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.

For me, this was the most exciting news all week. The Magnes Zionist describes the scene:

Around five thousand demonstrators protested the eviction of Arab families from their homes in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem and the settlement there of rightwing Jewish extremists. It was the largest Sheikh Jarrah protest and the largest joint Israeli-Palestinian protest so far.

The protest was composed of an interesting mix – Jewish leftwing activists, mostly (but not entirely) young; the Zionist left Meretz-Peace Now crowd, mostly (and entirely) old; Israeli Palestinian activists, and representatives of the evicted families. There were Israeli singers and a Palestinian hip-hop group from Shuafat. Many of the speeches were given in Arabic, both Jerusalem colloquial and standard, and judging from the crowd, more of the younger Israeli Jewish activists understood the speeches than the older generation. The “drummers” and the clowns were there in full force – these are activists who play the drum and dress up as clowns in an attempt both to lighten up the protest, and to drive home the point of non-violent protest.

Sara Benninga’s speech at the protest, “There is a New Left in Town,” is well worth reading in whole (it’s not very long). But here’s a bit of it:

[The New Left] is a partnership between Palestinians, who understand the occupation will not be defeated by missiles and bombs, and Israelis, who understand that the Palestinian struggle is their struggle.

The new Left joins hands with Palestinians in a cloud of tear gas at Bil’in and gets beaten up together with them by settlers at the South Hebron Mountain.

This Left stands by refugees and labor migrants in Tel Aviv and fights against the Wisconsin Plan.

The new Left is us — all of us!

Everyone who came here tonight. Everyone who dared cross the imaginary line between West and East Jerusalem, despite the threats and intimidation.

We are all the new Left that is emerging in Israel and Palestine.

We are not fighting for a peace agreement. We are fighting for justice. But we believe that injustice is the main obstacle to peace.

More: The website of the Sheikh Jarrah protesters is here.

Rabbi Brian attended the protest and reports: 5,000 Protest in Sheikh Jarah

News accounts: the JPost story, Haaretz, and Al Jazeera.

Some photos on Flickr.

Glenn Greenwald is right. This pro-Iraq War column by Marty Peretz is not only wrong, but it contains an unbelievably racist statement:

There were moments–long moments–during the Iraq war when I had my doubts. Even deep doubts. Frankly, I couldn’t quite imagine any venture requiring trust with Arabs turning out especially well. This is, you will say, my prejudice. But some prejudices are built on real facts, and history generally proves me right. Go ahead, prove me wrong.

There are racist bigots who have argued that Jews cannot be trusted, because they’re inherently deceitful people. These racist bigots are rightly called anti-Semites, and they are despised by anyone with a functioning brain.

Marty Peretz just argued that Arabs can’t be trusted, because they’re inherently deceitful people. He’s a racist bigot, and he should be despised by anyone with a functioning brain.

This is not new. And it should not be ignored. Marty Peretz is a flaming racist douchebag. He views Arabs as less human than the rest of humanity. He is not merely prejudiced. He is proudly so.

His opinions are of no more merit than those of David Duke. And no decent human should think otherwise.

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.

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)

It is fashionable in many quarters to bash the United Nations, and lets face it, there are many good reasons to; as an organization made up of the various governments of the world, the UN operates at the level of dysfunction that one would predict. The organization has not brought universal peace, and it has not fixed all the world’s problem, and it is beset by problems both within its control and outside it.

And yet.

And yet the United Nations, for all its faults, does great work. It sends talented women and men into countries in need, and helps them to grow. It provides fresh water, agricultural know-how, education, and family planning throughout the developing world. No, the UN cannot by itself lift a nation out of poverty. But it can help ameliorate the worst levels of degradation, and it can help countries slowly grow from dysfunction to functional.

The United Nations was engaged in Haiti before an horrific earthquake struck, providing both security and development aid to a nation that has long been dogged by semi-functional government and a broken civil society. They have paid a heavy price for their engagement. At least 36 UN workers have died in the earthquake so far, and it is possible those numbers will grow.

Their deaths are not more tragic than the other tens of thousands of deaths suffered in this earthquake. But they are worthy of note. Because it is easy to mock the UN for its failures. And yet the men and women who died in Haiti serving the UN died in service to humanity’s best impulses, our desire to help those who are worse off than we ourselves.

Humanity’s best impulses will be what helps the nation of Haiti to rebuild from the catastrophe in Port-au-Prince, and not just in the immediate future. The United Nations will remain in Haiti long after the minicams have gone home. They will not solve all the problems that plague Haiti; no organization can. But they will continue to help, as they have been helping for years.

And while it’s fashionable in some corners to criticize the United Nations, I hope we don’t forget that.

There’s never much that can be said in the first few hours of a natural disaster, other than that the disaster has happened, and that help will be needed. Well, disaster has happened. A magnitude 7.0 earthquake hit Haiti, right by the nation’s capital, Port-au-Prince. And help will be needed.

Haiti is the poorest nation in the Western Hempisphere, and one of the densest as well. Port-au-Prince is the nation’s most populous city, and it is full of structures that were built of cheap concrete with little serious engineering behind them. It is a nation with about half of its population subsisting on about $2 a day. Needless to say, that’s not a population building their houses with earthquake-proof redundancies. That’s a population happy to get a roof up that doesn’t leak.

When even the nation’s presidential palace — a structure that was built with care and engineering — has collapsed, it is unquestionable that thousands and thousands of homes of more modest construction have collapsed as well. And tens if not hundreds of thousands of people are at risk of injury, homelessness, and death.

Our neighbors to the south will need our help. The San Francisco Chronicle has a list of some options, and I’ll post more as they come along.

Until then, keep your thoughts and, if you’re so inclined, your prayers with the people of Haiti.

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.

Because I am a glutton for punishment with no sense of restraint, when the email came in saying that J Street was opening up local chapters, not only did I immediately sign up, but I checked off every single skills/interests box. (Can I help it that I’m so well-rounded?)

Sooo, I’m going to need some help, people! Sign up, please! And maybe we can even get a Long Beach branch going? (I have no idea what these local chapters entail, by the way, but I’m pumped.)

(Cross-posted at Modern Mitzvot.)

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 »

So there was a failed terror attack today, and while that’s kind of scary and all, really, in this case, it’s mostly hilarious:

Per Ed Henry on CNN:

This administration has expressed skepticism of the color chart alert system. They’re concentrating more on improving security checkpoints and other measures at airports, not colors.

Susan Collins on Homeland Security committee says she’s expecting a briefing soon, wonders how the passenger got explosives on the plane to begin with, and if he actually does have ties to any terrorist organization.

Passenger Richard Griffith, who was on the plane, just said the explosives must have been in the guys pocket, ended up “in his crotch”.

Now that’s what I call a crotch rocket.

Naturally, it’s not good that the bomber, Abdul Farouk Abdulmutallab, got an incendiary device onto a plane. And I’m dreading what new and exciting forms of security theater our friends at the TSA will come up with to make us feel safe that the guy or gal next to us doesn’t have a bomb in their crotch.

But honestly, I’m not all that worried. After all, here’s what evidently happened:

Federal authorities have been told that Abdulmutallab allegedly had taped some material to his leg, then used a syringe to mix some chemicals with the powder while on the airplane, one official said. Officials described the device as incendiary rather than explosive, pending tests by forensics experts at the FBI. Incendiary devices generally deliver less of an impact than explosive devices.

A man who said he was on Flight 253, Syed Jafry of Holland, Mich., told the Detroit Free Press that he noticed a glow three rows ahead in the Airbus 330, then smelled smoke. The next moment, Jafri recounted, “a young man behind me jumped on” Abdulmutallab.

So the guy got some chemicals on that could have maybe started a fire, but weren’t explosive. That’s not particularly scary. Oh, sure, it would be frightening in the moment. But you can’t bring a plane down with an incendiary device. Not even close.

In a way, this is the sort of “attack” that proves that terror countermeasures are working. If this is the best al Qaeda and its sympathizers¹ can do…well, it’s pretty pathetic. Basically, they’re as frightening as your high school friend who discovered you can set hair spray on fire. Both could hurt someone, other than themselves. But that would be more by chance than by design.

No, this attack is not reason to panic. It’s reason to laugh long and hard at those who want to scare us, reason to invoke bad double entendres about this wannabe’s crotch fire, like the one in this sentence. And most of all, it’s reason to cheer the demise of al Qaeda, a truly terrible organization that now has been reduced to setting small fires. I just hope no terrorist decides to egg my house. That could be horrible.

1. The guy evidently claims to be with al Qaeda, but there’s reason to think he might just be self-aggrandizing. (back)

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

Edited to add: Bahari has written in Newsweek a harrowing and necessary-to-read account of his imprisonment. Go read it right now.

Maziar Bahari, a Newsweek journalist, was held in prison for 118 days in Iran after the contested elections in June. His appearance on The Daily Show is worth watching:

I wish I had the time to do more than link to this post on The Lede blog over at The New York Times because there is a lot to say and think about in terms of what is happening in Iran, what the opposition is doing, what their strategy–short and long term–seems to be, but work and other obligations make it impossible for me to sit and do the work of writing it all up myself. You should, however, head over to The Lede and check in on what’s going on in Iran. It is inspiring and scary and more all at the same time.

I could write paragraphs and paragraphs about Bernard-Henri Lévy’s bizarre and disgusting HuffPo article, in which he does a premature touchdown dance at the prospect of the freeing of convicted child rapist Roman Polanski. Were I to do so, I’d probably start by noting that Lévy is wrong to say Polanski is about to be freed; at best, Polanski is about to be released on a $4.5 million bond, will have to wear an ankle bracelet, and remains without a passport. The extradition hearing remains, and is considered a slam dunk by most legal experts; Polanski is far from having been “freed.”

Were I to go on, I’d probably note Lévy’s deep concern that Polanski’s children have evidently been taunted in school because their dad’s a convicted fugitive child rapist. Now, that’s not fair to Polanski’s kids — they didn’t choose their dad, and one can’t blame them from the fact that their dad once forcibly raped a 13-year-old. But one can’t help but wonder whether Polanski’s children would face taunts if Polanski had paid his debt to society when it was due. Or, for that matter, if he had simply made the very easy decision not to rape a child.

I could go on in this vein for some time, pointing out the factual errors in Lévy’s piece, his pathetic attempt to paint Polanski as some sort of political prisoner, or the fact that not once in the article does Lévy even acknowledge that Polanski was ever even accused of drugging, forcibly raping, and sodomizing an underaged girl, not to mention the fact that Polanski pled guilty to statutory rape in the case, then fled before he could be sentenced.

I could note all this, but I won’t, because nothing I can say would be more damaging to Bernard-Henri Lévy’s credibility than these, his own words, as written:

I am mostly thinking about him: Roman Polanski, who I don’t know, but whose fate has moved me so much. Nothing will repair the days he has spent in prison. Nothing will erase the immense, unbelievable injustice he has been subjected to. Nothing will take away the hysteria of those ones who have never stopped pouring contempt upon him, hounding him through hatred and asking for his punishment as if we were living the darkest and most ferocious hours of the McCarthy era all over again. At least the nightmare is about to end. At least the end of the hell is looming. And this, for the time being, is what does matter.

Lévy wrote these words, sincerely, about a convicted child rapist and fugitive from justice. Nothing I could possibly say would be more damning than that.

Some leading Democrats have been proposing that the Afghanistan war, like Health Care, should be deficit-neutral.

The tax applies to all Americans earning $30,000 or more (although there are exemptions for “anyone who has served in Iraq or Afghanistan since the 2001 terrorist attacks as well as families who have lost an immediate relative in the fighting”). It’s called the “share the sacrifice act.”

I’m basically in favor of this. There’s a weird double-standard in politics in which Republican priorities — war, tax cuts, Bush’s prescription drug subsidy, and so on — are never paid for (in eight years, I don’t think a single major Bush policy was ever paid for), while Democratic priorities are expected to be deficit neutral.

Will Republicans and blue dogs — the so-called “Deficit Hawks,” nearly all of whom have voted again and again to increase the deficit to pay for wars and tax cuts — support this measure? Or if they’re not willing to pay for the war, will they call for complete US withdrawal as soon as possible? I suspect the answers will be “no” and “no,” alas.

Of the many genuinely brainless and irresponsible things Republicans and blue dogs believe, the childish belief that we can endlessly cut taxes while increasing our spending may be the most harmful. (Well, that and their belief that it’s okay to do nothing to address climate change).

So, as I have said elsewhere, I have been feeling guilty about not posting about the goings on Iran of late, and I am beginning to formulate some posts I’d like to write, but this news article caught my eye. No matter how much I might disagree with and oppose the government in Iran, there is no way that the Iranian embassy is wrong about establishing a scholarship in the name of Neda Agha-Soltan. It is, by definition, political:

Iran has criticised Oxford University after one of its colleges established a scholarship in honour of a woman killed during post-election unrest in June.

The Iranian embassy in London denounced the £4,000 ($6,600) Neda Agha-Soltan Graduate Scholarship offered by Queen’s College as “politically motivated”.

Queen’s said the award would help impoverished Iranians study at Oxford.

Ms Soltan became a symbol of the opposition after she was shot dead at an anti-government protest in Tehran.

BBC NEWS | Middle East | Iran denounces Oxford scholarship

For me, even though I agree with the politics, or at least what the politics behind the scholarship are perceived to be–since we don’t know who endowed the scholarship or why–the question is whether or not that is a good thing. I am still made uneasy by the way Neda’s image, and the idea of Neda, is exploited as a symbol of opposition to the government of the Islamic Republic, and, as an academic, I wonder about the degree to which a scholarship like this cannot help but be part of that exploitation, no matter how academically sound, impartial, etc. Queen’s College is in administering and awarding the money.

I wonder what others think.