Flexible Fanatics

On Ali and Nino and Mixed Marriages

Dear Republic,

Our ration of work by John Julius Reel continues with this piece, originally submitted for our “hill to die on” series, which beautifully braids together a Spanish romance with Azerbaijan’s greatest novel.

-ROL

FLEXIBLE FANATICS: ON ALI AND NINO AND MIXED MARRIAGES

My Andalusian wife wants no vestiges of our former love affairs in our home. We met when we were both thirty-seven, so that’s a big chunk of our lives to shed.

The last time I returned to the States, I was heading back to New York from my mother’s house in New Hampshire with the remains of my once large library and personal archives. The next morning I had a plane to catch at JFK and knew I could only take one duffel bag back to our small Sevillian apartment.

Since moving to Spain in 2005, I’d already radically whittled down my literary and romantic mementos. Three duffel bags now contained the dearest of the dear—seminal books to revisit, letters and printed emails to and from ex-girlfriends and the guys I used to carouse with, and all the best photos: at the Jersey Shore, at chic New York shindigs, from my high school proms and college cotillions.

With my sister at the wheel, I sat in the back choosing what to throw away: first a tattered first edition box set of The Alexandrian Quartet by Lawrence Durrell, which had mesmerized me in my late twenties but a decade later made me wonder what I’d seen in it; then James Salter’s two earliest novels, The Hunters and Cassada, which lacked the spark of his later work; finally old editions of classics I could find cheap replacements for.

As the discard pile grew, I felt diminished. Back in 1999, when I had an Uzbekistani girlfriend, I’d bought and read Ali and Nino: A Love Story, by Kurban Said. I now picked up the hard-cover copy. The book had waxed lyrical about the ballast we jettison for love and commitments.

I kept the book and jettisoned all keepsakes of my ex.

When I gave the signal, my sister would pull off the highway into a Walmart or Target parking lot to dump the detritus of my life—in phases.

“Talk about a paper trail,” she said.

We left the mouths of a dozen garbage cans gagging on pages, envelopes, and photographs.

Four stops later I had reduced the lot to a single duffel bag that met the airline weight requirement.

*

I recently reread Ali and Nino with interest. Ali Khan, born into a rich and traditional Muslim family in Baku, Azerbaijan at the start of the twentieth century under the sovereignty of Czarist Russia, forges his way between incompatible worlds. He attends the Imperial Russian Humanistic High School, where he is the “spokesman for the Mohammedan pupils” because of his “monkey’s instinct for languages and dialects.” He considers himself part of “the progressive russification of this far borderland” on the edge of the Caspian Sea, colonized for its abundance of oil.

He is in love with Nino Kipiani, “the most beautiful girl in the world,” a Georgian princess and Greek Orthodox Christian. When she asks him uncomfortable questions about his uncle’s harem, or when she proclaims that women should be free to go out in public with “a naked back, a bosom half uncovered,” Khan shrugs it off. In her presence, “all Eastern decency melted away. My hand lost itself in her dark hair.”

The novel does not mince words about Ali Khan’s relatively open but still severe Islamic perspective. When Nino reminds Ali Khan that the harems of the Orient were once filled with captive Christian women, he thinks: “I am a Mohammedan, you are a Christian, you were given to us by God as our legitimate prey.” When he finally informs his revered father that he intends to marry her, the old man advises him: “Do not beat her when she is pregnant.” When Ali Khan seeks the blessing of his fundamentalist friend Seyd Mustafa, asking him whether Nino should convert to Islam, the “wise Mustafa” replies: “Why should she? A creature without soul and intelligence has no faith anyway.”

As the English novelist and critic John Wain writes in the introduction to the Overlook Press edition, the novel makes such beliefs seem “natural and right… in their own setting.” Ali Khan is simply a flexible fanatic.

Despite coming from a family of warriors who “have fallen on the battlefield,” he refuses to enlist when the First World War breaks out, because he believes that to fight for the Czar would be to fight against Caucasia. But history intervenes. When the Czar abdicates and the leaderless Russian troops advance on Baku to pillage it, Ali Khan fights to his last bullet, barely escaping with pregnant Nino to Tehran to wait out the chaos. Later, when the Turks move in to give Azerbaijan a brief period of independence, he returns to serve his new country.

To help the cause, he allows Nino to host the civil servants and officers of the English occupation troops. When an officer compliments him on his “charming wife,” Ali Khan thinks: “A dog of an unbeliever dared to praise openly my wife’s beauty!” Yet seeing Nino as a hostess of infidels both humiliates and sexually excites him: “[W]e sat down on a bed, and I held a European woman in my arms… and it had never been so wonderful before.”

Although Russian schools, love, and geopolitics have combined to make Ali Khan a reluctant man of the world, when the Bolsheviks return to revoke Azerbaijan’s brief independence, even a pregnant wife can’t contain him. He takes a stand and does not budge. “So a man could be a coward and yet die a hero’s death for the country,” he thinks about a fallen comrade. The reader is left to wonder if the same could be applied to Ali Khan.

Ali and Nino: A Love Story is a novel about the pros and cons of compromise, the sad concessions progress requires, and the doubtful, precarious gains.

“What will become of the soul of Asia?” Ali Khan asks his progressive cousin Bahram.

“We’ll build a big house on the far end of Cannon Square… And on the front of the building we’ll write … ‘Museum’.”

*

The question of who wrote Ali and Nino evokes the novel itself: a mosaic shaped by people caught between cultures, loyalties, and historical upheavals.

First published in Vienna in 1937 under the name Kurban Said, a pseudonym, it became forgotten in the outbreak of the Second World War. In 1967, the Russian émigré and artist Jenia Graman came across a copy in Berlin, adored it, and translated it to English as a “labour of love,” at one point suggesting the artless title East-West Love. She predicted correctly that the story “would make a very good film, provided it was not messed up in the process.” The 2016 film, directed by Asif Kapadia, even when literally true to the text of the novel, figuratively betrays its complexity and undermines the tragedy of the ending by giving Ali Khan his daughter too soon. Graman’s work—not the original publication—became the basis for most of the book’s thirty-three translations into other languages.

Then there’s the man long believed to be behind the pseudonym, Lev Nussimbaum, a Jew born in Kiev who claimed to have converted to Islam while living in Baku as a boy. Taking the name Essad Bey, he published sixteen books over six years—1929-1936—including biographies of Stalin, Lenin, Mohammed the Prophet, and Czar Nicholas II, which historians have criticized as fictionalized.

Because the German Writer’s Union had stripped Bey of his membership in 1935, he had fellow author Baroness Elfriede Ehrenfels handle the copyright and facilitate the passage of royalties to him. She may have played a part in polishing the book.

In 2011, the magazine Azerbaijan International published an issue challenging Essad Bey as the “core author,” claiming that on his deathbed from Buerger’s Disease he had “more or less confessed that the manuscript had been… passed to him,” that he just gave it shape and folkloric color by, among other things, sending the characters on trips to Tiflis and Persia.

According to Azerbaijan International, the core author is Yusif Vazir Chamanzaminli, a cradle Muslim eighteen years older than Bey whose personal story, drawn from journals, coincides with Ali Khan’s, and the article suggests that a Jewish classmate might have been the prototype for Nino. Chamanzaminli was Azerbaijan’s ambassador to old Istanbul when the Bolsheviks took control of Baku in 1920. An outspoken critic of the Bolsheviks, he later returned home knowing the risks, was arrested as a counter-revolutionary, and died in the Gulag in 1943, a year after Bey passed away in Positano, Italy, in flight from the Nazis.

It has since come to light that Bey copied the travel sections from the work of the Georgian writer Grigol Robakidze, although perhaps with permission, since the two men knew each other.

At least three men and two women, representing Muslims, Christians, and Jews, seem to have had—for reasons both noble and not—a hand in the genius behind Ali and Nino, with geopolitics cooking the jamboree to a savoriness that sticks to the ribs.

*

In the book, a wizened Georgian offers Ali Khan an explanation for Islamic fanaticism:

… wood men and desert men. The Orient’s dry intoxication comes from the desert, where hot wind and hot sand make men drunk, where the world is simple and without problems. The woods are full of questions.... The desert man … has but one face, and knows but one truth, and that truth fulfils him. The woodsman has many faces. The fanatic comes from the desert, the creator from the woods. Maybe that is the main difference between East and West.

What portion of my Andalusian wife originated in the desert and what portion in the woods? Unlike in the U.S., where we like to break down our roots—a third Irish, a quarter Polish, a quarter Lithuanian, and the rest English, German, and French, in my case—Andalusians have no interest in parts, just the whole, a mestizaje of Phoenician, Greek, Roman, Arabic, Jewish, and Iberian bloodlines and influences.

Let’s call my wife Al-Andalus. Andalusia lived under Islamic rule for almost 800 years and has never—thank God—shaken it off completely. The religious procession in Tehran at the end of Ali and Nino, in which self-proclaimed martyrs flagellate themselves in the streets, is not so far a cry from what Sevillians live day and night all through Holy Week—watered-down fanaticism.

Raised in a dusty coal town during the last years of Generalísimo Francisco Franco’s rule, my wife exalted in saying the Rosary every morning with the nuns at the convent where she spent eight hours a day during the week and then went to Mass on Sundays. Nowadays she makes her living as a yoga instructor, reciting mantras to her students in Sanskrit. Her yoga center—with its hanging tapestries and the lingering scent of incense—makes me think of an alcove oriented toward Mecca.

The governor of Tiflis in Ali and Nino “is all for mixed marriages,” calling it “the physical penetration of the Orient with Western Culture.” My wife is living proof—over centuries—of such a dynamic.

She chose me and I chose her—and so the dynamic continues. We never said vows except before a state magistrate, but my wife expects “a desert man”—minus the harem—who wants but one face, but one woman, and that truth fulfils him. She wears these views on her sleeve, unapologetically, and doesn’t care that cosmopolitan types might consider her gauche for not allowing her husband his moments of romantic nostalgia.

My wife lives surrounded by nostalgia. We currently occupy the apartment where she spent her adolescence and early adulthood. We moved in to take care of her widowed, ailing mother. Daily, my wife sees high school acquaintances in the supermarket and on the bus; she has to cross the street to avoid the ex-boyfriend who embittered her twenties and thirties; neighbors she once saw as babes in arms now drop by with children of their own to visit their aging parents.

To her, all of this is “agua pasada,” nothing to slake her thirst for feelings on. Tradition is different—time-tested and impersonal, a base on which to build.

“You are lucky to live without nostalgia,” she says to me, “in another country, with nothing to remind you of your past, with nothing to keep you from your future”—as though nostalgia made us drunk.

Her die-hard sobriety reminds me of Ali Khan, who, when offered a glass of wine at a dinner party, thinks, “[N]othing in the world, not even Nino’s eyes, could make me drink in public.”

“What did you get from them that you don’t get from me?” my wife says, making the question sound declarative.

Where fidelity is concerned, she is an inflexible fanatic.

I chose well to keep Ali and Nino. It helps me assimilate the mosaic of my life. It’s fuel for the low flame on which the jamboree sits, still simmering.

John Julius Reel’s memoir My Half Orange: A Story of Love and Language in Seville was published by Tortoise Books in 2023. On Substack, he writes in English and Spanish at Rants from a Foreign Land. He reviews books on his YouTube channel Book Rants.

Image: Statue of Ali and Nino in Georgia.