Image: Aravis of Calormen and Shasta (Prince Cor) of Archenland
Back in December 2005, as the release date of the film version of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe began to get excitingly close, USA Today ran an article: ‘Is that Lion the King of Kings?’, which specifically examined the debate over whether these stories are Christian, whether non-believing audiences can enjoy them, whether even Christians should take the trouble to lead their children to see whatever Christian elements are there (Note: for an article in which I give my views on this subject of the book and film, check out The Greensboro News and Record right here; and for a blog post where I talk about whether parents should help children see the inner meaning and message of stories, click here).
A sidebar article raised the issue of possible productions of the other Narnia books, and of possible problems that might arise. Andrew Adamson, Wardrobe director, said that, if he were to direct a film version of The Horse and His Boy, he would change one thing, at least: the portrayal of the people of Calormen, a kingdom south of Narnia, as a Muslim culture (as Lewis does in the book).
Adamson, and others interviewed, believe that to follow Lewis at this point would be to ‘exacerbate ethnic tensions and prejudice against Arabs’ in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks by Muslim terrorists. Adamson said he would recast the Calormenes as another race entirely, probably something not even human.
Adamson, for what it is worth, doesn’t actually say that Lewis was a racist, but expresses concern over depicting an East-West civilizational clash on screen. (Not that such a depiction in itself is a problem: as the 2005 film Kingdom of Heaven made clear, you can show Muslims and Christians fighting each other – but you evidently have a moral obligation to depict the Muslims as noble and trustworthy, and the Christians as corrupt and self-serving.)
But many others have charged Lewis, and Tolkien, for his similar portrayal of the southern Haradrim in The Lord of the Rings, with racism.
Two points are in order: first, the Narnia books themselves have never been changed on this point, and yet, despite sales of nearly 100 million, there is no evidence they have caused ‘ethnic tensions’. Perhaps a popular movie will be different, but I see no reason why the Calormenes cannot be portrayed as they are in the books, highlighting not only the crueler aspects of their culture, but those worthy of emulation as well – indeed, Lewis, on one occasion, anyway, portrays one characteristic of Calormene culture as superior to its Western counterpart: namely, its storytelling.
Second, I think this boils down to a failure to understand what Lewis was doing. Anyone who thinks Lewis created the land of Calormen out of some sort of racial vainglory truly does not understand Lewis at all. In the same USA Today article, Alan Jacobs, an English professor at Wheaton College (a Christian institution), weighs in on the controversy. ‘I think Lewis thought he could draw on the ancient tradition in Europe of fearing the Ottoman Empire,’ Jacobs said. ‘So he changed the name, but kept all the imagery of the dangerous Middle East, something everybody in his generation could recognize and respond to. But then things changed, and in the 20th Century all the threats to Europe were internal. And so that whole tradition was swept away.’
What’s wrong with this analysis? On the face of it, Jacobs seems to think that Lewis wrote The Horse and His Boy (the first book in which the Calormenes play a significant part) before he realised (‘But then things changed’) that the greater threats to Europe were going to be internal (Germany, say). This of course is not true, as Jacobs knows: Lewis published The Horse and His Boy in 1954, nearly a decade after the end of World War II, and nearly forty years after Lewis himself fought the ‘internal threat’ of Germany in World War I.
However, I don’t think that is what Jacobs was saying. As it happens, I just finished reading his fine biography of Lewis, The Narnian. Here, he again addresses the subject of the Calormenes, but somewhat more fully than in the USA Today excerpt:
On the face of it, this seems odd: after all, the chief enemies of England in the lifetimes of Tolkien and Lewis made a cult of their blue-eyed, blonde-haired Aryanism. But the imaginations of those two men were shaped before the great wars of the twentieth century: they belonged indeed to an Old Western culture to which the chief threat, for hundreds of years, had been the Ottoman Empire.
Here it is clearer that Jacobs is stating, not that Lewis wrote the book before the fall of the Ottoman Empire, or the rise of internal European threats, but rather that he drew from the older tradition of the ancient enemy of Christendom, the Mohammadens, or Muslims. Just as an aside, if such a choice seems a bit dated from a 1954 point of view, it is, of course, absolutely prescient from a post-2001 point of view.
But more importantly, I think Lewis’s Calormenes are intended to make, not a racial, but a theological point. Consider this: Lewis wrote an almost-forgotten work called Williams and the Arthuriad, a commentary on his friend Charles Williams’s cycle of Arthurian poetry (Taliessin Through Logres and The Region of the Summer Stars). In that work, Lewis comments on one of the poems, The Coming of Palomides, and on Williams’s use of Palomides, a Saracen knight. Williams used the Muslim, according to Lewis, as a symbol of ‘all religions that are afraid of matter and afraid of mystery, [of] all misplaced reverences and misplaced purities that repudiate the body and shrink back from the glowing materialism of the Grail’; in short, because ‘Islam denies the Incarnation.’
A full treatment of Lewis’s, and Williams’s, point would be beside our point. It is enough to say that neither man expressed any racial animosity towards Arabs or Muslims at all. Indeed, during his discussion of "The Coming of Palomides," Lewis describes Muslims as ‘strong, noble, venerable; yet radically mistaken.’ That is, he admired the people, but disagreed with their doctrine.
This is consistent with Lewis’s own portrayal of the Calormenes in The Horse and His Boy, and later, The Last Battle.
Indeed, the Calormenes, far from being a despised race, completely foreign to their Northern neighbours (Narnia and Archenland), are actually close cousins. In his book, A Field Guide to Narnia, Colin Duriez notes that, ‘Calormen originated in the Narnian year 204, when outlaws fled south from Archenland.’ This fact means that the Calormenes are originally blood relatives of both Archenlanders and Narnians (Archenlanders, like Narnians, were descended from Frank I, first king of Narnia (see The Magician’s Nephew). Thus, Narnians, Archenlanders, and Calormenes all descend from the same man, which is as much as to say, God ‘made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth’ (Acts 17:26).
Moreover, Lewis gives us, in the Narnian tales, two noble Calormenes: Aravis (in The Horse and His Boy) and Emeth (in The Last Battle). Granted, their nobility consists, in part, in their rejection of certain aspects of Calormene culture (Aravis leaves an oppressive life in Calormen for freedom in Archenland, and Emeth ultimately rejects the worship of Tash, the Calormene god), but the point is that their nobility, and their acceptance by the white Narnians, has nothing to do with their ethnicity or the colour of their skin. In The Last Battle, Jewel the unicorn says of Emeth, ‘By the Lion's Mane, I almost love this young warrior, Calormene though he be. He is worthy of a better God than Tash.’ Here again, race or skin colour are irrelevant, and only the man’s words and deeds are taken into account. Critics may still cringe at even this 'theological supremacy,' but they may not with any accuracy describe it as racism.
Nor is this all: we could point to the fact that the Calormene Aravis marries Prince Cor of Archenland at the end of The Horse and His Boy, and so, later, becomes the Queen of that country; or that, in The Last Battle, Calormen, and Tashbaan, its capital, are revealed to be a part of Aslan’s true country. No writer with a racist agenda would have included such things in his book.
In short, as Jacobs notes in The Narnian, ‘readers…can tell the difference between, on the one hand, an intentionally hostile depiction of some alien culture and, on the other, the use of cultural differences as a mere plot device.’
