260 · Hanita Brand
be utopian in nature and still pertain to the here and now. Indeed, though
George Kanazi reminds us that the Greek word utopia means “no-place,”
or “nowhere,”^17 his example of Plato’s Republic is a good case in point:
it is quite evident in the case of this masterpiece that while being uto-
pian, it did not exclude the people of ancient Greece from applying the
author’s proposals and erecting what he thought was a more successful
polity than the one he witnessed around him at the time. In his Republic,
Plato envisioned the order that he actively tried to impose on his society.
While he rejected the kind of polity in which his family had played a dis-
tinguished part, he personally aspired to political activity and a suitable
political post, and tried to influence several rulers to establish a Platonic
government. These are not the acts of a person who only thinks of a no-
place. The ruse of a no-place is only meant to work as a clever device for
persuading people to read his composition and act upon it. And since
Plato wrote in Greek, the people who were supposed to be influenced by
his work were his fellow Greeks. Furthermore, the here and now were
integrally connected to his composition not only as an immediate place
where his principles were supposed to be implemented but also as the
initial source of inspiration and influence on his notions of the ideal re-
public. Thus, as C. M. Bowra states, while Greece was on its way to unite
into a larger political entity in the fourth century bc, “Plato and Aristotle
still regarded the city-state as the logical end of social development and
framed their conceptions of ideal societies on it.”^18
In fact, no author of a utopian work writes it in order not to be heeded
by his fellow citizens. To this we should add the fact that Memoirs was
written in Palestine in 1941, during World War II, according to Isḥāq
Mūsā al-Ḥusseini himself in a letter published in 1983 in the journal Al-
Karmil: in the author’s words, he was writing it “as I looked at the world
from above, while at the time the World War was raging ablaze.”^19 His
words stress the connection to the here and now, albeit on an interna-
tional rather than a national scale, something he repeated in his inter-
view with Abul ̔afiya, after feeling that he might have talked too much
about Palestine: “Don’t connect the book with the problem of the state
of Israel,” he tells his interviewer, “because the book was written in 1940
and has no connection [to it].”^20 Although the state of Israel was not yet
established in 1940–41, the Middle East conflict was very much alive at
the time. I will come back later to discuss the ever-increasing need of
the author to stress the non-Palestinian point. But even if we accept his