History in Century Hindsight

Islamophobia, Orientalism, Turkey

How will the history of the world be written in another century? I am glad I will not be around to find out, although I suspect future historians will look at the post-9/11 operations at home on the patriot front and abroad with patriot missiles as a low point in America’s future past. We can always look back and see how history was written a century ago. Here is a passage from a popular “History of the World” by John Clarke Ridpath, who penned it near the end of the 19th century. Although dated in its racial and ethnocentric overtones, it is refreshing to see some critical assessment on Western stereotypes at work as well. As an exercise, read the excerpt below to sort out the prejudice from the attempt, even if not up to present-day standards, to be less rather than more subjective.

Some allowance, however, must be made for the judgment which the Western peoples have passed upon the Turks. There is no denying the fact that a part of this judgment is prejudiced. The Aryan races have always shown a disposition to reject and contemn those usages with which they themselves are unfamiliar. They have done so. Not because the usages in question have contradicted the laws of right reason, the interests of the state, of the principles of morality, but simply because such facts have been strange, unfamiliar. The intolerance of the Western people in this respect has been as severe and inexcusable as many of the usages which they have contemned and despised. Continue reading History in Century Hindsight →

Wavell in Mecca: On Javan Muslims

Indonesia, Islamic Rituals, Saudi Arabia


[Note: Arthur John Byng Wavell (1882-1916) was a British soldier and adventurer who traveled in disguise to Mecca in 1908 and went on to Yemen in 1911 to witness fighting between the Zaydi imam’s troops and the Ottoman Turks. This account was originally published in 1912.]

Among all the pilgrims of different races daily pouring in [to Mecca on the hajj], I was most struck by the Javanese. In appearance and manners they seem not unlike the Japanese. They have the same acquisitive and imitative temperament, are intensely curious regarding everything new to them, and quick to adopt any fresh idea that may seem to them an improvement on what has gone before. In this they stand in strong contrast to the Arabs, and in fact to most Eastern peoples, whose extreme conservatism is what really hinders their progress. But while the Japanese have seemingly agreed to take England as their model, the Javanese endeavor to turn themselves into Arabs. The first thing they do on arriving is to attire themselves in the local costume – which, by the way, does not suit them at all. I am told that there are so many people wearing Arab dress in Java that a stranger might fancy himself in the Hedjaz. Continue reading Wavell in Mecca: On Javan Muslims →

Reading the Qur’an: Mohammed Arkoun

Anthropology/Sociology, Islam in America, Qur'an

By Jane Dammen McAuliffe
Dean of Arts and Sciences, Georgetown University
Professor, Department of Arabic and History

Mohammed Arkoun is the most honored French Islamicist alive today and continues to receive lecture invitations from around the world. His first language was Berber, and he learned Arabic and studied Islamic sources in French-speaking schools, first in Algeria and then in Paris (Gunther:127-131). Arkoun’s life-long project has been the sustained analysis of Islamic reason from the perspective of the contemporary epistemologies, both philosophical and social scientific. He is well-schooled in the successive forms of critical theory that have occupied humanistic scholarship for the last generation, particularly structural linguistics and semiotics. Continue reading Reading the Qur’an: Mohammed Arkoun →

You, Beirut and the Children

Lebanon, Poetry


Illustration: “Red Anemone,” by Diana Cornelissen

By George N. El-Hage
Columbia University

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 depth 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. Continue reading You, Beirut and the Children →

The Gates of Gaza

Arab-Israeli Conflict, Bible and Holy Land, Palestine, Poetry


Illustration: left: “Samson carries gates” by Johann Christoph Weigel, 1695; right, Large mural of Palestinian presidential candidate Mahmoud Abbas in Gaza city, December 26, 2004, Reuters

The fragile and it seems futile political engagement of Fatah and Hamas has run into a veritable brick wall in Gaza, not surprising given all the mud slinging that has been going on. Hamas supporters have stormed what they see as the Bastille of President Mahmoud Abbas and in biblical terms carried away the gates. In reading the news reports today and looking at the pictures, especially the Hamas fighters gloating in Abbas’s former presidential office, it is as the baseball sage said “déjà vu all over again.” With fighting still continuing in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, the agony of Palestinian suffering endures. Of course, this is not the first time that havoc has raged in Gaza. Since so little is held sacred in the “Holy Land,’ we might as well raid scripture and summon up an ancient moral tale that ended with a blind man’s suicide in which the temple walls came tumbling down. Today it is obvious there is no Samson in the heroic sense, and recent events confirm that the the blind still lead the blind, while much of the rest of the world simply turns a blind eye. In such times perhaps the only antidote to unstoppable tears is poetry… Continue reading The Gates of Gaza →

An Iraqi Diplomat

Iraq

Who signed the United Nations Charter in 1945 for Iraq? Before giving the answer, here are a few details from an Iraqi diplomat’s life.

He was born in Baghdad in 1903 when the population of the city was only 140,000. His father, Sheikh Abbas was a shi’a religious leader; his mother the daughter of a famous female mullah from Hilla. The family lived near the Kadhimain mosque, the keeping of which had been entrusted in an Ottoman firman of 1611 to an ancestor of this diplomat. When he was accepted by the Christian American University of Beirut in 1921, it took a fatwa by a local mufti to allow him to go there. In 1929 he received a scholarship to take his Ph.D. in education from Columbia University. The title of his thesis was “The New Iraq: Its Problem of Bedouin Education.” While in America he met Ms. Sarah Powell, who became his wife in 1933. Continue reading An Iraqi Diplomat →

Fat Chance Fatwas

Egypt, Islam and Christianity, Islamic Law, Journalism and Media

Breastmilk and urine: two unlikely bodily fluids to be news fit to print in the New York Times. But an article by Michael Slackman in Tuesday’s edition pours it on, the kind of hook that tabloids feed on, and then it gets milked for less than it is worth. Here is the hook at the front:

First came the breast-feeding fatwa. It declared that the Islamic restriction on unmarried men and women being together could be lifted at work if the woman breast-fed her male colleagues five times, to establish family ties. Then came the urine fatwa. It said that drinking the urine of the Prophet Muhammad was deemed a blessing.

For the past few weeks, the breast-feeding and urine fatwas have proved a source of national embarrassment in Egypt, not least because they were issued by representatives of the highest religious authorities in the land.

Continue reading Fat Chance Fatwas →

Laughter that Lasts 12 Centuries

Ethics, Humor and Satire, Literature

The honor of being the greatest writer in Arabic prose, at least in the eyes of numerous Arab literati for the last millennium, belongs to the Iraqi Abu ‘Uthman ‘Amr ibn Bahr al-Jahiz. Born in Basra in 776 C.E., a full millennium before our own nation was founded, Jahiz lived most of his life between the recently founded Baghdad and Samarra. He is the acknowledged master of Arabic adab literature, an eclectic form both entertaining and instructive. The elegance of his writing is matched by the grounding of his reflections on the ordinary and the lowest parts of the social order.

One of his most entertaining works that survives is a satirical look at misers and the nature of avarice. In a culture that idealized hospitality from the poor Bedouin’s goat-hair tent to the sumptuous silk cushions of the sultan’s palace, this is a telling admission that not everyone abides by the social norms. Continue reading Laughter that Lasts 12 Centuries →