A Melville Scholar at Risk: The Disappearance of Prof. Hassan Muayyad

Letter to the Editor A Melville Scholar at Risk: The Disappearance of Prof. Hassan Muayyad To the editor: I learned in December of 2007 that Prof. Hassan Muayyad, an Iraqi Melville scholar, had gone missing in his home town of Mosul, most likely kidnapped and assassinated. I had received a letter from Muayyad exactly five years before, in December of 2002, about three months before the U.S. invasion. He wanted help finding sources for a thesis at the University of Mosul on “Evil in Herman Melville’s Works.” Casting about for ways to respond to this tragedy, I learned about the Scholars at Risk program, which brings endangered scholars from across the world to American campuses, and has brought several from Iraq. I was happy to learn about this program, but also stricken. I knew that Hassan Muayyad was in danger, like any Iraqi civilian; but I did not realize the Scholars at Risk program was available, nor did I sufficiently recognize that Muayyad might become a target because of his learning. I knew that Muayyad’s thesis topic had potentially risky political relevance . Looked at one way, Moby-Dick is a revenger’s tragedy, in which Ahab’s delusory quest to rid the world of evil produces a disaster far in excess of the injury he suffers. He becomes the very thing that he hates, an accomplice of the evil against which he pits himself. At a time when vengeful religious fanatics— Christian and otherwise—are trying to set the terms of world politics, Ahab’s “intense bigotry of purpose” has numerous contemporary exemplars. I have no idea whether Muayyad considered any such contemporary implications of his topic. In the months that followed his initial letter, we carried on an intermittent correspondence, and I learned a little about his project, and a bit more about his experience of post-invasion Iraq. His interests appear to have been broadly religious and philosophical, as were Melville’s: “From the beginning of time,” Muayyad wrote me, “thinkers have pondered ‘the origin of evil’ without arriving at satisfactory answers. So, I am trying to confine the subject by concentrating on certain points and by C
2008 The Authors Journal compilation C
2008 The Melville Society and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 124 L E V I A T H A N A J O U R N A L O F M E L V I L L E S T U D I E S L E T T E R T O E D I T O R As indicated in Prof. Herbert’s letter to Leviathan, Iraqi Melville scholar Hassan Muayyad (at the time a Master’s student at the University of Mosul) wrote to several US scholars seeking research materials related to his thesis. Affixed to the envelop containing his form-letter, postmarked 6 December 2002, is the “Aggression Anniversary” stamp (above) issued in 2002 to commemorate the 1991 US invasion of Iraq. digging deeply into them. In Moby-Dick, I’ll concentrate on Ahab’s obsession with evil and delineate how he defines evil.” When our correspondence resumed following the invasion, Muayyad was grateful to “God Who saves us all” for the survival of his friends and family. “The Iraqi citizen at last finds a glimpse of hope,” says an e-mail of June 2004, “to live under a national sovereignty. Everyone here wishes to live in the shade of peace and democracy which may be achieved by our new government.” He was proud to report that “Mosul is now called by the American soldiers ‘THE JEWEL OF IRAQ,’ on the right bank of the Tigris. On the opposite bank of the river are the ruins of Nineveh, the city of Sennacherib in the 4th century BC.” As Muayyad wrote this, General David Petraeus was ceding the maintenance of civil order in Mosul, which his 101st Airborne Division had managed A J O U R N A L O F M E L V I L L E S T U D I E S 125 E X T R A C T S since June of 2003. Also at this time, Petraeus was expressing dismay at the decision...