It’s a Crime, Especially in Fiction

Books You Should Read, Islamophobia, Literature

by Reeva S. Simon

This perennial Western fear, that of a resurgent Islam, is a part of the Western historical memory. The sword-wielding Muslim thundering across the Straits of Gibraltar or laying siege to Vienna, the Old Man of the Mountain’s Assassins high on drugs launched to kill political leaders, white slavers, and Barbary pirates have been reincarnated as plane hijackers, embassy bombers, and nefarious creators of long gas lines. In the fiction of the “paranoid” and “vicious” categories, the conspiracy, the hero, and the villain are basic elements for thriller/spy novel success…

Thus, in fiction, anyone’s life can have meaning in the anonymous industrial and terrifying nuclear age. The reader identifies with the hero whose exploits become his own, and the fictional conspiracy becomes a personal threat on a world scale. Beating the gas lines during an oil embargo is transformed via fiction into vicarious vengeance against the villains, perceived as wealthy petrosheikhs who have created the oil crisis. But identification of the villain alone is not enough. In order to be thoroughly imbued with evil and to maintain credibility as a villain, the villain must be an impersonal figure; he is a stereotype; he mirrors the reader’s personal prejudices and fears. Only then is the reader hooked his villainy as he must also be on the hero’s noble character to such a degree that he can instantly and unconsciously root for the salvation of one and the damnation of the other. Continue reading It’s a Crime, Especially in Fiction →

Chew Some Qat

Food and Drink, Qat (Catha edulis), Yemen, YouTube Watch

One of the unique aspects of living in Yemen is chewing qat, the tender young leaves of the shrub Catha edulis. In the late afternoon Yemenis often get together with their supply of qat, a water-pipe (narghila) and plastic bottles of spring water. Much has written about the plant and its use. For starters, check out the Qatalog on Yemen Webdate.

Youtube now brings you rap versions by Yemeni artists. Chew on this or this for awhile.

The Letters of Badr Shakir al-Sayyab: #6

Iraq, Literature, Poetry


The Iraqi Poet Badr Shakir al-Sayyab

[Note: This is the sixth in a series of translations of selected letters of the noted Iraqi poet Badr Shakir al-Sayyab. For more information on the poet, click here.]

Letter #6 3/4/1956

Directorate of Public Trading, Baghdad

My Kind Brother, Dr. Suheil (Idris),

Sweet Arab greetings to you. Yesterday I received your kind letter and welcomed your decision to entrust “the reading of the previous issue” to Mr. Abdul Sabour. We hope that he will be fair in his criticism. Otherwise, our pens are ready, and we look forward to the precious opportunity to reevaluate much of the criteria and points of view. This is my opinion and it is also shared with our brother, Muhyyi al-Din (Ismai’l).

As for our brother, Kathem (Jawad), he blames you because you entrusted the “reading” of the issue of al-Adaab to “a person who is even ignorant of prosody,” but we, brother Muhyyi al-Din and I, have convinced him of the importance of the rationale that prompted you to do this: namely, to reveal the truth through the struggle between values and criteria. As of yet, we have not seen the last issue of “al-Adaab” – we have learned from trusted sources that it will imminently appear in the market. Continue reading The Letters of Badr Shakir al-Sayyab: #6 →

Don’t Debate, Rehabilitate.

Ethics, Islam: Introduction, Saudi Arabia, Terrorism Issue

“Don’t debate religion with fundamentalists: what they need is rehabilitation”

by Saad A Sowayan

Fundamentalism is a cultural phenomenon, though it dons religious garbs. It is a mode of consciousness shaped by cultural values, not religious principles. Thus we can understand it only if we examine it in its cultural context as a sociological rather than a theological question.

So, I will begin by taking a close look at the social incubators most likely to hatch fundamentalism.

I understand by fundamentalism strong adherence to an archetypal point of view and a fierce conviction of its fundamental truth, to the exclusion of any other alternate idea. Any alternative is resisted by a fundamentalist and treated not as a legitimate substitute stemming from a rational free choice, but as a detrimental antithesis of the fundamental truth of the archetype. The archetype is a model to be emulated and reproduced, not dissected or scrutinized. Continue reading Don’t Debate, Rehabilitate. →

Anthropo covertus: A Disputed Species

Afghanistan, Anthropology/Sociology, Ethics, Iraq War

Get ready for a shock. Anthropology (the best kept discipline secret in American academics) made the front page of today’s New York Times. And, believe it or not in the Ripley tradition, it was not about finding the “missing link” or “Noah’s ark”. In a report filed by David Rohde and entitled “Army Enlists Anthropologists in War Zones,” the focus is on the Pentagon’s newly instituted “Human Terrain Teams,” a kind of social science intellectual swat team approach, in which the military uses experts on the local culture. In a video on the website, an American officer explains that his soldiers no longer routinely break down doors of houses and violate the cultural space of Afghan homes, but let their Afghan counterparts knock first while they wait respectfully outside. While I am not sure it takes an anthropologist to point out what should be obvious through simple experimentation, the basic argument of the article is that the military is being coached to listen and work with the local population rather than play knee-jerk mercenary search and destroy games.

It is hard to argue with the sentiment that talking and negotiating are better ways to accomplish a proposed peace-building mission than assuming everybody in sight is a terrorist or is hiding one. So anthropologists, especially recent graduates who have a hard time finding jobs, should be pleased that supply actually might be influenced by a newfound demand for their services. Take Marcus B. Griffin, for example, an embedded anthropologist in Iraq who has a blog discussing his work. Continue reading Anthropo covertus: A Disputed Species →

Afghanistan: The Vaudeville Version

Afghanistan, Music and Dance, Orientalism

America not only flexes its military muscles and economic clout around the world, but at times takes the rest of the world for a song and dance. Vaudeville, the early 20th century dance hall and stage phenomenon, lyrically used and abused the world as a stage. But it seldom looked much like the real world of the time, and certainly not after almost a century later. Here was popular Orientalism, in the Valentino Sheik mode, for anyone who could afford sheet music. One of the wonderful nostalgic websites documenting this era is Parlor Songs, which publishes an online magazine.

If you would like to see how Vaudeville treated the Orient, check out the article by Richard A. Reublin in the 2005 issue. Among the songs discussed is “Afghanistan” written in 1920 by William Wilander and Harry Donnelly. Click here to listen to the song as you read the lyrics:

Afghanistan
A Romance of Asia
Words and Music by
William Wilander & Harry Donnelly
Published 1920 by Gilbert & Friedland, Inc.

[Verse 1]
In the land of Afghanistan,
There’s a Hindu maid and a man,
She swore by the stars up above her,
That he was the one to love her. Continue reading Afghanistan: The Vaudeville Version →

Tenure Crashers Gone Wrong

Anthropology/Sociology, Arab-Israeli Conflict, Archaeology and Antiquities

In a previous post I commented on the media-made controversy over the tenure case of anthropologist Nadia Abu El-Haj at Barnard College. In noting a pingback to my post on another blog, I discovered that those who would try to interrupt the tenure process at Barnard have gone even further into the wrong territory. The “Deny Abu El Haj Tenure Committee” has created a website using Prof. Abu El-Haj’s name (http://www.nadiaabuelhaj.com/) in order to attack her. The url has even been copyrighted. For a group that claims to be interested in restoring “honor” to Barnard, it appears any means justifies their tenure crashing end. I am not a lawyer (as my salary would well document), but this site seems a prime case for a libel suit. How can a group copyright a person’s name for a website and use that to attack? Forget the bulldozer, this is what the bull drops on the ground and it sure doesn’t smell like a fact.

Daniel Martin Varisco

Sociology or Anthropology? What’s the Difference?

Anthropology/Sociology, Teaching Resources

Note: The following is an excerpt from my Islam Obscured (New York: Palgrave, 2005, 137-138). I invite comments from both sociologists and anthropologists to help bridge the disciplinal gap in our joint interest and intellectual history over the Middle East.]

What is the difference between the anthropology of Islam and the sociology of Islam?

It is the character of lived experience I want to explore, not the nature of man. Michael Jackson (the ethnographer)

Whether or not an approach to religion is anthropological or sociological is a bit of a red herring. To a certain extent the answer is as trite as the discipline in which a researcher has been trained. But the interchange of labels is too rampant to be dismissed as simple cross-border interchange. Consider that French scholar Jean-Pierre Digard provides “perspectives anthropologiques” in a French journal of “sociologie,” while calling what he does “ethnologie.” In France Jacques Berque and Pierre Bourdieu teach “sociologie.” In Britain a number of social anthropologists regard what they do as a type of sociology, a notable example being Ernest Gellner. Since Gellner was trained as a philosopher and harbored lifelong suspicions of any notion that could be called Wittgensteinian, I suppose one category is as good for him as another. American academics are generally more disciplined. Clifford Geertz is an unabashed anthropologist, although he relies to a great extent on sociologists like Weber and Parsons. Even in formal ethnographies, the bread and butter of anthropological communication, the distinction can be fuzzy. Dale Eickelman, who conducted an ethnographic study of a pilgrimage center in Boujad, Morocco, identified his primary goal as making “sociological sense.” Given that most readers have a relatively clear idea of what sociology is about but little knowledge of what anthropologists do, the word choice may in fact be pragmatic rather than programmatic. Continue reading Sociology or Anthropology? What’s the Difference? →