From the WSJ Opinion Archives
CITIZEN OF THE WORLD
La Fallaci
A prophet of decline passes from the scene.
NEW YORK--Even as Oriana Fallaci breathed her last through lungs marinaded in enough nicotine to sink a ship (leave alone a birdlike creature who weighed no more than 80 pounds at best, pearl necklace included), protests rumbled in the Muslim world over a recent utterance by Pope Benedict XVI in which he faulted the prophet, Muhammad, for exhorting his followers to spread Islam by the sword. Effigies of the pope have been torched by mobs, although the irruption has also included unintended drollery; a spokeswoman for the Musharraf dispensation in Pakistan observed yesterday that "anyone who describes Islam as a religion as intolerant encourages violence."
Once more, the West has collided with the Muslim world; and once more, it is the West that is scrambling to soothe "the hurt." Already, the Vatican has issued a statement that "it was certainly not the intention of the Holy Father to . . . offend the sensibilities of Muslim faithful." Everyone, on tenterhooks, now waits to see if the pope himself will apologize (although the quote in question is something even the silkiest apologizer couldn't possibly get around). So it is tempting to believe that, on Thursday night, Ms. Fallaci--peering through her hospital window at this latest circus of pieties and outrage--simply said to herself, "I really can't take this any longer. I'm outta here."
Oriana Fallaci was the toughest nut, the primordial female ballbuster journalist. Her reputation was made through a series of innovatively intrusive, relentlessly probing interviews, in which she took on--and bested--some of the most prominent male politicians of the last third of the 20th century. She was not always the nicest gal, as I found in my experience as her editor for two monumental op-ed pieces that she wrote for this page in 2003 (they appear here and here). In fact, she was, by some considerable distance, the most difficult, exasperating and intransigent author I have ever worked with. She was also, by some distance, the most exhilarating, and the most perfectionist.
"La Fallaci," as she liked to call herself--yes, immodestly; but Italian divas don't do self-deprecation--became in her last years a fierce, even apocalyptic, critic of Islam. She feared the unassimilated--and, she believed, unassimilable--Muslim immigrants in the West, and she feared them to distraction. Above all, she despised Europe's political and cultural elites who were responsible--in her view--for turning Europe into "a colony of Islam." In a Spenglerian interview for this page last June, she told me: "The moment you give up your principles, and your values . . . the moment you laugh at those principles, and those values, you are dead, your culture is dead, your civilization is dead. Period."
She was part Cassandra, part Cordelia--though only part, as La Fallaci, while blunt of speech, had none of the natural mildness of Lear's youngest daughter. She could be charming, however, and surprisingly gentle, as I once discovered. I had gone to see her, in March 2003, at her townhouse on the Upper East Side--she loved New York, and lived here willingly even before an indictment for "vilifying Islam," issued by an Italian judge, made it impossible for her to live without fear of arrest in her native Tuscany--and I had taken my 4-year-old boy with me. I was late, and she chided me, her voice deep and gruff, etched with the havoc of a lifetime of cigarettes. Her illnesses had taken their toll on her appearance, and the effect of it all--a scolding face not in its first bloom, an assertive voice that could be mistaken for a hectoring one--put my son in such a panic that he hid behind my leg and started to cry. The sight of this so melted her that she changed, in an instant, from aggressor to angel, taking the boy by the hand and speaking to him in strange Italian juvenilia. Together, hand in hand, they went up the stairs and straight to a cupboard from where she pulled a small gold-wrapped box--exquisite, expensive--of chocolates. These she gave to my son--now putty in her hands--and the crisis passed. He sat in a corner of her living room, beside a life-size bronze statue of a large dog, and proceeded to eat the entire box (of six chocolates) with immense satisfaction. (I noted later that they had been filled with cognac.)
Ultimately, it has to be said that her fear of Islam, and of Muslims, unhinged her. Or, more accurately, disconcerted her to the point where she became unable to distinguish the incendiary from the provocative. An expert diagnostician she may have been, but her bedside manner--her constant references to Muslim immigrants as "invaders," to Europe as "Eurabia"--undermined her ability to achieve the goal she sought, which was to awaken the West to the very real dangers of cultural conflict in its midst.
Here's an illustration of what I mean, from a letter she wrote to me in March of this year. (I have left what she described as her "Fallaci English" unedited.) "In the speech I gave at the Italian consulate in New York to accept one of the four golden medals I have received in the last two months, I told that I had drawn a cartoon on the Prophet and his nine wives including the 9 year old one and his sixteen concubines including the she-camel. But I had not published it because I had not been able to draw well the she-camel. (True). The author of the booklet which asks the Moslems to eliminate me in accord with four Suras of the Koran even sued me . . . Meaning now in Italy they even appeal to the Italian law to incriminate an Italian citizen for a 'vilifying' cartoon that nobody has seen."
This is acid, bitter, marvelously funny. Oriana Fallaci was very brave. Perhaps a little too brave. But now is not the time to judge her by proportions.
Mr. Varadarajan is editorial features editor of The Wall Street Journal.
