and explained my dilemma. He made it clear that for a Muslim to endorse a book on the Koran, of all books, by a layperson and a non-believer was “a death sentence.” His response and that of a visiting scholar, for all intents and purposes, ended my quest for endorsements that would satisfy a publisher.

Then Rector of Saint Paul’s University, Pierre Hurtubise, a cousin of my Lucette, arranged for me to meet with an eminent Dutch theologian and guest lecturer who had written extensively on Islam and the Koran.

When I met with the man, he didn’t even glance at the manuscript that I placed before him.

 “Does your book present the Koran and the Prophet in a positive light?” he asked.

I replied, "No, not always."

“Then, I am not interested in reading your book.”

He went on to explain that the Bible also contains questionable passages, and for him to endorse a book that offered even mild criticisms of the Koranic text was to invite retaliation in kind, which would only benefit the enemies of religion.

Birds of a feather!