Every poem an epitaph

I had my first day out in Tunis today. It's a very nice place. It's definitely urban, but it feels more green than Istanbul. The air is cleaner and the spaces feel more open. The people are nice in general, but there are a lot of people looking to get money out of tourists, which makes things difficult for an unassertive person like myself. I don't feel like violence or outright theft is a problem here, but there are plenty of people who seem willing to do just about anything short of that to relieve you of your cash. I've found sunglasses and earphones work pretty well, since I can just ignore everyone and pretend not to notice if someone starts talking to me.

The medina, the old part of the city, is very interesting. It reminds me of a Turkish bazaar , except it's so much more closed in. When you are in this part of the city, you feel like you are underground. And it even looks like this when you go to the spot where you can get a panoramic view. You don't see any streets, just rooftops in varying states of disrepair.

I've been told people raise the suspicions of authorities if they go to the mosque every day, but hopefully this doesn't apply to foreigners. I've been praying almost every prayer at various mosques. I like the way they do prayer here much better than Turkey. It is much slower. Turks stay in prostration for around 5 seconds on average. Here it is more like 15-20 seconds. This may not sound that different, but you can feel the difference. The slower pace places the emphasis on actually being in a position of prostration, rather than just the back and forth movement of prostrating. This way, I find I am much more likely to catch myself when my thoughts drift to mundane matters.

Here is a link to my first photo album for this trip.

My plane leaves bright and early tomorrow morning. I hope to have Internet access in Tunisia, of course, but I'm not sure how reliable it will be. In any case, with 25 hours a week of course time and just as much time (God willing) spent studying, I probably won't be on as frequently. I definitely won't be doing much moderating inconvert_me, but I'll be around from time to time. I wish you all the best in your ventures in the meantime.

p.s. rosicrucian, I hope you find your kitty.

Eid Mubarak to all.

I'll be leaving for Tunisia in less than a week now, إنشالله. Rumeysa is going to stay in Turkey until the middle of November because she is busy applying to grad schools for next year, so I'll be on my own for a while. It will be very strange being alone for six weeks in such a new place. When I came to Turkey I had a few friends here so I had some support. This will be an entirely new experience.

Of course, the hardest part of preparing for this trip, as with all trips, is deciding what books to bring. This summer I changed my plans for grad school. Previously I had been planning on applying to philosophy programs, but now I will be applying to Islamic studies departments. A professor with a lot of experience in Islamic studies recommended this to me because he doesn't think I'll be able to find many philosophy programs that can teach me anything about Islamic philosophy. It's also a bit more practical because while applying to an Islamic studies program I can get a lot more mileage out of the time I've spent in Turkey and the coming year of Arabic studies. Moreover, when I was in the US this summer my mentor from community college -- who is singularly responsible for me studying philosophy and religion in the first place -- seemed to support the switch. The problem, though, is that I don't actually have any academic background in Islamic studies and, therefore, I don't have any academic writings on Islamic issues to submit with my applications next year. So, in addition to studying Arabic, I will have to organize a writing project for myself this year. And that requires books. Currently on my to-bring list:

Faith in Divine Unity and Trust in Divine Providence" by al-Ghazali
Al-Ghazali's Path to Sufism: His Deliverance from Error by al-Ghazali
The Niche of Lights by al-Ghazali
The Sufi Path of Knowledge by William Chittick
The Bezels of Wisdom by Ibn Arabi
Wandering Joy: Meister Eckhart's Mystical Philosophy by Reiner Schurmann
Being and Time by Martin Heidegger
Basic Writings by Martin Heidegger
On Heidegger's Being and Time by Reiner Schurmann and Simon Critchley

Frankly I have no idea what I'll be writing about. But, on the other hand, I never really do until I write. My procedure is generally as follows:

1. Get a lot of books
2. Carry too many of them around in my backpack
3. Drink a lot of coffee
4. Brood
5. ??????
6. Profit!

I recently happened upon this article on the causes of poverty. Admittedly, it is a bit simplistic insofar as it tends to neglect the fact that in many non-Western societies the appropriation of the goods of the commons by the few at the expense of the many did not start with the Industrial Age or Western colonialism. Nevertheless, I think it suggests a rough outline of certain basic principles that accord with the Islamic view of human nature and the natural world that have important consequences for economics.

The author criticizes two “myths” about the origins of poverty:

First, the destruction of nature and of people’s ability to look after themselves are blamed not on industrial growth and economic colonialism, but on poor people themselves. Poverty, it is stated, causes environmental destruction. The disease is then offered as a cure: further economic growth is supposed to solve the very problems of poverty and ecological decline that it gave rise to in the first place. This is the message at the heart of Sachs’ analysis.
The second myth is an assumption that if you consume what you produce, you do not really produce, at least not economically speaking. If I grow my own food, and do not sell it, then it doesn’t contribute to GDP, and therefore does not contribute towards “growth”.
People are perceived as “poor” if they eat food they have grown rather than commercially distributed junk foods sold by global agri-business. They are seen as poor if they live in self-built housing made from ecologically well-adapted materials like bamboo and mud rather than in cinder block or cement houses. They are seen as poor if they wear garments manufactured from handmade natural fibres rather than synthetics.
Yet sustenance living, which the wealthy West perceives as poverty, does not necessarily mean a low quality of life. On the contrary, by their very nature economies based on sustenance ensure a high quality of life—when measured in terms of access to good food and water, opportunities for sustainable livelihoods, robust social and cultural identity, and a sense of meaning in people’s lives . Because these poor don’t share in the perceived benefits of economic growth, however, they are portrayed as those “left behind”.

The crux of her argument, then, is this: “Poverty is not, as Sachs suggests, an initial state of human progress from which to escape. It is a final state people fall into when one-sided development destroys the ecological and social systems that have maintained the life, health and sustenance of people and the planet for ages.”
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Newsweek International has published a set of images from a Russian photographer who traveled extensively throughout the late Russian Empire and used a self-invented method to produce color photographs. They are absolutely stunning.

ETA: A Russophile friend of mine on Facebook upstaged me by providing a link to the full photo database.

Tonight was the annual iftar of the Bilim ve Sanat Vakfı (Science and Art Foundation). The foundation was created by (among others) my father-in-law and Ahmet Davutoğlu, who is now Turkey's foreign minister. Its mission is essentially to provide an arena for the development of the Islamic intellectual tradition in dialogue with modern academic perspectives. I hope I have the chance to really learn Turkish someday so I can participate there.

But tonight Rumeysa generously translated the speeches of the evening by my father-in-law and Foreign Minister Davutoğlu. The focus was on Professor Davutoğlu's transition to the political world, a transition he has long avoided and only now made quite reluctantly. For the past few years he had already become the backbone of Turkey's foreign policy as the prime minister's top foreign policy advisor and he had always hoped his time in this role would come to an end and he would be able to return to his academic work. But this year they finally asked him to be the foreign minister. His speech was in part an explanation for why he felt he did not have the luxury of rejecting that request.
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This month GQ published a rather damning story about the possible involvement of the Russian security services in the apartment bombings that led to the Second Chechen War. But then, apparently, the magazine's owners got cold feet and they are now doing just about everything in their power to keep the story out of Russia. Nevertheless, it's online now and in the process of being translated into Russian.

A very interesting article on race and class:

"What matters" by Walter Benn Michaels

"The neoliberal ideal is a world where rich people of all races and sexes can happily enjoy their wealth, and where the injustices produced not by discrimination but by exploitation – there are fewer poor people (7 per cent) than black people (9 per cent) at Harvard, and Harvard’s not the worst – are discreetly sent around to the back door. Thus everyone’s outraged that a black professor living on prosperous Ware St (and renting a summer vacation ‘manse’ on Martha’s Vineyard that he ‘jokingly’ calls ‘Tara’) can be treated with disrespect; no one’s all that outraged by the social system that created the gap between Ware St or ‘Tara’ and the places where most Americans live. Everyone’s outraged by the fact that Gates can be treated so badly; nobody by the fact that he and the rest of the top 10 per cent of American wage-earners have been doing so well. Actually, it’s just the opposite. Liberals – especially white liberals – are thrilled by Gates’s success, since it testifies to the legitimacy of their own: racism didn’t make us all this money, we earned it!"

It's hard for me to tell what news is big in the US while living abroad, but recently the story of Fathima Rifqa Bary, who ran away from her family in Ohio to stay with a Christian pastor in Florida due to alleged threats on her life made by her parents after they discovered she had converted to Christianity, has been making the Internet rounds and I have gotten the impression that it is also making the news back home. It seems to be an excuse for anyone with an opinion and the ability to google "Islam apostasy" to spout uninformed views -- and I fear the publicity surrounding the case will only increase.

I don't presume to know all of the facts of the case and I trust it will be dealt with appropriately by the authorities. I do, however, know a thing or two about Islam and I would like to clarify some issues here.

Apostasy

First of all, the Qur'an does not prescribe any specific punishment for apostasy in this life. There is no shortage of passages relating to apostasy, but they are generally not refering to the simple act of conversion as such. For example: "There is a party of the People of the Book say, 'Believe in what has been sent down upon those who believe at the beginning of the day, and disbelieve at the end of it; haply they will then return; and believe not any but him who follows your religion.'" This is not a case of Muslims simply having a change of heart and changing faiths. Rather, it was a form of psychological warfare adopted against the early Muslim community. Nevertheless, in none of these cases does the Qur'an lay out a requirement for any physical punishment in this life. So when Rifqa Bary says: "Imagine the honor in killing me. There is great honor in that. If they love Allah more than me, they have to do it. It’s in the Koran," she is either lying or repeating the lies of others.

But it is true that the classic understanding of apostasy in the Islamic legal tradition is that it warrants execution. This is primarily due to what I mentioned above, the conception of apostasy not as a simple matter of faith or lack thereof, but as a deliberate attack on the Muslim community. When this aspect of apostasy is not present, the question of whether execution is warranted remains a matter of debate. Worth reading in this regard is the article "Freedom of Religion and Apostasy" by Dr. Ahmed Raysunī.

But even setting aside that debate (one that is certainly important in its own regard), none of this is relevant to the case of Rifqa Bary, because the tradition of Islamic jurisprudence on this issue is relevant only to institutions wielding legitimate legal authority to implement such punishments, i.e. the kind that would only be found in an Islamic state. There is no scholarly difference of opinion on this. The punishments laid out in Islamic law are simply irrelevant to Muslims living in non-Muslim lands. And even in Muslim countries it remains the case that Muslims are categorically prohibited from taking such matters into their own hands.

Thus, in the case of Rifqa Bary, if there have been any threats against her life, there is no justification for such behavior in the Islamic legal tradition.

Honor kilings

One phrase that seems to be thrown around a lot in this debate is "honor killings." While Islamic law does lay down physical penalties for illicit sexual intercourse, the same condition mentioned above still applies: only legitimate legal authorities can carry implement such rules. Moreover, the Islamic evidence requirements are so stringent as to make the law almost entirely symbolic. In order for fornication to be proven, one must be able to produce four witnesses who can testify to having seen penetration. Thus, there is nothing Islamic about honor killings. Nor is the terrible phenomenon of parents killing their children unique to Muslims. It's just that when Muslims do it it gets a special name. When non-Muslims do it, it isn't as interesting. We just call it domestic violence or, more often, we just don't talk about it at all.

Of course, I find the phenomenon of domestic violence against women and misogyny in general destestable in any society and it hits particularly close to home when it is my fellow Muslims, who ought to know better, in question. But talking as though there is some unique problem of "honor killings" separate from the general problem of domestic violence in America is simply irresponsible.

So, as I said in the beginning, the Bary case should be handled by the authorities in accordance with normal procedure for such issues. It should not be sensationalized simply because it involves Muslims.

A blessed Ramadan to all.

"That you should fast is better for you, if you but know; the month of Ramadan, wherein the Koran was sent down to be a guidance to the people, and as clear signs of the Guidance and the Salvation. So let those of you, who are present at the month, fast it; and if any of you be sick, or if he be on a journey, then a number of other days; God desires ease for you, and desires not hardship for you; and that you fulfil the number, and magnify God that He has guided you, and haply you will be thankful. And when My servants question thee concerning Me -- I am near to answer the call of the caller, when he calls to Me; so let them respond to Me, and let them believe in Me; haply so they will go aright." (2:184-185)

There has recently been a resurgence in talk about the threat of the "Islamization" of Europe. I don't think most reasonable people need help spotting the hyperbole and racism intrinsic to this discourse, but I found this article that provides a very thorough analysis of the phenomenon. It's well worth the read, so I thought I would share it:

A Culture of Fear
by Pankar Mishra

Yesterday I ventured out to the book bazaar behind the Beyazit Mosque and purchased all the supplies I need to slowly start teaching myself Arabic calligraphy. I was doing alright until I got to Ba. When you pull the pen down the page, as you do for Alif, it moves smoothly. But in order to move from right to left (the direction of all the horizontal lines in the Arabic script) you have to manage a perfect balance of pressure. If you don't apply enough pressure the pen doesn't entirely touch the page, so you get half a line, and if you apply too much it skids and you get an unpleasant sound not unlike fingernails on a chalkboard. Nevertheless, I'm very excited and I think this will be a good motivator for me to spend more time on Arabic in general. If I can manage a passable Ba today perhaps I'll post a picture.

In other news, we have purchased our tickets for Tunisia. We will be leaving a few days after Eid al-Fitr, which is at the end of Ramadan (which ,in turn, is coming up in just less than 10 days).

Today I did a search to see if there were any upcoming concerts by my favorite Iranian musician, Shahram Nazeri. But I searched with the Turkish Google and came across a Web site with 36 of his albums. Most of them are unavailable outside of Iran. I highly recommend that you download an album or two. If you are unfamiliar with his work, start with Through Eternity.

My time in Turkey is drawing to a close. Rumeysa and I will be in the US starting on Monday. I'm excited to visit the US again, but today as I walked out of the Blue Mosque after the evening prayer it really hit me how much I will miss it here. Of course, we'll be back in August, but then we will hopefully be leaving again to study Arabic.

The Arabic plan seems to have changed. Rumeysa is concerned that spending a year in Damascus may cause problems for her moving to the US. I tend to be an optimist on such issues, but she does have a point. So now we're considering... Tatooine.



OK, well Tunis, actually.


Specifically, the Bourguiba Institute of Modern Languages. As far as I can tell so far it will be cheaper than Damascus, but we still have to do some more investigation. The downside is that the Arabic spoken in Tunisia is very far from Modern Standard Arabic, having both French and Berber mixed in. So we won't be able to practice as much in day-to-day life. But hopefully we can make up for that with more studying. Also problematic is the heavy-handed secularism in the country. I may even have to cut my beard. But, of course, this was also a potential problem in Syria.  

O Morning bird, sadly sing and remind me
Of my pain afresh with a burning sigh
Break this cage and turn it upside down
Wing tied nightingale, leave the corner of this cage
Compose the song of freedom for the mankind
And with a breath, set fire to the battlefield
Of the mass of this earth
The cruelty of tyrants and the injustice of huntsmen
Have broken my nest to the winds
O God, O turning globe, O nature
Turn our dark night into dawn.

(written by Bahar, unknown translator)

You can hear a (rather low-quality, but in that old folk music kind of way) recording of this here, performed by one of Iran's most famous classical musicians, Mohammed Reza Shajarian. Apparently he has called for the Iranian state music channel to never broadcast his songs again after Ahmadinejad refered to supporters of Mousavi as "brushwood and thorns." He told BBC Persian, "My voice is like brushwood and thorns, and it will forever remain brushwood and thorns!”

publius_aelius beat me to dedicating a poem from Mevlana Jelaluddin Rumi for the people of Iran in these important times, but I found this one and thought it appropriate:

I have returned, like the new year, to break the locks of the prison and smash the claws and teeth of these man-eating spheres.
The seven waterless planets are devouring the creatures of earth -- I will throw water upon their fire and still their winds.
I have flown from the beginning-less King like a falcon in order to kill the parrot-eating owls of this ruined monastery.
From the beginning I made a covenant to sacrifice my spirit to the King. May my spirit's back be broken should I break my pledge and covenant!
Today I am Asaf, Solomon's vizier, sword and firman in hand -- I will break the necks of any who are arrogant before the King.
If you see the garden of the rebellious flourishing for a day or two, grieve not! For I will cut their roots from a hidden direction.
I will break nothing but injustice or the evil- intentioned tyrant -- should anything have a mote of savor, then I am an unbeliever should I break it
Wherever there is a polo ball, it is taken away by the mallet of Oneness -- if a ball does not roll down the field. I will smash it with the blow of my mallet.
I now reside in His banquet, for I saw that His intention is Gentleness. I became the least servant of His way in order to break Satan's legs.
I was a single nugget, but when the Sultan's hand grasped hold of me, I became the mine -- if you place me in the balance, I will break the scales.
When you allow a ruined and drunken man like myself into your house, do you not know at least this much: I will break this and break that?
If the watchman shouts, "Hey!" I will pour a cup of wine on his head; and if the doorman seizes hold of me, I will break his arm.   
If the spheres do not rotate round my heart, I will pull them up by the roots; if the heavens act with villainy, I will smash the turning heavens.
Thou hast spread the tablecloth of Generosity and invited me to lunch -- why doest Thou rebuke me when I break the bread?
No, no -- I sit at the head of Thy table, I am the chief of Thy guests. I will pour a cup or two of wine upon the guests and break their shame.
Oh Thou who inspires my spirit with poetry from within!  Should I refuse and remain silent, I fear I would break Thy command.
If Shams-i Tabrizi should send me wine and make me drunk, I would be free of cares and break down the pillars of the universe.
(trans. William Chittick)

I've been enjoying some free time around the city these past few days, in addition to practicing reading (pronouncing) and writing Arabic. Today we saw a new mosque that has received some press here for being the first in Turkey to have its interior designed by a woman. The new mosques in Turkey have a tendency to be terribly drab and unoriginal, particularly on the inside. There are exceptions, but this is an exceptional exception. I thought I'd share some pictures, which you can see here.

Letter from Mir Hossein Mousavi on the results of the presidential election in Iran.

I am saddened by the outcome of the election, not because I am opposed to the Islamic Republic in principle (quite the opposite), but because I think Mousavi would have been a step forward in the refinement of the ideal of that very republic. I tended to defend Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the past because the attempt to play him up as some kind of Nazi bent on the slaughter of the people of Israel was absurd and dangerous.

But he was certainly a fool and now it seems he is a fool with no legitimate right to lead the people of Iran. This means he is an even bigger fool than I thought, because this is precisely the kind of behavior that risks undermining the foundations of the Islamic Republic. I wish the Iranian people patience, faith, clarity and determination in their struggle.

"This is my first visit to Saudi Arabia, but I've had several conversations with His Majesty," Obama said. "I've been struck by his wisdom and his graciousness."

I was tempted to write something up about Obama's speech, but this really says it all. Are we supposed to take him seriously? Praising the Saudi king for his wisdom and graciousness before going to Cairo to ask for partners on a quest for progress?

The actors in the absurd comedy that is American foreign policy may change -- and they may even add a few token quotes from the Qur'an to their repertoire (edit: not even) -- but the story remains the same.

So it seems that one of my favorite bands, Dredg, has joined the nü-atheist bandwagon. Their new album is inspired by Salman Rushdie's essay "Letter to the 6 billionth person." I only learned this after having purchased tickets to their concert in Anaheim in July. This was very saddening for me, as I really love their earlier albums and I even like the music on the songs I've heard from their new album. But I have a problem supporting such a message. So I've written my own letter, one which they will probably never read, but at least I've tried to do my part. Any commentary or suggestions before I send this off?
( To whom it may concern, )
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