MacEoin, Denis. "Hudna." Issues of Concern for Justice & Society (ICJS), June 23, 2008.
Denis MacEoin's historical and linguistic analysis touching on where infidels and Jews may stand as regards contemporary Islamic thought as expressed through language rings true to this ear.
Courtesy of Tammy Swofford, who maintains an always entertaining and perceptive blog, I have gotten notice of Andrew G. Bostom's The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism, a scholarly compendium of translations and much needed exegesis.
I'm not the scholar to review Bostom's work, but my blog category "LitStream" serves to pass along awareness of works, any medium, I feel may well have telling contemporary significance.
In addition, as regards this particular note, I strongly, albeit intuitively, believe that Islam's misery--its warfare with all and most of all itself--lays rooted in language poetics.
Representing FrontPage.com [1], Jamie Glazov asks, "Tell us about the origins of Islamic Antisemitism"--Andrew Bostom answers:
Islamic Antisemitism has a heritage independent of Europe, arose as an entirely indigenous phenomenon that dates from the advent of Islam, and originates in Islam’s virulently Antisemitic foundational texts—the Koran, most importantly, and the gloss on its myriad Antisemitic verses by the greatest classical (and modern) Muslim exegetes of the Koran, the hadith (which include in addition to corporeal Antisemitic motifs, critical Antisemitic motifs in Islamic eschatology), and the further elaboration, or embodiment of many of these themes in the sira, the early pious Muslim biographies of Muhammad, particularly the works of Ibn Ishaq and Ibn Saad. [2]
One need not wonder why good professors beg young poets and scholars to write responsibly and truthfully, for here the effects of rhetoric--for example, this well disseminated statement from the Koran (5:82), “Thou wilt surely find the most hostile of men to the believers are the Jews and the idolaters . . . ."--provide ample powder for baseless warfare across millenia.
Citing a 17th Century tract, Bostom relates, "In the midst of an anti-Hindu tract Sirhindi wrote, motivated by Akbar’s pro-Hindu reforms, Sirhindi observes, 'Whenever a Jew is killed, it is for the benefit of Islam.'”
How deeply has that remark been cherished, how widely spread, how passed through the mouth to sons who themselves become angry and calloused fathers, convinced of a generational cheat founded in a similarly transmitted transgenerational claim to great privilege?
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2. Bostom, Andrew G. The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism. Reviews. June 13, 2008 (andrewbostom.org).
3. Swofford, Tammy. http://www.tammyswofford.blogspot.com/.
Correspondence: James S. Oppenheim
Whatever happens this week, this blog will be slower (even more behind the eightball) than usual: I am swimming through Raphael Patai's other book, The Jewish Mind.
While I work on that and photography, for those who may wish to learn more and enter discussion about Islam in reasonable to excellent English and within the purview of a dominant Islamic community:
"The Beacon Website is dedicated to those who seek wisdom and knowledge wherever it is"--front page, second paragraph.
Here, here!
http://www.meforum.org/article/1858
Above all, please, if you comment here or write me, have integrity.
Cinnamon Stillwell has been writing for a few years out of San Francisco, and I trust her--so should you.
This is a pass-along, i.e., reading I think you would enjoy.
"I became a journalist because I wanted to travel, but I’m not sure why I chose war. I wish I could say it was some noble calling, but I think mainly it was adventure. It was Rudyard Kipling’s Kim and tales of the "Great Game" that drew me to Afghanistan."
It has a classic ring to it.
Check out the Guardian Weekly, "Dispatches from the Afghan front": http://www.guardianweekly.co.uk/?page=editorial&id=515&catID=7.
"Meddling is the only way to stay relevant," says Heinrich Böll. [1]
Many, many years ago, I had read a short story by Heinrich Böll titled "Murke's Collected Silences" and I never forgot it.
To cite and read it again, I found I had to order a whole collection of the author's work: The Stories of Heinrich Böll. Leila Vennewitz, Translator. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1995.
The publication history of the volume, in German assembly, dates back to 1981, with the publication of the novellas within the work dating back to 1965, then a fair flurry in 18 Stories in 1966, including "Murke's Collected Silences," and activity again in 1970 and 1981.
In a certain fashion, Heinrich Böll may be perceived as having been writing about the German soldier's experience, a central theme in the works encountered, through World War II while very much witness to America's Vietnam War era. As such, his stories march through the dim absurdities of conflict, drawing fully on the oddness so apparent to artists and prevelant in war photography, reporting, and writing--i.e., the way so many things aren't supposed to work and then do much to our delight, sometimes, and horror more often.
In 1972, Heinrich Böll won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
The Heinrich Böll Foundation North America [2], an affiliate of the German Green Party, describes the author as "a passionate advocate for persecuted fellow writers, civil rights activists and political prisoners."
If memory serves, and I believe it does here, readers may have found in Böll's fiction the reflection of the fast matured, progressive, and secular causes that came out of the Vietnam Era--anti-war, pro-environment, equal rights for minorities, women's liberation.
More than an author as cultural filigre, however, operates or resonates in his stories.
Long embedded in my psyche: the snipping out of windbag "Bur-Malottke's" many radio lectures the term "God" and splicing into its place, a more cautious, "That higher Being Whom we revere."
Murke in "Murke's Collected Silences" is the technician responsible for recording the new phrase in all the inflections required and slipping it into old lectures on "The Nature of Art." Relevant to the latest in the world's more fashionable conflict zones--I suspect there may be that much vanity and equal lack of sense in any--the disassociated philosopher's struggle to ascribe the origins of conflict to God or nature mirrors quite Bur-Malottke's dilemma regarding his own capitulation to convention, which lauds "God", and reverting to his earlier, more honest thoughts, at least to himself, in which he had hedged his bets.
Murke doesn't much care either way--"God" or "That higher Being Whom we revere"--and consequently has much fun with the job.
At the end of his day, Murke saves the pauses, the dead air on tape (hard to do with today's digital recording, eh), and gathers that into a loop of "silences", a thing so seldom heard amid so much impassioned speech.
In the metaphysics of a certain literary hardcore, books find their readers, not the other way around.
For those following the war news across the globe, in near real time, no less, Böll's work should find you--and you find "Murke's Collected Silences" along with "Adventures of a Haversack" (in which said sack visits more war zones and enjoys a longer and possibly more significant life than any of its owners), "Christmas Not Just Once a Year", which I take, perhaps upside-down, as the ultimate nonsense story about appeasing an impossibly demanding character.
Of the war stories, all travel between light and sorrow, finding in absurd conditions, accidents of fate, and plainly odd outcomes much the same world rotating toward us day on day that rolled away beneath the scrutiny of Heinrich Böll's literary oversight and vision.
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1. Front page, Heinrich Boll Foundation.
2. The Stories of Heinrich Boll. Leila Vennewitz, Translator. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1995.
Correspondence: James S. Oppenheim
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=5VWZoKWBYXE
From Slavija, Serbia--it's not what it's about: it is what it becomes about.
This is a "LitStream" entry--basically, I don't want to write at length but rather lend a little publicity to a bit of quick reading. According to the Guardian Weekly, "Observer foreign correspondent Jason Burke, author of ‘al-Qaeda: The True Story of Radical Islam’ and ‘The Road to Kandahar’, spent over a decade reporting from the Middle East." Experience tells. Enjoy.
http://www.guardianweekly.co.uk/?page=editorial&id=48&catID=2
Correspondence: James S. Oppenheim
Earlier in life, it was my way to "discover" an author and dutifully and enthusiastically read through his works. Peter Mathiessen was one such, from Raditzer to The Snow Leopard. Here, one dips into a New York Times piece on a guy named "Harold L. Humes", stumbles quickly across mention of The Paris Review, and reads the rest.
Enjoy.
Correspondence: James S. Oppenheim
For those as interested as I in language processes and conflict:
A new year's resolution for aid agencies and broadcasters: http://www.alertnet.org/db/blogs/30708/2008/00/7-174729-1.htm
Heisenberg applies.
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