In the early 19th century there was a florescence of Protestant missionary interest in saving Muslim, Jewish and other kinds of Christian souls in the Middle East. This thread continues excerpts from one of the earliest accounts from the 19th century, that of Joseph Wolff (1795-1862), a convert from Judaism to Christianity. In 1837 he published a diary of his travels. Like a number of Christians visiting the Muslim world, Wolff is more impressed by Muslim sobriety and devotion in their ritual than he is by the Christians he sees:
There is also an intriguing encounter between the Christian missionary and a Kurdish Muslim dervish:
Chalk one up for the Kurdish dervish over the atheists of Europe.
Poetry is the language of prophecy spoken by the angels and gods when they populated this earth before the fall. Hence, the poet is the offspring of that divine race that has since departed our planet to the lofty skies.
Man will never regain his divine status until he embraces his spirituality. Consequently, we have to use language differently. We have to say less and mean more before we are able to communicate effectively. Words should be spontaneous and timeless. They are meant to be charged with emotions and to embody visions that illuminate experience and communicate nothing but the truth.
The poet is not a prophet if prophecy is understood to be the prediction of future events, but the poet should be viewed as a seer if instead, prophecy is meant to be a warning that if man goes on doing such deeds, then the result will be dire.
Although poetry could be national or regional, nevertheless, it shall never be divorced from its universal message and concerns. It is within this context that I write my poetry and hope it will help make our world a better place, one word at a time.
Samples of My Poetry (Translated from the Original Arabic):
“If You Were Mine” No, I shall not tell you that I became a poet.
The day I read joy and sadness in your smile and witnessed the sun rising in your eyes, I abandoned my heart, crucified on the ivory ramparts of your face, and setting sail, I strove to navigate the deep waters of inspiration.
That day, I discovered my inner self in the mirror of your pure love, and I vowed to tell you this in words. These are some of them.
You are aware that I consider myself responsible before you for the many words yet left unsaid, more so than those recounted.
Possibly my arrival would be delayed tomorrow. I must prepare myself well. The journey for a poet is long and provisions costly and burdensome.
Perhaps I would find you watching for me and would forget the hardships of travel. Perhaps the sun could have set in your eyes, your black lashes drawing the curtain on the windows of waiting. I know I would be plunged in sorrow. For I have made all the preparations. I would leave the memory of my anguish planted in a tear and write upon its looking-glass: “If you were mine.”
“A Vision” I bathe every day in the stream of vision. I wear the cloak of poetry, and I write in the notebook of each morning a new sun. I create scenes and heroes. I draw them with colors and words, and they become perfect beings. They live and die, but I resurrect them anew. I live with them and become one with them. I modify their existence and alter their destiny so as to remain their master and their creator. I am the poet of illusion; my poems are worlds of light populated only with those who sincerely believe that poetry is the road to God and that my poems are the beginning of this road.
“Surprise Attack” Sway with the breeze Bow like a lily Disdain wounds Become buds Scattering spring And light Stopping tears And gales Descend softly with the dew Become a mound of anemones The color of my blood Attack the gardens Regain your tranquility My queen Penetrate the darkness of eternity Put your arms around the waist of space The minutes are impregnated The gardens would be born Soar with the echo
Be born as you desire Sister of dawn Torture hearts with love Put out the stars of your sky and the moon. Light anxious eyes To illuminate your world Even if the day explodes in fury Killing itself Tame wild mares, and meadows And shadows, tame the multitudes
Pile yourself up Like autumn’s notebook Turn inward Embracing the void as you fall Couple with the soil Become heavy with grapes
Sink your roots into my breast Deep as the carefree shaking Of a bird’s wing By the roadside Or a pulse from within the earth’s darkness Teach me of the seen And the unseen Let your fragrance perfume the wind Like frankincense Or dahlias
Become the lines in my hand For you are the ecstasies of beauty In my poems Open within me Like a star Like a smile Watch over my portals Like a breeze Fill my windows Scatter the day Fill my temple
Become flesh If only once, become flesh You would delight in being The substance of matter, and madness In enraptured eyes Attire yourself in the form of letters And their curves Tint the syllables For your garment of beauty is blue Giving the sky its color In my hand is a plume Melting between my fingers Dripping letters And blood.
“My People” I vowed to rise in the eyes of the sun To have its light wear me as a morning To build a castle in yesterday’s country And become the Easter of your holidays.
I relate to you a myth about me With love and my hands I build your home I visit you in my poems and my dreams With the warmth of your eyes I light my tomorrow.
I build for you from the sap of my eyelashes A swing in the shade of our Cedar tree Its ropes are my hope and my sinews And my solemn belief in our awakening
If you had listened to the cry of my lyrics You would have become again one family and friends You are the conscience of poetry within me And the sweet wine in my cup.
I traveled from you to remain for you I make no distinction… you are all my loved ones If your love should weaken Take my blood and the throb of my heart.
“You, Beirut, and the Children” As the leaves of October,I scatter myself over your blazing inferno; Your divine and succulent body From its forbidden summits Down to its ravenous depths and fertile valleys.
As a summer cloud bearing spring, I shower gentle kisses upon your flushed lips Whose color gives the rose its crimson Whose benevolent banks are a bed of red anemones.
Glory to your heavenly eyes, Two lakes of pearl and coral I am the maker of dreams, Of bracelets most precious Grant me to fashion an enchanted bangle For thy delicate wrist.
Your hair, Waterfalls roaring in the twilight, Forests of bewilderment, Fields of ripened grain blessed by the harvest sun Nourish me from your bountiful fruits.
I am the titan of lovers Emerging from the womb of legends Lost in the annals of ancient fables My odyssey yearns for a happy ending With the beautiful princess.
O my friend, In this time of madness Rootless with each step Heart forged of iron What may we hope to plant But dejection?What may we hope to reap But regret? What may we hope to build our home upon But the banks of sin?
O my Magdalene My virgin My sweet lamentation My beloved City Lend me your voice So I can speak unto them
War has broken my wings My throat is barren My strings rusted And despair has muffled my hymn
Tell them to spare the children To let the children live and dream
YOU, enemies of innocence Let the children bloom Let love conquer the forces of darkness Let peace reign.
Suffer the little children to come unto me Let my beloved approach Let my City live For unto them alone is My love My kingdom My poetry.
For the published poetry books of George El-Hage, click here.
In the early 19th century there was a florescence of Protestant missionary interest in saving Muslim, Jewish and other kinds of Christian souls in the Middle East. This thread continues excerpts from one of the earliest accounts from the 19th century, that of Joseph Wolff (1795-1862), a convert from Judaism to Christianity. In 1837 he published a diary of his travels. Here are the passages related to a brief stop in several of Yemen’s ports:
In the early 19th century there was a florescence of Protestant missionary interest in saving Muslim, Jewish and other kinds of Christian souls in the Middle East. One of the earliest accounts from the 19th century is that of Joseph Wolff (1795-1862), a convert from Judaism to Christianity. His missionary travels began in 1821 and he also went in search of the “lost tribes” of Israel. In 1837 he published a diary of his travels. This is a fascinating book to read, once one gets by the evangelistic fervor. He was considered by fellow missionaries to be somewhat of an “eccentric,” as he acknowledges in the frontispiece to his travels.
Amid the blizzard of punditry and spin-doctoring – especially spin-doctoring from perpetrators and advocates of prescriptions for Afghanistan who turned from the Bush administration’s original goal of smashing al-Qaida and denying it sanctuaries in Afghanistan from which the 9/11 attacks were hatched to destroying Iraq and “nation-building” in Afghanistan – it is worth pausing to take account of how the startling swift advance of the Taliban there from a border post to a provincial capital then to all other provincial capitals in less than a week and Kabul on the weekend looks from Afghan and perhaps even Taliban perspectives. So far, those have been limited to interviews with media-savvy Afghan modernists, on the one hand, and a Taliban press conference on the other. Or, all the news that fits the script(s).
What is new among facts closer to the ground is the much derided and in recent months ignored Doha “process,” if we might borrow that term. Doha is the proximal point of departure for everything that has happened in Afghanistan since the former Trump administration negotiated, signed, and exchanged copies of an agreement with the Taliban last year. From the outside, to external observers, this all looked very diplomatic, including accepting the Taliban as a de facto international player. Very diverting, and pundits were diverted into deconstructing it as variously hasty, overdue, giving up on Afghanistan, or a typical Trump deal, all show but bankrupt at its core. But that wasn’t the Doha Process from Afghan perspectives.
By setting a date for withdrawal of US troops on the ground in Afghanistan in return for Taliban agreeing not to molest that withdrawal, that Trump agreement with Taliban negotiator-representatives reset the game in two ways. First, it concluded armed hostilities in a classic Afghan form of conflict-management where one side concludes it cannot win, stops fighting, and effectively changes sides (while on the surface hiding that) by withdrawing from the field, with the other side accepting that instead of destroying its foe. Second, it provided a sort of non-aggression pact, or informal, more private than public, assurance that the withdrawing party would not be molested in return for effectively laying down arms. This underlying structure of the Doha Agreement from an Afghan perspective, on which foreign observers focused as leaving the Afghan government to make its own agreement, has a denser significance in customary Afghan approaches to conflict management. In those terms, the high-level Doha agreement provided a model subsequently applied “down the line,” as it were at all the points of actual armed conflict in myriad local discussions, agreements, and private assurances by Taliban that they would not molest or revenge themselves on soldiers who laid down (and especially surrendered) their arms nor civilians who didn’t oppose them. They may or may not have had a strategy to preserve and take over existing apparatus of government, as well as discarded military equipment much paraded before the cameras. But this much is basic: they managed a negotiated cessation of fighting and freedom of movement for themselves.
I don’t have direct evidence of myriad local negotiations and private assurances of this sort; but the alternative favored by external pundits – that thousands of soldiers and police, all of them, spontaneously and simultaneously deserted a government too corrupt, distant, and indifferent to their own welfare – is inherently implausible. It is implausible, first, that all would do this at the same time, as if Afghans were of one mind like a flock of pigeons and, second, that the occasional holdouts might not have been taken by Taliban as betrayal of the deal justifying their return to fighting. By all accounts so far, there was little of that and a lot of quietly stopping and simply stepping out of their way.
The structural condition for this outcome was set by the final US strategy of driving Taliban into the mountains and hinterlands while securing urban centers where most of the population lived. To old hands, this might resemble an old Vietnam strategy and defiance of the Maoist alternative, though it probably follows a more contemporary counter-insurgency doctrine of pushing insurgents to the margins so the centers can develop and develop constituencies for development. Again, I do not know if this was the rationale, but the effect of pushing Taliban out of sight was to push them out of mind and so to fail to register localizations of the Doha Deal for what they were, a deal and not just threats to kill any who opposed them.
Second, subsequent Afghan behavior supports the hypothesis of quiet assurances not just in Doha and not just in myriad local settings but all up and down the spectrum from local to national forces and government. The sudden night-time flight of President Ghani, a day after a final – recorded – broadcast in which he proposed to plan a meeting to mediate a national council to negotiate differences, followed the next day by not-so-former grandees who still represented important constituencies, some armed, stepping forward to announce that they stood ready to organize and host such a meeting with the Taliban, suggests the fix was in, notwithstanding his professions of sudden decision and sudden departures. Former President Hamid Karzai, current co-President Abdallah Abdallah, and surviving Mujahadin leader Gulgbeddin Hikmatyar interposed themselves with not-so-subtle reminders of other constituencies in Afghanistan, including armed ones, that Taliban would have to take into account.
While Taliban do not have such a reputation from their previous takeover and time in power, their performative defiance of the rest of the world in that period has so far (not this week but since the Doha Agreement) taken a back seat or at least been supplemented by professions of wanting international recognition following performances of such at Doha and in – of all things – a press conference in Kabul two days after Taliban fighters entered the capital. Whether a Conference of the Big Birds will occur, and whether it might include the volunteer grandees, the gesture and the roles claimed by persons making it are wholly Afghan. Call it speculation in settlement, jockeying for position, attempts to take the game ahead now that the game behind is up. This is the normal next phase in customary Afghan conflict-management: it is not de-escalation, not compromise or cutting the difference, but realignment that recognizes and accepts interests and a politics of alliance-making that begins with collusion. Even former President Ghani’s statements from his new not-yet-exile in the UAE are such a bid to, in journalist terms, “relevance.” In this regard, it may have been wiser than the pundits realized for US President Biden to blame the Afghan army for its debacle, since that cast him, an outsider, and not them as the betrayed party.
Where does this leave journalists and other observer-interpreters? For the most part, they have been outside the local versions of the Doha Process in Afghanistan; within Afghanistan they have been close to modernist constituencies that hitched their stars after the first Taliban period to the two domains that Taliban then forbade, especially to women – namely, education and media broadly interpreted to extend from fashion to broadcasting, publicity, and centering on expressive professions. These are most accessible to foreign observers, first, because they want to be – those are their reference groups – and second because foreign observers already have categories for them that provide a kind of pre-understanding that is at best thin when it comes to Taliban but also when it comes to the other demographic most threatened by them in the past, the Shia Hazara.
The coming test not just for the New Taliban but for the old grandees is who will take an interest in those Afghans in whom foreigners take an interest. This is not just the media world of commentators and interpreters focused by modernists, and particularly by urban women who have grasped the opportunities in education and media to measure the distance they have come from the last time Taliban were in power; it also must include the Shia Hazara whose marja (religious leader/exemplars) in neighboring Iran have deep networks among co-religionists in Afghanistan. This time, Iran is not a bystander and, for those who worry about such things, has two decades of experience recruiting and deploying third-party volunteers/mercenaries in its own regional adventures. Whether or not it could mobilize them, at the least, Iran would take an interest in direct threats to the welfare of Shia in Afghanistan. Arguably, the stability of Afghanistan going forward will depend on such negotiations and alliances formed that Taliban neglected (or rejected) last time but whose public spokesmen now profess to want to engage.
My only prediction is that the process will drive outsiders crazy, and lacking local points of reference will test abilities to tell their own. Among those local perspectives…
In The Conference of the Birds, the Persian Sufi poet Farid al-Din Attar of Nishapur (1142-1220) described a meeting of all the birds to decide who would be their sovereign. Each bird represented some human fault, and after some discussion the wisest urged that they seek out the Simorg. To do that, they had to pass through seven valleys, one where they abandon dogmas, one where they abandon reason for love, one where they abandon worldly knowledge, another where they abandon desires and lusts. In the Valley of Unity they realize that everything is connected, in the Valley of Wonderment that they have never understood anything, and in the final valley of Poverty that the ego is nothingness. The birds experience agonies and pain. Many die of fright even at the prospect of the journey, but some do set out, and a final 30 reach the abode of the Simorg (=30 birds in Farsi), which they realize is like the reality of a mirror in which one sees oneself reflected.
Jon W. Anderson is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the Catholic University of America. He conducted ethnographic research in Afghanistan in the 1970s.
Historians generally assume that “modernity” jump-started in Afghanistan in 1919 with the crowning of Ghazi Amanullah Khan as emir and later as king in 1926. Succeeding his father, Habibullah Khan, who had been assassinated while on a hunting trip, Amanullah launched a campaign similar to Ataturk in Turkey and Reza Shah in Iran to create a “European” style modernity with the moderated trappings of Islam. All three Islamic countries were being reborn after the disaster of World War I, even though only Ottoman Turkey had been directly involved. In 1919 Afghanistan was one of the least “modern” countries in the region, long buffeted by foreign invasions from its neighbors but never fully controlled by an outside power.
When history repeats itself, it does so with a vengeance. In 1842 Great Britain suffered one of its major defeats when in a retreat from Kabul some 16,000 British troops and civilians were annihilated. In 1989, after losing more than 15,000 troops, the Soviet Union pulled out of its decade-long attempt to make Afghanistan a Marxist ally. Today NATO, led by the United States, is ending its attempt to democratize the Afghans against terrorism after two decades and a loss of over 2,300 American servicemen and another thousand from NATO member troops.
Lowell Thomas in Afghanistan in 1923
The case of Amanullah is well worth revisiting. The flamboyant American journalist, Lowell Thomas, who made his claim to fame by glorifying Lawrence of Arabia, was able to cross the Khyber Pass in a Buick at the invitation of Emir Amanullah. He describes his visit in Beyond Khyber Pass (1925). Well aware of the dangerous and uncharted territory he was entering, he quoted lines from the British Raj poet Rudyard Kipling:
“When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains, And the women come out to cut up what remains, Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier.”
Driving up to Jalalabad and Kabul in his motocar, a sight to behold at the time, Thomas paints a time-machine Orientalist picture of a land filled with brigands and fanatics, sprinkled with an occasional positive note. On women in this Islamic realm, he writes:
But, as they say, a picture is worth a thousand words, so here is what Thomas shows of the typical Afghan woman:
Like his adoration of Lawrence during World War I, Amanullah becomes a local icon resurrecting a backward society into a Westernized future. Thomas writes:
One of those “good things in life” was tennis, which Amanullah loved, just as he did the new American silent cinema. And just as he loved his wife Soraya, who threw off the veil (which Amanullah considered not essential to Islam) and wore stylish Western clothing of the time.
Amanullah and Soraya
In 1929, after a decade that benefited elites, the masses of Afghanistan had little to show. It seems that Amanullah though that all the country needed was modern dress. He even convened a loya jirga of tribal leaders who were forced to dress in suits. After a rebellion, not unlike the Taliban started in the early 1990s, Amanullah abdicated and spent the rest of his life in luxury in Europe, dying in Italy in 1960.
Thomas was hopeful about a new nation of Afghans, but was aware that it would not be easy.
In an assessment of the fall of Amanullah, the writer Sirdar Ikbal Ali Shah in 1932 summed up what doomed the king:
The blame game for the messy withdrawal of American troops and the host of Afghan supporters is now in full swing. If two decades of outside support was not enough to transform Afghanistan into what the neocon architects dreamed of for it and Iraq, it is hard to see what staying any longer would have accomplished. The swift takeover by the raggle-tag Taliban apparently took the Pentagon intelligence by surprise, but it also shows that little would be accomplished by maintaining any military presence. Whether Biden made the right decision or not (and history, rather than partisan congressional committees, will be the best judge), it is obvious that the majority of Afghans have chosen the Taliban rather than the puppet government paved with good intentions but as corrupt as all the previous ones.
It is too early to tell how the Taliban will govern. As an opposition they were demonized, but taking on the responsibility of running a country with a population of some 38 million divided into numerous ethnic and tribal enclaves will be a full-time job. Spending the winters in neighboring Pakistan is over with. The “buck”, as they say, now stops with a group that has a dubious record with the potential for continuing human rights abuses. Either the Taliban will be reborn with a slight nod to moderation, not as much as Amanullah of course, or will themselves fail so miserably to bring peace and economic prosperity, that they too will be toppled.
As Thomas noted almost a century ago:
“The swaggering Afghan has good reason to swagger. The independence of his wild mountainous country, placed squarely between two jealous rivals, the Bear to the north and the Lion to the south, has remained intact… Yet the freedom-loving mountaineers —hiding in ravine and cave- later waged incessant guerilla warfare on all who passed their way.”
