Tony Judt, a well-known historian, has written an engaging essay called “Girls! Girls! Girls!” for NYRBlog, The New York Review of Books blog, about how our stance towards sexual behavior on (and, by implication, off) campus has changed over the years. I don’t agree with everything he says–and he would probably say it’s because I am a product of my (and his) times–but what he says is thought-provoking. Here are some snippets, which, taken out of context, may lose some of the irony that informs them in the original:

Shortly after I took office [in 1992 as chair of NYU's History Department], a second-year graduate student came by. A former professional ballerina interested in Eastern Europe, she had been encouraged to work with me. I was not teaching that semester, so could have advised her to return another time. Instead, I invited her in. After a closed-door discussion of Hungarian economic reforms, I suggested a course of independent study—beginning the following evening at a local restaurant. A few sessions later, in a fit of bravado, I invited her to the premiere of Oleanna—David Mamet’s lame dramatization of sexual harassment on a college campus.

How to explain such self-destructive behavior? What delusional universe was mine, to suppose that I alone could pass untouched by the punitive prudery of the hour—that the bell of sexual correctness would not toll for me? I knew my Foucault as well as anyone and was familiar with Firestone, Millett, Brownmiller, Faludi, e tutte quante. To say that the girl had irresistible eyes and that my intentions were…unclear would avail me nothing. My excuse? Please Sir, I’m from the ’60s.

***

[T]he anxieties of contemporary sexual relations offer occasional comic relief. When I was Humanities dean at NYU, a promising young professor was accused of improper advances by a graduate student in his department. He had apparently followed her into a supply closet and declared his feelings. Confronted, the professor confessed all, begging me not to tell his wife. My sympathies were divided: the young man had behaved foolishly, but there was no question of intimidation nor had he offered to trade grades for favors. All the same, he was censured. Indeed, his career was ruined—the department later denied him tenure because no women would take his courses. Meanwhile, his “victim” was offered the usual counseling.

Some years later, I was called to the Office of the University Lawyer. Would I serve as a witness for the defense in a case against NYU being brought by that same young woman? Note, the lawyer warned me: “she” is really a “he” and is suing the university for failing to take seriously “her” needs as a transvestite. We shall fight the case but must not be thought insensitive.

So I appeared in Manhattan Supreme Court to explain the complexities of academic harassment to a bemused jury of plumbers and housewives. The student’s lawyer pressed hard: “Were you not prejudiced against my client because of her transgendered identity preference?” “I don’t see how I could have been,” I replied. “I thought she was a woman—isn’t that what she wanted me to think?” The university won the case.

***

Here as in so many other arenas, we have taken the ’60s altogether too seriously. Sexuality (or gender) is just as distorting when we fixate upon it as when we deny it. Substituting gender (or “race” or “ethnicity” or “me”) for social class or income category could only have occurred to people for whom politics was a recreational avocation, a projection of self onto the world at large.

Why should everything be about “me”? Are my fixations of significance to the Republic? Do my particular needs by definition speak to broader concerns? What on earth does it mean to say that “the personal is political”? If everything is “political,” then nothing is. I am reminded of Gertrude Stein’s Oxford lecture on contemporary literature. “What about the woman question?” someone asked. Stein’s reply should be emblazoned on every college notice board from Boston to Berkeley: “Not everything can be about everything.”

Full disclosure: One reason this piece engages me as much as it does, is that I have the same response as Judt to the question he poses at the end of his post:

So how did I elude the harassment police, who surely were on my tail as I surreptitiously dated my bright-eyed ballerina?

Except in my case she was a dark-haired and compellingly dark-eyed woman from Iran. And I have made the answer my title.

Cross-posted on It’s All Connected.

From ABC News:

The killers showed no mercy: They didn’t spare women and children, or even a 4-day-old baby, from their machetes. On Monday, Nigerian women wailed in the streets as a dump truck carried dozens of bodies past burned-out homes toward a mass grave.

Rubber-gloved workers pulled ever-smaller bodies from the dump truck and tossed them into the mass grave. A crowd began singing a hymn with the refrain, “Jesus said I am the way to heaven.” As the grave filled, the grieving crowd sang: “Jesus, show me the way.”

At least 200 people, most of them Christians, were slaughtered on Sunday, according to residents, aid groups and journalists. The local government gave a figure more than twice that amount, but offered no casualty list or other information to substantiate it.

An Associated Press reporter counted 61 corpses, 32 of them children, being buried in the mass grave in the village of Dogo Nahawa on Monday. Other victims would be buried elsewhere. At a local morgue the bodies of children, including a diaper-clad toddler, were tangled together. One appeared to have been scalped. Others had severed hands and feet.

Religious violence is not a new thing. Some of the most enduring images I have from my Jewish education are descriptions of the violence that has been perpetrated for centuries against Jews by Romans, Greeks, Christians and, though perhaps less often, Muslims. One subtext of those lessons was that the Jews, because we were so steadfast in our religious beliefs, because we refused to assimilate, have been made to suffer religious persecution more than any other group; and, indeed, when I was younger, I often experienced real cognitive dissonance when I heard about religious violence that did not involve Jews. Over time, as my vision of the world and my place in it widened, that dissonance disappeared. I came to understand as well that religion was sometimes merely the justifying veneer that one group would place over the violence they wanted to do to another, a way of hiding their more political and material motivation.

The more I heard and read about religious violence, the more familiar the scripting of it became–and it is remarkable how similar the scripts are; how carefully scripted the incitements to violence are, if not the violence itself, regardless of the religious denominations involved–and, eventually, the stories I would hear left me feeling more numb than anything else. Yes, it was horrible that people were killed, but, I would think, as long as religion contained within it the possibility for someone to decide that he or she is following the one true path and that all those not on that path are morally and spiritually inferior and therefore suspect, then the potential for religious violence inhered in religion, and there was no escaping it.

I continue to believe that, I suppose, which is why I tend not to write about religious violence as such: I just don’t think there is all that much to say, or, rather, that I have much to say that would be useful. Still, this story, which has also been reported on Yahoo! News and other news outlets–the New York Times puts the death toll at 500–brought me up short. In part, this is because I have a very close friend from Nigeria, and she has talked often about the tension between Muslims and Christians in her country. Indeed, this massacre is said to have been retaliation for a similar slaughter of Muslims perpetrated by Christians some time ago, and I can even imagine, from the way in which she talks about it, that my friend might have been among those Muslim-killing Christians had she been in the country and the circumstances been “right.” I feel, in other words, a personal connection to this story that I have rarely felt, not least because my friend might have been among those killed whether or not she had participated in the prior massacre.

I did not know about how deeply my friend’s fear, mistrust, and hatred of the Muslims in Nigeria ran until after our friendship was well-established. She says she feels this way only about Nigerian Muslims, not about people who follow Islam in general, and I believe her, and she tells stories about her own experiences in Nigeria and the experiences of the people she knows to justify herself. The fact that she makes this distinction, of course, suggests that the issues at stake are not really religious, but the fact that they are expressed religiously–in terms of spirituality and morality and the one true path to God–makes it hard, even just between the two of us, to get at what those stakes really are; and then I think about the way our invasion of Iraq and ousting of Saddam Hussein made space for the Sunni and Shia to go at each other’s throats–check out this NPR interview with Deborah Amos about her new book, Eclipse of the Sunnis: Power, Exile, and Upheaval in the Middle East–and even the Israeli-Palestinian struggle over the status of Jerusalem, which is so often played out in religious terms. And when I think about how may more examples I could list, I cannot help but feel that maybe it’s all, always, political; maybe the god or gods all these people fight over is just a way of not having to take responsibility for their own politics, their own desire for power, their own inability to share, their own fear of everything that makes them vulnerable; maybe the need to make your religion the only true one is nothing more than fear and cowardice, and we all know how thin the line is between the coward who cowers and the coward who becomes a bully.

It has been a very long time, since I was an undergraduate in fact, that I have known personally someone who could place her or himself so easily, so firmly, so absolutely, on one side of this kind of divide and so thoroughly forget that the other side is also inhabited by people; and yet even as I write that, it would be dishonest of me not to own up to the fact that I too once stood with Israel, as a Jew, in strictly religious terms, in a way that denied the humanity of the other side.

That we all have this capacity within us is by now a cliche, but how do you learn to accept that impulse in someone who has become your friend? Because if you cannot accept it–which is not the same thing as approving of it, or allowing it to go unchallenged–then there can no longer be a real friendship. This is the question that I am confronting.

Cross-posted on It’s All Connected.

Some things I’ve been reading when I should’ve been grading papers or doing other work:

• A Tough Patron and an Old Ideology Give Women a Lift in Bulgarian Politics, by Dan Bilefsky, The New York Times: What’s most interesting in this article about how Bulgarian Prime Minister Boiko M. Borisov has been appointing women to political offices are the explanations people give for why he is doing so and why women are needed in politics. Boiko says, for example, “Women are more diligent than men, and they don’t take long lunches or got to the bar,” and also, “Women have stronger characters than men because when they say no they mean no, and they are less corruptible.” Others suggest that women are less corruptible because they have more to lose, and others talk about the fact that while Bulgaria “never had a feminist movement” but that during “Communism women in Bulgaria were represented in almost every walk of life, from plant managers to medicine.”
• An interesting piece in The Lede about the politics behind Iran’s capture and the televised confession of Abdolmalek Rigi, leader of Jundallah, a militant group that claims to be defending Sunni Muslims in Iran’s southeast and has killed hundreds of Iranian soldiers and civilians since 2003. For some related articles in the news try here, here and here.
• In I Was the One Reading Andrew Marvell. You Were . . ., also in the Times, Alan Feuer turns some of the “Missed Connections” postings on newyork.craigslist.org into found poems.
• I appreciated “Thoughts on the ‘hookup culture,’ or what I learned from my high school diary, a guest post on Feministe by Nona Willis Aronowitz. One of my favorite bits: “We need to admit as a culture that teens are sexual beings, and that more often than not, sexual maturity has a completely different timeline than emotional maturity.”
• Before I became a translator, I was working on what might have become a book exploring male heterosexuality and pornography, of course, was one of the things I was researching. At the time, I was very disappointed at the narrowness and often impoverished nature of the discourse I found not only about the representation of men in heterosexual video pornography (which was what I was looking at) but also in pornography that was touted as progressive and even feminist. Perhaps one day I will return to that project, but in the mean time I have been enjoying Male Submission Art, the mission of which is to “showcase beautiful imagery where men and other male-identified people are submissive subjects. We aim to challenge stereotypes of the ‘pathetic’ submissive man.” The images are often very cool, and what I like about the analysis is that its core tenet seems to be that for a man to “submit” (whatever that word might mean in any given context) is not, by definition, for him to unman himself or to be unmanned by the one he is submitting to (whatever to “unman” might mean in any given context). Leaving aside the question of whether the particular sexuality expressed by the site is one’s cup of tea or not, it is–for me, anyway–a new, interesting and interestingly subversive way of trying to transform what we mean when we say the words “manhood” or “masculinity.”
• It’s odd, and maybe a bit arrogant sounding, to include something that I’ve written in this list, but I’ve recently been putting together my application for promotion to full professor, which involved going through the two books of translations that I’ve published. As I did so, I was reminded of how wonderful a poet Saadi was. (One of these days I have to add my work to the Wikipdedia entry on him.) So these words may be mine, but they are someone else’s work. It’s from Selections from Saadi’s Gulistan:

The best thing for an ignorant man is to be silent, and if he understands that, and practices it, he will no longer be ignorant.

If the learning you possess is less than perfect,
keep your tongue tucked safely in your mouth.
Empty words disgrace the one who speaks them,
like serving a walnut shell without a nut.
A fool was trying hard to teach his ass
to talk. A wise man watching him observed,
“Aren’t you afraid of what they’ll say
when they find out what you’re doing? This beast
will never learn the trick of human speech.
Better you should learn the gift of silence.”
A man who does not think before he speaks
will almost always use the words foolishly.
If you will not take the time a wise man takes
to speak wisely, practice an animal’s silence.

• The Year of the Drone: A blog with an interactive map and analysis of US drone attacks in Pakistan.
• Ethics and Aesthetics: An brief, interesting post by Malachi Black on The Best American Poetry.

I have a three or four sets of technical writing papers to grade this weekend–I am teaching two sections this semester–and I was thinking to get started tonight, but I can’t bear the thought right now of having to deal with student writing so I am going to procrastinate by telling you briefly about a discussion I had Monday with the section that is all male (the other is mostly male) about the assignment they will be handing in to me next week. I am using a textbook called Elements of Technical Writing, by Thomas Pearsall, the first seven chapters of which deal with the technical writing process. Each chapter is given over to one step in that process, and Pearsall has built an incremental assignment into the sequence of chapters: Students are to imagine that they work for a start-up company that is thinking about investing in groupware so that employees can work remotely. They have been asked by their supervisor to do some research and write a report on groupware that she can use to persuade management to spend the money. The first two steps in the writing process that Pearsall lays out involve putting together a work plan, a description of the project and a list of the tasks that need to be completed. On Monday, we were talking about the audience analysis section of the work plan, and I was asking my students to list what they knew about their supervisor that might be relevant to how they would choose to write their report. They called out some obvious things about being a manager, and then someone said, “She’s a woman.”

“Is that relevant to the writing of your report?” I asked.

“Of course,” someone else answered.

“Why?” I asked, and the answers came very quickly.

“Because women are more skeptical than men.”

“Because women over analyze everything”

“They pay too much attention to details.”

“Women ask too many questions.”

“Because women never forget when you make a mistake.”

“Because women in the workplace always feel they have something to prove; she’s probably going to be really pushy.”

There were a couple of more that I don’t remember clearly, but all of them–with the exception perhaps of the last one–were such unambiguous instances of sexist stereotyping that I was, for a moment, shocked into silence. It had been a very long since I’d heard anyone anywhere assert those stereotypes as if they were simple fact. “Do you really think you want to write your report based on those assumptions?” I asked. “Remember, she’s your supervisor.” A few of my students laughed; a couple of them shook their heads; we had a brief and predictable conversation about sexist stereotyping; and while I doubt I changed anyone’s mind about women in general, they all seemed to get the point: don’t base workplace behavior on those kinds of assumptions.

Then, as the conversation was winding down, someone said, “It’s good there are no girls in the class. If there were, they’d be fighting us all the way and we ‘d never have been able to talk like this.” Unfortunately, class was over and so I couldn’t pursue precisely what he meant by that, but I walked to my car with mixed feelings. On the one hand, there is wisdom in what that student said; on the other hand, there would have been value for those men in having to deal with women’s anger; and it made me start to wonder about how to structure a lesson, or lessons, around the problems of sexism in the workplace and ethical behavior in the workplace, that would remain true to the course description but also go a little deeper than some version of When you go to work, check your sexism/racism/etc. at the door. It’s something I will be thinking about, since it looks like I will be teaching technical writing for the foreseeable future.

Cross-posted on It’s All Connected.

Like Kittenloss said in her or his comment on DeadSpin, where I found this story–thanks to my friend Amy King–I expected, based on the title, “NYU Business School Professor Has Mastered the Art of Email Flaming,” to side with the student, but the details convinced me otherwise. The graduate student, and the graduate part is important, walked into Galloway’s lecture one hour late on the first day of class and Galloway asked him to leave and told him to come back the next day. This is from an email that the student sent to Galloway complaining about the lateness policy–you can’t enter class if you’re more than 15 minutes late–and explaining his lateness:

As of yesterday evening, I was interested in three different Monday night classes that all occurred simultaneously. In order to decide which class to select, my plan for the evening was to sample all three and see which one I like most. Since I had never taken your class, I was unaware of your class policy. I was disappointed that you dismissed me from class considering (1) there is no way I could have been aware of your policy and (2) considering that it was the first day of evening classes and I arrived 1 hour late (not a few minutes), it was more probable that my tardiness was due to my desire to sample different classes rather than sheer complacency.

Here are the barely tongue-in-cheek first paragraphs of Galloway’s response:

Just so I’ve got this straight…you started in one class, left 15-20 minutes into it (stood up, walked out mid-lecture), went to another class (walked in 20 minutes late), left that class (again, presumably, in the middle of the lecture), and then came to my class. At that point (walking in an hour late) I asked you to come to the next class which “bothered” you.

Correct?

You state that, having not taken my class, it would be impossible to know our policy of not allowing people to walk in an hour late. Most risk analysis offers that in the face of substantial uncertainty, you opt for the more conservative path or hedge your bet (e.g., do not show up an hour late until you know the professor has an explicit policy for tolerating disrespectful behavior, check with the TA before class, etc.). I hope the lottery winner that is your recently crowned Monday evening Professor is teaching Judgement and Decision Making or Critical Thinking.

In addition, your logic effectively means you cannot be held accountable for any code of conduct before taking a class. For the record, we also have no stated policy against bursting into show tunes in the middle of class, urinating on desks or taking that revolutionary hair removal system for a spin. However, xxxx, there is a baseline level of decorum (i.e., manners) that we expect of grown men and women who the admissions department have deemed tomorrow’s business leaders.

The rest of the letter is worth reading as well.

For me, what jumps out here–aside from the obvious question of whether Galloway is just being a dick, which I think he is not–is the degree to which this student seems to take for granted that, as a customer of the college, he has the right, because the customer is always right, to do what he did. I have run up against the “I am a customer of this school and you have therefore to give me what I want” thinking a lot over the past couple of years, and it troubles me. There are ways in which students are and should be treated as customers: they have a right to adequate parking, to clean and comfortable facilities, to access to technology, to competent teachers who come to class prepared, etc. But I a not a customer service representative and I resent the hell out of it when students treat me that way.

Cross-posted on It’s All Connected.

Zahra’s Paradise. Here’s the first page:

Only chapter one is up so far, but it looks like it’s going to be a very good book. Go check it out.

Check it out.

Here is John Krautzner’s–he’s the creator and self-styled “Alpha Male” on the page–post called “Reasons to Hit Girls:”

There are many reasons to hit girls. First of all, it keeps those bitches in line. If a girl is mouthing off to you, slug her in the face. This accomplishes three main goals. First of all, she shut the fuck up. Secondly, she will have more respect for you and your fists of justice. But most importantly, she will learn a valuable lesson that will keep her in line for years to come.

Another reason to hit girls is that it is Natural. That’s right, it is NATURAL to hit girls. God, in his infinite knowledge wrote into our DNA the instinct to hit women. If you deny this instinct, then you are not a man. If women didn’t get hit by men, they wouldn’t know what to do. They would panic and a lot of people would die.

More Reasons to Hit Girls:

it’s fun and healthy

it’s inexpensive

Chuck Norris does it

it reduces your chance of contracting HIV by 17%

I want you to

it reduces stress

they like it

The page has been up since 2006, and it’s possible that Krautzner has all but forgotten about it, but that is no excuse. Apparently, there used to be a page called “Hitting Women” that was taken down fairly recently. I have logged a protest with Facebook. If you’re on Facebook, you ought to do the same.

The spot is very cleverly done, but there are all kinds of messages here, both implicit and explicit, both conforming to gender stereotypes and not, and I am wondering what other people see and how they feel about it.

Also up on It’s All Connected.

Laid up with gout today, and for the past four days–the most serious attack I’ve had in a while; I could barely walk on Thursday and Friday–but today is the first day my head feels clear enough that I can get some work done. I’ve been watching TV and reading to distract myself, and so this seemed like a perfect time to start a “What I’m Reading” series of posts, which I’ve been wanting to do for a while.

1. Via Fatemeh Fakhraie: Why Taylor Swift Offends Little Monsters, Feminists, and Weirdos. I don’t know Taylor Swift’s music–or, if I do, because I’ve heard in on the radio, I don’t know that I know it–but I enjoyed this analysis of her image and music.
2. From Critical Mass: The Blog of the National Book Critics Circle Board of Directors, which is doing a series called “30 Books in 30 Days,” each day given over to an NBCC award nominee, this brief review of a biography of John Cheever made me want to read Cheever’s work again for the first time in a long time.
3. Also from Critical Mass, this take on Louise Gluck’s new book, A Village Life. I have always liked Gluck’s work.
4. I’d never heard of the poet Eleanor Ross Taylor, till I read this–yet one more from Critical Mass–appreciation of Captive Voices: New and Selected Poems, 1960-2008. She sounds like someone I could learn something from, not to mention I enjoyed the poems quoted in the piece. Now all I need is a semester with the time to do nothing but read.
5. New York Times writer Katherine Bouton reviews two books about Mary Anning, The Fossil Hunter: Dinosaurs, Evolution and the Woman Whose Discoveries Changed the World, by Shelley Emling and Remarkable Creatures, by Tracy Chevalier. The first is a biography, the second is a novel. Here is Bouton’s lead: “Mary Anning was one of the few women to make a success in paleontology and one of the fewer still whose success was not linked to that of a paleontologist spouse (or any spouse: she was single). She made five major fossil discoveries from 1811 to her death in 1847 and many lesser ones. Why then is she best known as the inspiration for the tongue twister “She sells seashells by the seashore?”
6. In the same issue of the Times, Denise Grady writes about the ethical issues that arise when doctors take cells from patients and then use those cells in research and, sometimes, in commercial ventures that make a whole lot of money. “A Lasting Gift to Medicine That Wasn’t Really a Gift” is a response to The Immortal Life of Henriette Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot. Henrietta Lacks was an African-American woman who died of cervical cancer in the 1950s, and Skloot’s book is an attempt to come to terms with both sides of an issue mired in questions of race, class, medical ethics and more: Lacks’ cancer cells, which were taken for analysis, went on to become a mainstay of modern medical research, being used in developing the first polio vaccine and in the development of drugs for diseases including Parkinson’s leukemia and the flu, and they not incidentally have made some people in the medical field very, very rich. Lacks’ family, who can’t even afford their own health insurance, has never seen a dime of that money. The story is not as simple a one of exploitation as that outline would suggest, which is why Skloot’s book sounds like it is worth reading, but so is Grady’s opinion piece.
7. Due in 2013, the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, will contain some significant revisions that could result, according to Times reporter, Benedict Carey, in “fewer children [getting] a diagnosis of bipolar disorder[,] ‘[b]inge eating disorder’ and ‘hypersexuality’ [becoming] part of everyday language” and a significant change in the way many mental disorders are diagnosed and treated. This book is used to define the line between the so-called normal and the so-called abnormal; changes in it could have a profound impact, therefore, on society. It is, therefore, worth paying attention to.
8. If any of you, like me, have gout, you want to know about GoutPal, the only informational site about gout that I have found–and it’s got a ton of information–that is not also trying to sell you something. I have glanced through it a couple of times, and I am beginning to realize that I need to read it. If you have gout, you probably should too.
9. An opinion piece on Tehran Bureau that’s worth reading about how to understand what happened in terms of the Green Movement in Iran on February 11th: Were the Greens Defeated?
10. Also from Tehran Bureau: Why North Tehranis Don’t Revolt: Why some people who clearly see the regime as “them,” don’t see the opposition as “us,” or at least not enough of an “us” that they are willing to risk joining the protests.

If you’re an Asian American poet, you should consider applying for this retreat. Kundiman does great work. Here’s a basic description:

In order to help mentor the next generation of Asian-American poets, Kundiman is sponsoring an annual Poetry Retreat at Fordham University. During the Retreat, nationally renowned Asian American poets will conduct workshops with fellows. Readings, writing circles and informal social gatherings will also be scheduled. Through this Retreat, Kundiman hopes to provide a safe and instructive environment that identifies and addresses the unique challenges faced by emerging Asian American poets. This 6-day Retreat will take place from Tuesday to Sunday. Workshops will not exceed eight students.

Read the rest here.

Writing in this past Thursday’s issue of The New York Times (February 4th), Michael Kimmelman compares the European tour on which the government of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad sent the Tehran Symphony Orchestra to similar tours on which the former Soviet Union would send its own world-class performers, such Sviatoslav Richter.¹ The concerts these performers gave served both to distract Western audiences from the dissidents the Soviet government was exiling to the gulags and to force those audiences into “the moral compromise [that] attending such propaganda events” would require. Given that the Iranian symphony’s tour took place “around the time the Iranian government executed two more political prisoners, charging nine others with waging war against God, a capital offense,”² it is likely that the Islamic Republic was trying to implement a similar strategy. Indeed, the title of the music the orchestra performed, “Peace and Friendship Symphony,” by Majid Entezami, would seem to make that strategy explicit. Kimmelman, however, does not have kind words for the music, calling it “a four-movement jeremiad of martial bombast and almost unfathomable incompetence and silliness, originally performed, according to Tehran Times, last February in Iran to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the revolution [and] retitled for this occasion.”

What struck me most about Kimmelman’s article, though, was not what he had to say about the similarities between what Tehran was trying to do last month and what Moscow did during the Cold War, but rather what he had to say about the differences:

The difference now isn’t just that the Tehran orchestra playing a pathetic Peace and Friendship Symphony is such a far cry from Emil Gilels playing Beethoven’s Emperor concerto. More fundamentally, it’s that a tour by an anointed symphony orchestra from the other side barely registers in the Western political consciousness. In an Internet age when everyone’s supposedly savvy to crude propaganda, the presumption seems to be that the Iranian tour doesn’t even rise to the threshold of newsworthiness.

But this presumption is a result of what the American musicologist Richard Taruskin calls a common fallacy. The fallacy, he has written, consists in turning “a blind eye on the morally or politically dubious aspects of serious music,” as if “the only legitimate object of praise or censure in art” is whether it’s good or not.

“Art is not blameless,” Mr. Taruskin writes. “Art can inflict harm.”

We take the blame-worthiness of art for granted when it comes to popular culture, criticizing Avatar, for example, for being yet one more movie about a white guy who saves a nature-loving people of color or the writers of a show like Battle Star Galactica for how they write rape into the show’s narrative; but it is good to be reminded that no art, not even classical music, is without political significance, that it too can be used as propaganda, to reinforce, or to subvert, the status quo.

In the conclusion to his review, Kimmelman quotes an Iranian businessman living in Geneva. This man was angry because he kept “seeing Ahmadinejad’s face in the music.” He said, however, that his heart “goes out to the musicians. They’re victims like the rest of us.”

Cross-posted on It’s All Connected

1. Interestingly, the piece has two different titles: “A Swiss Concert For an Audience Back in Tehran” is the print version; the online version reads, “The Sour Notes of Iran’s Art Diplomacy.” (back)
2. And some of them are likely to be executed as well, as the government in Iran gears up to intimidate the opposition further in the days before February 11th, the anniversary of the founding of the Islamic Republic. (back)

Note: Portions of this post were edited on January 19 to correct problems that resulted from careless cutting and pasting.

Oy! So I was, with mild interest, reading the conversation that was beginning to develop around the post written by Julie about J Street opening local chapters. I say “mild interest” because I find so much of the politics surrounding the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians–which also means the conflicts between and among all the various groups who have an interest in how that conflict is, or is not, resolved–not only tiresome, but also, all too often, childish. It’s not that I think the issues are not profoundly, world-changingly important; it’s just that I no longer have the patience that I once had for sifting through the partisan nitpicking and political opportunism, not to mention the outright hatred, into which so many discussions of those issues inevitably devolve. Still, the little bit that I have heard about J Street has suggested to me that they are trying to be adults by, at the very least, broadening the conversation both in terms of content and in terms of who gets to participate, and that is refreshing, even though I don’t know enough about most of their positions to say how much I support them beyond the statement I have just made.

What caught my interest about the conversation Julie’s post started was that it concerned literature, the role of literature in political movements, the stance political movements should take towards individual works of literature, what it means to write politically engaged literature and what it means to engage literature politically. The first part of the conversation is about the play Seven Jewish Children, written in 2009 by Caryl Churchill in response to Israel’s invasion of Gaza. The play consists of a series of simple imperative sentences, each beginning with “Tell her” or “Don’t tell her”–her being a female of indeterminate age, though she is probably pretty young. Collectively, these imperatives represent some of the positions that Jews, as groups and as individuals, Israeli and not, have taken in response to both the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and Israel’s existence. In my own opinion, the play, which I have not read as carefully as I might, and so I am willing to be convinced otherwise, walks a fine line between exposing and critiquing, but also humanizing, the denial and hypocrisy of many who support Israel’s policies out of fear for their own and the Jewish community’s survival, and propagandizing that position as a tool to demonize both Jews and Israel. Ultimately, I don’t think the play crosses the line into propaganda, though I can see how others might reasonably say that it does. Moreover, since it is a play, I suppose that what really matters in terms of this question is how the play is produced, not simply how it reads on the page.

The first comment on Julie’s post is by Sebastian, who says:

I do not remember seeing any discussion of J Street [on Alas]. Before you rush and support them, check at least the Wiki entry… and maybe look into how mainstream Israel supporters feel about them. Maybe also read Seven Jewish Children and remember that J Street endorses the play.

Chingona then points out that J Street did not “endorse” the play. Rather, the organization asserted that the play is not necessarily antisemitic and they defended the theater company that put the play on. Sebastian then admits not that he’d misread J Street’s position on the play, but that he hadn’t even bothered to read the original statement; he also explains that he thinks “it’s worth reading and discussing [Seven Jewish Children], but staging it according to the terms of the author is taking a stance with which I most certainly do not agree.” Presumably, since he does not specify, the part of the terms of performance that Sebastian objects to is the text in boldface below:

The play can be read or performed anywhere, by any number of people. Anyone who wishes to do it should contact the author’s agent (details below), who will license performances free of charge provided that no admission fee is charged and that a collection is taken at each performance for Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP), 33a Islington Park Street, London N1 1QB, tel +44 (0)20 7226 4114, e-mail info@map-uk.org, web www.map-uk.org.

Certainly, Sebastian is within his right to disagree with these terms, and he is within his right not to attend any performance of the play and to try to convince others not to attend; he also would be within his rights to organize a boycott of the play in his community were someone trying to put it on there. What I am interested in, however, is that the disagreement he expresses is not with the text of the play itself, which he thinks is worth reading and discussing, but with people putting the play to political use, to serve a practical purpose in the world, one that involves human being, human bodies and the relationships between and among them. Some might argue that medical aid is not political, or at least that it ought to be beyond politicization. In principle, I agree, if by politicization you mean the kind of partisanship that is more about who wins and who loses than about finding solutions; but it’s not just that there is nothing about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict that is not already, always, political and politicized; it’s that medicine is itself, wherever and however it is practiced, is already, always, political simply because it is about human being and human bodies; and to suggest that literature ought not to be used to make medical care available to people who need it, regardless of the politics of the organizations involved, is to suggest that literature needs to be controlled, hemmed in, fenced in, to be kept safe from those who would corrupt it, to protect its purity, so that it can be read and discussed, for example, without the taint of an overt political agenda. Or maybe it is to suggest that it’s us who need to be kept safe from literature, because literature has the power to move people to act, not just to think and to feel.

However one understands the impulse to keep literature out of the material reality of people’s lives, that impulse at its core is the impulse to censor, to control meaning and thereby to control people’s imaginations. Let me be clear, though: I am not accusing Sebastian of censorship or of wanting to censor anyone. He is neither making nor advocating policy in his comments on Alas; and let me be clear about something else as well: I am talking in this post about literature, works that aspire to the level of art, the purpose of which is to explore human being and feeling, not–as propaganda attempts, and is designed, to do–dictate it. I can imagine, for example, a production of Seven Jewish Children that might qualify as propaganda, one in which, say, the characters were all wearing Nazi uniforms and in which there was no irony to make that costuming decision anything other than a simple equating of Israel with Nazi Germany. I would not argue that such a production should be censored, but it is unambiguously a production neither I nor anyone I know would support, no matter how worthy the goal of fund raising for Medical Aid for Palestinians might be–and from what I can tell that is a worthy goal. What if, though, the director of the play, the one who made the choice to put Nazi uniforms on the actors, was Jewish, and let’s say he or she was making in this production a serious attempt to use that costuming in an ironic way, as a reference to the fact that the Jews, who were the victims in the Holocaust, are now, in Israel, in the position of being an occupying oppressor, of victimizing the Palestinians.¹ The point of the comparison, in other words, is not to say that Israel–and, by extension, the Jews–are no different from the Nazis, that the Israelis are committing what is tantamount to genocide against the Palestinians, but rather to illuminate the dynamic by which violence begets violence, all too often turning those who were victims of violence into perpetrators of the kinds of violence they suffered. Further, imagine that the program notes for this imaginary production make clear that it is intended to explore what it means that the violence done by the Israelis to the Palestinians has become part of Jewish identity, in the sense that if one is Jewish, one must be accountable in some way for one’s responses to that violence. Moreover, let’s even say that there is a note in the program explaining that the choice of Nazi uniforms was because the Holocaust, more than any other persecution the Jews have suffered, can stand for all the persecutions through which the Jews have lived. The comparison to the Holocaust per se, in other words, is not even the point. Read the rest of this entry »

1. I wish I didn’t feel the need to add this footnote, but I do: To make this reference is, of course, not to deny that the Palestinians have also been guilty of victimizing Israelis. (back)

This is my constant refrain these days when it comes to current events in Iran: I wish I had time to do more than write this little bit and link to a couple of blog posts and articles worth reading, but I’ve got too much else on my plate right now. Massoud Alimohammadi, from everything I have been able to gather, was a nuclear scientist who supported the opposition in Iran. The Iranian government has constructed a narrative in which Alimohammadi was a supporter of the regime and he was killed by a car bomb that was planted by the Mujahedin-e Khalq with the help of, of course, Israel and the United States. Here are links to a few places that have more information, analysis and more links to further details:

• Gary Sick at Gary’s Choices: Assassination in Tehran
• Homylafayette: Tehran University Professor Massoud Alimohammadi Assassinated: Fact and Fiction
• Frontline|Tehran Bureau: Bomb Kills Iran Nuclear Physicist Tied to Mousavi

I have been working on a long post dealing with the politics of Holocaust imagery in literature and the Jewish community. It should be done soon. I’m hoping to write something more in depth about Iran when I am done with that.

Cross-posted on It’s All Connected.

Jeffrey Gettleman, in this New York Times article, writes about how three Evangelical Christians from the United States–Scott Lively (click here to read quotes from his talk in Uganda), Caleb Lee Brundidge and Exodus International board member Don Schmierer–are now trying to distance themselves from an event in Uganda at which they spoke about “how to make gay people straight, how gay men often sodomized teenage boys and how ‘the gay movement is an evil institution’ whose goal is ‘to defeat the marriage-based society and replace it with a culture of sexual promiscuity.’ The reason for their backpedaling is that the event contributed to the climate that led to the Anti-Homosexuality Bill of 2009, which would make homosexuality a capital crime. In a rhetorical move that is remarkably similar to the ways in which the religious right tries to distance itself from people who murder doctors that perform abortions, each of these men or their organizations has issued statements about how their message is one of love and compassion, not hatred and violence. Read the article and follow some of the links. Their hypocrisy speaks for itself.

I do have to share, though, my favorite quote from Gettleman’s article. Referring to the Ugandan Anti-Homosexuality Bill, Schmierer says, “That’s horrible, absolutely horrible. Some of the nicest people I have ever met are gay people.” (Makes me wonder if any of them are Black.)

Cross-posted on It’s All Connected.

Writing in the January issue of Harper’s Magazine, Joshua Cohen wrote this at the end of his review of Laor’s book:

It often seems that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is just [...] a textual problem. If so, then the muddle of meaning that must be analyzed lies in parsing not Palestinian from Israeli, but “Israeli” from “Jew.” Only once those epithets have been dissevered can some sort of dialogue begin, between two political entities and not between two (or three) religions or Peoples. Until then, “Israel” will continue to be vilified as a word that means something other than what it should, while all critics of Israel will be accused of anti-Semitism.

It is not clear to me from the review how much of this is Cohen, how much of this is Laor and how much of it is Cohen putting into his own words what he agrees with in Laor’s book, but any book that leads to this kind of thinking, to asking these kinds of questions, whether I ultimately agree with the book or not, is a book worth reading. Now, if there were only 36 hours or more in a day. Sigh.

Cross-posted on It’s All Connected.

Farid Al-Din Attar is one of the most important writers in the Persian canon. Not only is he a major poet in his own right, but his work offers crucial insight into Sufi thought and experience, while prefiguring other important poets like Rumi, Saadi and Hafez. As well, once translations of classical Persian literature began to appear in English in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, Attar’s work—along with, among others, that of the three poets I just mentioned—played an important role both in helping the English-speaking world of the time understand Persian and Islamic culture and in bringing into English literature an influence felt by the likes of Matthew Arnold and Lord Byron, and that contemporary writers like Robert Bly continue to find important. It is both ironic and a shame, therefore, that only one of Attar’s major works, Manteq al-Tayr, exists in a contemporary translation for a general English-language readership, The Conference of the Birds, published in 1984 by Afkham Darbandi and Dick Davis. Readable, enjoyable and poetically powerful, The Conference of the Birds is the kind of translation we deserve of a literature that has influenced ours in such significant ways. Unfortunately, whatever its merits on scholarly grounds, the same cannot be said—at least not with the same enthusiasm—for John Andrew Boyle’s out-of-print translation of Ilahi-Nama, The Ilahi-Nama or Book of God, published by the University of Manchester Press in 1976.

In an essay called “Representations of Attar in the West and in the East,” Christopher Shackle criticizes Margaret Smith’s 1932 translation of Manteq al-Tayr for being written “in a prose whose archaisms, including biblical ‘thee’s and ‘thou’s, cover Attar’s studiously clear style with a patina of reverence….” (187). Boyle’s Ilahi-Nama suffers from the same weakness. Here, for example, is his rendering of the passage in “The Tale of Marjuma” where the woman berates her brother-in-law for trying to have his way with her:

She said to him: “Art thou not ashamed before God? Dost thou thus show respect to thy brother?
Is this thy religion and thy probity? Dost thou thus keep trust for thy brother?
Go, repent, return to God, and eschew this wicked thought.”

That man said to the woman: “It is no use; thou must satisfy me at once,
Otherwise I will cease to concern myself about thee, I will expose thee to shame, I will slight thee.
Straightaway now I shall cast thee to destruction, I shall cast thee into a fearful plight.” (32)

As well, Boyle too often relies on a literalness that ends up being unintentionally comic and/or almost impossible to comprehend. The first line of the final section of the “Exordium,” in which Attar praises and meditates upon the greatness of God—“Come, musk of the soul, open thy musk-bladder, for thou art the deputy of the Vicar of God” (27)—is an example of the former. In “The Tale of Marjuma,” to give an example of the latter, when the female protagonist is on a ship at sea, about to be raped by the entire crew, she prays to God to save her. This is Boyle’s rendering of that scene:

When the woman learned of these wicked men’s feelings, she saw the whole sea as a liver from her heart’s blood.
She opened her mouth [and said]: “O Knower of Secrets, preserve me from the evil of these wicked men.” (38)

The phrase “the whole sea as a liver from her heart’s blood” clearly relates to the idea in Persian culture that the liver, not the heart, is the seat of emotion, but what the phrase means, except in the vaguest of senses, is far from clear. By way of comparison, here is my version of those lines:

When she learned
what the men intended, she turned
and saw in the sea surrounding her,
filled with her heart’s blood, a liver
wide enough to hold all she felt.
Her mouth fell open. She knelt,
prayed: “Protect me, Knower of Secrets!
Save me from this wickedness.”

I make no claim that this is great poetry, or that there is no better solution to the “heart’s-blood-liver” metaphor; and I am very aware that whether or not my translation will endure is a question that only time and readers will answer, but the value of bringing Ilahi-Nama into 21^st century American English poetry is not only, and not even primarily, that it might be successful in these terms. Rather, the value lies in the sustained engagement translation is—both in the writing and the reading—with another culture.

On the one hand, the value of such engagement is, or ought to be, self-evident, requiring no further justification. On the other hand, however, given the current national and international political moment, it is, or ought to be, impossible to talk about translating Persian literature without also talking about both the state of relations between Iran and the United States and the political unrest that has focused world attention on Iran since the contested presidential elections there in June 2009. Each of those dynamics demands that the people of the United States learn as much about the Iranian people, their culture and their history, as we possibly can, especially since our collective ignorance about Iran has been profound since diplomatic relations between our two countries ended after the Islamic Revolution in 1979-80. Boyle’s translation of Ilahi-Nama is not a text to which people are likely to go for that kind of learning, most immediately because it is out of print, but also because its archaic diction and biblical style is more likely than not to alienate them.

I am neither naïve nor arrogant enough to assume that my translation of Ilahi-Nama will by itself effect any change, large or small, in US-Iran relations or that it will alter even one reader’s notions about Iran and/or Islam. I do know, however, that each translated book made available to a reading public increases the likelihood of such change taking place. At the very least because it offers a radically different view of Islam from the version practiced and promulgated by the current Iranian government and can therefore help to combat the anti-Muslim stereotypes currently in fashion, but even more significantly because it is a great work of literature written by one of the world’s greatest poets, whom we in the United States deserve to know better than we do, a new literary translation of Ilahi-Nama should be among the books making such change possible.

Sources

ʻAṭṭār, Farīd al-Dīn. The Ilāhī-Nāma Or Book of God of Farīd Al-Dīn ʻAṭṭār. Trans. John Andrew Boyle. Persian Heritage Series, Vol. 29 Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1976.

Shackle, Christopher. “Representations of Attar in the West and in the East: Translations of the Mantiq Al-Tayr and the Tale of Shaykh Ṣanʻān.” Attar and the Persian Sufi Tradition: The Art of Spiritual Flight. Eds. Leonard Lewisohn, and Christopher Shackle. London: I. B. Tauris, 2006. 165-93.

One of eight major works that can reliably be ascribed to Attar, Ilahi-Nama (Book of God or, sometimes, Divine Book) has, according to Encyclopedia Iranica, been translated once into English, by John A. Boyle in 1976, and once into French, by F. Rouhani in 1961. Four of Attar’s eight works—Ilahi-Nama is part of this subset—are mystical narratives, each one dealing with a different aspect of Sufi thought and experience. Ilahi-Nama’s subject is zuhd, or asceticism, which Sufis understand to mean a disciplined stance of detachment and indifference towards one’s desires so that one will not be ruled by them. This focus on the interior world of human emotion differentiates Ilahi-Nama from the other of Attar’s poems with which it is often compared, Manteq al-tayr (Conference of the Birds), his best known work in English. The two poems are similar in form (they are each frame stories) and message (the key to enlightenment exists within each human being, not in the external world), but the framing narrative of Manteq al-tayr, an allegory about a group of birds in search of a king, is essentially a critique of people’s need to find a master who will lead them on the path to true understanding. Ilahi-Nama, on the other hand, is about learning to master oneself.

The framing narrative of Ilahi-Nama is about a caliph who asks his six sons what they desire most. The first son says he wants the daughter of the king of the peris (faeries); the second wants to learn the art of magic; the third son desires Jamshid’s cup because it will reveal to him the secrets of the world; the fourth seeks the water of life; the fifth son covets the ring Solomon used to control demons; and the sixth son wants to master alchemy. As each son gives his answer, the father tells stories to illustrate, first, how shallow and materialistic the son is for wanting what he wants and, second, how the son should understand his desire so he can use it on the path to enlightenment. None of the sons, however, accept their father’s lessons at face value, arguing that he has misunderstood their desires and that the lessons he wants them to learn, therefore, are misguided. When the father tells his first son what has come to be known as “The Tale of Marjuma,” for example—about a beautiful and righteous woman who, after her husband leaves on pilgrimage to Mecca, must fend off a series of men who are so overcome with lust when they glimpse her beauty that they will stop at nothing to have her—the son accuses his father of wanting to eliminate sex. “God forbid[!]” the father replies, explaining that “The Tale of Marjuma” illustrates how sex, properly comprehended and entered into, is a first step on the path to enlightenment:

But when your desire achieves apotheosis,
sex gives birth to a love without limits;
and when this love is pushed by passion to the edge
of its strength, spiritual love emerges; and when
spiritual love can grow no further, your soul
will vanish into the Beloved’s endlessness. (My translation)

Given that the surface of the narrative in “The Tale of Marjuma” feels more like a Perils-of-Pauline-type story in which the depraved and debauched men get their comeuppance than one about the spiritual nature of sexuality, the son’s misreading of the tale is an easy one to fall into. Such a reading, however, fails to account for, among other things, the fact that not all the men who try to possess the woman give in to their desires without a struggle. They are, in other words, neither evil nor merely slaves to their desires; they are human and flawed and, more to the point, they are, in the end, able and willing to repent. Indeed, they must repent, for God has punished them with a paralysis from which—in an irony that is at the core of the story’s meaning—they can be healed only by confessing to the woman everything they did to her. Read the rest of this entry »

One word: plagiarism. I spend a great deal of time at the beginning of the semester, on the first day actually, talking about it, explaining it and making sure my students understand my policy, which is: If I catch you willfully trying to fool me by passing off someone else’s work as your own, you will fail for the semester, no second chances. I lecture in excruciating detail–with more than a few examples of students who were passing (one was even getting an A) whom I failed because I caught them willfully plagiarizing–about why I take it personally when someone tried to do this: because it means that he or she thinks either that I am stupid, that I won’t know the difference between her or his writing, which I have been reading all semester, and the professional-grade writing that students inevitably hand in when they plagiarize, or that I don’t care enough about my job actually to pay attention to the work that students hand in. I repeat this warning several times during the semester, with a shorter version of the same lecture, especially when I assign any paper that involves even the smallest amount of research. I even tell my students how I am going to catch them. Most plagiarism these days involves students cutting and pasting stuff from the web, and if it’s on the web, I tell them, Google can find it. “Please,” I ask them, “don’t put me in the position of having to fail you. If you are having problems with an assignment, come talk to me. As long as you are someone who has been coming to class and doing the work–even if you’ve been getting D’s–I’d rather work something out (an extension, whatever) to make it possible for you to do the work than to fail you for plagiarism.”

Inevitably, though, there are students who don’t believe me or who think they are smarter than I am, and this semester is no exception. I have caught three plagiarists in my Technical Writing class, and it’s really pissing me off. First, the assignment they plagiarized–writing a set of instructions, a description and a process analysis–while not necessarily easy, is not hard to do well on if you take the time to do it right. Second, two of the students were clearly passing; one of them was on his way to getting a B. (The other would have ended up with a D+ or a C, depending on how he did on his final paper.) Third, the remaining plagiarist does not have English as his first language, and so the work he’s been handing me has not only been sprinkled with the kinds of grammatical errors one would expect from someone writing in his second language; even when his writing was grammatical, it had a slight “accent” that betrayed his country of origin. So what did he hand me? A grammatically perfect description of a light bulb, as if I wouldn’t notice the difference.

All three of them are going to fail for the semester.

And now that I have vented, I am going to bed. I need the sleep.

Cross posted on It’s All Connected.

Edited because of privacy issues.

According to one of my students, in a paper he wrote meant to talk about the different approaches to history in Maxine Hong Kingston’s China Men and Island, edited by Him Mark Lai, Genny Lim and Judy Yung, China has historically been infused with a “racial ideology of male masculinity” and that is why so many “Chinese Americans believe in racial inequality.” I wish I could quote the entire two sentences for you; they are truly precious. It’s not just the poor quality of this writing per se that gets to me, though, it’s that phrases like “racial ideology of male masculinity” appear all over the essays I have been getting from far too many of the students in the literature class I have been teaching–as if the students were choosing one word from column A, two from column B, etc. in order to come up with a sentence that sounds so intellectually profound that I won’t notice it doesn’t really mean anything. It is depressing and debilitating when the papers handed in by my freshman composition students are, in many ways, better written than the ones handed in by the students in an advanced literature class.

The only things we know for sure about the life of Farid al-Din Attar are that he was a pharmacist and a native of Nishapur, Iran, where a monument to him that was built over his tomb at the end of the 15^th century CE still stands. The best evidence that we have places his birth in Nishapur in either 1145 or 1146; and scholars seem to agree that he died in Nishapur when he was well over seventy years old, at the hands of Mongol invaders, in April of 1221. The legends which grew up around him once his fame as a poet and mystic began to spread in earnest in the 1400s tell us something about the high esteem in which others held him and his work, but—except for the fact of how he earned his living and his claim that he therefore did not have to write the eulogies and other panegyrics that court poets had to produce to earn their keep—the work itself reveals next to nothing about the details of his life.

Attar wrote six major works of poetry and one of prose. The prose work, Tadhkirat al-awliya (Memoirs of the Saints), is a collection of biographies of famous Sufis. The poetic works are Asrar-nama (Book of Mysteries), Mantiq al-tayr (The Conference of the Birds), Mushibat-nama (Book of Adversity), Mukhtar-nama (Book of Selections), Divan (Collected Poems), and the book portions of which I will be translating, Ilahi-nama (Book of the Divine). Recognized masterpieces though they are, none of these books earned Attar much recognition outside of Nishapur during his lifetime. Only after he died, in the second half of the thirteenth century, did people start to pay attention in earnest to Memoirs of the Saints, and, as mentioned above, it was not until the 15^th century that his fame as a mystic, a poet and master of narrative really began to spread.

The more people valued Attar’s work, the more they told stories about him. There is, for example, a probably apocryphal tale about the time that Rumi’s family came to Nishapur when Rumi was still a child. Attar—who was by then already an old man—immediately recognized in the young Rumi a unique curiosity and intelligence. One day, according to this narrative, Attar saw Rumi following his father out of their house and said, “Look! There goes a sea chased by an ocean!” This story also has Attar giving Rumi a copy of his Book of Mysteries and, when Rumi’s family left Nishapur, saying to Rumi’s father, “One day your son will set fire to all forlorn hearts” (Moyne & Newman 28-29).

The desire that there should have been a meeting between Attar and Rumi, certainly one of the greatest poets Iran has ever produced, no doubt arose from Rumi’s own acknowledgment of Attar as one of his spiritual and literary masters. About Attar, for example, Rumi wrote the following:

Attar was the spirit;
Sanai, its two eyes.
I am their shadow.

…

Attar has toured the seven cities of love;
I am still at the turn of the first alley. (Quoted in Moyne & Newman 29)

Rumi, in other words, looked to Attar not only, and perhaps not even primarily, as a literary influence, but also as a spiritual one. Indeed, everything Attar wrote is devoted exclusively to Sufi practice and ideas. As Leonard Lewisohn and Christopher Shackle write in their introduction to Attar and the Persian Sufi Tradition: The Art of Spiritual Flight, “throughout all of [Attar’s] genuine collected works, there does not exist even one single verse without a mystical colouring [sic]; in fact, Attar dedicated his entire literary existence to Sufism” (xix). This spiritual focus lies at the root of Attar’s importance in both the East, where his stature and influence are comparable to that of John Milton in the West, and the West, where the translation and study of his work has not only influenced Western perceptions of Iran and, more generally, Islam, but has also inspired artists of all kinds.

The first work of Attar’s to be translated into English, in 1809 by the Reverend J. H. Hindley of Manchester College, was what we now know to be the apocryphal Pand-nama. Hindley translated it, according to Christopher Shackle, to help the British “colonial administrator [of India] get inside the Muslim mind-set [….]” (168). This colonialist agenda drove much of the translation of classical Iranian literature into English during the 1800s, and one can find it also, though not as explicitly expressed, in Edward Fitzgerald’s translation of The Conference of the Birds, the first authentic work of Attar’s to be brought into our language, and the only one to receive any substantive attention in the West. Fitzgerald’s translation was published by his literary executor in 1889. Most recently, in 1984, Afkham Darbandi and Dick Davis published the only verse translation of the entire text.

The Conference of the Birds is about the mystical journey undertaken by thirty birds to find the Simorgh and achieve enlightenment. “Simorgh,” however, means “thirty birds” in Persian, and the point of the story is that the birds discover they are themselves the Simorgh, that enlightenment is already within them. The Conference of the Birds has sparked the imaginations of writers, poets, musicians and directors throughout the English-speaking world. American novelist Jeffrey Lewis, for example, published The Conference of the Birds: A Novel in 2005 (Other Press), while the Australian poet Anne Fairbairn recast Attar’s masterpiece in a contemporary Australian context in her book length poem, An Australian Conference Of The Birds (Black Pepper, 1995). As another example, the musical group Om recorded an album called Conference of the Birds in 2006; and the director Peter Brook, along with Jean-Claude Carriere, adapted The Conference of the Birds for the stage in a version that was published in 1982, a project for which the British poet Ted Hughes wrote one hundred poems based on Attar’s text (Heilpern 8).

Clearly, Farid al-Din Attar is a poet to be reckoned with. He is a central figure in the literature of Iran, and of Persian Sufism more specifically. Moreover his work has influenced the literary landscape of English in ways that continue to reverberate. The rest of Attar’s work deserves to take its place in English next to The Conference of the Birds, so that we can see what else he has to teach us and how else we might be inspired by what he has to say. My next post will be about Ilahi-Nameh, the book of Attar’s selections from which I will be translating.

Sources

Heilpern, John. Conference of the Birds: The Story of Peter Brook in Africa. Theatre Arts Book 1999

Lewisohn, Leonard & Christopher Shackle. Attar and the Persian Sufi Tradition: The Art of Spiritual Flight. London: I. B. Tauris 2006

Moyne, John A. & Richard Jeffrey Newman. A Bird in the Garden of Angels: On the Life and Times and An Anthology of Rumi. Costa Mesa: Mazda Publishers 2007

Cross posted on It’s All Connected