This video interview with Talal Asad (Professor of Anthropology, Graduate Center of
the City University of New York), recorded in 2008, is well worth watching. Harry Kreisler welcomes Professor Talal Asad who reflects on his life and work as an anthropologist focusing on religion, modernity, and the complex relationships between Islam and the West.
by Daniel Martin Varisco, Middle East Muddle, Anthropology News, November, 2013
As President Franklin Delano Roosevelt prophesied, December 7th, 1941 is a day that lives in infamy, even some seven decades after the event that triggered United States entry into the Second World War. Another date of more recent infamy is December 17, 2010, when a harassed Tunisian vegetable hawker named Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire in front of the municipal building in the picturesque town of Sidi Bouzid. Although badly burned, he survived until January 4, just ten days before Ben Ali, the Tunisian dictator for some 23 years, boarded a plane for exile in Saudi Arabia. The first kind of infamy was the beginning of a devastating war, the second became the stimulus for what was hoped to be a sweeping political revolution across the Middle East. Three years later it seems to be politics as usual, a chilly seasonal change from the jasmine scent of the Arab Spring that blew across Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen and now swirls through the political maelstrom enveloping a surviving dictator in Syria, ongoing instability in Iraq and Afghanistan and a new regime outlook in Iran.
Seasoned pundits know that in many parts of the world spring’s prospects yield to the heat of summer, the cooling autumn and eventually the chilly reality of winter in a never-ending cycle. The Arab Spring is not one season fits all, but the overall effects have been more chilling than thrilling this year. In Tunisia the Islamic party leading the country is in a state of national paralysis following the July killing of opposition MP Mohamed Brahmi. In Egypt the elected president, Muhammad Morsi, remains in military custody and his major party of support, the Muslim Brotherhood, has been banned. The military, under General Sisi, has reinstated martial law in a move that most Egyptians, it seems, support. In both Tunisia and Egypt, the transition to power by Islamic groups who promised not to dismantle the civil state structure has angered a wide range of groups, especially secularists and more moderate Muslims. Continue reading Chilling Prospects for the Arab Spring
For anyone following the driving issue of Saudi women behind the wheel, here is a tune to drive home the problem.
The photographer Ziyah Gafic recently went to Saudi Arabia to film women in context. Check out his interesting video here. He is allowed to photograph several well educated and wealthy women in their luxurious surroundings. The very fact that he is not free to film women outside such crafted, indoor settings is the “elephant in the room” that the lens does not capture.
Celebrating Saudi Arabia’s National Day
In case you missed it, September 23 was Saudi Arabia’s National Day, the oil-driven nation’s 4th of July. Not surprisingly many people, proud of their country, took to the streets to celebrate. But what is good for the state is not necessarily seen as good for the faith, especially in the conservative Wahhabi/Salafi variety that weds tribal origin with a dogmatic theology. The tension between a strict form of Islamic practice and the diversity that instills cultural practices has always been a problem, perhaps even more so with the wealth economy that the current generation of Saudi youth has grown up in. In 1927 King Abdul Aziz established the Committee for Promotion of Virtue and The Prevention of Vice. In short this is known as the “religious police.” For those less familiar with Islamic doctrine, this relates back to the classic Quranic principle of al-amr bi- al-maÊ¿ruf wa-al-nahy Ê¿an al-munkar, generally translated as commanding right and and forbidding wrong. There is a long history about the use of this penchant phrase, analyzed in detail by Michael Cook in his Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong in Islamic Thought (Cambridge University Press, 2010), a work of over 700 pages.
Abdullah Hamidaddin has written an interesting commentary on a recent tragedy on the Saudi National Day in which a car of religious police chased a vehicle that apparently was thought to contain two drunken men. In the chase the car careened off the road, killing the driver and his brother. The religious police fled the scene, but the chase was captured on a cell phone video. When the video was posted to social media, there was an outcry to rein in the zealous religious police. In this case it turned out the men had not been drinking.
What were these “thought police” thinking? I say “thought” rather than “religious” police, because the very nature of the committee leads to a kind of witchcraft mentality. Continue reading Thought Police: What were they thinking?
Although few Western non-Muslim travelers penetrated the forbidden zone of the ka‘ba in Mecca, illustrations proliferated by the mid-18th century. The image above was taken from the 1857 edition of Sale’s translation of the Qur’an (London: W. Tegg & Co) and reproduced in Henry J. Van-Lennep’s Bible Lands: Their Modern Customs and Manners Illustrative of Scripture (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1875). The two most famous travelers to make surreptitious trips to Mecca were Johann Ludwig Burckhardt in 1814 and Richard Burton in 1853.
Omar Borkan Al Gala
The news from the Middle East and broader Islamic World is as dismal today as it was yesterday. Syria continues to be a spiraling bloodbath, as does Iraq as we near the 10th anniversary on May 1 of the notorious Bush the Younger declaration of “Mission Accomplished.” Several hundred garment workers may have lost their lives in the collapse of an 8-story sweat shop in Bangladesh and the list goes on. There are times when those of us on the comfortable outside looking in need to take a breath and find something to laugh about in the onslaught of absurdity. The fact that yesterday I heard a lecture on Waiting for Godot is not entirely irrelevant for posting this blog.
For the Saudi purity police it seems that it is possible for a visitor to be so media-savvy handsome that local women need to be protected by deporting him. The case in reporting-stupidity point is about a certain Omar Borkan Al Gala, a fashion photographer, actor and poet from Dubai. England’s authoritatively silly tabloid The Sun carries the following subline: “THE internet is awash with speculation that one of the men deported from Saudi Arabia for being “too handsome†is a fashion photographer from Dubai.” For a pretend news source that Murdoch-murders the truth every chance it can get, there seems to be a voyeuristic fascination with Arab men’s bodies, including Saddam in his undies.
So is this guy really so handsome that he is a whipped-up man of mass distraction to the Saudi regime? Continue reading Too handsome for Saudi Women
[â€Traffic sign in Saudi Arabia. The man-without-a-head symbol indicates a pedestrian sidewalk.â€]
I recently came across a rather plebian junior high school level text on The Middle East: History, Culture, People (by Thomas G. Kavunedos and Harold E. Hammond, Bronxville, New York, Cambridge Book Company, Inc, 1968). The book is quite forgetable, but some of the illustrations bring you to a full stop. My favorite is the illustration above. If indeed this was once the sign for a crosswalk, no wonder everyone seems to drive Mercedes in the kingdom.
Daniel Martin Varisco
[Tabsir Redux is a reposting of earlier posts on the blog, since memories are fickle and some things deserve a second viewing. This post was originally made on October 10, 2006.]