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Rizpah protecting the bodies of her sons, by George Becker, left; William Cullen Bryant, right

With Gaza ablaze, the political woes of contemporary Palestinians continue to echo past tragedies on the same blood-drenched ground. Consider the vengeance of the Gibeonites, both a purge and a scourge in the early days of Israel’s King David. Setting aside who is who for the moment, the biblical account recorded in the book of II Samuel describes a weak David with a struggling economy (called a famine in those days). The Gibeonites, who sought vengeance for their slaughter by the former King Saul, demanded seven of his sons, and David agreed. The princes were soon hanged in eye-for-an-eye justice. Yet the queen mother of two of the sons spent five months protecting the bodies from being devoured by beasts not shaped like humans. Her name was Rizpah and she can be seen as a maternal heroine or a distraught widow.

Like so many of these seemingly sacred stories, almost any moral can be teased out of the narrative. Should the lesson be “Do not make deals with the enemy, even when you are weak”? I can see both supporters of Hamas and Israeli hardliners applauding the message. Or might it be possible to read the story in a more sane hindsight as a referendum on the futility of vengeance? Were the matter simply an eye for an eye, it could theoretically stop after the first act of vengeance, but this region has seen an infinity of eye-gouging that no blessed peacemakers have yet been able to stop. My own preference is for Rizpah fighting off the vultures of violence, less an act of protecting only one’s own than defiance of the perpetual killing that makes martyrdom a virtue on both sides.

Once again, I prefer to tune out the talking heads and let a poet of the past speak: (more…)

This is my first attempt to translate Indonesian poetry. I was so taken with it, that I just had to try. I met the author, the headmaster of an Islamic boarding school in his home. He had recently read his poem at a public forum and read it again for me. I asked him (and would have have begged him if necessary) for permission to translate and post the poem. When Westerners look for strong statements against terrorism, maybe we should turn to poetry.

Allahu Akbar (Almighty God)
By Abah Faqih Muntaha,
Headmaster, Pesantren Al-Asy’ariyyah, Wonosobo, Central Java, Indonesia
Translated by Ronald Lukens-Bull, Ph.D.

Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar.
It should be that when we hear those words, say those words
Our heart quivers and we feel very small
We should feel insignificant and afraid to sin
With Your greatness, God
We should not feel arrogant,
Or look for unlimited strength.
They should not cause fear because of violence,
Sadism, cruelty, and even hatred.

Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar.
It should spread rejuvenation, tranquility, and obedience to God.
It should not create the impression that Islam is a religion of terrorists,
Roughnecks, sadists, trouble-makers, fear mongers,
And even murderers.

With the Word of God, who is great
Allahu Akbar with all His Power
Makes evil men good,
Refined, and humble.

With Allahu Akbar, people should become wise
To create a better future,
a future that is patriotic, religious, and civilized.

But we should not just think in terms of one year, 2 years, or ten years.
But in terms of the Eternal.

A bomb dropped by an Israeli air force F-16 jet exploding in Beit Hanoun, north of the Gaza Strip.

The Siege of Gaza: Barack Obama’s First ‘Test’?
John L. Esposito, Middle East Online, December 31, 2008

Until the Israeli government gets a message that the international community will hold Israel to the same standards as it does other nations and the Palestinians, there can be no hope for peace negotiations to work.

While some had predicted Barack Obama would be “tested” early in his administration by America’s enemy Osama, Obama’s first major foreign policy “test” has instead come from America’s ally, Israel. (more…)

Lithograph letter illustrating The Child’s Bible Illustrated from a 19th century serial publication.

When the once holy land of Biblical proportions is the issue on the front page of every newspaper, politics must make way for metaphor. The Israeli plan to bring down Hamas echoes with Samson bringing down the temple on the Philistines. Lots of Philistines were killed that memorable day, but only with a martyr’s mentality. Plug in “Gazans” or “Israelis” for “Philistines,’ and the martydom makes both scenarios equally mad. Moving forward in Biblical time, the Philistines did not disappear as a thorn in the side of Israel. Today, well beyond the world of the prophets, the jet fighters and tanks of the IDF have replaced David’s sling, but search as the military scanners may there is no Goliath in modern Gaza. Was Sophocles still writing for the stage, the ongoing Israel/Palestine tragedy would make Oedipus Rex look like Twelfth Night. How unbiblical a thought. (more…)

A rocket fired from the Gaza Strip takes off toward Israel. AP

Is Israel Repeating Mistakes of the Past?

By Yassin Musharbash, Der Spiegel, December 31, 2008

Israel has promised a “war to the bitter end.” Yet history is full of examples showing that battling an organization like Hamas is almost futile. It is a lesson Israel learned just two short years ago.

It was almost a century ago when the British soldier T.E. Lawrence described for posterity the World War I revolt of the Arabs against the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East. Lawrence helped organize the revolt, and he famously said that combating such an uprising was “like eating soup with a knife.”

A rocket fired from the Gaza Strip takes off toward Israel.
His adage may not be perfectly applicable to the current Israeli offensive against Hamas in the Gaza Strip. Hamas, after all, is more than just a rebel group. It is simultaneously a political party, a social-services organization and a terrorist group. It is a sworn enemy of Israel, and it continues to incessantly fire rockets across the border, hoping to kill Israeli civilians at random. The group has a civilian and a military component.

Still, the maxim uttered by Lawrence — who was later immortalized in the film “Lawrence of Arabia” — does have a present-day application when speaking of the ongoing fight against terror groups like the Taliban, Hezbollah, al-Qaida. And Hamas. Lawrence was essentially describing the problems that result when a regular army comes up against an irregular fighting force. In military parlance, such a conflict is called “asymmetrical.” (more…)

English poet and traveller Wilfrid Scawen Blunt (1840 - 1922), circa 1880.

Webshaykh’s Note: Given the ongoing crises in the Middle East, it is useful to return to earlier commentaries. In the excerpt below the voice of Wilfrid Scawen Blunt echoes with resonance for events currently in the news about Gaza, Iraq and Afghanistan. Let us all hope that the new year brings tolerance and peaceful intentions for us all.

Wealthy and well connected Wilfrid retired from the foreign service in 1869 and soon the traveling Blunts went east. As Wilfrid noted about his first visit to Egypt in 1879, he was still “a believer in the common English creed that England had a providential mission in the East.” After learning about Bedouin customs firsthand in Syria Lady Anne spoke for both travelers about their interest in no longer looking at the people “with the half contemptuous ignorance” of Europeans. Not only were the Blunts aware and appalled at Eurocentric attitudes, but Wilfrid wrote of Islam as a “true religion,” which certainly had far more to offer African converts than Christianity. In 1881 Blunt bought an estate in Cairo, where he became a neighbor and friend of the Islamic reformer Muhammad ‘Abduh. On a visit to England Blunt arranged a visit between ‘Abduh and the reigning social philosopher, Herbert Spencer; the Egyptian reportedly told Spencer that the East was learning the evil rather than the good from the West, but the best of both was the same.

Blunt was perhaps the most famous aristo-critic of British imperialism in Egypt. With the impunity his elite upbringing bequeathed at the time he admonished Lord Cromer, whose “wrong-headed administration” only served to Anglicize Egypt. He used his impeccable social connections to lobby British politicians, including Prime Minister Gladstone, whose “Oriental” policies he deplored. Blunt’s radical critique of the colonial transgressions committed by the burdensome white race is second to none, including Fanon and Césaire. Consider his prescient diary note at the close of the nineteenth century:

The old century is very nearly out, and leaves the world in a pretty pass, and the British Empire is playing the devil in it as never an empire before on so large a scale. (more…)

 

A lithographic painting depicting a Muslim funeral procession in India, circa 1888.

Excommunicating Dead Terrorists
by Leor Halevi, On Faith, Washington Post, December 29, 2008

Recently the Muslim Council of India sent an important message to the world’s Muslims. It asked one of the country’s largest Muslim graveyards, Marine Lines Bada Qabrastan, where unclaimed bodies are often interred, to deny burial rites to the nine men who died after terrorizing Mumbai. Refusal to bury the terrorists in a Muslim cemetery signifies not just that terrorist attacks are un-Islamic, a contention often heard, but that their perpetrators become, by carrying these acts, non-Muslim. “They cannot be Muslims or followers of Islam,” declared Muslim Council president Ibrahim Tai, “so they cannot have a final resting place anywhere
on sacred Mother India.”

The question then arises, what should India do with the dead bodies? (more…)

Palestinian rescue workers carry a wounded prisoner in the rubble of the Saraya prison after it was hit by a missile strike on Sunday. Photo by Majed Hamdan / AP.

Gaza: the cycle can be broken

The Independent/, Sunday, 28 December 2008

More than 30 years ago, the American political philosopher Michael Walzer wrote: “First oppression is made into an excuse for terrorism, and then terrorism is made into an excuse for oppression.” It was a good description of the Israel-Palestine problem then, and a good description of the dynamic that would make it worse over the following three decades.

It is a dynamic that operates in contravention of the simple, comforting and wrong principle that two democracies have never gone to war against each other.

The conflict between Israel and the people of Gaza is driven by democratic impulses. Hamas, the Islamic political party and paramilitary organisation, won control of the Gaza Strip in free and fair elections in January 2006. Its charter famously calls for the destruction of the state of Israel and, although that was hardly the issue on which those elections were fought, there can be little doubt about the depth and extent of hostility towards Israel felt by the majority of the population of Gaza. (more…)

Nazende al (Flattering Red) from ‘The Book of Tulips’ ca 1725

by Anna Pavord

But as in any love affair, after the initial coup de foudre you want to learn more about the object of your passion. The tulip does not disappoint. Its background is full of more mysteries, dramas, dilemmas, disasters and triumphs than any besotted aficionado could reasonably expected. In the wild, it is an Eastern flower, growing along a corridor which stretches either side of the line of latitude 40 degrees north. The line extends from Ankara in Turkey eastwards through Jerevan and Baku to Turkmenistan, then on past Bukhara, Samarkand and Tashkent to the mountains of the Pamir-Alai, which, with neighbouring Tien Shan is the hotbed of the tulip family.

As far as western Europe is concerned, the tulip’s story began in Turkey, from where in the mid-sixteenth century, European travellers brought back news of the brilliant and until then unknown lils rouges, so prized by the Turks. In fact they were not lilies at all but tulips. In April 1559, the Zürich physician and botanist Conrad Gesner saw the tulip flowering for the first time in the splendid garden made by Johannis Heinrich Herwart of Augsburg, Bavaria. He described its gleaming red petals and its sensuous scent in a book published two years later, the first known report of the flower growing in western Europe. The tulip, wrote Gesner, had ‘sprung from a seed which had come from Constantinople or as others say from Cappadocia.’ From that flower and from its wild cousins, gathered over the next 300 years from the steppes of Siberia, from Afghanistan, Chitral, Beirut and the Marmaris peninsula, from Isfahan, the Crimea and the Caucasus, came the cultivars which have been grown in gardens ever since. More than 5,500 different tulips are listed in the International Register published regularly since 1929 by the Royal General Bulbgrowers’ Association of the Netherlands. (more…)

Fifteen Great Reasons We Should Embrace and Follow the Quran-only Islam

by Abdur Rab, opednews.com, December 14, 2008

Islam that we should follow is the one guided strictly by the Quran’s tenets. The Hadith, the alleged second source of Islam, is unacceptable as religious guidance as it has given rise to spurious, untenable and ludicrous ideas that have corrupted practiced Islam (See: Chapters 10 and 11 of the author’s recently published book Exploring Islam in a New Light: An Understanding from the Quranic Perspective). The Quran-only Islam seeks to replace the most widely held notions of Islam that have led to sectarian divisions among Muslims, and given rise to the violence, strife, inequality and fanaticism seen so often in western portrayals of Islam. The Hadith believers think that the Quran is not sufficient or easy for us as guidance. The Quran, however, is emphatic on the points that it is detailed and self-explained (6:114; 12:111; 16:89), and straightforward, clear and sufficiently easy to follow (39:28; 43:2; 44:2, 58; 54:17, 22, 32, 40). There are at least fifteen great reasons why one should embrace and follow this Quran-only Islam: (more…)