Rasa'il Khalil al-Wafa'

The Gate of Heaven

2006-12-02T19:53:00.000-06:00

This morning was like the morning of that first poem, the retreat in the guest house, ten years ago. The barn-that is, the garden house, which from my room seemed to me beautiful and mysterious-had become the very mystery in which I was hidden. It was the same hour. Perhaps the years were no more. The tired man was on his tower among the little boxes. There was a quilt for covering plants in a garden. It smelled of rats. Also the chicken houses had been moved. The outward orchard is all down. The wry trees are gone. The earth is sown with new grass.

Famous but unknown, tired but powerful, a man without virtue and without prayer, impotent, hungry, at peace, unable to speak, looking at the valley: Who is like unto God! God, my God, here is a traitor who loves You beyond speech! And yet I have no love. I have no moon, I have no valley.

I sat by the orchard heaters until I smelled all over of oil and flame. I saw the moon through the flame. Without heart, without brain, the senseless man has prayed for fire and apparently received none. Everywhere is beauty. Where are You, O my God? I was ashamed of singing on the road to the barn, but what else could I have done? Alive and dead I climb the glorious barn. The mud of my feet going up is the mud of my hands going down. I will go down more wretched than I went up because more glorious. This barn cannot be known. It is Mount Lebanon, where Father Charbel Makhlouf saw the sun and moon.

I leaned my chin upon the windowsill and prayed to You, my Lover, in the following terms:
"When the pie was opened
The birds began to sing.
Was not this a dainty dish
To set before the King?"

My God, Who is like You? How can I compare the visits of your children with the silence that dwells on the hills? Yet I have made their hearts suffer by loving them. I have defiled many lives with my impertinence. We have all gone away and have begun over and over to pray, and I believe conversation is a punishment for false mysticism. How can we help ourselves? But I am once again made clean by frost and morning air, here in the presence of the moon.

As long as I do not pretend I suffer, as long as I do not trade in false coin, nor claim that I have already disappeared-my brothers' prayers can always mend me. The windows are open. Let the psalms fly in. Prime each morning makes me safe and free. The Day Hours sustain me with their economy, by night I am buried in Christ. At 3 a.m. I wear the old white vestment and say the Mass de Beata. Through the gaps in my own prayer come the psalms of the Night Office that I discovered in the woods yesterday afternoon.

There, there is the crooked tree, the moss with my unspoken words, those pines upon that cliff of shale, the valley living with the tunes of diesel trains. Nobody knows the exact place I speak of and why should I tell them? For every man is his own Jacob, wakes up at the foot of his own ladder. And thus he arises in his own unrecognizable house, his gate of heaven.

What happens after that? Do you put down "The rest is silence" and close the book and sell it to the public? That would be a lie. For Jacob afterward married. His first wife, the fertile one, was ugly. He served fourteen years. He bred sheep. He fled from Rachel's father. His flocks drank from the well where Jesus later sat and spoke with my elder sister.

We too have all married over and over again, and yet we have no husband. But thank God for the hill, the sky, the morning sun, the manna on the ground which every morning renews our lives and makes us forever virgins.

Taken from "The Sign of Jonas" by Thomas Merton

Morior Invictus

2006-10-21T11:53:00.000-05:00

Morior Invictus - "In death, unconquered..."

I have been away from the wide world of weblogging for an extended summer hiatus. For those of you who might know me and care, Shannon, Lupe and I moved from the south side of Chicago to the south suburbs of Boston in June. I have taken a job as a consultant at a law firm which is working on the 9-11 litigation; although sadly leaving the University of Chicago and some great friends in Bridgeport. Compounded with this transition was the blessed birth of a healthy baby boy on Sept. 4. Jack Daniel is a handsome little guy and seems to have, thankfully, not only got his mom's good looks but her saintly personality.
I have had to put my translation on hold, and the frustration of giving it up has prevented me from blogging. Not to mention the fact that so much was happening in our lives, I didn't even know how to begin writing about it. And I clearly have had no time to write about or translate anything else. However, I have recently begun working on another paper for the University of Chicago on the concept of jihad in the sermons of Ali b. Abi Talib. Or more specifically, on the concept of piety in the Amir al-Mu'mineen's sermons on jihad. Being away from Hyde Park, and in the cooperative environment of the law firm in which I work, has made me realize the importance of writing "in a community." I have therefore decided to switch gears, temporarily, from my translation, (which I promised my shaykh I would finish and I will,) and begin publishing a few pages of this paper for the comments, questions and criticism of whomever may care to read and respond. And perhaps more personally important, to have an informal forum and journalistic medium to express my ideas, even if no one is listening.
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The Concept of Taqwā in ‘Alī Ibn Abī Tālib’s Sermons on Jihād

"فإنَّ الجِهادَ بابٌ مِن أبوابِ الجَنَّةِ فَتَحَهُ ﷲُ لخاصَّةِ أوليائِهِ وهو لِباسُ التَّقوَى ودِرْعُ ﷲِ الحَصينَة ُ وَجُنَّتُهُ الوَثيقَةُ ."
“Jihād is one of the doors of paradise which God opens to chosen ones of His closest friends. It is a robe of piety, the impregnable armor of God and His trustworthy shield."

Because the four years of ‘Alī Ibn Abī Tālib's caliphate were marred by the first and the most ideologically divisive, civil war in Islam's history, it is not surprising that social and armed conflict are prominent themes in many of the sermons, letters and sayings collected in the Nahj al-Balāgha[1]- the vast majority of which were composed during this violent period of unrest in the early Ummah. However, ‘Alī's use of the word jihād, when exhorting his followers to enter into the brutish, human business of war (al-harb,) battles (al-malāhim,) and killing (al-qitāl,) is noteworthy. What are we to make of a quote like the famous one from ‘Alī’s twenty-seventh sermon, “On Jihād,” with which this essay began? What role does piety (taqwā) play in sermons that speak of combat? How does it change the tone of these speeches which were delivered before such gruesome battles?

Of course, it is a well known and well established fact that the Arabic root (j-h-d)’s semantic range of meaning includes not only "going to war," but just as often the "exertion of any pietistic effort" (al-ijtihād) or even "faithfully enduring some trial, tribulation or adversity" (al-majhada.)[2] After a close reading and literary analysis of passages, taken exclusively from ‘Alī’s sermons about going to war, this article will demonstrate that the concept of jihād therein is framed by the Amīr al-Mu’minīn’s even more copious exhortations to a piety (taqwā) which is rooted in the act of fearing God (taqā) and constantly remembering our own death's inevitability. This pious fear of God which makes a soldier unafraid to die is the moral quality that makes him so virtuous; and an example to be followed in the spiritual life of every Muslim. Of course, this thematic framing of jihād in the context of taqwā does not dilute the martial meaning of the word. It cannot be denied that the immediate, historical context of ‘Alī’s sermons on jihād were the very bloody battles of the first civil war. Instead, the use of religious language in ‘Alī’s speeches during the war augments our understanding of his definition of piety – as more than the mere possession of faith, but a committed willingness to take decisive action in that faith's defense. Indeed, the universal lesson of ‘Alī's sermons, appropriately classified as "calls to arms," is that we should all live with the kind of faith for which we are ready to die.

Piety clearly plays a leading role in ‘Alī’s sermons about going to war. And it dramatically changes the way we understand his concept of jihād in at least two ways. The first is literal and the second is allegorical. On the one hand, the Amīr al-Mu‘minīn’s use of religious language and emphasis on piety in his sermons on jihād affect our understanding of his justification and preparation for engaging in armed combat. This literal reading is perhaps one of the earliest examples of an Islamic just war theory. On the other hand, in an allegorical sense, the commander of the faithful’s sermons on jihād can be read as exhortations to all believers, men and women, young and old, to zealously pursue pious lives and daily combat forces of sin and evil which seek the corruption of human souls in the world. Jewish and Christian mystics have often read the military psalms of David in just such an allegorical way.[3]

This essay will deal with both the literal and the allegorical interpretations of ‘Alī’s sermons on jihād and describe the role piety plays in each. In the literal sense of these sermons and the historical context of the first civil war, I will demonstrate that ‘Alī’s emphasis on piety and moral virtue in his justification and preparation for war is one of the earliest examples of an Islamic just war theory (after the sayings and example of the prophet Muḥammad, of course.) In describing this literal interpretation of jihād, I will give examples of ‘Alī’s moral justification, physical preparations, and rules for engagement in armed conflict. In the allegorical sense of these same sermons, I will demonstrate that ‘Alī’s allusive use of religious and pietistic language in his exhortations to jihād opens the sermons up to another level of interpretation, one which calls all people to holiness by spiritually combating sin and evil on the battlefield of their own souls. In describing this allegorical interpretation of jihād, I will give examples of ‘Alī’s extensive use of metaphors (al-isti‘ārāt) (like the beautiful and oft-quoted, “Jihād is one of the doors of paradise, a robe of piety, the impregnable armor of God and His trustworthy shield”) which expand the semantic range of the orations and encourage interpretations that go beyond their immediate, literal meaning.

It is difficult to separate these two levels of meaning in ‘Alī’s sermons, because his eloquent use of figurative language is so common in them all. For this reason, I will divide my analysis of ʿAlī's sermons on jihād into three general themes: 1) on going to war and its justification; 2) on preparing and training for war; 3) and exhortations to jihād. And in exploring the role of piety in each of these three subjects, there will be occasion to describe both literal and allegorical interpretations of each sermon.

On Going to War and Its Justification:

Labīb Bayḍūn’s topical concordance of the Nahj al-Balāgha, published in Damascus in 1978, is an extremely helpful resource for students of ‘Alī Ibn Abī Ṭālib's sayings on a given subject. In selecting passages for this essay, I have relied heavily on the outline and verses which Bayḍūn provides in the eighteenth chapter, so candidly entitled: “On war (al-ḥarb,) battles (al-malāḥim,) and killing (al-qitāl.)” It is interesting that Bayḍūn does not include jihād in this chapter title even though the word appears frequently in many of the quotations which he cites therein. It is indicative of an essential difference between ʿAlī's use of the words war, battles and killing on the one hand, and jihād on the other. The former group of near synonyms refers to the savage, unfortunate behavior of humanity in its fallen state. But the word jihād is so semantically connected to a pious fear of the Lord (taqwa) that it elevates the word's meaning in both the literal and allegorical ways already described. In the literal sense, ʿAlī's calls for jihād differ from other battle cries because they are appeals for a just war waged in a virtuous manner. The religious weight of the word jihād in this tragic context reminds Muslims that even in the ruthless human business of war, there is an example of justice and virtue to be imitated. In the allegorical sense, this same religious weight of the word jihād appeals to the ancient scriptural meaning of a holy war fought on a spiritual battlefield where both angels and demons fight for and against human souls.

In his introduction to chapter eighteen, Bayḍūn says: "‘Alī, who was never defeated in battle, would not begin to fight until he called his adversaries to the truth (yada‘ū ilā- l- ḥaqq) and showed them proof by reminding them of God's signs. If they rejected (him) after this, (still) he was slow to go to war - wanting to extinguish dissension and avoid bloodshed, seeking tranquility, harmony and peace." [4] This prefatory remark reveals another important dimension of the word jihād as it is used in ʿAlī's sermons. Before a commander can justify going to war, he must sincerely converse with his enemies, honestly calling them to witness the validity and moral imperative of his message. From the sermons of the ‘Amīr al-Muʿminīn, we can distill three essential conditions which must be met before justly engaging in any war. They are the eloquent expression (balāgha), impassioned exhortation (da‘wa) and faithful witness (shahāda) of the truth. These three activities are not only pre-conditions of a just war. They are also the basic justification and ultimate goal of any war which is piously pursued.

[1] ‘Alī b. Abī Tālib (d.40/661), Nahj al-Balāgha, compiled by Sharīf al-Radī (d.406/1015),
edited by Husayn al-A‘lamī (Beirut: Mu’assasat al-A‘lamī li-l-Matbu‘āt, 2003).
[2] See Appendix I for a comprehensive study of the root (j-h-d) and its semantic range of meaning in ‘Alī's sermons collected in the Nahj al-Balāgha.

[3] Examples are too numerous to provide a detailed list at this time. Indeed, a whole book could be devoted to the subject in either one of the two traditions. However, St. Anthony of Egypt, St. John of the Cross and Thomas Merton are at least three examples of ancient, medieval and modern Christian mystics who would metaphorically read the psalms in such a way.

[4] Labīb Wajīh Bayḍūn, Taṣnīf Nahj al-Balāgha, (Damascus: Maktabah Usāma Karm, 1978), p. 231.

The Desert's Seductive Charm: Part III

2006-05-09T11:47:00.000-05:00

"فِتنَة ُ الصَحراءِ "
The Desert's Seductive Charm
A Novella by Aḥmad Abū Khanayjar

(Translated from Arabic by Khalil al-Wafa')

(٣)
I don't know where this gentleman gets all this prattle!? He is recollecting ancient beliefs which were lively in the regions of the desert and the tribe in a day when dominion was held by ignorance and superstition. But today religion and science have completely vanquished ideas such as these; by which primitive minds confronted the universe in order to live in agreement with what was found to explain the natural phenomena which their comprehension were unable (to grasp) - like the reflection of the moon's image in water.
I think I know the motivation for this detail which he wants to add to his narrative. But this logic will drag him into numerous inconsistencies either with the original tale or with the events as they took place. Also, things being what they are, he has left out some (details,) like the moon's riding a camel on his descent to the desert.
As for the inconsistencies which I have in mind, it is the creation of two identical young men. This isn't possible. And also their being puritanically chaste, despite the fact that one of them – I will not be able to clearly say his name without reliving the struggle and causing the rivers of blood to flow again – was caught naked inside a woman's tent, who continues to swear to his virility. And had it not been the will of God for the wise men to intervene, things would have gone in a very different direction. And he, on account of this, reduced the number of heads of cattle from their herds and secretly transferred them to the herds of the woman, since her husband was away (at the time.) And this is at least one of the reasons which compelled them to leave for the market – to fetch a new male camel which could introduce new blood into their herds; since the family of the woman made it a condition that (they would) take every male. As for the old camel herd, I will not dwell on him, since he is like the waiter in the cafe. But I will reveal to you a secret. The two young girls who were mentioned at the well during the moment of the eclipse, one of them was no other than "Safiyya," their cousin.
But what is aggravating is that this council which he is holding by unfurling a tablecloth, sitting around and extensively lingering there - all of this is intended to create a distance from the events. But this will be over my dead body.

• • •
-7-
Now...
Allow me to move my feet to let the blood flow through them as I loose what binds them as a result of sitting in the previous council too long; so that I have the strength to complete all that I promised you in the way of "texture," and so that you are able to choose your own garment according to your own measurements, and people, everyone, can see it. I am the opposite of the emperor's tailor. I have not sought the refuge of a dark, remote room in which to place the loom. Instead, I have assembled the loom in broad daylight, facing the moon, in the open air, at the beginning, (from whence) the road forks and the side streets branch out like those which confronted Oedipus when he was returning home. But this is another story.
I'm talking to you!
My promise is still standing. I will finish the rest of the councils for you at the earliest opportunity. But now, let's go back to the two young men and their third, the husky camel, being led by his bridle calmly and obediently, passed from hand to hand. Or else they left the reins to him, as it walked between the two of them like a child between his two parents. (The camel) catching snippets of the conversation which was going on between them, displaying – from one moment to another – it's desire to participate (in the conversation,) by drawing their attention to himself by either getting a little ahead of them or falling behind to graze on some vegetation at the side of the road. And in each of these situations, one of the two young men would hurry to grab the bridle and pull the camel behind him.
As you can see....
The trip is calm, going along exactly according to plan and design. This is the point at which the roads begin to diverge, splitting into three paths:
The first goes straight in the direction of the tribal camps.
The second goes into the grazing fields, bypassing the tribes from behind. Indeed, it might take the un-experienced traveler into the depths of the desert.
The third goes straight into the vast wilderness, where there is (only) certain death and perdition. This third road passes between two huge boulders, to the right of which the second road passes and to the left of the two boulders, passes the desired track of the tribes and the camel race, whose appointed time was approaching.
The two of them smiled and their souls were happy when they saw the road diverging. So they let go of the rein of the camel, who no sooner felt the slackening of the bridle from them, then it started running towards the two boulders and knelt down between them. Bewilderment traced its lines in the eyes of the two young men when the camel seemed to them to be kneeling, burdened by the weight of his heavy load - the two boulders. His head facing the road of the vast wilderness. The camel had closed its eyes and started moving its mouth as it growled, a thin foam collecting around its nose and mouth. The two of them walked ahead in his direction fearfully. Each of them sat down on a boulder as night began to drop its curtain.

• • •
-8-
The origin of the story of the two boulders is that a man had lost his way in the desert on his camel, finding himself in so much trouble that he looked out over (tracts of his own) annihilation. So he put a pebble under his tongue, trying to squeeze water from it in order to combat the thirst and dryness of his mouth. While he was sleeping near his camel, he awoke to a strong uproar breaking out around him, and the gurgling like the gurgling of water flowing among rocks. He thought to himself, 'I must be dreaming, or else these are the first throws of death, appearing as a craving for water. But the camel pressed him close to his side, so he sat up.
It seemed as if a cyclone had uprooted (everything) after it struck the area around him, while the weather was returning to its tranquil state. He stood up and saw it, the Sesban oasis, rising up in the middle of the desert. He stood up awe-struck, for despite all the stories which he had heard, he had never believed in the existence of a hidden oasis in the desert. He had always thought it was one of the fantasies and illusions of travelers along similar desert paths, by which they pass the time and make a long journey feel short. But now here it is, in front of him, just as the stories described.
It is an oasis whose dimensions are un-apprehensible to the eye from a distance. A wall of Sesban bushes, in all their verdant splendor, encircles it. From thence is derived its name. The uproar was coming from inside it. He went forward cautiously, followed by his camel. When the sound of water struck both their ears, the man stopped, wondering: Is water the bait, leading them to the trap of entering the oasis from which no one exits or returns?
The man noticed from his position that the weather was beginning to get colder and the moon was becoming more radiant. His eyes glimpsed something like watermelon vines extending their ends outside the wall of thick Sesban. He approached it to be sure of what he saw. He reached his hand out to the leaves of the plant to see if they were alive or if he was suffering the agonies of an incipient death as it now was tricking and deceiving him. But his hand collided with a fruit, pushing the leaves aside with his hand. The size of the fruit startled him.
He didn't think any more. He grabbed his camel and made him kneel between two fruits. No sooner did he pass the end of the net underneath them, then he cut them with his knife from the plant and he bound the ropes of the net to the saddle. He was moving eagerly and with fervently, afraid of being exposed whereupon the people of the oasis would capture him and drag him inside where his certain perdition lurks. He struck the camel cruelly on its backside, so the camel rose, struggling to its feet, complaining of its poor treatment which he had never received from his master before. With one leap, the man mounted the camel, spurring him on its side. It was as if the camel sensed his danger, so it ran far away from the oasis.
The stories say: "The oasis faces the tribe's camps." So the only thing the man had to do was turn his back on the oasis and travel until he found himself among his own people.
The camel started out quickly. Then, gradually, his pace started to slacken until he stopped completely where some say that the fruit started to get heavy. The sun was on the verge of rising when the camel knelt down. The man thought: (I) must have to leave the watermelons here – in the desert – and go with the camel, to save myself first and then return with the camel another time to transport the one proof of the existence of the city of Sesban.
He tried to free it from the net, but he couldn't. So he was forced to untie it from the saddle and leave it. On his way, he laid markers to lead him when he returned.
But when he returned with a band of his brothers and cousins, the two watermelons had turned into two boulders around which hung ropes of the net.

To Be Continued . . .

The Desert's Seductive Charm: Part II

2006-05-05T12:43:00.000-05:00

"فِتنَة ُ الصَحراءِ "
The Desert's Seductive Charm
A Novella by Aḥmad Abū Khanayjar

(Translated from Arabic by Khalil al-Wafa')

(٢)
Even though I agree with him about this beginning, as one of the many beginnings with which it is possible to start; especially since it is more distinctive than other, more feeble beginnings. For there are (many) possibilities for the beginning, like: "On the day of the eclipse...or the day of the race....or on the day of infamy....or...." But he is free, so let him begin how he wants. However, the gentleman then must permit me to record some imperfections afflicting this beginning which almost lends itself to attracting the eye of the reader and the ear of the hearer:
1) Why has he still not named his two protagonists at this point (in the story,) even though the story is realistic and the characters are well-known to everyone who lives in these parts? Or at least, he's heard their story of crossing the desert roads; (the same roads) which spread their story and publicized it among the caravans traveling between the tribes and their markets.
And what is he getting at? Be on guard my dear friend, the reader! The first harbinger of magic is suggestion and the commingling of events which we are unable to separate. But I will reveal their names to you to spite him: Abel and Cain.
2) He is stuck on the waiter in the cafe without a clear goal. What is his role? What does this gentleman want exactly? 'Tension,' as the saying goes? If the role of the waiter is to increase the tension of the events and also serve to link them, then is this plausible?
3) Finally, he should have indicated what Cain purchased as the two were leaving the market where he bought a dagger. Why is he concealing this information?

• • •
-6-
The road to the tribe's camps is long, taking a full seven days and seven nights. So I have to let them walk, between them that camel which seized their vision and their hearts. And it was walking leisurely, like a bride ambling towards her groom.
The tale has been tranquil up to this point and the journey is long. On account of this, I will let them cross the road of desire slowly. And I will pause briefly to reveal what is ambiguous to you in the (yarn) I have been weaving for a short time. In front of me are seven nights, with seven councils. In them, I will narrate for you everything that will open the locks on events. But, in a measure. . . .

The First Council :
Know then! They are paternal and maternal cousins at the same time. They were born on the same night after seven years of torturous waiting. After six, barren years had passed in the marriages of the two brothers to the two sisters, throughout which they had tried everything and every medicine, hopelessness began to creep inside them. But the female soothsayer seemed to be a solution and final hope.
They went to her. She said after she threw her seashells on the sand between them: "Seven years, and seven years, and the full moon since the moment of its appearance at the pool of water, each of the two sisters would lie sleeping, naked, spreading her legs to the rays of the moon, following it wherever it goes. At the same time, the two naked brothers are in the water the whole time and at the moment of the moon's setting, two men come out of the water, and each one would have sex with his wife. Then, wrapping her in his gown, he returns with her to his tent, carefully (preventing) the air from touching her."
After arguing and quarreling, protesting and hysteria, everyone accepted. The longing for a son and the need for one who would bear the name before they disappeared into the desert sands was stronger than any other warning. So they went to the pool of water and carried out the instructions of the soothsayer exactly.
Nine months later, two children were born. It was as if they were twins, impossible to tell them apart. And to ward off the evil eye, they gave each of them the name: Hasan.

The Second Council :
They grew in exact proportion to one another, becoming two strong, young men. Life pulsed powerfully in their veins. They were never separated from one another, even sleeping, a night here and a night there. But what most worried people was their lack of interest in participating in the camel race which the tribe annually undertook four nights after celebrating ʿAshūrāʼ.
The tribe believes that the moon on an ancient night resembled the moon on this night – the night of the full moon. (Then, the moon) descended from on high when he saw a nymph from among the earth's daughters, treading lightly near the pool of water. He descended without her sensing him as he walked on the desert sands towards her. She had already taken off her robe, wanting to bathe, when she sensed him. So she dove quickly into the pool to hide her nakedness.
The moon stood confused when he couldn't find her. But the sand betrayed her secret to him, so he descended behind her and caused her to conceive by his rays. Then she came out (of the water) and gave birth to the original grandfather and grandmother of the tribes. But the daughters of the jinn noticed the moon's repeated descent to the pool, so they tried to kidnap and trap him, to keep him from the pool. So he ascended back into the sky and never repeated the descent. For he keeps trying to free himself from the snares of the jinn's daughters, who for their part keep trying to capture him again.
In imitation of this day, the tribe holds a camel race. And in the evening, the celebrations begin with the victor, who has the right to choose any bride he wants. Even if she is engaged to her cousin, still she becomes his right. For this is the custom.
These two were averse to participate, but what happened on the day of the eclipse... excuse me.... If you want to know what happened, wait for me in the next council.

The Third Council :
When years passed without the two seeming to have a desire to participate in the race, and also showing no interest in marriage, as was customary, the unease which began insignificant and weak started to grow, until it became a nightmare hanging over the hearts of fathers and mothers.
Thus, despite their nature which was superior to their peers in the field of work and (despite) the number of heads (of cattle) which they owned: sheep, goats and camels; still, their shunning of the time-honored custom made them the subject of innuendos, conversation and rumors. All of this compelled the mother/aunt to ask them on that particular night about the reason for their aversion to women?
They understood from the beginning what the mother/aunt was getting at with her choice of the word, "women," instead of the word, "marriage." And when it seemed to them by the tone of (her) voice that there was a strong accusation being leveled against their manhood, or doubts abounded concerning them, one of them said: "We never found a women like you." The mother/aunt laughed, but ignored (his) circumvention (of the question.) Determined to know the answer, she said unequivocally: "Women all seem the same in bed."
In this way, the intimations increased in maliciousness and prominence. So one of them responded harshly, "But we never found someone who compelled us to leave one another, taking us to bed!"
The mother/aunt was reassured a little, even though she was intent on getting the young women's confirmation by enticing them to her tent. Perhaps . . . maybe . . . what she wanted was verification from the other direction.
So in the night on which the moon was eclipsed, the young women went out with tambourines and cymbals, singing and dancing to help the moon escape from the snares of the jinn's daughters who veiled him. And they set out in the direction of the well, laughing with the naiveté of girls and the frivolity of their intellects.
Among the maidens were two girls, causing all eyes to become fixed on them and a heavy silence to descend among the young men. This silence came commensurately to the two of them, causing them to turn towards one another and withdraw at a distance. Then they ran in the direction of the shepherd's fields, where the old, camel herd was pasturing their flock. They told him briefly about their desire to participate in the camel race and win it. The man laughed at length, taking his time to know (fully) what had happened. Then he counseled them. From there, the two set out in the direction of the distant market.

To Be Continued . . .

The Desert's Seductive Charm: Part I

2006-05-02T11:53:00.000-05:00

"فِتنَة ُ الصَحراءِ "
The Desert's Seductive Charm
A Novella by Aḥmad Abū Khanayjar

(Translated from Arabic by Khalil al-Wafa')

• • •
-1-
Watch!
I will take for you: a thread from the sun, a thread from the air, a thread from the earth, and a thread from the water and fasten them to the tip of my spindle, spinning it thoroughly, until (the four) become a single thread, strong and long, whose beginning is indistinguishable from its end. Then, on my loom I will lay it to weave a unique fabric.
Pay attention!
Stitching now means "plot." So arouse your senses, examine the "texture" of the garment closely, see the brilliance of its colors! I will encourage you to try it on and have it fitted to your size. Pass your fingers over it, feel the surface and its soft, velvet-like quality.
Listen!
You are the only one that the garment will fit, relative to its size. Its length and its width are equivalent to your height and girth. So the garment resembles Cinderella's glass slipper. For what I'm making now is not like magic. Rather, it is magic by its very nature.
Now....
Don't consider me a liar or a cheat like the emperor's tailor, who claimed to weave a garment which only the most intelligent could see. But then a child screamed: "The emperor is naked!" For my garment, all will be able to see and all will be able to touch. What's more, I will promote this manner of dress as suitable for everyone; each according to his or her (own) measurements, and also ....
But....
Let's now begin our story. All you need to do is be patient and kind with me.

(١)
Who does this gentleman think he is? About what threads and garments is he speaking? He must want to trap us in the throws of his alleged "clothes." The story he's telling is only a stratagem. (caveat emptor) I'll be on my guard from the beginning, (when) his game was claiming that it was magic.
But, this gentleman must know that magic only comes about through gullibility, and desiring that, he is trying to mislead (us) by it, with his violation of reality and its rules. All of this in order to make us see it his way and at that very moment, he will control us completely. Many things around us are eclipsed by obscurity, controlling them. So fear and intimidation are talking to us. For this reason, that's why he came; knowledgeable of our own limited experience, pretending that he has the power to reveal what is veiled in mystery in a strange land. And this is just the beginning, oh noble reader!
Guard yourself against his actions. They are actions closest to the jugular. Like stealing kohl from the eye, or turning a rope into a snake, or making a man fly in the air, or walk on water, or cutting a young girl in half with a saw . . . and other such actions. Avoid them!
Before he begins his story, let me make a correction: I read in one of the books, I don't remember where or when, neither the name of the book nor its author – that the naked emperor in that particular story represents a naked truth. So let him tell me, this noble magician, where and when was the truth naked?
Pardon me . . . Have I fallen under the control of his magic?

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At dawn, the two of them dismounted in the area of the market just as the old shepherd had commissioned them. They walked around a little then stopped at a cafe to drink green tea, but their eyes were fixed on the camel merchant's yard.
Anxiety struck their sides, blowing violently in their beings. Sitting down didn't settle them, prompting the waiter in the joint to ask them, as he offered them the tea of their choice, "What is the reason for your visit?" Indeed, it seemed to him by their dress and their manner of speaking, they must be foreigners. One of them smiled and the other replied: "We were nearby here when we heard the clamor of the market place rising, and we wanted some tea."
The waiter smiled and went away. But his features betrayed his suspicion, and he continued watching them cautiously throughout the period of their sitting there. He said to himself: "You can't believe twins."
The two of them definitely felt the glances of the waiter spying on them. So they stood up after some time and they circled the market without stopping in front of anything in particular until they were no longer given the feeling that someone was spying on them, if indeed someone should be. And when they were walking around only leisurely, the two of them were on guard at the same time of anyone who came in contact with them. (Fearing) his hand might reach the coin purse, while they were inattentive, stealing it without their knowing.
The tour (of the market) took a long time. They passed the camel market during it and they returned cheerfully to the joint where the waiter received them with the same suspicious smile. They asked him for green tea and they sat waiting for it calmly.
They didn't utter a single word throughout the period of their sitting there, seeming to be only concerned with the taste of the green tea, and the heat in the air. And at the same time, they smiled at everyone who entered the cafe. But on account of the great similarity between them and their being strangers, the eyes of those entering the cafe were drawn towards them. Still they smiled to ward of the persistent glances and their astonished looks.
Despite all of this, the waiter didn't fail to notice that their ears were listening to the conversations of passing customers about selling and buying, about the market and its strength. He said to himself: 'I bet they want something, but what is it?'

• • •
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When the market started to disperse, the two of them got up, bought a water skin and two sacks of food which they left in the protection of the waiter at the cafe. Then they went directly to the camel market. The directions of the old man were clearly phrased: "Be present in the market early to become acquainted with its condition, without expressing their intention to buy, because the brokers in the market would come to know their desires, as well as the amount of cash in their possession. So (the brokers) would continue to lay in waiting, trying to sell to them at the highest price. And they, the strangers, would not be able to counter the tricks of the brokers and their little games."
The camel herd broke the camel's chains when the two of them entered. Their eyes passed around the yard, quickly examining all the camels there in order to choose the requested animal. Their vast number and various sizes confused their ability (to choose.) They turned towards each other, were they in a hurry to begin?
Before the one of them who was again tying his headscarf with a trembling hand answered, he caught out of the corner of his eye one of the brokers coming towards them. He grabbed the forearm of his companion to alert him. So his friend became aware (of what was going on) and the two of them decided to move quickly before the broker got to them; for they didn't know how they would escape him. No sooner did one of them move his foot, than a camel rushed up behind them, standing between them as if it was suddenly frozen. The head of the camel was facing the setting sun and his short bridle was dangling from his muzzle. As a result of the one camel's outburst, all the other camels were startled and the two of them separated instinctively out of fear that the camels would trample them in the commotion of the one camel's recalcitrance. But that one (camel) stood between them and they saw the animal's shadow cast behind it. It seemed like that of a legendary, colossal beast. The two calmly approached the camel which stood waiting for them and they grasped its bridle.

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They didn't debate the price set by the camel herd, who came running after his camel in pursuit of it. The directions said: "Get to know the camel herd and buy from him." The brokers tried to interfere, but the two of them with great firmness kept them at a distance from bidding and profit. They paid the camel herd the price and they led their camel towards the cafe.

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The waiter, who had been watching them all day, continued guarding their possessions at the end of the day, helping them load the goods and the gifts which they had bought onto the back of the camel. He said: "Excellent! An excellent camel!"
He went up with them until they left the market. One of them took out some cash and gave it to him. The waiter smiled. They said: "A good boy." They passed in front of him, but he called out to them, saying: "Be on guard! Don't let the current tranquility of the beast fool you." He laughed as he returned to the cafe and the two of them set out in the direction of the tribe's camps.

To Be Continued . . .

Happiness

2006-04-23T22:20:00.000-05:00

"Happiness" - Naguib Mahfouz
(from Echoes of an Autobiography)

I returned to the old street after a long absence to attend a funeral.
No trace worth mentioning remained of its golden form.
On its two sides, towering buildings had replaced the villas, and it was crammed full of cars, dust, and turbulent waves of human beings.
With a feeling of great pride, I remembered its radiant appearance and the aroma of jasmine.
I remembered the beautiful girl who appeared at the window, casting her radiance on the passersby.
Who knows where lies her happy tomb in the city of the departed? There come to me now the words of the wise friend: "The first love is but a training that benefits the lucky ones who attain the love of God."

The Night Journey and Mi'raj of the Prophet

2006-04-22T11:07:00.000-05:00

Q.17:1: "Praise be to Allah Who has taken His servant by night from the Sacred Mosque (al-Masjid al-Haram, Mecca) to the Farthest Mosque (al-Masjid al-Aqsa', Jerusalem)." Q.33:56: "Allah and His angels shower blessings on the Nabee (Prophet). You who believe; send blessings on him and salute him with a worthy salutation."

Q.53: 1-18: "By the star when it sets, Your companion does not err, nor is he deceived:Nor does he speak of his own desire. It is nothing except an inspiration that is inspired, which one of mighty powers has taught him, one vigorous; and he grew clear to view when he was on the uppermost horizon. Then he drew near and came down till he was at a distance of two bow lengths or even nearer, And He revealed to His slave that which He revealed. The heart did not lie in seeing what it saw. Will you then dispute with him concerning what he sees? And truely he saw him yet another time by the furthest-tree of the furthest boundary, near which is the Garden of Abode. When that which shrouds did enshroud the furthest-tree, The eye did not turn aside nor yet was it overbold. Truely he saw one of the greater revelations of his Rabb (Lord)."

________________________________________

Allah ordered Jibraeel to go down with seventy thousand angels to Muhammad (pbuh), and stand by his door. "Accompany him to My presence. And you, Mikaeel, take the hidden knowledge and go down with seventy thousand angels and stand by the door of his bedroom. You, Israfeel, and you Azraeel, do as Jibraeel and Mikaeel have been ordered." Then He said to Jibraeel: "Increase the light of the moon with the light of the sun, and increase the light of the stars with the light of the moon." Jibraeel asked: "Allah, has the Day of resurrection dawned?" Allah said: "No, but tonight We are calling to Our presence Muhammad (pbuh), the last Messenger who came after Isa (Jesus) to reveal to him a secret that pertains to Us." Jibraeel said: "Allah, what is that secret?" Allah said: "Jibraeel! The secret of kings cannot be given to the servants. Go with My order and don't ask."
And Jibraeel began his descent carrying with him the heavenly message. All the angels accompanied him as Allah had ordered, until they reached the door of Muhammad (pbuh). When they arrived, they said: "Qum ya sayyidi: Arise, my Master, and prepare yourself! Ride on the back of the buraq, the heavenly creature that will carry you on your journey to the Rabb (Lord) of power through the land of the angels!"

THE BURAQ (HEAVENLY BEAST)

When Allah ordered Jibraeel to carry with him the buraq for Muhammad (pbuh) to ride, he went to the paradise of buraqs and there he found forty million buraqs. Every buraq had a crown on its forehead inscribed with the words: "There is no god only Allah, Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah." Under it was written: "Believe in Me, in My angels, in My books, and in My Rasools (prophets)." Jibraeel saw among them a buraq who secluded himself and who sat alone crying. Jibraeel came to him and asked him why he was in such a state. The buraq answered: "I heard the name of Muhammad (pbuh) forty thousand years ago, and my yearning for him has prevented me from eating and drinking." Jibraeel chose that buraq and he took him.
The buraq had the body of a horse but the face of a human being, with big black eyes and soft ears. His colour was that of a peacock whose plumage was set with red rubies and corals, on which sat a white head of musk on a neck of amber. His ears and shoulders were of pure white pearls attached with golden chains, each chain decorated with glittering jewels. His saddle was made of silk lined with silver and gold threads. His back was covered with green emerald and his halter was pure peridot.
The speed of the buraq is according to his sight. His legs reach wherever his eyes can see. Jibraeel said: "Rasool Allah, this night is your night, and your turn has come to shine in the sky of creation. You are the sun of ancient and recent knowledge, you are the moonlight of the beauties of the worlds, the happiness of creation and the adornment of the lands of human beings and angels. You are the cup of love from the river of milk and honey. The river of Kawser in paradise overflows in anticipation of seeing you. You, the joy of all creation, the pride of paradise, the tables are ready and the palaces of heaven are waiting for your coming!"
"Jibraeel," said Muhammad (pbuh), "did you come with a message of mercy or wrath?""I came with a message from your Rabb (Lord) to give you a secret.""What does the Rabb (Lord) of Generosity want to do with me?""He wants to shower you with His mercy and all human beings that accept you.""Give me a moment to prepare myself.""I brought you water of paradise and a turban with a message inscribed: 'Muhammad the servant of Allah; Muhammad the prophet of Allah; Muhammad the beloved of Allah; Muhammad the friend of Allah.'""Jibraeel, tell me more about that turban.""Allah created a turban from his light and he entrusted it to Ridhwan, the angel-custodian of paradise, and the praising of Ridhwan's host of angels belonged to the owner of that turban before heaven and earth were created. Tonight, when the order came for your visit, Ridhwan took the turban from paradise, and all forty thousand angels said with him: 'Our Rabb (Lord), you have ordered us from time immemorial to praise the owner of that turban. Honour us tonight with his sight and permit us to walk before him.' And Allah granted them what they asked. Then Allah ordered me, Jibraeel, to hand Mikaeel the precious jar of the pure water of Salsabil, and Mikaeel to give to Azraeel, and Azraeel to give it to Israfeel, then Israfeel to Ridhwan, then Ridhwan sent that water another time to the highest paradise: Jannat al-Firdaws, where all the beautiful maiden-angels washed their faces with that water and shone even more brightly. Then they sent back that water to me, and I am giving it to you."
And Muhammad (pbuh) showered with the water from paradise. As soon as it touched his noble body he became covered with a garment of subtle angelic light, and Jibraeel gave him the buraq to ride. But the buraq stopped and asked Jibraeel: "Is that Muhammad (pbuh) who is invited to our Rabb (Lord)?" Jibraeel said: "Yes." The buraq asked: "Is he the owner of the blessed pond in paradise?" Jibraeel said: "Yes." The buraq said: "Is he the leader of the people of paradise?" Jibraeel said: "Yes." The buraq said: "Is he the intercessor on Judgment-Day?" Jibraeel said: "Yes." At that time the buraq began to melt like ice and snow melt in the light of the sun. He knelt down and said to Muhammad (pbuh): "Pride of creation, ride on me; but I have one request to ask of you: Do not forget me on the day of intercession."

THE JOURNEY TO THE FAR-DISTANT (al-Aqsa') MOSQUE

When Muhammad (pbuh) began to ride he was crying. Jibraeel asked him: "Rasool Allah, why are you crying? " He said: "I remembered human beings. Are they going to ride on Judgement Day as I am riding now on the buraq, and go to their heavenly palaces in paradise?" Jibraeel said: "Yes, truely, we are going to resurrect the pious ones in delegations of riders: On the Day when We shall gather the righteous unto the Beneficent, a goodly company (19:85)."
At that Muhammad (pbuh) felt happy, and he rode forward on the buraq. Jibraeel took hold of the reins while Mikaeel held the saddle, and Israfeel the saddle-cloth. The buraq moved in space until in the blink of an eye they reached the place appointed for their first stop in the middle of the desert. Jibraeel said: "Muhammad, go down and pray to Allah in this place." Muhammad (pbuh) said: "What is this place?" Jibraeel said: "This is the place where you are going to emigrate, and it is going to be your second city." That was the town of Yathrib not far from Mecca, and its name was going to be Madina.
In the blink of an eye they again passed through space until they stopped a second time, and Jibraeel told Muhammad (pbuh) to come down and pray."Which place is this, Jibraeel?" asked Muhammad (pbuh)."This is Sinai, where Musa (Moses) used to speak with Allah."Then the buraq moved in space another time until he reached a third place where Jibraeel ordered him to pray."And now, where are we, Jibraeel?""You are in Bethlehem, where Isa (Jesus) was born and from where he spread the message of the King of heavens and of the earth."
As Muhammad (pbuh) walked with delight on the soil where Isa (Jesus) was born, he felt someone moving near his right shoulder who said: "Muhammad! Wait, I want to ask you a question." But Muhammad (pbuh) did not respond. Then another call came from behind his left shoulder, but again he did not answer it. Finally, an unimaginably beautiful mountain covered with the wealth and beauty of this world appeared in front of him and spoke to him with a human voice, but for the third time Muhammad (pbuh) did not respond. Then he asked Jibraeel about the three voices. Jibraeel said: "If you had listened to the first voice all your nation would have been corrupted because it is the voice of evil; and had you listened to the second one, all your nation would have been tyrants because it is the voice of Satan. And if you had stopped to hear the decorated mountain all your nation would have preferred this world to the eternal world."
Muhammad (pbuh) continued on his way and saw two beautiful angelic beings, one masculine and one feminine. They wore a beautiful dress and the fragrance of heaven. They kissed him between his eyes and left. He asked Jibraeel who were these two. He said: "These are the believers of your nation. They are going to live in happiness and die in happiness and they are going to enter paradise." Then another angel appeared to him and offered him three cups to drink: one of water, one of milk, and one of wine. He took the cup of milk and drank, and Jibraeel said: "You have chosen the cup of fitra: innocence." Then a maiden-angel appeared and offered Muhammad (pbuh) three suits of cloth, one green, one white, and one black. He took the first two. Jibraeel said: "White is the colour of believers and green is the colour of paradise. All of your followers are going to be believers in this world and all are going to enter paradise in the next."
Then, as Muhammad (pbuh) was walking on the place where Isa (Jesus) taught, he entered the Temple of Sulaiman (Solomon) in Jerusalem. He found the temple full of angels waiting for him. Every angel in the temple represented a group of angels in paradise. Then he saw all the Prophets (alaihi salaam) standing in rows. He asked Jibraeel who all these were. Jibraeel said: "These are your brothers from among the prophets, and these angels are the leaders of all the angels of paradise." Then Jibraeel made the call to prayer, after which he said: "Muhammad, most honorable of beings in the sight of Allah, proceed to prayer." And Muhammad (pbuh) came forward and led the prescribed prayer, and all the prophets (alaihi salaam) and the angels followed him.

Adam spoke saying: - "Praise be to Allah who created me with His hands and ordered the angels to prostrate for me and brought out all the prophets from among my descendants!"
Then Nuh (Noah) said: - "Praise be to Allah who accepted my prayer and saved me and my people from drowning with my ship with the help of the angels, and honoured me!"
Then Ibraheem (Abraham) said: - "Praise be to Allah who took me as His friend and gave me a huge kingdom, and gave me prophets for descendants, and saved me from the fire of Namrood, and made it cool and safe for me!"
And Musa (Moses) said: - "Praise be to Allah who spoke to me without an intermediary and chose me for His message, and made me victorious over Pharaoh with the help of his angels, and gave me the Torah which Jibraeel taught me how to write, and adorned me with His love."
And Dawood (David) said:- "Praise be to Allah who revealed the Psalms to me, and softened the iron between my hands and all other elements, and chose me for His Message!"
And Sulaiman (Solomon) said:- "Praise be to Allah who has made subject to me the winds, the jinn, and human beings; who taught me the language of birds; who gave me a kingdom which he never gave to anyone after me, and supported me with all his angels."
And Isa (Jesus) said:- "Praise be to Allah who sent me as a Word from Him to the world, taught me the Torah and the Gospel, made me cure the deaf, the dumb, and the leper, made me bring back to life the dead by His permission, and supported me with Jibraeel and all His angels."
And Muhammad (pbuh) said:- "All of you praised your Rabb (Lord) and I praise Him also, Who sent me as a M0ercy for human beings and revealed the Quran to me, expanded my breast, took out my sins, raised me up, made my Nation and all human beings the best that could be, and called me 'Kind and Merciful'"!
And Jibraeel said:- "That is why, Muhammad you are the last of Prophets and a Mercy for human beings. Prophets and angels, creations large and small, Allah and His angels send blessings and salutations on His Prophet! You also send much blessings upon him and utmost greetings! Increase your praise. Praise is an angel with two eyes and two wings that flies to Allah directly to ask forgiveness for its reciter until Judgment Day."

Then Muhammad (pbuh) continued on his way, riding on the buraq together with all the angels that came to greet and accompany him. Whenever he passed through a different universe he found the angels of that universe gathered to greet and dress him with all kinds of gifts and adornments. They dressed him with the cloaks of perfection and made him the possessor of every beauty.
Then Muhammad (pbuh) heard a very powerful voice coming from Israfeel from behind the veils of Lordly Power and Angelic Perfection: - "Paradises and heavens! Angels! Mountains and trees and oceans and rivers! Moons and suns and stars and planets and constellations! Plunge in to the beauty and perfection of Muhammad (pbuh). Angels and houris of paradise, walk with pride! Creation, be happy tonight, for we are receiving in our presence the Master of human beings and the Seal of Prophets."

THE ASCENT - AL MI'RAAJ

Another voice came from an angel called Ismaeel, saying: "Heavenly stairs, show yourselves and descend!" upon which the ladder of heaven descended all the way from Firdaws, the loftiest paradise, until it reached the Temple of Sulaiman (Solomon). The arms of the ladder shone with two heavenly lights, red amethyst and green jasper of the greatest perfection. Every believer is going to see that ladder and climb on it. It has one hundred steps and it goes from the temple to the first heaven.
Jibraeel called Muhammad (pbuh) and the buraq climbed the first step. There Muhammad (pbuh) saw all kinds of angels red in colour. On the second step, Muhammad (pbuh) saw angels in yellow cloth, on the third step the angels were green and all of them were greeting him and giving him heavenly gifts which he took and gave to Jibraeel to keep as a trust for the believers on earth. On the fourth step messenger-angels came and said: "Jibraeel, keep rising for the Rabb (Lord) is waiting!" And Muhammad (pbuh) saw their subtle bodies shining and their faces glittering like mirrors in the sun.
Then he climbed the fifth step of the ladder and saw a huge world of angels that had no beginning and no end. All of them were praising Allah and their only words were: "There is no god only Allah." He asked Jibraeel: "How many are these angels?" for he was awed by their numbers. Jibraeel said: "If the skies and the earth and the moon and the sun and the stars and galaxies were crushed into dust and were all piled up, their dust particles would not be one tenth of the angels of this step of the ladder of paradise." Then the buraq climbed up to the sixth step and there a great surprise awaited Muhammad (pbuh), and a great event took place which passed all description. An immense, white-upon-white angel sat on a chair of burnished white gold, accompanied by a great host of angels with wide, awe-struck gazes looking at the divine majesty. The white angel stood up and said: "Muhammad, welcome! I beg you to bless my seat by sitting on it." When Muhammad (pbuh) sat on the chair, it melted with love for him and became a cloud of multicolored light chanting the praise of Allah. Out of every drop of that cloud Allah created another throne and another great angel sitting upon that throne.
Then the buraq climbed to the seventh heaven and Muhammad (pbuh) saw angels whose light replaced the light of his vision, as in the case when someone looks at the sun and his sight is stolen away. At that time, he became able to see whatever these angels were seeing. Then he climbed the eighth step of the ladder and saw nothing but angels in prostration. He quickly climbed to the ninth so as not to disturb them. On the ninth step of the ladder he saw angels which passed description and he stood in awe, unable to comprehend their creation. At that time their leader appeared and said: "Rasool Allah! we are dressing you with the secret of our creation and enabling you to understand all things by Allah's permission."
Then Muhammad (pbuh) went up to the tenth step of the ladder and saw the angels that praised Allah in all the languages that had been created since the beginning of creation. Muhammad (pbuh) wondered at the limitless creations of Allah. At the eleventh step, the angels numbered even more than the angels of the fifth step, and out of them an infinite number of colours glowed, different for each single one of them. At the twelfth step, Muhammad (pbuh) found angels with faces like moons and eyes like stars. The light of their faces were covering their words. On the thirteenth step, the most beautiful angels appeared and these were the angels of Allah, praising Allah with soft voices and revelling in other-worldly beauty. Their music did not resemble any other kind of music and if one tone of that music were heard on the earth everyone on it would faint.
On the fourteenth step Muhammad (pbuh) saw the angel Ismaeel with seventy thousand angels riding on horses. Behind everyone of them was a battalion of one hundred thousand angels created from the attribute of Beauty. It is the duty of each and everyone of these angels to appear on earth at least one time to bring it the touch of his beauty. The fifteenth to the twenty-fourth steps were under the command of the angel Ruqyaeel, great and small, thin and wide. The twenty-fifth step to the ninety-ninth were presided by the angel Qalaeel. His right hand was under the first heaven. Between each two of his fingers there are seven hundred thousand angels continuously praising Allah. For each of the praises that they utter strings of pearls come out of their mouth. The diameter of every pearl is eighty-one miles. For each pearl Allah creates an angel that guards it and keeps it as a trust for human beings until they enter paradise.
Then Muhammad (pbuh) saw a huge throne from a precious element other than gold standing on five posts. Each post has two wings and each wing encompasses the constellation of our world five times. On each wing rest fifty thousand angels, each of whom ask forgiveness for human beings in a different dialect and yet in complete harmony and with an angelic sound that melts the rocks of the seven earths. Out of each one of their tears Allah creates fifty thousand angels more whose task is to ask forgiveness in the same way as these angels do and in many times more dialects than they. Then the throne spoke to Muhammad (pbuh) and said: "I and the angels who guard me were created to carry human beings to their stations in paradise." Then, the throne invited Muhammad (pbuh) to sit on it, and when he sat he felt a pleasure he had never experienced before.

THE FIRST PARADISE: THE ABODE OF PEACE

Muhammad (pbuh) arrived at the hundredth step where he heard the angels praising and glorifying their Rabb (Lord) in the first heaven. It is called Dar as Salaam, the Abode of Peace, and has one hundred and twenty-four thousand doors. Each door represents a prophet. Jibraeel knocked at the door reserved for Muhammad (pbuh). A voice said from inside: "Who is it?" Jibraeel replied: "It is Jibraeel and Muhammad (pbuh)." The voice said: "Has he been sent for?" Jibraeel said: "Yes, he has been called to the Divine Presence." The door was opened. The angel Ismaeel came on a horse of light, covered in a cloth of light, holding a staff of light. In his right hand, Ismaeel carried all the deeds of human beings performed during the day, and in the other, all that they had done during the night. One thousand processions of angels accompanied him.
Ismaeel said: "Jibraeel, who is with you?" He replied: "The Prophet Muhammad (pbuh)." Ismaeel said: "Has he been sent for?" Jibraeel replied yes. Then the buraq was invited to land on the first paradise, the nearest paradise to the world. It is also called As Samaa ad-Dunya: the nearest heaven. This paradise can be compared to a rolling wave held in mid-air; Allah spoke to it and said: "Be a red emerald," and it was. The praising of its inhabitants is: Subhana zil Mulki wal Malakut: "Praise be to the Possessor of the earthly and the heavenly dominions."
Then Muhammad (pbuh) looked at the first heaven and found an angel formed like a man. All the actions that belong to human beings are displayed to him. If the spirit of a believer comes to him he sends it to paradise; if the spirit of an unbeliever comes to him he asks forgiveness for it. When forgiveness is granted he sends it to paradise. He has a tablet made of light which hangs from the throne to the first heaven. He writes on it the names of those who are sent to paradise. Then Muhammad (pbuh) saw a man with an angelic power towards whom he felt a great attraction. When he asked who that man was, Jibraeel said: "This is your father, Adam." Adam greeted him and said to Muhammad (pbuh): "Welcome to the good son and the righteous Prophet."
There are two doors to the right and the left of Adam. When he looks at the right side he is happy and when he looks at the left he weeps. Muhammad (pbuh) asked what these two doors were. Jibraeel said: "The door to the right is the door to paradise and rewards. When Adam sees his children entering it he smiles and is happy. The door to the left leads to punishment and the fire. When Adam sees his children entering it he weeps and is sad for them. Out of each of his tears Allah creates an angel who asks forgiveness until the day when forgiveness is granted and they are allowed to enter into paradise."
Then the angels began to recite: "I yearn to see the one whom Allah createdTo be unique in creation!No beloved one is purer nor more elevated than that one,Allah's beloved is His servant, the Praised One (Ahmad)Whose name was cut out from the nameOf the Most Glorious One.His are the attributes that no eloquence can express.It is enough honour that for him the moon split in two.What more do you ask than Allah's perfecting of his beauty?And truely Allah endowed him with the best character.And truely Allah created his light to be the greatest blessing,And He called him "Beloved" before He created creation.And because of his light the sun was clouded over,Because of his overwhelming light filling the firmament.The clouds showed a great miracle and movedLike a wild herd,And thunder clapped and rain pouredUpon his mere request.What more do you want than the softening of the rockWhen he walked upon it with his sandalled feet,Although you did not see its marksWhen he tread on the sand?Allah has elevated him to His presenceAnd the angelic world.Were it not for him, there would never be paradise,Nor heavens, and no earth.What an honour Allah bestowed upon him when He gaveTen salutations to those who wouldSend to him only one!"
They moved for five hundred thousand light-years within the radius of the first paradise. The buraq moved faster than the speed of light, for each of its steps could reach wherever his sight did. The entire distances they travelled were filled with angels whose number is known only to the Creator, praising Him and glorifying Him with all kinds of praises. There was not one handful of space but it was occupied by an angel in prostration. They were all sizes, big and small. A voice came saying: "My beloved Muhammad! all these angels are glorifying Me, and I am sending all this praise as waves upon waves of angelic blessings to support human beings through their daily life. These blessings will guide them towards everything that concerns them, and open for them all kinds of physical and spiritual knowledge that will help them progress in their ways of life, materially and spiritually. I will raise them through this angelic power and enable them to enter My paradise when they come to My Divine Presence."

THE SECOND PARADISE: THE ABODE OF CONSTANCY

Then Jibraeel ordered the buraq to take Muhammad (pbuh) to the second paradise, whose name is Dar al Qarar, the Abode of Constancy. He then knocked at one of the doors of the second paradise. It was made of a heavenly element that has no name in our language. The angel Jarjaeel came with one thousand processions of angels who made an even greater and happier music than the angels of the first paradise. A voice said: "Who is it?" "Jibraeel.""Who is accompanying you?""Muhammad, the Prophet of Mercy."Then the door was opened. Muhammad (pbuh) saw angels whose faces were like the disk of the sun, riding horses and girded with spiritual swords and lances. Muhammad (pbuh) asked: "Jibraeel! who are these?" Jibraeel answered: "These are angels whom Allah created to support humans against devils. Their praising is: Subhana zil `Izzati wal Jabarut: 'Glory to the Rabb (Lord) of Force and Might,' and they are wearing yellow turbans on their heads. When they praise Allah their turbans move and radiate a yellow light that supports the light of the sun. They radiate another light also, which makes the devils run away and chases out gossip from the heart of believers." Then Muhammad (pbuh) saw two very handsome men sitting on a throne made of red rubies. He asked: "Who are these?" Jibraeel said: "They are your relatives, Yahya (John) and Isa (Jesus)." Isa (Jesus) was of a reddish complexion as if he came out of the bath. Then angels came to Muhammad (pbuh) in battalions, greeting him one by one. Allah extended time in such a way that one second was enough to greet all of the angels and pray with them, for the time of prayer had come. Isa (Jesus) and Yahya (John) greeted Muhammad (pbuh) farewell, and Jibraeel ordered the buraq to go to the third paradise.

THE THIRD PARADISE: THE ABODE OF ETERNITY

Muhammad (pbuh) moved in space for another five hundred thousand light-years until they reached the third paradise. It is called Dar ul Khuld: the Abode of Eternity. As they approached their destination they heard great voices that thundered all around them. "That is the sound of angels praising their Rabb (Lord)," said Jibraeel. As they approached they heard the music of the angels by which everything moves in the orbits of the heavenly worlds. Jibraeel stopped at a door made of a pure, burnished heavenly copper, and he knocked. "Who is there?" said a voice behind the door. "Jibraeel, bringing Muhammad." "Has he been sent for?" "Yes." And the door was opened.
Muhammad (pbuh) entered and he saw an angel who changed from one shape to another in every moment. As he changed, his colour changed also. He seemed as one moving in a flash and yet immobile like a moving series of pictures and yet each picture is fixed in its place. Behind the angel Muhammad (pbuh) saw seven hundred thousand angels, all of them moving like the first angel, from one colourful image into another, like countless kaleidoscopes. Their feet reached the seven earths. Their musical praise was: Subhan al Hayy ul Qayyum al lazi la yamut: "Glory to the Living One, the Self-Subsistent who never dies!" The melody of their praise moved the entire heavens to unutterable joy which showered mercy on the earth and its inhabitants. Muhammad (pbuh) asked Jibraeel to ask the angel whether human beings could hear that music and if it were possible for them. The angel said: "Anyone who opens his angelic power and connects himself to us will hear that melody and he will receive the reward that we receive for uttering this praise." Then the angel recited: Secret Reality! Angelic heart of light,Kingdom of power, shining in steadfast light,Firm in foundation, in beauty all complete,Its essence descended from Adam's heart enthroned,Just as the All Merciful descended on His Throne.Essence of angels' light in Adam manifest,And yoked with it Allahs' trust fulfilled,The grant He made to all mankind.Here appeared knowledge of Allah's lightKnown only to chosen saints who alone can see.Where His knowledge glows imperfection fleesAnd all worldly cares dim and disappear.Here ends and begins the place of drawing nearWhere the pure ones settled, similar to light upon light.
As they moved forward they saw a handsome man before whose beauty everything paled. "This is Yusuf (Joseph), the Prophet," said Jibraeel. Muhammad (pbuh) approached him and greeted him, and Yusuf (Joseph) greeted him back with the best greeting of heaven. Jibraeel said: "Out of the beauty of Yusuf (Joseph) came the beauty of all human beings. His is the beauty of the full moon, the sun and the stars." Yearning for angelic beauty will melt the hearts of the stone hearted. The faint hearted cannot hope to approach its secret, for they will immediately fall under its power and extinguish themselves in it. That is the meaning of the sweetness of painful yearning in love: the approach of beauty in its absence is sweeter still than its embrace and possession. For possession of the beloved entails the satisfaction of the lower self, while to remain in pain because of the beloved is better than comfort and contentment.
Behind Yusuf, Muhammad (pbuh) saw a great human crowd, all of them wearing radiant angelic dresses. Muhammad (pbuh) asked, "Who are these people, Jibraeel?" He answered: "Behind Yusuf (Joseph), Allah created seven hundred thousand posts in paradise; on each post there are seven hundred thousand red jewels; each jewel contains seven hundred thousand palaces; in every palace there are seven hundred thousand rooms, and in every room there are seven hundred thousand windows. These rooms are inhabited by human beings who carry angelic powers and spend their lives in love of each other and nature. Their hearts are filled with love of Me and devoid of low desires. They pine for Me and I pine for them. Every day these human beings appear at their windows and look at the people of paradise. From their beauty a great light shines forth, in the same way that the sun appears in the windows of the sky and sheds its light over the people on earth. Then the people of paradise say: 'Let us run towards the Lovers of Allah.' As soon as they reach them these Lovers adorn them with all kinds of rainbows and showers of light. They give them a dress made of green silk which symbolizes the qualities of those made perfect and agreeable to Allah.

THE FOURTH PARADISE: THE SHELTERING GARDEN

Then Jibraeel called for prayer and Muhammad (pbuh) led the prayer among all the inhabitants of paradise. Then the buraq moved for another five hundred thousand light-years during which they travelled towards the fourth heaven which is called Jannat al-Maawa: the Sheltering Garden. There they heard a voice mixing angels and spirits. The door was made of silver upon a floor of gold. Again, the voice behind the door asked: "Who is there?" and Jibraeel answered, "Muhammad." "Has he been sent for?" "Yes." And the door opened.
Muhammad (pbuh) saw angels standing and sitting, lying and bowing, praising and saying: "Subhan al Malik al Quddus Rabb al Malaaikati war Ruh," : "Glory to the holiest King, Rabb (Lord) of the angels and the Spirit!" Muhammad (pbuh) asked Jibraeel, "Jibraeel, is that not the prayer of my grandfather Abraham?" and Jibraeel said, "Yes, this is how your grandfather Abraham used to pray, and Allah was so happy with that prayer that he created an entire host of angels and filled the fourth heaven with them. He ordered them to repeat the same prayer. If anyone recites that praising among human beings, Allah will give them rewards according to the number of these angels."
Then Muhammad (pbuh) saw two angels, one of transparent crystal like spring water, and one denser like salt water. Jibraeel said: "One is the angel of sweet waters. He carries all the oceans of this universe with his right thumb. The other is the angel of salty waters. He carries all the oceans of this universe in his left thumb. These are the angels responsible for supporting every creature in creation through water, sweet or salty. They meet without mixing, as Allah has said: "He has loosened the two seas. They meet. There is a barrier between them. They encroach not one upon the other." (40:19-20)
Behind them Muhammad (pbuh) saw angels shaped like birds, standing on the bank of a great river of paradise. When a human being on earth says: "There is no god only Allah," one of these angel-birds opens his wings. If the person says: "Glory to Allah," the angel-bird enters the river to swim in it. When the person says: "Praise be to Allah," the angel-bird dives into the water. When the person says: "Allah is greatest," the angel-bird comes out of the river. When the person says: "There is no power nor might except in Allah," the angel-bird will shake off the water from him, and seventy thousand drops of water will come from him, out of each of which Allah creates an angel that asks forgiveness for that person until Judgment Day. In addition to this, Allah orders forty thousand rewards written in the book of that one and keeps them for him until his resurrection.
Then Muhammad (pbuh) saw a man who leaned against the books of human beings, in which were inscribed all their deeds. Muhammad (pbuh) asked: "Who is this?" Jibraeel said: "This is the Prophet Idris, peace be upon him." Muhammad (pbuh) approached Idris and greeted him. Idris greeted him back and said: "Welcome to the pious brother and perfect prophet." Above him Muhammad (pbuh) saw a dome of light on which was written: "There is no god only Allah, Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah." Muhammad (pbuh) looked inside it and saw a venerable old man with a white beard filled with light and crowned with a white turban. He asked: "Who is that, Jibraeel?" He answered: "That is an angel representing the Prophet Idris." Muhammad (pbuh) greeted him and said: "My brother! Allah has elevated you and honoured you, and you have entered paradise before me and saw its pleasures." Idris said: "Beloved one! At first I did not enter paradise nor see its pleasure. But when I left this world I entered a garden with a door on which I saw: 'Beyond this door none may enter before Muhammad (pbuh) and his nation.' And I asked Allah, 'For the sake of my grandson Muhammad (pbuh), let me in.' Allah let me in, so now because of you I am in this place."
Then Idris recited:"This Station sought by all for shelter,This lofty place where all people bow subduedAnd stands the noble MessengerWith wisdom and might endued,Station of guidance and angelic lightWhere gloom of night and orphans' sadnessAt once are effaced,This is the Station of direct communicationAnd the firm foothold for those determined to reach.The All-Merciful called him His beloved oneAnd he is the beloved one of the universeAnd from his light came the light of all life."

THE FIFTH PARADISE: THE GARDEN OF BEAUTY AND FELICITY

Muhammad (pbuh) travelled for five hundred thousand light-years, after which he arrived at the fifth paradise which is called Jannat al Naeem: "the Garden of Beauty and Felicity." Its door is made of mixed gold and silver from heaven. Jibraeel knocked at the door and a voice said: "Who is it?" "Jibraeel, bringing Muhammad (pbuh)." "Has he been sent for?" "Yes." "Welcome, Beloved one, to the fifth paradise!" The door opened and Muhammad (pbuh) saw five beautiful ladies whose radiant light among their servants made them appear like diamonds surrounded by pearls. His heart was moved towards them. He asked Jibraeel: "Who are these ladies?" He answered: "This is Hawwa (Eve), the mother of human beings, this is the Virgin Maryam (Mary), the mother of Isa (Jesus), this is Musa's (Moses') mother Yukabid, and this is Assia, the wife of Pharaoh." The fifth lady looked like a sun among stars. Her light shone over the rest of the inhabitants of that paradise like a gentle breeze passing through the tree-leaves. Jibraeel said: "This is an angel representing your daughter Fatima"
Muhammad (pbuh) asked: "Jibraeel, what is the secret of this paradise?" Jibraeel said: "Allah created this paradise to reflect the beauty and perfection of women. The light of this paradise is the source of the angelic lights of all women on earth. Women have been created to carry the secret of creation in themselves. Allah has honoured them greatly by making their wombs the repository of His word which represents the Spirit. He looks at the most sacred place and there descends His mercy and blessings. He perfected that place and covered it with three protective layers to shelter it from any damage. The first is a layer of light, the second a layer of love, and the third a layer of beauty. There he fashions and creates human beings after His likeness, as Muhammad (pbuh) said: 'Allah created Adam after His likeness.' He orders the angels of the womb to perfect His creation by giving the baby life, beauty, health, intelligence, and all kinds of perfect attributes that will make each one distinguished among human beings."
"Women are not created weaker but more generous than men. They are created more beautiful and less fierce, as beauty hates to hurt and harm others. That is why they seem weak to people, but in reality they are not. Angels are the strongest of created beings, and women are closer to the angelic nature than men, as they are readier than men to carry angelic light. It is the good manners and ethics of spirituality which they carry which makes them less forceful than men. Even physically, however, they are extremely strong. They undergo great upheavals in their body without flinching for the sake of childbirth, and face the direst physical conditions more successfully than men because Allah has enabled them to insure the survival of generations."
"Allah gave women five angelic qualities which men rarely have. They are the source of peace, as Allah said that He created them "so that you might find rest in them" (30:21). This is the attribute of the first paradise which is named "the Abode of Peace." They are oasis of constancy in the midst of chaos and change. That is why they give birth as the mother nurtures and shelters the baby more reliably than the father. This is the attribute of the second paradise, which is named 'the Abode of Constancy.' They perpetuate generations. Through their offspring Allah creates angelic prophets and saints who establish His perpetual remembrance on earth as the angels establish it in heaven. This is the attribute of the third paradise which is named 'the Abode of Eternity.' They are generous and bountiful. They are described as 'a fertile land' in all Scriptures because they give without counting, including life. They sacrifice themselves for the sake of another creation, and this is the attribute of the fourth paradise which is named 'the Sheltering Garden.' Finally, they are the source of Beauty. Through their softness and subtlety, Allah has crowned the earth with the diadem of angelic grace. This is the attribute of the fifth paradise which is named "the Garden of Beauty."

THE SIXTH PARADISE: THE GARDEN OF EDEN

Muhammad (pbuh) travelled again on the buraq for five hundred thousand years. On his way to the sixth paradise which is called Jannat al Aden: "the Garden of Eden," he saw nations and nations of saffron-coloured angels standing on pedestals of pink marble. They had one thousand wings and on each wing there were one thousand faces. Each face had one thousand mouths saying: "Praise be to the Rabb (Lord) of Majesty and Splendour!" Jibraeel knocked at the door of the sixth paradise which was made of aquamarine and gold. As usual, a voice asked from behind the door who was there and the answer was given: "Jibraeel, bringing Muhammad (pbuh)." "Has he been sent for?" said the voice. "Yes," replied Jibraeel. The door was opened. Muhammad (pbuh) entered and what he saw passed all imagination and all recorded books, all fabled accounts, all legends, all histories.
Silent gold sat on stars of pearl. Under every pearl fifty thousand angels whirled in a lake of galaxies producing a heavenly sound like a million birds humming on top of the buzzing of a million bees. Everything is moving at the speed of light but at the same time everything is silent and still. Each angel spoke words of greetings to Muhammad (pbuh) at the same time in a different language but distinctly and without any clash one with the other. Their words were phrased in diadems and garlands of light which he wore one after the other on his head and around his neck. A huge angel named Semlaeel appeared at the head of ten thousand processions of similar angels wearing a crown of multi-coloured garnets and reciting praise of Allah in an angelic language which made each angel swoon and rise up in turn. These were the karubiyyun: 'Those brought near.' No one on earth can see them and live because of the intensity of their light which they borrow from the One they behold.
Muhammad (pbuh) asked: "Jibraeel! What is this untarnished heavenly sound?" "Rasool Allah!" Jibraeel answered, "This is the music of the angelic souls in the presence of their Rabb (Lord) trembling like a leaf, not daring to move or speak, awed and annihilated by perfection, yet vivified and moved by divine Light, rushing to the divine meeting and announcing your coming."
Muhammad (pbuh) saw a honey-coloured angel of astounding beauty and of yet even greater majesty so that his majesty overpowered his beauty. He had a long mane of hair and a long beard out of which light flashed like thunderbolts. He had a stern face and yet a child's eyes. His enormous chest seemed to heave like a dormant volcano under his shirt of heavenly brocade. When Muhammad (pbuh) enquired about him, Jibraeel said: "This is your brother Musa (Moses). He is the one who prayed six times on the Mount of Sinai in order to be a simple servant in your Nation. He is the vanquisher of tyrants and the secret of his father Yaqoob (Jacob). Allah wrote for him the character of a fiery servant. That is why he approached the burning bush and was not afraid when His Rabb (Lord) wanted to speak to him."
Musa (Moses) was crying and he said to Muhammad (pbuh): "Prophet of the Last Nation! Intercede for me and my people." Muhammad (pbuh) said: "Why are you crying, my brother Musa (Moses)?" He replied: "I cry for love of you and for the great honour where Allah has raised you and made your nation countless people and other nations very few, even mine. Muhammad! you are the seal of prophets and the light of creation. Allah is raising you today to His presence, to a station where no-one can reach. Remember me there as Allah made you the intercessor for all human beings including prophets, from Adam to Isa (Jesus). Then he recited:
"Prophet sprung from Hashim's line,Lover of Him Who is lauded above,Sealer of every book revealed to mankind.Opener of treasured knowledge sublimeWho mounted the buraq to ascend to his Rabb (Lord),Allah in Whose presence none before had remained,Approach that place where only angels draw nearMessenger of Allah before whom winds and clouds moveAnd lay open clear myriad paths to celestial light.For your intercession human souls plead and yearn,Prophet at whose sight angels delight!It is you for whom paradise was made and adorned,For you the furthest-tree of farthest limit is made to standAnd bear the fruit of compassion in every land.Beloved Muhammad, may Allah grant us to beAlways numbered in your noble band."

THE SEVENTH PARADISE: JANNAT AL FIRDAWS

Muhammad (pbuh) arrived at the seventh paradise whose roof touches the Heavenly Throne and whose name is Jannat al Firdaws, after a travel of five hundred thousand light-years. He knocked at the door which was made of pure emerald, topaz, beryl, and gold. After he entered he saw another gate of light. From it came the praise of nations of hidden angels at whose sight one would die of awe because of their intense beauty. Their laud was simply: "Praise be to the Creator of Light!" Beyond this it is not permitted to speak about them. Muhammad (pbuh) greeted them with the greeting of peace and proceeded past the gate of gold to a dome of light which encompassed all the previous heavens, although the distance he had travelled between the sixth and the seventh heaven was the same as that between each two of the other layers of paradise.
Inside the dome Muhammad (pbuh) saw an angelic being which resembled him in every fashion and who was leaning against a wall of white silk which seemed to move like a waterfall and yet stand firm. Muhammad (pbuh) asked who that was and Jibraeel said: "This is your grandfather Ibraheem (Abraham), the leader of the pure of heart and a great one among prophets." Ibraheem (Abraham) said: "Welcome to the pious son and the perfected Prophet!" Around Ibraheem (Abraham) stood crowned angels. Each of their crowns contained four hundred diamonds, each worth more than what the entire earth contains. At their service stood throngs of angels crowned with the light of the previous angels and all were reading the Ayat ul Kursi. Jibraeel said: "This is the verse that keeps the universe firm in the balance. This is the secret of the order of Creation." And the angels recited:
Allah! There is no god save Him, the Living, the Eternal, Neither slumber nor sleep overtakes him. Unto him belongs whatsoever is in the heavens and whatsoever is in earth. Who is he that intercedes with him save by His leave? He knows that which is in front of them and that which is behind them, While they encompass nothing of His knowledge except what He will. His Kursi includes the heavens and the earth, And He is never weary of preserving them. He is the Sublime, the Tremendous. (2:255)
Circumambulating the building against which Ibraheem (Abraham) leaned, the entire universes, the throngs of angels of the seven heavens, the angels of mercy and the angels of wrath, the angels of beauty, the angels brought near, the great and the small angels, the visible and the invisible angels, and all the human beings whose angelic souls had been purified and elevated to the divine presence, the prophets, the truthful saints, the martyrs, the righteous, all of creation whirled and turned in the same direction as every heavenly body, counterclockwise, around the Kaaba of the heavens. Muhammad (pbuh) said: "Jibraeel, How wondrous are the incredible marvels of my Rabb (Lord)!" And Jibraeel replied: "Muhammad! You have seen only a glimpse of the wonders of Allah."

(Sources: WAQF IKHLAS
Publisher' Note:Permission to reprint and distribute is granted only if this heading is included, and the text is not modified in any way, shape or form to alter the intended meaning. Ihlas Holding A. S. Cagaloglu-ISTANBUL )

Adam's Liberation

2006-04-16T21:12:00.000-05:00

Christ is Risen! He is Risen Indeed!

The Paschal Sermon of St. John Chrysostom
"The Golden Tongued" (d.407)

If any man is a devout lover of God, let him enjoy this fair and radiant triumphal feast. If any man is a wise servant, let him rejoicing enter into the joy of the Lord. If any has labored long in fasting, let him now receive his recompense. If any has wrought from the first hour, let him today receive his just reward. If any has come at the third hour, let him have no misgivings; because he will in no wise be deprived thereof. If any has delayed until the ninth hour, let him draw near, fearing nothing. If any has tarried even until the eleventh hour let him, also, be not alarmed at his tardiness; for the Lord, who is jealous of his honor, will accept the last even as the first; He gives rest to him who comes at the eleventh hour, even as to him who has wrought from the first hour. And he shows mercy on the last, and cares for the first; and to the one he giveth, and upon the other he bestoweth gifts. And he accepts the deeds, and welcomes the intention, and honors the acts and praises the offering.

Wherefore, enter you all into the joy of your Lord; and receive your reward, both the first, and likewise the second. You rich and poor together, hold high festival. You sober and you heedless, honor the day. Rejoice today, both you who have fasted and you who have disregarded the fast. The table is full-laden; feast you all sumptuously. The calf is fatted; let no one go away hungry. All of you, enjoy the feast of faith: receive all the riches of loving-kindness. Let no one bewail his poverty, for the universal kingdom has been revealed. Let no one weep for his iniquities, for pardon has shone forth from the grave. Let no one fear death, for the Savior's death has set us free. He who was held prisoner of it, has annihilated it. By descending into Hell, he has made Hell captive. He angered it when it tasted of his flesh. And Isaiah, foretelling this, did cry: Hell, said he, was angered, when it encountered You in the lower regions. It was angered for it was abolished. It was angered, for it was mocked. It was angered, for it was slain. It was angered for it was overthrown. It was angered, for it was fettered in chains. It took a body, and met God face to face. It took earth, and encountered Heaven. It took that which was seen, and fell upon the unseen. O Death, where is your sting? O Hell, where is your victory?

Christ is risen, and you are overthrown. Christ is risen, and the demons are fallen. Christ is risen, and the Angels rejoice. Christ is risen, and life reigns. Christ is risen, and not one dead remains in the grave. For Christ, being risen from the dead, has become the first-fruits of those who have fallen asleep. To Him be glory and dominion unto ages of ages. Amen.

Trans. by Isabel F. Hapgood, from "The Bible and the Holy Fathers for Orthodox," ed. By Johanna Manly,
(Menlo Park, California: Monastery Books, 1990), p. 11

London

2006-04-09T21:22:00.000-05:00

London - William Blake

I wandered through each chartered street,
Near where the chartered Thames does flow,
And mark in every face I meet,
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every man,
In every infant's cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forged manacles I hear:

How the chimney-sweeper's cry
Every blackening church appals,
And the hapless soldier's sigh
Runs in blood down palace-walls.

But most, through midnight streets I hear
How the youthful harlot's curse
Blasts the new-born infant's tear,
And blights with plagues the marriage-hearse.

St. Patrick

2006-03-16T11:51:00.000-06:00

St. Patrick :
Profile
Born at Kilpatrick, near Dumbarton, in Scotland, in the year 387; died at Saul, Downpatrick, Ireland, March 17, 493. His parents were Calphurnius and Conchessa. The former belonged to a Roman family of high rank and held the office of decurio in Gaul or Britain. Conchessa was a relative of the great patron of Gaul, St. Martin of Tours. Kilpatrick still has many memorials of Saint Patrick, and frequent pilgrimages continued far into the Middle Ages to perpetuate there the fame of his sanctity and miracles. Kidnapped from the Scottish mainland around the age of 16, and shipped to Ireland as a slave. He was sent to the mountains as a shepherd, where he spent his time in prayer. After six years of this life, he received a dream in which he was commanded to return to Britain; seeing it as a sign, he escaped. Studied in continental monasteries. Priest. Bishop. Sent by Pope Saint Celestine to evangelize England, then Ireland. In 33 years, he effectively converted the whole of Ireland. In the Middle Ages Ireland became known as the Land of Saints, and during the Dark Ages its monasteries were the great repositories of learning in Europe - all consequences of St. Patrick's ministry.

The prayer, popularly known as "St. Patrick's Breast-Plate," is supposed to have been composed by him in preparation for this victory over Paganism. The following is a literal translation from the old Irish text:

I bind to myself today
The strong virtue of the Invocation of the Trinity:
I believe the Trinity in the Unity-The Creator of the Universe.
I bind to myself today
The virtue of the Incarnation of Christ with His Baptism,
The virtue of His crucifixion with His burial,
The virtue of His Resurrection with His Ascension,
The virtue of His coming on the Judgement Day.
I bind to myself today
The virtue of the love of seraphim,
In the obedience of angels,
In the hope of resurrection unto reward,
In prayers of Patriarchs,
In predictions of Prophets,
In preaching of Apostles,
In faith of Confessors,
In purity of holy Virgins,
In deeds of righteous men.
I bind to myself today
The power of Heaven,
The light of the sun,
The brightness of the moon,
The splendour of fire,
The flashing of lightning,
The swiftness of wind,
The depth of sea,
The stability of earth,
The compactness of rocks.
I bind to myself today
God's Power to guide me,
God's Might to uphold me,
God's Wisdom to teach me,
God's Eye to watch over me,
God's Ear to hear me,
God's Word to give me speech,
God's Hand to guide me,
God's Way to lie before me,
God's Shield to shelter me,
God's Host to secure me,
Against the snares of demons,
Against the seductions of vices,
Against the lusts of nature,
Against everyone who meditates injury to me,
Whether far or near,
Whether few or with many.
I invoke today all these virtues
Against every hostile merciless power
Which may assail my body and my soul,
Against the incantations of false prophets,
Against the black laws of heathenism,
Against the false laws of heresy,
Against the deceits of idolatry,
Against the spells of women, and smiths, and druids,
Against every knowledge that binds the soul of man.
Christ, protect me today
Against every poison, against burning,
Against drowning, against death-wound,
That I may receive abundant reward.
Christ with me, Christ before me,
Christ behind me, Christ within me,
Christ beneath me, Christ above me,
Christ at my right, Christ at my left,
Christ in the fort,Christ in the chariot seat,Christ in the poop [deck],
Christ in the heart of everyone who thinks of me,
Christ in the mouth of everyone who speaks to me,
Christ in every eye that sees me,
Christ in every ear that hears me.
I bind to myself today
The strong virtue of an invocation of the Trinity,
I believe the Trinity in the Unity - The Creator of the Universe.

Happy St. Patrick's Day !!!

(and happy one-year, web-log anniversary to my Grenadan friend! )
(http://planetgrenada.blogspot.com/)
"This is the first post for Planet Grenada and my first attempt at 'blogging.' To be honest, I didn't spend a long time trying to find 'just' the right name for this blog but I think this will do nicely. Grenada was last stronghold of the Muslims in Spain when the Christians took back the country in the Reconquista. Grenada is also the name of the Caribbean country whose temporary Marxist regime was toppled by the Reagan Administration in the 1980's. (I can identify with both uses in interesting ways) Calling it *Planet* Grenada seems fitting to me since I've been thinking about and intrigued by the Afro-futurism movement recently and its ideas seem to resonate with some of my recent thoughts and activities. So for the moment, the name seems to evoke all the right things. It also seems a bit fitting to get this thing going in the early hours of St. Patrick's Day. At least, according to one version of the St. Patrick's day legend, the usual story of St. Patrick driving the snakes out of Ireland was actually a kind of bait-and-switch and the snakes are in reality a stand in for the Moors. Anyway, this is enough introduction for now. More to come later.... "

((Many more postings have followed in the first year of this creative web-log, which was one of the first sites to inspire me to create the Rasa'il Khalil al-Wafa'. Thanks Abdul-Halim! Keep on blogging in the free-world! ))

"I am the handmaiden of the Lord..."

2006-03-15T22:30:00.000-06:00

In memoriam: Rachel Corrie
(April 10, 1979 - March 16, 2003)

"My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord, my spirit rejoices in God my savior; he has looked with favor upon his lowly servant. From this day, all generations will call me blessed, the Almighty has done great things for me and Holy is his name. He has mercy on those who fear him in every generation. He has shown the strength of his arm, he has scattered the proud in their conceit. He has cast down the mighty from their thrones and has lifted up the lowly." (Luke 1:46-53, the "Magnificat")

February 27 2003
(To her mother)

Love you. Really miss you. I have bad nightmares about tanks and bulldozers outside our house and you and me inside. Sometimes the adrenaline acts as an anesthetic for weeks and then in the evening or at night it just hits me again - a little bit of the reality of the situation. I am really scared for the people here. Yesterday, I watched a father lead his two tiny children, holding his hands, out into the sight of tanks and a sniper tower and bulldozers and Jeeps because he thought his house was going to be exploded. Jenny and I stayed in the house with several women and two small babies. It was our mistake in translation that caused him to think it was his house that was being exploded. In fact, the Israeli army was in the process of detonating an explosive in the ground nearby - one that appears to have been planted by Palestinian resistance. This is in the area where Sunday about 150 men were rounded up and contained outside the settlement with gunfire over their heads and around them, while tanks and bulldozers destroyed 25 greenhouses - the livelihoods for 300 people. The explosive was right in front of the greenhouses - right in the point of entry for tanks that might come back again. I was terrified to think that this man felt it was less of a risk to walk out in view of the tanks with his kids than to stay in his house. I was really scared that they were all going to be shot and I tried to stand between them and the tank. This happens every day, but just this father walking out with his two little kids just looking very sad, just happened to get my attention more at this particular moment, probably because I felt it was our translation problems that made him leave. I thought a lot about what you said on the phone about Palestinian violence not helping the situation. Sixty thousand workers from Rafah worked in Israel two years ago. Now only 600 can go to Israel for jobs. Of these 600, many have moved, because the three checkpoints between here and Ashkelon (the closest city in Israel) make what used to be a 40-minute drive, now a 12-hour or impassible journey. In addition, what Rafah identified in 1999 as sources of economic growth are all completely destroyed - the Gaza international airport (runways demolished, totally closed); the border for trade with Egypt (now with a giant Israeli sniper tower in the middle of the crossing); access to the ocean (completely cut off in the last two years by a checkpoint and the Gush Katif settlement). The count of homes destroyed in Rafah since the beginning of this intifada is up around 600, by and large people with no connection to the resistance but who happen to live along the border. I think it is maybe official now that Rafah is the poorest place in the world. There used to be a middle class here - recently. We also get reports that in the past, Gazan flower shipments to Europe were delayed for two weeks at the Erez crossing for security inspections. You can imagine the value of two-week-old cut flowers in the European market, so that market dried up. And then the bulldozers come and take out people's vegetable farms and gardens. What is left for people? Tell me if you can think of anything. I can't. If any of us had our lives and welfare completely strangled, lived with children in a shrinking place where we knew, because of previous experience, that soldiers and tanks and bulldozers could come for us at any moment and destroy all the greenhouses that we had been cultivating for however long, and did this while some of us were beaten and held captive with 149 other people for several hours - do you think we might try to use somewhat violent means to protect whatever fragments remained? I think about this especially when I see orchards and greenhouses and fruit trees destroyed - just years of care and cultivation. I think about you and how long it takes to make things grow and what a labour of love it is. I really think, in a similar situation, most people would defend themselves as best they could. I think Uncle Craig would. I think probably Grandma would. I think I would. You asked me about non-violent resistance. When that explosive detonated yesterday it broke all the windows in the family's house. I was in the process of being served tea and playing with the two small babies. I'm having a hard time right now. Just feel sick to my stomach a lot from being doted on all the time, very sweetly, by people who are facing doom. I know that from the United States, it all sounds like hyperbole. Honestly, a lot of the time the sheer kindness of the people here, coupled with the overwhelming evidence of the wilful destruction of their lives, makes it seem unreal to me. I really can't believe that something like this can happen in the world without a bigger outcry about it. It really hurts me, again, like it has hurt me in the past, to witness how awful we can allow the world to be. I felt after talking to you that maybe you didn't completely believe me. I think it's actually good if you don't, because I do believe pretty much above all else in the importance of independent critical thinking. And I also realise that with you I'm much less careful than usual about trying to source every assertion that I make. A lot of the reason for that is I know that you actually do go and do your own research. But it makes me worry about the job I'm doing. All of the situation that I tried to enumerate above - and a lot of other things - constitutes a somewhat gradual - often hidden, but nevertheless massive - removal and destruction of the ability of a particular group of people to survive. This is what I am seeing here. The assassinations, rocket attacks and shooting of children are atrocities - but in focusing on them I'm terrified of missing their context. The vast majority of people here - even if they had the economic means to escape, even if they actually wanted to give up resisting on their land and just leave (which appears to be maybe the less nefarious of Sharon's possible goals), can't leave. Because they can't even get into Israel to apply for visas, and because their destination countries won't let them in (both our country and Arab countries). So I think when all means of survival is cut off in a pen (Gaza) which people can't get out of, I think that qualifies as genocide. Even if they could get out, I think it would still qualify as genocide. Maybe you could look up the definition of genocide according to international law. I don't remember it right now. I'm going to get better at illustrating this, hopefully. I don't like to use those charged words. I think you know this about me. I really value words. I really try to illustrate and let people draw their own conclusions. Anyway, I'm rambling. Just want to write to my Mom and tell her that I'm witnessing this chronic, insidious genocide and I'm really scared, and questioning my fundamental belief in the goodness of human nature. This has to stop. I think it is a good idea for us all to drop everything and devote our lives to making this stop. I don't think it's an extremist thing to do anymore. I still really want to dance around to Pat Benatar and have boyfriends and make comics for my coworkers. But I also want this to stop. Disbelief and horror is what I feel. Disappointment. I am disappointed that this is the base reality of our world and that we, in fact, participate in it. This is not at all what I asked for when I came into this world. This is not at all what the people here asked for when they came into this world. This is not the world you and Dad wanted me to come into when you decided to have me. This is not what I meant when I looked at Capital Lake and said: "This is the wide world and I'm coming to it." I did not mean that I was coming into a world where I could live a comfortable life and possibly, with no effort at all, exist in complete unawareness of my participation in genocide. More big explosions somewhere in the distance outside. When I come back from Palestine, I probably will have nightmares and constantly feel guilty for not being here, but I can channel that into more work. Coming here is one of the better things I've ever done. So when I sound crazy, or if the Israeli military should break with their racist tendency not to injure white people, please pin the reason squarely on the fact that I am in the midst of a genocide which I am also indirectly supporting, and for which my government is largely responsible. I love you and Dad. Sorry for the diatribe. OK, some strange men next to me just gave me some peas, so I need to eat and thank them. Rachel

Making Room...

2006-03-14T14:16:00.000-06:00

"MAKING ROOM..." - A Lenten Message :
(2006) Cardinal Roger Mahony, Archbishop of Los Angeles

The Gospel proclamation for the First Sunday of Lent (Mark 1: 12-15) tells of the 40 days Jesus spent in the wilderness preparing for his ministry of announcing the good news of the Reign of God. As we begin our Lenten observance this year, we would do well to fix our eyes on Jesus, to enter with him into the spirit of those 40 days in preparation for the celebration of the Easter mysteries.At the close of the 40 days, Jesus moves from the wilderness to Galilee. From that point forward, it seems that he is nearly always surrounded by people. Crowds gather around him. Whole groups follow him. They press in on him. We might say that people were always “invading his personal space.” We also know from the Gospels that Jesus took time for himself, time away from the throngs, in order to pray. But the Gospels most often portray Jesus together with others.Those 40 days in the wilderness were devoted to praying, fasting, and undergoing the harshest kinds of temptation. But the 40 days can also be understood as a period of intense preparation, a time for Jesus to make room in himself for all those he would meet in the course of his public ministry, for all those who would draw near to him, come to him, plead with him, ask him for mercy and healing and help.

Our Lenten practices, whatever they may be, are much more than pious devotions. Whether our practice takes the form of “giving up” dessert during Lent, redoubling our efforts at prayer, increasing our contribution to help those in need, fasting, or abstaining from meat, they are all to be understood as a Spirit-assisted effort to empty ourselves of all that would stand in the way of being filled to overflowing with the light and life and love of God. Do we really have room enough for God?So many of us live amid so much clutter, so much noise. We travel through life at breakneck speed. Lent is the time to empty ourselves not only of the seemingly never-ending stuff, sound and speed in our lives, but also of our pettiness, our prejudice, our anxiety, our fear. It is an opportunity to make room, not only for God, but for those who come our way. How open is our door to those who come to us? Is there room enough in our hearts and our homes for those in need?

To take up our Lenten practice this year in the Spirit of Jesus Christ, we face a unique challenge in this call to make room for God. In recent months and in different parts of the world, we have seen the escalation of strong sentiments against immigrants. These sentiments appear to be mounting in our own country as well. How might our various Lenten practices such as prayer, fasting, and almsgiving, our effort to empty ourselves so as to make room for God, relate to the complex reality of immigration, especially in the face of increasing hostility toward immigrants?

Pope Benedict XVI’s first Encyclical Letter, Deus Caritas Est (“God is Love”) is helpful to us here. Writing on love as the heart of the Christian faith, our Holy Father says:…if in my life I fail completely to heed others, solely out of a desire to be devout and to perform my “religious duties,” then my relationship with God will also grow arid. It becomes merely “proper” but loveless. Only my readiness to encounter my neighbor and to show him love makes me sensitive to God as well. Only if I serve my neighbor can my eyes be opened to what God does for me and how much he loves me. . . Love of God and love of neighbor are thus inseparable, they form a single commandment. . . No longer is it a question, then, of a “commandment” imposed from without calling for the impossible, but. . . a love which by its very nature must then be shared with others.
(Deus Caritas Est no. 18).

To the question: “Who is my neighbor?” Jesus’ answer is clear. As his disciples, we are called to attend to the last, littlest, lowest and least in society and in the Church. This Lenten season, join me in committing our Lenten practices to making room for the stranger in our midst, praying for the courage and strength to offer our spiritual and pastoral ministry to all who come to us, offering our prayer and support for the ones in our midst who, like Jesus, have no place to rest their heads (Matthew 8:20).

(more... Street Prophets: "The Gospel vs. H.R. 4437" )

"Galileo's Apologies"

2006-03-13T00:14:00.000-06:00

Tsegaye Gabre-Medhin
Poet Laureate:

(August 17, 1936-

February 25, 2006)

"Ethiopia’s premier versatile and prolific man of letters. For half a century now he has been continuously productive as poet, playwright, essayist, social critic, philologist, historiographer, dramatist, synthesist, peace activist, artistic director...on matters national, continental and global. Even if he has yet to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, he has often been more appreciated and duly honored abroad than in his own land. Perhaps this is in keeping with that old Ethiopian saying to the effect that ‘a prophet is often not esteemed in his own country.’ In this day and age, when most of us have been preoccupied and indeed consumed by wars and rumors of wars in Ethiopia-Eritrea and elsewhere in the Horn of Africa, it seems as though there is nothing else of positive value or of grave concern that deserves or commands the attention of Ethiopians. Today we shall take time out from violence and war and reflect on the life and works of Poet Laureate Tsegaye Gabre-Medhin who is a living legend, a literary hero, and as one observer described him recently, Ethiopia’s 'biblical sage'."

(more... http://www.ethiopians.com/tsegaye/ )

Selected Poems:

Dreamer

A lover love rejected
With a spirit dejected,
A monk God-forsaken

Whose total Faith is shaken,
Are less lost than dreamer

Into whose peace a " question "
Plunged like a knife
And woke him to life,
To search, to find his way
To dodge, to fight his way
NOT dream it away !

Guilty?
On the grave of my friend, I stood.
For blood and flesh, I stayed . . .
And with faith I prayed, and prayed;
For blood and flesh, he was robbed . . .
And with doubt, I hoped, and I hoped.
On the grave of my friend, as I stayed...
On my future, I brood.
I stood on the grave of a man.
A tomb-stone of a man, I burdened.
The grave of a man, I murdered:
And with hope, my future, I sketched,
When with prayer, my killer hand, I stretched.
On the tomb-stone, of the man, I murdered: . . . Urrahh!!! I won!
On my victim's carcass, I climb. While on his tomb, I tread ...
My bloody fingers, I spread: Thus to repent, to justify, I have tried ...
While I hoped, and prayed, I have cried.
And I won, my daily wine, and bread! ... Is it a crime?

Galileo's Apologies
Give me not your cold shoulders,
Life is but useless if too cool;
Hate me not dear friends,
For I am but an ambitious fool
Whose dream goaded by fate.
His time-record in destiny's file.
Till eternity inserted: and yet,
Has proved but an imbecile.
Judge me not dear children.
For my cause is but the better
Of your own end and of our Earth,
Yet made me but, fortune teller.
Thus beware to read, honourable babes,
While keeping me in your hatred cage
In the Book of Time, in To-morrow Tell,
My apologies on the last page.

I Remember
When, " God! ", I said," why don't You let me choose?"
"More castles high and wide, with gardens full of charm,
Fountains here and there, more acres of good farm,
More golden rings to wear, spectacles and shoes,
All these you can; yet have nothing to lose.
Because I know, by one push of Your arm,
To give, and cause all people to alarm;
As life is short I should always amuse!"
Then walking out for air I met a child.
Who lying by the road in ragged dress,
With voice so dead and words he cannot press,
To passers-by who looked at him as wild,
Stated thus, " I am very soon to die," I have no home, no food, no foot, no eye! "

For more biographical information and further links to Tsegaye's work, See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsegaye_Gabre-Medhin

Before & After....What next?

2006-03-05T18:53:00.000-06:00

"The Shrine Crisis -
Words that need to be said"
By Muhammad @
http://iraqthemodel.blogspot.com

Life is coming back to normal in Baghdad and marketplaces and offices are open again after being shut for 4 days. Although there were a few security incidents today people are mostly looking at these as part of the usual daily situation and not related to the latest shrine crisis.But, what can we learn from this lesson and how can we make benefit from it in avoiding similar problems in the future.

It's not a secret who was behind the attack on the shrine and I am sure that who did it were the Salafi/Wahabis whether Iraqi or foreigners and with external support from parties planning to disrupt the political process in Iraq.The reason I believe it's the Salafis who did it comes from their own ideology which considers all mosques built upon tombs as places of polytheism and infidelity and thus must be destroyed. This also applies to Sunni shrines like Abu Haneefa and al-Gailani; Salafis consider the Shia and the Sufis their worst enemies and they commonly refer to them in their speech with the term "tomb worshippers" or Mushrikoon Quborioon in Arabic.It's worth reminding that this is not the first time Salafis try to destroy the shrines in Iraq; their armies invaded Iraq back in the 19th century and burned the shrines in Kerbala and Najaf before the Ottoman empire repelled them and stopped them from reaching Baghdad where they were planning to destroy the shrines of al-Kazum, Abu Haneefa and al-Gailani (Shia, Sunni and Sufi respectively).Followers of other sects would not dare do something like this because they fear the wrath of the imams; our culture has many stories about the supernatural powers possessed by the deceased imams. These stories planted fear in our hearts from even talking badly about them, let alone blowing up their tombs!This leaves only one faction that justifies and pushes for destroying these tombs and this is the Salafi ideology.Of course there are some who invest this ideology for political causes and here we come to the second beneficiary who stands behind the first beneficiary who carried out the attack for ideological reasons.

This second beneficiary is the parties who would like to see the new Iraqi state fall apart and who are scared of the idea of a democratic, stable Iraq next door as such a neighbor would transmit the democratic infection to their peoples. This includes more than one neighboring country; one provides logistics and training, the other provides media support while another one endorses the remnants of the Ba'ath regime who lost a lot of their privileges when Saddam was toppled.

Now that we have outlined the identity of the perpetrators depending on motives, interests and ideology we can move on to talk a little about the reactions to the atrocity which has a lot in common with the reactions to the Danish cartoons (I'm comparing the reactions here, not the actions that triggered them). The two reactions are similar in two aspects a) Overreaction and b) Exploiting the atrocity to serve political causes.As a person who lives in Baghdad I've been following the situation from the early hours after the attack; on Wednesday morning I was on my way to work when I heard the news on the radio and I began watching closely to probe the feelings of the common people. People were at work as they always are, clerks behind their desks, grocers looking after their goods and municipal workers picking trash from the streets and I haven't noticed any unusual feelings among the people I came in contact with. In general life was normal until noon in the Shia majority district of Baghdad and there were absolutely no signs of a crisis of any sort. But on my way home I saw the men in black take to the streets after Ayatollah Sistani issued his fatwa (I wish my Shia brothers bear with me and read to the end).

Ayatollah Sistani issued a fatwa on Wednesday that sounded peaceful and normal from the first look but if you look closer at each word you will find that the "safety valve" became the igniter this time.Two years ago the shrine of Imam Ali in Najaf was attacked and although this is the holiest shrine for Shia Muslims the incident wasn't met with that much angry reactions instead we heard soothing statements like "these are mere stones and we can rebuild them and make them even better than before".This time things were different because the political situation is different; the Ayatollah called for nationwide protests (and not to attack Sunni mosques) and a week of mourning.

Now let's examine the part that said "do not attack Sunni mosques"…the sentence openly accuses the Sunni of being behind the attack or why would their mosques be mentioned in the first place?In the government statements the term "Takfiri terrorists/Saddami Ba'athists" is the one commonly used but in the Ayatollah's fatwa this was replaced by "Sunni".This fatwa which is sugar-coated with tolerance and restraint is actually pointing at the perpetrator that we-should-not-punish-because-we-are-merciful.So…the protests were not spontaneous like clerics want us to think; in fact the only spontaneous protest was the one in Samarra itself!I live here and I've seen the whole thing. The demonstrations in Baghdad began after the fatwa and I saw how shop keepers unwillingly closed their shops when the men in black with their arms and loudspeakers ordered them to do so "in the name of the Hawza" and I saw the sad look on the faces of people abandoning their only source of income for a time that could go indefinitely.One might ask why would Iraqis obey such orders?I say, Imagine yourself standing in front of your shop watching the police retreat from the street while angry men with arms come and order you to leave your shop and join the "spontaneous protests"!Believe me you will find no other choice but to join the mob or face the risk of being considered an infidel traitor.I'd also like to point out the provoking language that was used in the calls for many protests. In one example I heard in person, the guy holding the mic said "today they attacked your Imam's shrine and tomorrow they will take your women, so rise up".

The reactions and protests were far from spontaneous like clerics claim they were. The protests were organized and under supervision of commanders who have clear goals and those commanders were intent on provoking a reaction that carries clear signs to the Sunni, secular and moderate parties that succeeded in applying substantial pressure on the UIA and won the US on their side.So those radical parties were looking for a justification for a planned crisis to bring back to attention the centuries-long suffering of the Shia and they wanted to gain more support for what they consider legitimate political demands from giving the impression that they are the only targets for terrorism.So, this was planned to prepare the atmosphere for putting the blame on others and sending a message to the other parties that "we cannot contain the anger of the street forever and you have to listen to us and answer our demands if you want us to prevent a catastrophe."

However, it seems there are also some positive outcomes from this incident and its aftermath; the first one in my opinion was the performance of the Iraqi army which had a good role in restoring order in many places. Actually the past few days showed that our new army is more competent than we were thinking.But the latest events have also showed the brittle structure of the interior ministry and its forces that retreated before the march of the angry mobs (if not joined them in some cases) and I think the statements that came from the meetings of our politicians pointed this out so clearly when Sunni politicians said they wanted the army to replace the police and police commandos in their regions and this indicates growing trust between the people and the army.

The other positive side is represented by the line we've seen drawn between clerics and politicians.In spite of the attempts of clerics to look like as if they were the defenders of national unity with all their meetings, joint prayers and hugs, the political leaderships got a sense of their growing danger and the meeting at Jafari's home (which al-Hakeem didn't attend) showed that the government is keen to keep the country intact and the government systems as functional as possible to contain the crisis. This meeting indicates that politicians have realized that those clerics whether Sunni or Shia are the origin of the problem and are ready to coup on even their political allies which made the politicians more aware of the danger imposed by clerics on the project of building a state ruled by the law.Clerics will not stop and they will carry on with their plans and I suspect they will launch the next phase of their plan soon after they received instructions from Syria (the Muslim scholars) and from Iran (the Sadrists).The objective of the second phase will to move the conflict from one on the streets to a conflict with America. That’s not my personal opinion, but it's what clerics themselves are saying including Muqtada who returned from Qum in Iran to organize a joint Sunni-Shia demonstration against the occupation!!Now the government has rise to the level of the challenge and proceed to take the most important and critical step and disband religious militias of all sorts and limit the influence of clerics-of any sect-in the decision-making process.I think this is the best time for the new government to tackle this issue as the government now has all the factors that make such a move legitimate and necessary.

"Samarra crisis: Tying the strings"
By Salam Adil @
http://asterism.blogspot.com

Reading Iraqi blogs lately has made me realise that I am as well, if not better informed about what is happening in Iraq than any overpaid newspaper commentator. So in the spirit of blogging I think I have even more right to publish my own poorly researched highly subjective articles.

Let me start with two obvious points as described excellently by Mohammed in Iraq The Model. The Sunni fundamentalist Wahabis were behind the bombing of the Samarra mosque. Probably people from Saudi Arabia as this bombing also coincided with an attempted bombing of the largest refinery in Saudi Arabia.The second obvious point is that the violence following the bombing was well-planned and organised. People did not spontaneously decide to put on black clothes and go occupy the nearest mosque.If you are worried about who actually carried out the bombing you are asking the wrong question. Any number of groups in Iraq have the means and the ability to bomb the shrine. the real question is how did they get away with it so easily. If you have read the reports, you will know that setting up the explosives would have involved a lot of heavy drilling and about 12 hours hard work.

The big scandal is that there was no proper security around the shrine and the perpetrators knew it.Security is in the hands of the Iraqi police and internal defense forces and these are in the hands of the Shia militias. This bombing could not have happened without their knowledge. So the next question this raises is why would the Shia militias be so happy to allow one of their shrines to be destroyed like that. The answer to this can be seen in the political process.Things had not been going to well for the political Shia. They made a lot of gains in the past year and stood to lose everything. They had control of the interior ministry a working majority in the interim government and the lions share of the vote in the election. But the negotiations after the election were going pear-shaped. They did not have enough votes or supporters to get the two-thirds majority needed to form a government. The Kurds, encouraged by the Americans were digging in their heels to prevent the Shia getting control of the key defense and interior ministries and the Americans were enticing smaller parties in the UIA to switch sides. This would have made the UIA an actual minority in the parliament and allowed Iyad Allawi to be shoe-horned into the role of Prime Minister. Something extreme needed to be done to break this downward cycle and the Shia parties are nowhere near ready to burn bridges with America.Given this situation a civil war would have been a big advantage. It cements the UIA back together again as the smaller Shia parties would not be able to survive (literally) without the protection of the big Shia militias. It also gives the big Shia parties the justification to override the stalled constitutional process and go ahead with the formation of a break-away Shia state in the south that they had always been planning.

I am also sure that they expected American politicians fearing upcoming elections would be scared to hell of the violence and would make any number of concessions to the Shia.However, I do no think the civil war plan played out the way the Shia militias expected. In one word Sadr happened. Instead of falling into line with SCIRI and Badr, Sadr jumped into an alliance with the Sunnis. If the Shia militias had continued their civil war plan they would have to face splitting the Shia movement down the middle with Sadr's supporters allied with the Sunnis against them. With the positive reaction of the Iraqi people to this unlikely alliance, victory would not have seemed so certain. So after staring into the abyss the Shia politicians and their counterparts in the militias would have been forced to break off the civil war and go down the political route again.Hence Jaafari's little trip to Turkey that incensed the Kurds so much. I would not be surprised if he went there to agree on what happens to the Kurds if the Shia form their own state.So what now?

It is clear now that the Americans are no longer the main problem for the Iraqi people. They have come out of all this as impotent and irrelevant. The only thing the American army was able to do during this civil crisis was disappear in their bases and hope no one knocked on the gates. If America is not willing to contribute another 100,000+ soldiers to Iraq they might as well not bother.Now the main enemy for the Iraq people and the main danger for the region is the current government. It creates the situation for civil war because of the deadlock inherently written into its constitution. Parties in the government are forced into increasingly violent actions to break any deadlocks.It is also encourages civil war because it encourages the parties to form breakaway sectarian states with their own access to oil wealth. Unfortunately the leaders of the parties are to greedy and stupid to realise that such a move will inflame the sectarian divisions across Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf and spark an international war over the oil-producing regions.The best solution is to drop the whole constitutional process. Iraqis must form a national unity committee and start from an entirely Iraq perspective. This is in the interests of the Kurds who will be fed to the turkish dogs otherwise and for the Sunnis who are left sitting in the desert. and the Shia because it will prevent a war that can kill millions.

Ash Wednesday

2006-03-01T14:31:00.000-06:00

"Remember! You are dust, and unto dust you shall return."

A Meditation on Death: “The Imitation of Christ," by Thomas á Kempis (d.1471)

Very soon the end of your life will be at hand: consider, therefore, the state of your soul. Today a man is here; tomorrow he is gone. (I Machabees 2:63) And when he is out of sight, he is soon out of mind. Oh, how dull and hard is the heart of man, which thinks only of the present, and does not provide against the future! You should order your every deed and thought, as though today were the day of your death. Had you a good conscience, death would hold no terrors for you; (Luke 12:37) even so, it were better to avoid sin than to escape death. (Wisdom 4:16) If you are not ready to die today, will tomorrow find you better prepared? (Matthew 24:44) Tomorrow is uncertain; and how can you be sure of tomorrow? Of what use is a long life, if we amend so little? Alas, a long life often adds to our sins rather than to our virtue!

Would to God that we might spend a single day really well! Many recount the years since their conversion, but their lives show little sign of improvement. If it is dreadful to die, it is perhaps more dangerous to live long. Blessed is the man who keeps the hour of his death always in mind, and daily prepares himself to die. If you have ever seen anyone die, remember that you, too, must travel the same road. (Hebrews 9:27)

Each morning remember that you may not live until evening; and in the evening, do not presume to promise yourself another day. Be ready at all times, (Luke 21:36) and so live that death may never find you unprepared. Many die suddenly and unexpectedly; for at an hour that we do not know the Son of Man will come. (Matthew 24:44) When your last hour strikes, you will begin to think very differently of your past life, and grieve deeply that you have been so careless and remiss.

Happy and wise is he who endeavours to be during his life as he wishes to be found at his death. For these things will afford us sure hope of a happy death; perfect contempt of the world; fervent desire to grow in holiness; love of discipline; the practice of penance; ready obedience; self-denial; the bearing of every trial for the love of Christ. While you enjoy health, you can do much good; but when sickness comes, little can be done. Few are made better by sickness, and those who make frequent pilgrimages seldom acquire holiness by so doing.

Do not rely on friends and neighbours, and do not delay the salvation of your soul to some future date, for men will forget you sooner than you think. It is better to make timely provision and to acquire merit in this life, than to depend on the help of others. And if you have no care for your own soul, who will have care for you in time to come? The present time is most precious; now is the accepted time, now is the day of salvation. (2Corinthians 6:2) It is sad that you do not employ your time better, when you may win eternal life hereafter. The time will come when you will long for one day or one hour in which to amend; and who knows whether it will be granted?

Dear soul, from what peril and fear you could free yourself, if you lived in holy fear, mindful of your death. Apply yourself so to live now, that at the hour of death, you may be glad and unafraid. Learn now to die to the world, that you may begin to live with Christ. (Romans 6:8) Learn now to despise ail earthly things, that you may go freely to Christ. Discipline your body now by penance, that you may enjoy a sure hope of salvation.

Foolish man, how can you promise yourself a long life, when you are not certain of a single day? (Luke 12:20) How many have deceived themselves in this way, and been snatched unexpectedly from life! You have often heard how this man was slain by the sword; another drowned; how another fell from a high place and broke his neck; how another died at table how another met his end in play. One perishes by fire, another by the sword, another from disease, another at the hands of robbers. Death is the end of all men (Ecclesiasticus 7:2) and the life of man passes away suddenly as a shadow. (Psalm 38:7; 143:4)

Who will remember you when you are dead? Who will pray for you? Act now, dear soul; do all you can; for you know neither the hour of your death, nor your state after death. While you have time, gather the riches of everlasting life. (Luke 12:33; Galatians 6:8) Think only of your salvation, and care only for the things of God. Make friends now, by honouring the Saints of God and by following their example, that when this life is over, they may welcome you to your eternal home. (Luke 16:9)

Keep yourself a stranger and pilgrim upon earth, (I Peter 2:11), to whom the affairs of this world are of no concern. Keep your heart free and lifted up to God, for here you have no abiding city. (Hebrews 13:14) Daily direct your prayers and longings to Heaven, that at your death your soul may merit to pass joyfully into the presence of God.

Aniconic Self-Portrait

2006-02-20T23:00:00.000-06:00

This is a 'word cloud' built from the vocabulary of my web-log, (the most frequently appearing words are printed in a larger font.) Thanks to my friend over at http://planetgrenada.blogspot.com for keeping me up to date on the happenings of the "cool kids" in the blogsphere ; )

An Iconic Peace

2006-02-12T13:45:00.000-06:00

Muhammad on a camel, and Jesus on a donkey, greet the prophet Isaiah.

Here is an 'icon of peace,' drawn long before the beginning of the current 'cartoon war.' This remarkable image is taken from a 14th century MS of the Ilkhanate empire in Iran and Iraq. Clearly, that "medieval age" was a much more tolerant time than our current "enlightened era" - a time of real respect and honest dialogue among the three, great, Arbahamic faiths. God willing, we will move beyond 'cartoon wars' one day, and again start to draw pictures of religious co-existence.

The Cartoon War

2006-02-08T22:47:00.000-06:00

f.y.i.
A new blog devoted exclusively to you know what and who (s.a.s.)

Face of Muhammed - Drawings of Muhammed

Hamas & Ibn Khaldun: Going for the Cylcle?

2006-02-03T19:33:00.000-06:00

f.y.i. A fantastic article taken from an intelligent and well-written weblogger, I just discovered. Add this site to your bookmarks! www.ahjur.org/tabsir

I am not an expert on the Palestine issue, nor am I trained to think in the apocalyptic terms sometimes engaged by pundits and enraged politicians who forget that political science is more often an art or even pure fiction than a replicable analytical technique. But the overwhelming election victory of Hamas (which might equally be seen as the crushing defeat of Fatah) is too intriguing to pass up. Much of the speculation in the media is about tactics: Will Hamas give up support of violent acts against Israelis? Will Israel stubbornly refuse to negotiate with a group it would rather see fade into oblivion? Will the United States see this democratic experiment as a bridge or a barrier on the so-called road map to peace? In all this I cannot help but think about what the famous 14th century North African savant Ibn Khaldun would have said if he could be interviewed from the grave for the New Tunis Times. It might go something like this…
NTT: “It is an honor, Mr. Bin Khaldun, to meet a man who some Western scholars think was the Arab intellectual precursor of the sociologists Emile Durkheim and Max Weber, the economist Adam Smith and the Italian political theorist Niccolo Machiavelli.”
IK: “Actually, it is Ibn Khaldun, my friend. I am not yet ready to be cast into the Bin of discarded Islamic icons. And in my day and age we had no Misters and certainly nowhere near the number of mistresses to be imagined in Montesquieu’s Paris. I am only a humble scholar who has written a simple introduction to the study of history. If these other lesser lights you mention plagiarize what I wrote, it is none of my affair.”
NTT: “My apologies, Sir.”
IK: “Again, you seem not to know much about my world. I was neither sired nor ‘Sir-ed’ in Tunis, where my family comes from, or Cairo, where I taught for a spell.”
NTT: “Perhaps you have a view on the current election in Palestine, where an avowedly militant group called Hamas just won an impressive victory at the polls. What do you think will happen next?”
IK: “I do not claim to be expert on 21st century history, and I must admit my surprise that the world has lasted this long without an apocalyptic end to the misery humans bring upon themselves and the rest of the world God created. But I have heard that the problem stems from the powerful state of Israel once it occupied this holy land more than half a century ago. Some Israeli politicians, if not the majority, view Hamas as little more than a bunch of wild Bedouin nomads. For them nomads are rough, savage and uncultured, and their presence is always inimical to civilization; however, I believe that at its core the people who support Hamas are hardy, frugal, uncorrupt in morals, freedom-loving and self-reliant, and so make excellent fighters. In addition, they have a strong sense of ‘asabiya, which can be translated as ‘group cohesion’ or ‘social solidarity.’ This greatly enhances their appeal during a time of military occupation. Western-oriented urban centers like Tel Aviv, by contrast, are the seats of the crafts, the sciences, the arts and culture. Yet secular luxury corrupts many Israelis, and as a result they see opposition as a liability to the state, even women and children who throw rocks at tanks. Morality is completely relaxed and the arts of defending justice and of negotiating with the enemy are forgotten, so they are no match for voting extremists.”
NTT: “I am not quite sure I understand that last point. How will Hamas assume power, since the Israeli state is not about to be obliterated by rhetoric?”
IK: “If we think of Hamas as religious-driven nomads who conquer the minds of ordinary people, remember that their elected leaders establish a new political dynasty. At first the new rulers retain their Islamic virtues and solidarity, but soon they seek to concentrate all authority in their own hands. Increasingly they rule through a bureaucracy of clients, perhaps taking money from other conservative Islamist groups. As their former supporters lose their moral suasion there is an increasing use of the secular political process, and getting elected comes to be more important than proper ruling. Luxury corrupts ethical life, and the population of support decreases. Just look at what happened to Fatah. Rising expenditure demands higher taxes, which discourage production and eventually result in lower revenues.”
TNN: “Are you saying you support the economic policies of the Bush administration? As an Arab I would assume you revile American policies.”
IK: “Well Adam Smith took my idea of an invisible hand underlying all modes of production, with some hands perhaps less invisible than others. But the problem is not so much with trickle down economics as it is with trickle down politics, when elected officials skim off the people’s wealth and live in expensive villas; this is probably why Fatah was voted out of office. I really do not care what the Bush administration does as long as they just leave my part of the world alone. I wish they would invent an energy substitute for crude oil and let the Middle East get back to welcoming tourists and building shopping malls.”
TNN: “So what happens next in the process?”
IK: “The elected officials of Hamas or any newly emerging party and their clients become isolated from the groups that originally brought them to power. Such a process of decline is taken to last three generations, or about one hundred and twenty years. Religion is a major influence on the nature of such a model; when ‘asabiya is reinforced by religion its strength is multiplied, and great empires can be founded. This is what both Hamas and the Iranian ayatollahs are counting on. The theory is that religion can also reinforce the cohesion of an established state. Yet the endless cycle of flowering and decay shows no evolution or progress except for that from the primitive form of violence against civilians to a civilized parliament like the Knesset where words replace bullets. Although the damage may be as bad in the end.”
TNN: “So do you really think it will take three generations or one hundred and twenty years before the crisis between the Palestinians and Israel is resolved?”
IK: “Well some think that is how long it took Noah to build his ark. As a medieval rationalist, I would not say this, but consider the complications in the process of addressing deep-seated wrongs when all sides feel aggrieved. It can be noted that those people who, whether they inhabit the desert of Gaza or settled areas and cities in the West Bank, live a life of abundance and have all the good things to eat, die more quickly than others when a drought, famine or stringent government security comes upon them. This was the case, as I know well from seven centuries ago, with the Berbers of the Maghrib and the inhabitants of the city of Fez, and as we hear, of Cairo. It is not so with the Palestinian Arabs who inhabit waste regions and deserts, or with the inhabitants of regions where the glass house tomato grows and whose principal food is cheap imported spaghetti, or with the present day inhabitants of Ifriqiyah (Libya) whose principal income is from oil. When an Israeli missile strikes their houses, it does not kill as many of them as of the other group of people, and few, if any, die for any moral result. Those who die in such raids are victims of their previous habitual state of fighting back, not of the democratic hunger that now afflicts them for the first time. “
NTT: “But why does it take so long for change?”
IK: “Think of it this way. Prestige is an accident that affects human beings. It comes into being and decays inevitably. No human being exists who possesses an unbroken pedigree of nobility from Adam down to himself. Nobility originates in the state of being outside. That is, being outside of leadership and nobility and being in a base, humble station, devoid of prestige, as is the case with every created thing. But this reaches its end in a single political party within four successive generations. This is as follows: The builders of the party’s glory know what it costs them to do the work, and keep the qualities that created past glory and made it last. The candidates who come after had personal contact with these founders and thus learned those things from them. However, the future candidate is inferior to the earlier in this respect, inasmuch as a person who learns things through study is inferior to a person who knows them from practical application. The third generation must be content with imitation and negative attack ads on the media and, in particular, with reliance upon a very narrow view of tradition. These future party members are inferior to those of the second generation, inasmuch as a person who relies upon tradition is inferior to a person who exercises judgment. The fourth generation, then, is inferior to the preceding ones in every respect. Its members have lost the qualities that preserved the party platform of their prior glory. They imagine that the earlier principles were not built through application and effort. They think that it was something due to their specific view of religion from the very beginning by virtue of the mere fact of their descent, and not something that resulted from group effort and individual qualities. For they see the great respect in which the newly elected leader is held by the people, but eventually the future leader does not know how that respect originated and what the reason for it was. He, for I doubt Hamas will elect a woman as leader in the near future, imagines it is due to his party descent and nothing else. He keeps away from those in whose group feeling he shares, thinking that he is better than they. This is the way of all flesh.”
TNN: Were you the first to say “the way of all flesh.”
IK: “No, I read it in a Maureen Dowd op-ed piece last week. “
Luke Warmonger

"Watching Hamas"

2006-02-01T23:16:00.000-06:00

!!! سنة جديدة سعادة

"May this be a happy and prosperous Islamic New Year for all the people of that land, so anomalously, called 'Holy.'"

f.y.i.

ELECTION DISPATCH
WATCHING HAMAS
by Ari Shavit (The New Yorker)
Issue of 2006-02-06 // Posted 2006-01-30

Shalom Harari is a former Israeli Military Intelligence officer who has been following the rise of Hamas—the Islamic Resistance Movement—for almost a quarter century. An awkward, voluble man of nearly sixty, Harari gained a measure of fame in intelligence circles when he began to tell his colleagues in internal reports that Hamas, founded in 1987, and initially a small outgrowth of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, would, with its platform of armed resistance, grassroots politics, and Islamic ideology, come to dominate Palestinian politics. Six years ago, while most of his colleagues were anticipating peace, Harari was rightly predicting a second intifada; that uprising led to the decline of Yasir Arafat’s creation and power base, the Fatah Party.
Last Thursday night, just hours after it was announced that Hamas had crushed Fatah in legislative elections––an event that caused some right-wing Israeli politicians to declare the birth of a terrorist “Hamastan”—Harari welcomed a visitor to his home, in the town of Yavne, near the Mediterranean. While most Israeli and Arab-language news channels were broadcasting scenes of Hamas supporters in the Gaza Strip waving green flags as they celebrated their stunning victory, Harari had tuned in to a seemingly tedious military ceremony on Egyptian state television. “Look at the wives of the generals,” he said. “Many of them are wearing traditional head scarves. This was not so ten years ago. And this tells you where we are heading. When the women of Egypt’s pro-Western military élite are dressed like that, you know that the Hamas victory is not about Palestine. It’s about the entire Middle East.”

Harari, who served as an intelligence officer in the West Bank and then as the adviser on Palestinian affairs to the Israeli Defense Ministry, is still closely connected to his former colleagues, and he said he had heard that, some weeks ago, the Palestinian President, Mahmoud Abbas, who was afraid of a Hamas rout at the polls, begged Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to exert United States pressure and postpone the scheduled elections. Rice refused, Harari said, and told Abbas to go forward. (A State Department spokesman declined to confirm the details of their conversation.)
And yet Harari would like to believe that the American “mistake”––if that is what it was––was a blessing in disguise. “At least, now we know what we are faced with,” he said. “Now we can make a real diagnosis and understand what is truly the malaise.”

Harari said that he first took note of the Palestinian Islamists in the early nineteen-eighties, shortly after the Iranian revolution, when Islamists won student elections in the prestigious universities of the West Bank. A decade later, Islamists won elections in chambers of commerce in the occupied territories and, more recently, started to win in municipal elections. Now Hamas has taken control of the parliament, he said, and is sure to challenge Abbas for the Presidency.
But look around, Harari said: “In Jordan, too, wherever there are free elections––trade unions, student unions, professional guilds––the Islamists have the upper hand. If the Hashemite kings”––Hussein and Abdullah––“had not played all kinds of tricks, the Islamists would have had a large representation in parliament as well. And when Egypt held its American-inspired parliamentary elections recently, the number of seats won by the Muslim Brotherhood rose fivefold. Throughout the Middle East, the Muslim Brotherhood is the main power with grassroots support. The Islamists are less corrupt. They are the ones with integrity and compassion. They are of the people and they speak for the people. Today in the Arab world, the choice is clear between democratically elected Islamists and Western-leaning dictators.”

Rising heavily from the sofa in his living room, Harari held up a small prayer carpet he acquired in Gaza almost ten years ago. The rug had been woven by handicapped children in a philanthropic workshop run by Yasir Arafat’s brother, Fathi. “Look at it,” Harari said. “It has a map of the entire land—from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. But the land is all green. All Muslim. No place for Jews here, no mention of Israel. Acre, Jaffa, Nablus—no Tel Aviv. Yet this was woven in a Fatah institution. Back in the Oslo era, the Hamas terminology was already taking over Arafat’s movement.
“Now look at these campaign posters,” he went on, gesturing at his collection. “They are all from recent weeks. Notice the difference: while the Hamas ads are calm and tranquil, with no hint of violence, the Fatah ads are full of guns and grenades and jihad rhetoric. While Hamas projects religious dignity, Fatah goes back to its aggressive revolutionary ethos. There was no real talk of peace. The decades of work that Hamas did in mosques and schools and charity organizations transformed Palestinian society from within. What suddenly erupted today has been simmering beneath the surface for a generation. There was not one moderate option that represented the whole Palestinian people. Americans, Europeans, and moderate Israelis like me wanted to believe that Arafat and Abbas were the sole representatives of the Palestinian people, but they were not. Hamas claimed all along that it had the support of forty per cent of the Palestinians, and it was probably right. Among the fundamentalists, the idea that Islam is superior to other religions has become predominant. Long before it took over the Palestinian parliament, Hamas managed to turn what we thought to be a national conflict into a religious war.”

Harari, as a retired brigadier general, admits to being impressed by the resilience of the Hamas leadership in the face of Israeli attacks. The issue, of course, is whether this revolutionary movement, whose charter is devoted to the elimination of Israel, could develop into a ruling party interested in territorial compromise. On that Harari is doubtful. “It would take years before real negotiations could resume,” he said. “An over-all peace agreement is out of the question for a long time. ”
Yet the impact of the Hamas victory, he said, is not local but regional. “As we speak,” he said, “there are growing fears not only in Israel but in Jordan, Egypt, and even Syria. The Hamas victory is a Middle East earthquake. Its shock waves will be felt in every town between Casablanca and Baghdad.”

"The Raven"

2006-01-29T14:00:00.000-06:00

In memoriam: Lenore

(E.A. Poe first published this, perhaps the most famous of all Armerican poems, in the New York Evening Mirror on this day, January 29, in 1845.)

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore--
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
"'Tis some visiter," I muttered, "tapping at my chamber door--
Only this and nothing more."

Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December,
And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.
Eagerly I wished the morrow;--vainly I had sought to borrow
From my books surcease of sorrow--sorrow for the lost Lenore--
For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore--
Nameless here for evermore.

And the silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain
Thrilled me--filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before;
So that now, to still the beating of my heart, I stood repeating
"'Tis some visiter entreating entrance at my chamber door--
Some late visiter entreating entrance at my chamber door;
This it is and nothing more."

Presently my soul grew stronger; hesitating then no longer,
"Sir," said I, "or Madam, truly your forgiveness I implore;
But the fact is I was napping, and so gently you came rapping,
And so faintly you came tapping, tapping at my chamber door,
That I scarce was sure I heard you"--here I opened wide the door--
Darkness there and nothing more.

Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing,
Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortals ever dared to dream before;
But the silence was unbroken, and the stillness gave no token,
And the only word there spoken was the whispered word, "Lenore?"
This I whispered, and an echo murmured back the word, "Lenore!"--
Merely this and nothing more.

Back into the chamber turning, all my soul within me burning,
Soon again I heard a tapping something louder than before.
"Surely," said I, "surely that is something at my window lattice;
Let me see, then, what thereat is and this mystery explore--
Let my heart be still a moment and this mystery explore;--
'Tis the wind and nothing more.

Open here I flung the shutter, when, with many a flirt and flutter,
In there stepped a stately Raven of the saintly days of yore.
Not the least obeisance made he; not a minute stopped or stayed he,
But, with mien of lord or lady, perched above my chamber door--
Perched upon a bust of Pallas just above my chamber door--
Perched, and sat, and nothing more.

Then the ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling,
By the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore,
"Though thy crest be shorn and shaven, thou," I said, "art sure no craven,
Ghastly grim and ancient Raven wandering from the Nightly shore--
Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night's Plutonian shore!"
Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore."

Much I marvelled this ungainly fowl to hear discourse so plainly,
Though its answer little meaning--little relevancy bore;
For we cannot help agreeing that no living human being
Ever yet was blessed with seeing bird above his chamber door--
Bird or beast upon the sculptured bust above his chamber door,
With such name as "Nevermore."

But the Raven, sitting lonely on that placid bust, spoke only
That one word, as if its soul in that one word he did outpour
Nothing farther then he uttered; not a feather then he fluttered--
Till I scarcely more than muttered: "Other friends have flown before--
On the morrow he will leave me, as my Hopes have flown before."
Then the bird said "Nevermore."

Startled at the stillness broken by reply so aptly spoken,
"Doubtless," said I, "what it utters is its only stock and store,
Caught from some unhappy master whom unmerciful Disaster
Followed fast and followed faster till his songs one burden bore--
Till the dirges of his Hope that melancholy burden bore
Of 'Never--nevermore.'"

But the Raven still beguiling all my sad soul into smiling,
Straight I wheeled a cushioned seat in front of bird and bust and door;
Then, upon the velvet sinking, I betook myself to linking
Fancy unto fancy, thinking what this ominous bird of yore--
What this grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt, and ominous bird of yore
Meant in croaking "Nevermore."

This I sat engaged in guessing, but no syllable expressing
To the fowl whose fiery eyes now burned into my bosom's core;
This and more I sat divining, with my head at ease reclining
On the cushion's velvet lining that the lamp-light gloated o'er,
But whose velvet violet lining with the lamp-light gloating o'er
She shall press, ah, nevermore!

Then, methought, the air grew denser, perfumed from an unseen censer
Swung by Seraphim whose foot-falls tinkled on the tufted floor.
"Wretch," I cried, "thy God hath lent thee--by these angels he hath sent thee
Respite--respite and nepenthe from thy memories of Lenore!
Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe and forget this lost Lenore!"
Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore."

"Prophet!" said I, "thing of evil!--prophet still, if bird or devil!--
Whether Tempter sent, or whether tempest tossed thee here ashore,
Desolate, yet all undaunted, on this desert land enchanted--
On this home by Horror haunted--tell me truly, I implore--
Is there--is there balm in Gilead?--tell me--tell me, I implore!"
Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore."

"Prophet!" said I, "thing of evil!--prophet still, if bird or devil!
By that Heaven that bends above us--by that God we both adore--
Tell this soul with sorrow laden if, within the distant Aidenn,
It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels name Lenore--
Clasp a rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore."
Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore."

"Be that our sign of parting, bird or fiend!" I shrieked, upstarting--
"Get thee back into the tempest and the Night's Plutonian shore!
Leave no black plume as a token of that lie thy soul has spoken!
Leave my loneliness unbroken!--quit the bust above my door!
Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!"
Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore."

And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting
On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;
And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon's that is dreaming
And the lamp-light o'er him streaming throws his shadows on the floor;
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
Shall be lifted--nevermore!

Baba Yuhanna Bulus II

2006-01-16T09:55:00.000-06:00

Will Dialogue Survive The Death of Pope John Paul II?
Pope John Paul II was, in many ways, the Muslim world's best friend among Christians in the world today. After his death this week, are there more friends waiting to follow his example?

By Zahed Amanullah, April 6, 2005

With the death of Pope John Paul II this week at the age of 84, many Muslims around the world reflected on the man who did more to bridge the gap of understanding between Christians (erm, the Catholic ones) and Muslims than nearly any other. The pope's death "is a big loss for the Catholic Church and the Islamic world," said Sheik Sayed Tantawi, the head of Egypt's Al-Azhar University. Ahead of this Friday's funeral at the Vatican (sorry Charlie), the Muslim world marked the occasion with periods of mourning and remembrance. Even members of the fledgling Taliban said his ideas were "worth considering." In his 1994 book Crossing the Threshold of Hope, Pope John Paul noted that "the image of believers in Allah who, without caring about time or place, fall to their knees and immerse themselves in prayer remains a model for all those who invoke the true God." During his 27 years as pontiff, John Paul II was the first Pope to visit a mosque (indeed, Muslim countries), and personally pardoned his would-be Muslim assassin, who made an attempt on his life in 1981 (he later pardoned breakdancers as well). Views on Islam will be a key factor in determining the next pope. "We have to learn to live with Islam," says Cardinal Theodore McCarrick of Washington. "We have to learn how to dialogue with Islam." One of the current prospects (with good betting odds) is Nigeria's Cardinal Francis Arinze, a point man on Islam for the Vatican for over 20 years (he would also be the first African pope in 1,500 years). Over the next several weeks, cardinals will choose between him and many others - Italy's Dionigi Tettamanzi, Oscar Andres Rodriguez Maradiaga of Honduras, and Germany's Joseph Ratzinger - gauging their abilities to foster interfaith dialogue with the Muslim world. Still, Muslims may rightly fear that the best in Catholic-Islamic relations is behind them. "At the heart of Islam is the call to stand in submission before God," said Eide Alawan, a Muslim activist from Michigan. "Through his doctrines, he did that. He was in total submission to God. And, in that sense, he was a Muslim."Zahed Amanullah is associate editor of alt.muslim. He is based in London, England.

Kizilbash - What is your religion?

2005-12-18T23:36:00.000-06:00

Kizilbash – for the love of the living Imam :
- http://kizilbash.squarespace.com

What is your religion?

"But what is your religion?" the young lady asked. Kizilbash didn't know exactly what to say. He paused for a moment, then the answer came, "If you ask my skin, 'What is your religion?' it will reply, 'I am Sunni,' because there is no inward without an outward. But if you ask my inner parts, they will say, 'We are Shia,' because there is no outward without an inward. My heart, the storehouse of the secret of secrets, proudly says, 'I am Alawi,' for blasphemy is the passport of the Lovers. If you ask my eyes, they will say, 'The right of us is Jewish and the left of us is Christian,' because one sees no life without law and the other sees no law without spirit. My hands are Hindu, because there is no belief without action and no action without reaction, and my ears are Buddhist, for they hear the voice of God in silence. My feet are atheist, for the dust of the earth knows nothing of God."

Through The Looking Glass

2005-11-28T20:16:00.000-06:00

Through The Looking Glass: Nine Danger Signs Of Militant Islam
The purported "danger signs" of militant Islam appear often in the American landscape. Trouble is, they are found mostly among extremist Christians.
By Sheila Musaji, October 27, 2005 (Posted @ alt.muslim)

On Monday, October 24th, Frontpagemag.com published an article entitled The Nine Signs by Jamie Glazov. This was an interview with Dave Holly of the United American Committee which purports to give the nine danger signs of militant Islam. Only two weeks ago the same group published an article (The Seven Danger Signs of Militant Islam) which they are promoting as some sort of a litmus test for Muslims and plan to distribute to Islamic leaders to sign and help promote. This group appears to be prone to conspiracy theories as shown by a recent entry on their blog which makes unfounded and false claims, as pointed out by the Wall Street Journal.I am certain that given a little time this list of signs will grow. Here are my responses to this idiocy propogated by extremist Christians. These responses are not given in the spirit of dialogue and mutual understanding in which I believe deeply, but in the spirit of aggrieved desperation. It is my prayer that the extremists among all faiths will stop pushing for a war between the two major faith groups on earth and stop inciting the ignorant to hatred and mutual distrust and animosity - for the sake of all of humanity.The following are the "signs", my responses, and examples of how each of these signs fail.Danger Sign 1: Justification of any Islamic terrorism, Palestinian or otherwise.Which definition of terrorism? If you are speaking about suicide bombing or violence targeted at civilians, then that point has already been addressed by most legitimate Muslim scholars worldwide - it is forbidden by Islam and falls under the title of hirabah. A lengthy list of these statements and fatwas can be found at Muslim Voices Against Terrorism.Example of how this sign fails: Pat Robertson's call for the assassination of the leader of a sovereign foreign state is an example of an American Christian cleric not only justifying but encouraging terrorism. Is this a danger sign of militant Christianity?Danger Sign 2: Supporting or refusing to condemn Osama Bin Laden, Al Qaeda, Hamas, or other terrorists or other terrorist organizations by name.Condemning Osama bin Laden or Al Qaeda is no problem and has already been done by Muslim scholars. Since even the UN is having a problem coming up with an accepted definition of "terrorism" to agree to condemn "other terrorists or other terrorist organizations" without knowing who is making the designation would be foolish. For example, there have been some countries (Russia and China for example) who were quick to try to place the label of "terrorist" on legitimate independence movements who were carrying out non-violent protests. The Serbs tried to convince the world that the "ethnic Bosnians" (read Muslims) were terrorists during the time we now have proof the Serbs were carrying out ethnic cleansing against them. Any condemnation would have to be on a case by case basis. There have been a number of fatwas specifically against Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda.Example of how this sign fails: Irish (Catholic) American support for the IRA has been longstanding and problematic. Does this support or lack of condemnation say something about the Irish Catholic community? Is this a sign of militant Christianity?Danger Sign 3: Promoting jihad for Muslims to fight against what they determine is "injustice" or "aggression".The US government went to war with Iraq in what they determined to be a fight against aggression. WWII was fought to battle injustice and aggression. Does this mean that no Muslim country on earth has the right to fight against injustice or aggression? Or that no citizen of any country no matter the tyranny they live under has the right to do so?If what is being referred to are the illegal calls for jihad by individuals who have no right under Islamic Law (Sharia) to make such a call (e.g. Osama bin Laden) then no problem. The Amman Conference of Muslim scholars clearly stated that no one except qualified scholars are qualified to issue any fatwas or Islamic legal rulings.Muslim scholars have also clearly spelled out the difference between legitimate jihad and terrorism just as Christian scholars have spelled out the difference between terrorism and just war.Example of how this sign fails: The following statement by Ann Coulter is an example of a Christian promoting a Crusade against what she perceives to be injustice or aggression - "We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity... That's war. And this is war." Is this a danger sign of militant Christianity?Danger Sign 4: Demands for Sharia law in the West, or denying that Sharia forbids equal rights for women and members of religions other than Islam.A community might make a request to have family courts which operate under Sharia law - just as some Jewish communities have family courts which operate under Jewish law. Whether they win or lose their case is up to their local communities and whatever the decision the Muslim community involved must abide by the laws of the nation they live in. Sharia law is a dynamic and changing system - just as any system of law. It may be possible that Sharia law in a particular community or nation is interpreted in such a way that the rights of women and minorities are not protected. This does not mean that Sharia in general is by its very nature required to deny these protections.The example given in the article was the murder of Theo van Gogh which was a criminal act under both Dutch and Islamic (Sharia) law. Even if the film in question was considered blasphemous, the Sharia rules for blasphemy do not apply to non-Muslims, and both Islamic and Dutch law require a legitimate court and a trial to decide innocence or guilt and punishment. This criminal act of an individual is no more reflective of Islam than the murder of abortion doctors is reflective of Christianity.Examples of how this sign fails: The following quote by a Christian minister is an example of a militant Christian view. It appears that Christians believe that they own the entire world: "This is our land. This is our world. This is our heritage, and with God's help, we shall claim this nation for Christianity. And no power on earth can stop us." (D. James Kennedy)As to how people of other faiths are viewed: The God of Islam is not the same God. He's not the God of the Christian or Jewish faiths. It's a different God, and I believe it is a very evil and wicked religion. (Rev. Franklin Graham)Their view of women is distorted. Christian women should submit to their husbands and Christian husbands should be the leader, ruler or person in authority in the family. Danger Sign 5: Demanding that Americans accommodate the public expression of Islamic laws, customs, and practices that conflict with, or are harmful to American laws, customs, and practices.The example given in the article is the case of Sultaana Freeman, a Muslim woman from Florida who sued the Department of Motor Vehicles to permit a photo of her veiled face to be used on her driver's license. As a Muslim, I am glad that the Florida court ruled against her. Of course an ID photo needs to serve the function of ID, and further I would hope that no one is allowed to drive if they are wearing this form of niqab as it would restrict their vision. She has the right to dress any way she pleases and to interpret the Islamic modesty requirements as liberally or conservatively as she pleases, but must then also accept the consequences of those choices. I assume that she is an American citizen, and if so, she has the right to request anything she wants of the legal system, but the legal system has the right to deny her that request. Any American citizen has the right to object to any law they wish and to work to change that law if they so choose. As long as a particular law is in effect they are required to abide by the law or face the legal consequences.Any American has the right to file any law suit they want no matter how frivolous as long as they are willing to pay the costs involved, and to abide by the decision of the court.As far as "customs and practices" - it would be impossible to generalize such vague concepts or all Americans. The Amish drive their buggies on the highway - and they have the right to do so, that isn't the normal custom or practice, that doesn't make them un-American.Example of how this sign fails: Jerry Falwell said, "One day, I hope in the next ten years, I trust that we will have more Christian day schools than there are public schools. I hope I will live to see the day when we won't have any public schools. The churches will have taken them over and Christians will be running them. What a happy day that will be!". Is this an example of militant Christianity?Danger Sign 6: Denying that Muslims were involved in the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and other attacks around the world. There are all sorts of conspiracy theories out there - some more lunatic than others. People have the right to deny or affirm any crazy theory they want under freedom of speech and thought. And, the rest of us have the right to call them lunatics.Example of how this sign fails: There are Christians who insist the world is no more than 6,000 years old and that creation took place in six normal 24-hour days. The Christian Identity Movement denies the Holocaust.Danger Sign 7: Refusal to cooperate with or inciting others not to cooperate with authorities or standard security procedures. During the peace protests in Washington DC, a number of individuals carried out acts of civil disobedience - they refused to cooperate with the authorities and were arrested. This is a long standing American form of protest. There are religious communities that refuse to pay the part of their taxes that go for military spending, and they pay the consequences of that action. Individuals have refused to cooperate with the draft and gone to prison instead. Librarians have resisted cooperation with "standard security procedures" implemented with the Patriot act. This too is the right of any American. Martin Luther King comes to mind as one example of a Christian who refused to cooperate with authority.Example of how this sign fails: The following quote from an article on Christian civil disobedience ought to speak for itself: "When the government acts in a way which violates Christian conscience under the tests set out above, Christians have several ways to work with the situation. They can seek legislation which changes that which they abhor, they can use the courts to determine whether the law actually applies to them in the way it seems to, they can use the courts in an effort to overturn the law as being a violation of the Constitution, or they can submit to the government while refusing to obey the law."Danger Sign 8: Branding Progressive Muslims or Muslims of different opinions as "apostates". The UAC article about these "danger signs" says: "Attempts to label other Muslims in this way should be seen as a danger sign for peace-loving Muslims. This is not compatible with a free society. It is the same thing as hate speech, such as the KKK using racial slurs against Black people, or Nazis engaging in anti-Semitic rhetoric." This example shows a total disregard for the right of free speech guaranteed by the constitution. I may disagree completely with anything a Nazi or KKK individual says, but they have the right to say whatever they want as long as they don't incite to violence. The reason we have a free society is that even these hateful groups have the right to express their opinion. No Muslim has the right to make this statement about another Muslim. The Amman Conference of Muslim scholars clearly addressed this issue.Example of how this sign fails: You don't have to look very far to find examples of Christians branding other Christians as apostates: "These post-Christian secularists and sissy-Christian apostates push a new Pagan worldview and a budding, intolerant new 'ism' which may prove as ruthless in the name of 'tolerance and diversity' as every other totalitarian 'ism' born and bred from European anti-God thinking (Diocletian-Rousseau-Hegel-Marx-Nietzche-Darwin-Freud-Lenin-Hitler-Stalin)." And as for the Biblical punishment for apostasy - the punishment is death: (Deuteronomy 17:2-5 and 32:23-25, Deuteronomy 13:6-10, 1 Timothy 1:20)Danger Sign 9: Refusal to interact, converse, or socialize with non-Muslims. If any individual wants to be a hermit, or anti-social, that is certainly odd but it is not illegal. There are many religious groups in the US who isolate themselves from contact from the greater society in order to maintain their own particular way of life (some Mormon, Amish, and Mennonite communities for example). There are also many more religious groups that live in communities (Orthodox Jews in New York for example), and even more who advocate for their own parochial schools and social organizations for the same reasons. There are even a few cults who live entirely separated with no social contact with the greater society. This is odd, but protected by the constitution.I have never heard of anyone who refused to have anything to do with anyone outside of their community, and can't even imagine how they would exist in such a state.I am certain that American citizens in the early 19th century "never imagined that they would later be forced to compete for cultural dominance" with the Eastern Europeans, Jews, Italians, Irish, Chinese and other groups deemed as inferior or outside of the norm, but this is exactly what did happen. The city of Boston might be pointed out as an example of a particular ethnic group having "control of an entire city". The fact that Rotterdam's population is now 40% Muslim is just the way it is, as is the fact that in California and some other Southwestern states, the Hispanic population is probably over 50% now.Example of how this sign fails: The Christian Exodus group has taken separation from others who do not share their beliefs to a new high and have targeted making South Carolina a Christian state and "have not ruled out the possibiliy of the state seceding from the United States."In conclusion, after just a brief survey on the net, I found examples of militant Christians who would: - Deny rights to people of color (Christian Identity Movement)- Support the murder of abortion doctors (Army of God)- Make the practice of Islam "illegal and punishable" by law (Kristiansand Progress Party in Norway.- Deny US citizenship to anyone who is not a Christian (Gary North)- Deny that there is any possibility for Muslims and Christians to live in peace (Operation Save America)- Allow the worship of no other religion on this planet except Christianity (Rev. Joseph Morecraft, Chalcedon Presbyterian Church)- Demand that Christians have exclusive control of the US government (Gary North)- Advocate the use of nuclear weapons to destroy the 100 largest Muslim cities, in the event of any WMD attack on America (David Atkins)- Arrest every Muslim that enters Georgia (Rep. Saxby Chambliss)- Institute a policy of killing the relatives of anyone who commits an act of terrorism (Lewin Nathan)- Sponsor a petition to "close the borders, deport Musims, and deport Muslims NOW" - Believe that the rights of one American are worth more than the combined lives of all the men, women and children in other nations combined (Ron Pisaturo)- Charge that those who believe in Judeo-Christian values are better qualified to run America than Muslims or Hindus (Pat Robertson)- Want the reading of the Qur'an to be banned in public or private (Christian Voice)- Believe that winning the 'War on Terror' means Muslims must be either "Westernized" or "Christianized" (Srjda Trifkovic)- Want to ignite a religious war that will lead to Armageddon (Concerned Christians)- Believe that the Christian goal for the world is the development of universal Biblical theocratic republics (David Chilton, Christian Reconstructionist)- Consider the 'War on Terror' to be a Tenth Crusade- Support racial segregation - Encourage Christians to "absolutely ignore the court" (Pat Robertson)- Remove the separation between church and stateThis list could go on and on, but enough said. You can find numerous examples of militants, fundamentalists, extremists, criminals and even mass murderers among every religious group. Although counting numbers is pointless, I am certain that Slobodan Milosevic was responsible for more deaths than Osama bin Laden. I haven't seen any demands that Christians sign some sort of a statement to prove that they don't have "militant intentions".The reality is that this entire exercise is futile. The voices that have us looking to what it is in Islam, or Christianity, or Judaism to find the answers for why criminals carry out violent acts in the name of those religions are only creating polarization, decreasing any chance for dialogue, and leading us down a path that can only lead to a clash of civilizations that might end all civilization.The voice of moderation rather than the voice of extremism needs to be heard. We need a spiritual jihad against terrorism carried out by those among all faiths who still have hope for a safe world for their children to grow up in.Sheila Musaji is the editor of the online journal The American Muslim.

The "Mu'allaqa" of Imru al-Qays

2005-11-21T20:16:00.000-06:00

١ قفا نبك من ذكرى حبيب و منزل بسقط اللوى بين الدخول فحومل
1. Stop here, you two!
Let us weep for the memory of a beloved and a campsite,
Where the sands spin to an end, between al-Dakhūl and Hawmal,

٢ فتوضح قالمقراة لم يعف رسمها لما نسجتها من جنوب وشمال
2. And Tūdih and al-Miqrāt, whose traces have not been erased,
By the southern and northern winds which whipped across them.

٣ ترى بعر الارام في عرصاتها وقيعانها كانه حب فلفل
3. You see the fesces of white gazelle in the desolate spaces,
And the sunken tracts, (sprinkled) like peppercorns.

٤ كاني غداة البين يوم تحملوا لدى سمرات الحيّ ناقف حنظل
4. As if I, on the morning of departure, when they loaded (their camels,)
Near the tribe’s acacia trees, was splitting colocynth.

٥ وقوقا بها صحبي عليّ مطيهم يقولون لا تهلك اسى وتجمل
5. My companions stopped there their mounts for me,
Saying: “Don’t waste yourself grieving . . . control ourself!”

٦ وان شفائي عبرة مهراقة فهل عند رسم دارس من معول
6. Surely my cure will be tears poured out;
So at an effaced trace is there a place for weeping?

٧ كدابك من ام الحويرث قبلها وجارتها ام الرباب بماسل
7. As was your habit before her, with Umm al-Huwayrith,
And her neighbor, Umm al-Rabāb, at al-Ma’sal.

٨ اذاقامتا تضوح المسك منها نسيم الصبا جاءت بريا القرنفل
8. When the two of them arose, musk emanated from them,
A gentle breeze diffusing the sweet scent of cloves.

٩ ففاضت دموع العين مني صبابة على النحر حتى بل دمعي محملي
9. Then tears flooded my eyes from a delicate longing,
(Cascading) down my throat until they soaked my sword’s sheath.

١٠ الا رب يوم لك منهن صالح و لا سيما يوم بدارة جلجل
10. Aahh… Did you not spend many an excellent day with them?
Especially that day at the Juljuli estate.

١١ و يوم عقرت للعذرى مطيتي فيا عجبا من كورها المتحمل
11. Or the day I butchered my mount for the virgins,
What a sight were its saddle and load!

١٢ يظل العذرى يرتمين بلحمها وشحم كهداب الدمقس المفتل
12. So they spent the night tossing its meat around,
And fat like the fringe of a tightly-twisted, raw-silk robe.

١٣ و يوم دخلت الخدر خدر عنيزة فقالت لك الويلات إنك مرجلي
13. Or the one day I entered the howdah, the howdah of ‘Unayza,
And she said: “Shame on you! You’ll force me to walk!”

١٤ تقول وقد مال الغبيط بنا معا عقرت بعيري يا آمر القيس فانزل
14. She was saying, as the camel saddle swayed under us together,
“Oh Imrū al-Qays! You’ve butchered my camel, get down!”

١٥ فقلت لها سيري وأرخي زمامه ولا تبعديني من جناك المعلل
15. So I said to her: “Strip me and loose its reins,
Don’t drive me away from your twice to be tasted fruit.

١٦ فمثلك حبلى قد طرقت ومرضعا فألهيتها عن ذي تمائم مغيل
16. I’ve had sex with pregnant women, like you, while nursing,
I distracted her from an amuleted, one-year old boy.

١٧ إذا ما بكى من خلفها آنحرفت له بشق و تحتي شقها لم يحول
17. When he cried behind her, she turned to him,
With half her body, while the half under me didn’t turn.”

١٨ و يوما على ظهر الكثيب تعذرت على و آلت حلفة لم تحلل
18. Or the day on the back of a sand dune, she drew back from me,
And swore an oath which was never broken.

١٩ أفاطمة مهلا بعض هذا التدلل وإن كنت قد أزمعت صرمي فأجملي
19. Oh Fatima! Be slow to act so boldly!
And if you’re determined to cut me off, do it skillfully!

٢٠ وإن كنت قد ساءتك مني خليقة فسلي ثيابي من ثيابك تنسل
20. If it is some characteristic of mine which has upset you,
Then draw my clothes from yours (and) they’ll slip away.

٢١ أغرك مني أن حبك قاتلي و أنك مهما تأمري القلب يفعل
21. Don’t you know that love of you is killing me?
And whatever you command (my) heart (to do), it does?

٢٢ و ما ذرفت عيناك إلا لتضربي بسهميك في أعشار قلب مقتل
22. Your eyes only shed tears to strike,
With your two shafts, the pieces of my slaughtered heart.

٢٣ وبيضة خدر لا يرام خباؤها تمتعت من لهو بها غير معجل
23. Many a fair, secluded egg, whose tent none dare seek,
I dallied playfully with her, unhurried.

٢٤ تجاوزت أحرسا وأهوال معشر علي حراص لو يشرون مقتلي
24. I stole past guards (to get to her,) past clansmen,
Eager, could they conceal it, to kill me.

٢٥ إذا ما ثريا في السماء تعرضت تعرض أثناء الوشاح المفصل
25. Whenever the Pleiades are unfurled across the sky,
They unfold like pleats of gems and pearls on an ornamented sash.

٢٦ فجئت و قد نضت لنوم ثيابها لدى الستر إلا لبسة المتفضل
26. I came when she had taken her clothes off to sleep,
Behind a screen, (everything) but a (delicate) mifdal.

٢٧ فقالت يمين الله ما لك حيلة و ما إن أرى عنك العماية تنجلي
27. She said: “By God! There is no evading you!
And I see that the errors of your ways have not left you. "

٢٨ خرجت بها تمشى تجر وراءنا على أثرينا ذيل مرط مرحل
28. So I went out with her, and as she walked she drew behind us,
The hem of her embroidered gown (to cover) our two tracks.

٢٩ فلما أجزنا ساحة الحي و آنتحى بنا بطن حقف ذي ركام عقنقل
29. When we left the tribal area, we were kept out of sight,
In the belly of low ground, (dunes) piled (on all sides), twisting, turning.

٣٠ إذا قلت هاتى نولينى تمايلت علي هضيم الكشح ريا المخلخل
30. When I said: “Give me! Grant me!” She swayed,
Towards me, slender of waist and plump in the anklets place.

٣١ مهفهفة بيضاء غير مفاضة ترائبها مصقولة كالسجنجل
31. Slender, fair, no corpulence (to her),
Her collar bone polished like a mirror.

٣٢ كبكر مقاناة البياض بصفرة غذاها نمعر الماء غير المحلل
32. Like the first egg of an ostrich, pearly white with shades of yellow,
It's food the sweet, life-giving water, unmuddied.

٣٣ تصد وتبدي عن أسيل وتتقي بناظرة من وحش وجرة مطفل
33. She turns away, revealing a smooth cheek, fending me off,
With a glance like the gazelle of Wajra with fawn.

٣٤ وجيد كجيد الرئم ليس بفاحش إذا هي نصته ولا بمعطل
34. And a neck like that of a white gazelle, long,
When she extends it, it is never unadorned.

٣٥ وفرع يغشي المتن أسود فاحم أثيث كقنو النخلة المتعثكل
35. How full is the dark, (curly) hair, down (her) back falling, jet black,
As abundant as dates on a fertile palm.

(To be continued........)

Ramadan mubarak la-kum!

2005-10-12T19:37:00.000-05:00

رمضان مبارك لكم

Here's a fantastic article on the 'meaning of Ramadan' from alt.muslim by Ibrahim Abusharif, who also regularly posts equally thoughtful, and well-written web-logs at fromclay.blogspot.com. Check it out.

Ramadan, Counterculture, And Soul
In one month, we're given the assignment of defrocking the ephemeral world of its authority over us, and to reinstate a spiritual bearing that helps us perceive where permanence lies.
By Ibrahim N. Abusharif, October 4, 2005
Each religion has a history. Among the aspects common to most of them is the fact that seasons of fast have long been part of their spiritual regimen. For millennia sages of diverse experiences have offered insights, esoteric and practical, on the benefits associated with voluntary deprivation for a specific time and for a transcending purpose. They have expanded on how the molecular realm of food and drink, for example, connects with the intangible realm of will and choice and of gratitude and conscience, and how certain sublime knowledge comes only to those who have mastered their desires. But nestled among the insights there may also be an indictment especially germane today: apparently, there is something corrupting about going through a full year in this life without some major interruption in habit, a break from conformity, that helps us to step outside our cartoon world. Ramadan, the Muslim season of fast, is such a disturbance. In one month we're given the peculiar assignment to defrock the ephemeral world of its authority over us and to reinstate a spiritual bearing that, if unsuppressed, is competent in perceiving where permanence lies and privy to the sham of postmodernism and its strobe-light logic. In contemporary terms, fasting the month of Ramadan is a countercultural movement that confronts an ethos that tries to cancel the interior of religion and discount the importance of rituals in human life. What the modern aspirant does in Ramadan is hardly subtle. In depriving ourselves of food and drink from dawn to dusk, we implicitly defy a despotic marketing imagination that has deputized nearly all of us to serve a culture of "buy and dispose and buy more." This depletes resources, darkens the sky, and melts Arctic glaciers. But it also dulls our sense of the sacred. We each have a body, a fact we're constantly reminded of, and a body does have needs, organic and sensual, which we cater to day and night. But to submit to the curriculum of fundamentalist secularists that "body" defines humanity is a dereliction that revealed religion has always warned of. We are created from the clay of the earth but are also infused with a soul that has no material correlate in this world. Religion has recognized this duality, not as a glitch in our creation, but as a trial. Somewhere in the teachings of all the great ones (including Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad), there's an un-asterisked point: in negotiating the material and spiritual selves, one brushes up against salvation. The choice, they have stressed, comes down to the question: what aspect of our humanity do we devote ourselves to? For the Muslim, the nurturing of the soul is paramount and is guided by what we offhandedly call in pamphlets the "five pillars of Islam," essential rites of worship that have been passed down from the Prophet Muhammad. These pillars start to lose their meaning when we forget a baseline understanding of religion: Islam insists that each of us is born into this world with a pure condition, a state of grace, in fact. While humans may be feeble, sometimes foolish, belligerent, and forgetful, our center was made uncorrupt. This is equally true for men and women. The rites of worship and the way of life they engender are meant to bring us closer to our original state because it is not confused about God nor indifferent to our role in His world. Fasting the month of Ramadan is one of these pillars, unique among them, in fact, because, as far as rites go, its very form connects well with the unseen, since the "act" of fasting is about refraining, which is invisible and altogether private. Unlike prayer, pilgrimage, charity, and even the testimony of faith, which involve body, money, or voice, fasting is hidden and is permitted close dwelling with other concealed aspects of the human creation that the consumer of popular culture is scolded to neglect. As far as time is concerned, Ramadan is the ninth month of the Muslim calendar, but it is also a word with a lexical meaning. It refers to heat, the intense temperatures required to purify a precious metal from alloys mixed with it. The end result is an uncontaminated shine, purified by trial. On this count, Ramadan can be a disrobing experience. It's a month that can expose the unsavory alloys that dodged our defenses, not the least of which are envy, arrogance, selfishness, pretension, and a general inclination toward the ephemeral and a discounting of what lasts forever. During this time, our devotions are supposed to help us reclaim the organizing principles of revealed religion, which cannot really happen without regaining control over our desires. If the coup is successful, scholars say, then there's spiritual manumission, a kind of freedom in which we "remember." Interestingly, the Arabic word for "humanity" is related to the Arabic term that means "forgetfulness" (as some Arab linguists have suggested). What this implies is that the human being's chief hurdle in his salvation-quest is to actively remember the ultimate drama of life: we have a Maker; our lives are brief and with purpose; we are accountable for what we do; and after our earthly lives, we all shall live again and be brought back to God. The religion project has always sought to help us remember, not something new, but what we all know intuitively. In each of us there is this soul, a spiritual master, originally very close and aware of God. In the tumble of a crowded life, however, we are prone to silence or ignore that spirit. This is especially true when there is subtle pressure to forget our unseen origins. Ramadan mitigates this pressure. The spiritual aspirant is freer to see gain through subtraction: more faith through emptying, eloquence by learning silence, and honor in being humble. It is an axiom of Islam that matters of salvation and faith involve choice and effort, everyday. Faith in God and purity of heart do not survive a passive relationship. God-consciousness is not a state per se, but a course and always so. God by His very nature is forgiving and merciful. He does not need an event in history or violence to forgive. What He asks of us is to remember Him and have this remembrance honorably expressed in what we do. And in the event of failure, there is recourse in asking for forgiveness, supplicating with a penitent heart that rejects despair. In the Quran, despair is severely censured and associated with disbelief itself. The reason for this is self-evident: without hope, faith is simply not possible. I remember a conversation with a zoology professor of mine during my undergraduate days. He said that it is unlikely that creatures deep in the sea have any kind of awareness of what it means to be wet, not even an awareness commensurate to primitive brains. But the irony is not restricted to fish: the greater the immersion the less aware we become of it. There is an observation generally agreed upon among religious folk, that there is indeed an immersion in the fleeting realm, and it's nearly impossible to escape it without help. It is before our senses, from billboards to broadcasts. And after a while, we're disabled from even noticing. Ramadan is help, a knock on a door, an invitation to walk out of the cave.Ibrahim N. Abusharif is the editor-in-chief of the Starlatch Press, a Chicago-based publishing house. You may email him at ibrahim_feedback@yahoo.com or visit his blog From Clay.

Happy Rosh Hashanah!

2005-10-08T09:16:00.000-05:00

"Grapes? Figs? Melons? Well, fruit, anyhow..."
By Michael Handelzalts (taken from Haaretz - 10/8/05)

On New Year's eve we tasted a piece of apple after we dipped it in honey, as we are told to do in "Kitsur Shulkhan Aruch," the abbreviated codex of Jewish law, to make our year sweet. And this week, 5766 years ago, during the second week after the creation of the world, "the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed. And out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the Tree of Life also in the midst of the garden, and the Tree of Knowledge of good and evil ... And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: But of the Tree of the Knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die." God did not say a word about eating from the Tree of Life.

The snake beguiles Eve to eat from the tree of good and evil by assuring her that she will not die as a result. "She took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her." Ibn Ezra writes that after eating from the Tree of Knowledge, "Adam knew Eve his wife," and that means they had intercourse, as that is why it was called "the Tree of knowledge."Post factum, God admits that the snake got it right: "Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever." According to God's intelligent design, two simpletons can live forever - as long as they do not "know" each other and multiply. Had the snake been an honest broker to mankind and not Satan in disguise, he would have beguiled Eve to eat from both trees, starting with the Tree of Life, followed immediately by the Tree of Knowledge.Apples - or notBut which fruit are we talking about? Rashi deduced that as Adam and Eve "sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons" the fruit was a fig, as the tree that was their undoing was their refuge. Ibn Ezra says that had it been a fig, it should have been written that they sewed leaves of the Tree of Knowledge. To which Rashi counters that God did not mention a particular tree by name, as he did not want to shame the tree forever and blame it for being the cause of man's sin. The sages of the Talmud proposed that the fruit could have been a grape, a fig or even wheat.The Latin word for "fruit" in the bible used by Jerome is fructa. The Greek word for "apple" is melon, and the Latin is malum. In the seventh book of "The Aeneid," Vergil writes "et quos maliferea despectant moenia Abellae" about Abella, a town in Campania, being famous for the quality of its apples. Etymologists think that the town's name is the source for the English apple, the German apfel and the Russian jabloko. But no Jewish interpreter of the Bible mentions the apple as the fruit of temptation - although it is considered a symbol of carnal love: "As the apple tree among the trees of the wood, so is my beloved among the sons ... Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples: for I am sick of love" (Song of Solomon).

In the Avesta, the holy scriptures of the Zaroastrians, the Persian word pairidaeza means "an enclosed garden." This is the source of the Hebrew pardes and the Arabic firdus - orchard. The Greek historian Xenophon was deeply impressed with the Persian walled fruit garden and coined the Greek word paradeisos for it, which served the 70 people translating the Bible into Greek to come up with "the Garden of Eden." St. Jerome in his Latin translation opted for paradises, which in English became "paradise."Eris, the goddess of discord, came uninvited to the wedding of Thetis and Pelleas, the future parents of Achilles, and dropped a golden apple on the wedding feast table, with the inscription kallisti, "to the most beautiful one." The Trojan prince Paris was called to decide which of the three goddesses - Hera, Athena or Aphrodite - deserved to have the apple. He awarded it to Aphrodite, who promised him the love of Helen, wife of Menelaus, the woman who had the face that would launch a thousand ships, to fight the Trojan war.That golden apple earned the sobriquet malum discordia, "the apple of discord." The "good and evil" of the Tree of Knowledge were rendered into Latin as boni and mali. Thus in Christianity the apple became the fruit of discord between man and his maker. "The Fall of Man," a painting by the popular and highly respected Hugo Van Der Goes (1470), depicts an apple tree, with clear detail of both leaves and fruit, in the biblical Garden of Eden complete with Adam and Eve and the Devil. Thereafter, artists everywhere choose apples for the trees in Garden of Eden.

"Kitab al-tuffaha," "The Book of the Apple," is a short text ascribed to Aristotle, but most probably written in Arabic in the 10th century C.E. In 1235 it was translated into Hebrew by Abraham Ibn Hisdai. It is a treatise on death, supposedly dictated by Aristotle as he lay dying. Its Platonic viewpoint, the absence of a Greek version of the text (which was rendered as "Liber de Pomo" into Latin from the Hebrew), and its claim to be "Aristotle's last work" conspired to make it a (relatively) plausible candidate for the one relic that proved Aristotle's final submission to the irresistible charms of Judaism.Aristotle's friends offer to summon a doctor to his bedside, to which he says: "I will disobey the advice of the physician, and will employ no drug but the scent of an apple; which will keep me alive till I have given you the lecture to which you have a right." And by the end of the book the apple falls from his hand and he dies. This anecdote is strangely reminiscent of a midrash about Moses' demise, according to which the patriarch smells an apple before his death, and with its good fragrance his soul departs his body. The Torah is supposed to be a "Tree of Life" to those who follow it. Could it be that the fruit of the Tree of Life was also an apple? Benjamin Franklin quoted in his "Poor Richard's Almanac" the old adage that "an apple a day keeps the doctor away." So, for your very good health, ladies and gentlemen, have an apple!

السلطان "The Sultan"

2005-10-06T15:36:00.000-05:00

١

The summit of Cairo became visible above the top of Muqattam hill like bees’ hives - houses sticking to adjoining buildings with minarets and domes poking holes between them, the late afternoon covering (the area) in a sleepy, ashen veil.
The sultan, Noah, stopped the parade’s procession and turned towards his servant Mansur, saying: “Leave me, and return a little before dawn.” Mansur didn’t leave, but instead stood speechless and confused. The sultan said (again): “Go! The appointed time of prayers is quickly approaching.”
Mansur took out an ax from underneath his cloak, on the blade of which death was shining. He threw it at the feet of the Sultan and said sadly: “I was commissioned to kill you, my lord.” The sultan stared at him in a daze, so the man continued: “It was agreed that I should hide, (waiting) until night fell and then approach you stealthily in order to remove your head.”
The sultan’s face yellowed like the rays of the setting sun with anger as he asked: “Who?”
“The queen,” (Mansur replied.)
“The devil! Did she have accomplices?”
“General Kardash . . . and Wazir ‘Uqbitu . . . “
“Oh the horror! A palace of sand and a tempest of iniquity seeks the destruction of a man whose (whole) life has been dedicated to justice!”
“Truly, greed is the livelihood and the provisions of subjects, my lord.”
The sultan turned, muttering: “I will certainly punish the criminals.”
Mansur said sadly: “You will not be able to return, my lord.”
“What did you say?” (The sultan responded.)
“Their eyes are everywhere and their daggers are unsheathed.”
“No subjects have loved another sultan the way they have loved me.”
“That’s why they have devised their scheme so that they could pretend afterwards that you had gone into occlusion. But if we return, they will discover my betrayal of them and they will descend upon us (with the fury) of demons.”
“Are we resigned to leaving my flock at their mercy?”
“Flee! . . . Disappear completely from their sight. I pretended to betray you in order to rescue you. They told me to return to bring the good news to them of your assassination and burial.”
The sultan’s face paled even more severely as he blurted out: “The queen, that viper, the foreheads which bent before me were heavily burdened with hypocrisy and deceit. The tongues with which she doubly and fervently praised (me) were soaked in poison. The body which obeys love trembles above waves of secret sinfulness. How did all of this happen behind my back?”
Mansur, suffering, said: “How my sadness grows, my lord.”
“Enough sadness, for what do I have now beside that? Nature will explode from its dark shell in a flaming fire of rage and revenge,” (the sultan responded.)
“Disappear, my lord! Go to the most remote highland (of Upper Egypt) or to the land of Syria. Here is a purse of gold.”
The sultan hesitated motionless as he changed into a phantom under the eyelashes of night. Mansur said anxiously: “You don’t have time. Flee before fate overtakes you.” The sultan moaned, saying: “Do you want me to renounce life, defenseless, to voluntarily seek death, to wander pursued, without a flock, to leave and look for a flock without a shepherd? The world is wide and full of starvation and plagues.”
٢
Sultan Noah lived on the edges of the city which were beyond the cemeteries. Only his closest associates had ever seen his face, and the few of his subjects who had witnessed him in the yearly festival parades. So he did what he could to disguise himself and he used the gold to buy grains. In this way, he spent his days bartering and he devoted his nights either to contemplating the revenge he would take on his enemies, or else he continued (to pray) the religious, devotional prayers which he so loved during the days of his kingship.
The news spread of his disappearance like the wind and was equally difficult to keep secret. Indeed, the conspirators worked to publicize it. So it spread from tongue to tongue and from quarter to quarter. Some of his business partners relayed it to him: “Have you heard what they’re saying about the disappearance of Sultan Noah? People are confused, saddened and asking questions. Some say that he used to spend the night praying on top of Muqattam hill, perhaps wild animals devoured him? Or perhaps highway robbers killed him? Perhaps he withdrew into some cave like the monks? That’s not to mention the queen’s grief or the minister and commander’s confusion! Oh, how much of that there is! If only you could see the people gathering in the streets. Oh, how painful is the mourning for the absent beloved!
Then the news announced on a front-page article and issued the proclamation: ‘The crown prince has been pronounced – a boy of six – sultan. And he had appointed Wazīr ‘Uqbitu, Vice Regent, and General Kardash, Wazīr and General.’
Noah received the news like a hammer blow to his head. He heard his death knell on every tongue. His ego evaporated into air. He became intimately associated with death while he was still alive. He was unable to defend himself against the onslaught completely. From death, (he acquired) an awareness of creation since he had died. That is to say the death which seemed at first obscure/ambiguous to him as he passed through it. Life wasn’t about a heart beating or blood flowing, but it was a meaning reflected in an awareness of humanity. Noah had died. He no longer considered revenge something laudable. Since another person had taken his place on the throne, a stranger had usurped his bed, and his citizens had been (unnecessarily) charged a tax of sadness and tears for his (loss.) He could see no meaning to his returning. He would demolish the world which was the greatest feast of his construction and his formation. And so the years passed, confirming his death, crushing his worldly life. For his own good, he traded all of his nights for devotional prayers. And he spent the whole amount. In this way, his path to the threshold of God’s (house) and His courtyard were cleared and made easily accessible.
This new information seemed to him a greenish-yellow color. The sultan was not the only person who had disappeared. See how the flavor of life changes, and its face is frowning. He was forcing what was proceeding, he was missing what should be enjoyed, he was withholding what he should spend at any price, he found too expensive what was really cheap. Social situations get worse, misfortunes are compounded, tyranny becomes more oppressive and iniquity becomes overwhelming. The people returned to recollecting their deceased sultan and appealing for the mercy of his bygone era. Noah returned to feeling life rushing through the limbs of his body as if in an image of his memory. But the flood of deliberate rumors about the sultan having afflicted (his) subjects, (all contrived) for the sake of ruining his reputation. (There were whispers,) some saying that he had been careless, others that he had (spent too much time) devoted to the habits of monks, still others that he had been a lecherous homosexual. Some even said that he had become so crazy, he told the members of his household to worship him. Most people doubted the truth of what was being said, but others believed the truth of it. And anxious confusion prevailed, draining (the people) in a trial of distress and affliction. So Noah became anxious and depressed. After having become satisfied with death, he began to feel the pain of what had been destroyed with death.
٣
In the fifteenth year of his disappearance, a friend named Talib visited him. He was panting from agitate excitement. Quickly, he threw himself on the sofa, saying: “The heart of the city is throbbing on account of the new delegation.”
So Noah asked with the tranquility which his nature had assumed after years of praying piously: “What happened to the heart of the city?”
“Haven’t you heard? Sultan Noah is not dead!”
A fresh confusion uprooted his tranquility and he muttered: “Noah’s not dead!?”
“Verily, he is alive and working amongst the people.”
“Talib, that’s impossible.”
“It’s the truth, with neither embellishment nor detraction!”
“Have you seen him yourself?”
“Of course.”
“Had you seen his image before?”
“I frequently saw him at festivals.”
“And you have found that the one you see now is the same sultan?”
“Precisely and exactly! And many others have recognized him too.”
“How mysterious and amazing!”
“The oppressed quickly rallied around him…”
“What did the young sultan Mutawakkil do?”
“A fight is flaring up between the two parties, that of Mutawakkil and that of Noah. Noah’s men continue to fight in disparate factions, but they are weakening the (young) sultan’s army.”
Noah mumbled in confusion: “A fight between the father and his son!”
“The son claims that the other is an imposter and swindler.”
But Noah knew that his adversary was his son.
Talib said excitedly: “In the path of justice, everything else becomes trivial.”
٤
The soul of Noah shook. It pulled from his life of seclusion and devotional prayers back into the vastness of the world. He heard his name repeated on the tongues of citizens. He heard voices calling him, asking him to deliver them from the injustice and iniquity which they were suffering. He was able to imagine, momentarily, that he had been resurrected, that he was alive (again,) that death had died. But quickly, he was defeated and dying again. He knew that that life belonged to another man. Maybe he was the imposter or crazy or the con-artist. So he became convinced that his death was forever interminable.
Still, Talib said to him: “Come with us to his barracks outside the Fatuh gate to swear to him (your) allegiance.”
(Noah’s) soul yearned to see him, so the two men went together into the darkness of the night until they joined a group too numerous to count. The two of them stood in the long battalions, the foremost parts of which were in front of the sultan’s tent and the furthest parts of which lay at the edge of the desert. Then he appeared before them, and (Noah) found that he resembled himself in height, although somewhat thinner in build. His eyes shown in the strong light and his features bore the mark of nobility. (Noah) bent down to kiss his hand, as he said: “We give you our allegiance again, just as we gave it to you the first time.”
The resurrected sultan said: “God confirms and supports the believers.”
“In order that victory might come from your hands,” (Sultan Noah responded.)
“Have you any previous experience in combat?”
“I was a soldier before I became a merchant.”
“Then join our forces!” (The resurrected sultan exclaimed.)
٥
Noah said to himself: ‘Truly, the man is a real sultan. There is no doubt about that. And to the degree that he is a sultan, to that degree I am dead. I destroyed myself, protecting myself from death; but he assumed a nature that was not his own, challenging death. No hope of existence will ever return to me, except (existence) under his wings. And such is the game of life and death which destroyed my life. Rather, he is the man who has devoted all his strength fighting in the way of lost justice. His face speaks with nobility and sincerity and determination. And if my intuition is sure of this fact, is it important whether he is the real sultan or not? His soul urged him to return to his hermetic isolation. But he quickly became ashamed of his weakness. So he decided to become a soldier in the sultan’s army and perform his devotional acts through jihad.
٦
The two armies eagerly rushed into the battle. And as was customary practice in those times, General Kardash proceeded to challenge the (new) sultan to fight him. Whenever a knight volunteered, (Kardash) felled him. But the (resurrected) sultan was leading most of his soldiers (by words rather than action.) So the real sultan charged into the battle. But General Kardash didn’t recognize him. The two exchanged violent blows, but Noah gained the upper hand against his adversary and threw him to the ground. He stood over his bleeding head and said: “Die you traitor! Don’t you know me yet?”
Kardash gazed at him with fading vision. His face was unable to express his shock as he murmured: “You! . . . No . . .No . . .” and his spirit departed.
The two armies were ferociously engaged, and the young sultan was leading his soldiers with a dexterity which surprised Noah. The battle continued until the sun set behind the walls (of the city) and both sides returned to their camps.
٧
On the second day, the young sultan appeared between the battalion lines seeking a duel. A knight went out to challenge him and a intense fight encircled them which Noah followed with a racing heart. He found himself longing for the safety of his son, yet he felt guilty for his longing. A heavy grief overwhelmed him. And when the young boy was victorious, Noah shut his eyes as if running from the pain of this world.
The youthful sultan continued to challenge the bravest knights and his victory was also repeated until the new sultan said to Noah: “Go out and face him! You are an experienced warrior!” Noah hesitated, sunken in his anxious agitation, so the sultan said again in a commanding tone: “Go! God will assist you.” Noah didn’t know any way out. The young sultan didn’t recognize his father, so he didn’t realize the conflicting emotions with which he was wrestling in his chest as he said to him with hatred: “You killed Kardash! You will pay the price of your crime!” The father grappled with his son and the son rushed to kill his father. But the father received his blows skillfully, deflecting them with dexterity and avoiding to injure him. But the skill of the son forced Noah into a tight corner and the son persisted, with mortal blows intended to lead to certain death. Indeed, the father didn’t know of any other way out, except an unexpected blow which tore his (son’s) sword away, leaving him defenseless. The young sultan stood waiting the final blow, but Noah hesitated, at which point voices from the new sultan’s army bellowed: “Off with his head!” But Noah was completely paralyzed. So his son’s soldiers attacked to defend their sultan and the armies again engaged in battle until sunset.
٨
Noah was summoned to meet the (new) sultan who asked him harshly: “Why didn’t you finish off our enemy and your enemy?”
Noah said apologetically: “I don’t kill defenseless men, my lord.”
(The sultan) said angrily: “Nevertheless, you squandered any justifaction when you wasted the blood of our dead men.!”
Noah did not doubt the truth of his words, and he sunk deeper into a state of sadness and distress.
٩
The two armies returned to the confrontation on the third day. By noon, the scales had tipped in favor of the new sultan. The sultan and his men met in the evening and the victorious army triumphantly entered the city where a spirit of enthusiasm and happiness greeted them. The new sultan decreed that the young sultan, the queen and the prominent men of their administration be thrown in jail. And the new sultan summoned Noah and said to him: “You also are to be placed in prison until a judge decides your fate.” Noah asked, stunned: “Don’t my actions, proven in battle, count in my favor?” “Nothing counts in your favor except your innocence,” the new sultan replied.
١٠
In this way, the prison brought together the groups, all shackled in chains. The first person to recognize Noah was his servant Mansur, who had rescued him from treason and who had become after a chamberlain as reward for that fictitious crime. He looked at his master in a daze and then shouted joyfully: “My lord!” The group surrounded him until they recognized him and immediately their muscles shivered. Mansur called to the young sultan: “This is your father, my lord, this is the true sultan of Egypt.”
Noah began to let his eyes gaze between the queen, his old agents, and his son. Then he said: “Of course I’m your father. My men and your mother betrayed me and you didn’t know.”
The young sultan muttered: “My father!?”
“Of course! I am your father, Noah, the victim of treason and treachery.”
“But why are you bound in chains like us?”
“It is a punishment for my refusal to kill you.”
The son said anxiously: “How much that (moment) confused me.”
Noah again began to scan with his eyes (the faces) of the queen and the rest of the men who had betrayed him. Then he said sarcastically: “Saver the consequences of your treason.” Then he motioned with his beard to himself as he said: “As I saver the consequences of my carelessness.”

(translation by khalil al-wafa' - not to be cited without permission.)
{excerpt from N. Mahfouz's collection of parables:}
"Satan's Preaching" - al-shaytan ya'izu

back to school days...

2005-09-26T16:32:00.000-05:00

Today was the first day of the Autumn quarter here at the University of Chicago, and tomorrow is my first day of classes. I am actually the kind of person who looks forward to going back to school. And I know how nerdy that sounds since most of my family and closest friends cannot understand what it is that I'm still doing in school. Nevertheless, there is a kind of somber, end of summer, beginning of fall, contemplative feeling to this time of year, which is part of what has always made it one of my favorite seasons in life's great cycle.
In separate but related business, to date, I have been reluctant to write too much about myself or my professors in this blog; however, much of my time and energy over the next ten weeks will be consumed by the classes I'm taking with those three or four women and men- so I have decided to use this web-journal for productive, creative, brainstorming activities - on the content of those classes only. (I will not mention my professors' names, although anyone who knows them will clearly see their influence on the thoughts and reflections which I have been and will continue to post in this web-log. The best ideas are theirs and any misconceptions/fallacious interpretations are entirely my own.)
That being said, I am taking four arabic language and literature classes:

* advanced arabic grammar and syntax
* pre-islamic(jahiliyya) poetry: mu'allaqat, su'luk, ritha'
* islamic love poetry (thru the div. school/history of literature)
* modern arabic literature: the novels of naguib mahfouz (awlad haritna, al-zuqaq al-midaq, layali alf layla)

I am extremely excited and a little bit nervous to go back. I have spent the last month as a full-time father with my one year old daughter. That was work! And it was so rewarding. But it's time to change gears again and settle back into the other routine that I know so well. I will have more to say as the quarter progresses re: those four arabic language and literature classes. I look forward to using this journal as an informal, though serious forum for free and unfettered, intellectual ramblings on what I'm reading, translating and writing over the next ten weeks. i love fall and all its somber, contemplative dimensions. ma'shallah....

City of Brass: "Islam and Freedom"

2005-09-24T15:00:00.000-05:00

f.y.i.
an interesting article from one of my favorite web-logs.

City of Brass: Islam and Freedom - Principled pragmatism at the maghrib of one age, the fajr of another

"The Second Coming" - W.B. Yeats

2005-09-24T11:01:00.000-05:00

"Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all convictions, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? "

"imagining incarnation"

2005-09-23T13:00:00.000-05:00

the pine mountain woods and wild aimless nights,
the shapeless memories and sleepless shadows
haunt the caves and cliffs of my rocky soul;
where a grey-blue eyed wolf ran dirty and screaming
through the dark blue-green valleys of dream.

chasing the blood and silence of summers and dawn,
in water and stone rocky streams he watched
a reflection distroted and torn.
the broken mirror and a choking prophet-
silently stardusted heavens in bleeding muddy earth,
wait an angel or a demon to be born.

and the night was shattered by the scream of a child-
drawing her first breath. creation transformed
in two delicate lungs, the night reconciled with day.
an innocence stronger than all the pain of the world,
ten fingers that dripped light,
from a tiny body transfused,
with the flame that set fire to the stars.

stars burning like sand seen by silent cyprus trees.
sand like prayers, whispered and blown on a new-moon journey-
carried by warm wind to expectant heavens,
and set delicately to shine against an infinitely receding sky.
stardust prayers, sandwarm wind,
heaven and earth suspended beneath the soft bare feet
of a lupine desert pilgrim alone.

and a desert wind awakens the dreaming soul,
as breath like a finger draws pictures in colored stone-
writing songs that turn in the swirling sand.
songs silent and old, in a language long forgotten
sung only by children and stones.

deserts freckled the color of a woman's dark back,
and wind like a finger speaking sense to the curves.
sand to the wind, a chill from a crystal,
all is flesh on flesh and by flesh eternal.

the earth is on fire with the light of creation:
a mother straining, a wave breaking, a sun rising
heard all in the laughter of children playing,
a boy and a girl are the clear mountain stream
that splashes and spits and runs throughout time.
a water dissolving both angels and demons,
a crystalline spray painting rainbows and dreams.

we are those children and the world is our stream.
we are the song of the sand and the fingers of wind.
we are the rainbow burning, the ocean turning, heart unfolding
two children laughing in the swirl of the world.
we are flesh on flesh and by flesh eternal.

الطاووس

2005-09-22T17:05:00.000-05:00

الطاووس

"Allah has provided wonderful creations including the living, the lifeless, the stationary and the moving. He has established such clear proofs for His delicate creative power and great might that minds bend down to Him in acknowledgment thereof and in submission to Him, and arguments about His oneness strike our ears. He has created birds of various shapes which live in the burrows of the earth, in the openings of high passes and on the peaks of mountains.
They have different kinds of wings, and various characteristics. They are controlled by the rein of His authority. They flutter with their wings in the expanse of the vast firmament and the open atmosphere. He brought them into existence from non-existence in strange external shapes, and composed them with joints and bones covered with flesh. He prevented some of them from flying easily in the sky because of their heavy bodies and allowed them to use their wings only close to the ground. He has set them in different colors by His delicate might and exquisite creative power......
The most amazing among them in its creation is the peacock, which Allah has created in the most symmetrical dimensions and arranged its hues in the best arrangement with wings whose ends are inter-leaved together and whose tail is long. When it moves to its female it spreads out its folded tail and raises it up so as to cast a shade over its head as if it were the sail of a boat being pulled by the sailor. It feels proud of its colors and swaggers with its movements. It copulates like the cocks. It leaps on the female for fecundation like lustful energetic men at the time of fighting.
I am telling you all this from observation, unlike he who narrates on the basis of weak authority, as for example, the belief of some people that it fecundates the female by a tear which flows from its eyes and when it stops on the edges of the eyelids the female, she swallows it and lays its eggs thereby. If its feathers could be likened to anything growing on land, you would say that it is a bouquet of flowers collected during every spring. If you likened them to cloths they would be like printed apparels or amazing variegated cloths of Yemen. If you likened them to ornaments then they would be like gems of different color with studded silvers. The peacock walks with vanity and pride, and throws open its tail and wings and laughs - admiring the handsomeness of its dress and the hues of its necklacke of gems. But when it casts its glance at its legs it cries loudly with a voice which indicates its call for help and displays its true grief, because its legs are thin like the legs of Indo-Persian cross-bred cocks. At the end of its shin there is a thin thorn and on the crown of its head there is a bunch of green variegated feathers. Its neck begins in the shape of a goblet and its stretch upto its belly is like the hair-dye of Yemen in color or like silk cloth put on a polished mirror which looks as if it has been covered with a black veil, except that on account of its excessive lustre and extreme brightness it appears that a lush green color has been mixed with it. Along the openings of its ears there is aline of shining bright daisy color like the thin end of a pen. Whiteness shines on the black background. There is hardly a hue from which it has not taken a bit and improved it further by regular polish, luster, silken brightnes and brilliance. It is like scattered blossoms which have not been seasoned by the rains of spring or the sun of summer........
How can sharpness of intellect describe such a creation, or faculty of mind, or the utterances of describers manage to tell of it? Even its smallest parts have made it impossible for the imagination to pick them out or for tongues to describe them. Glorified is Allah who has disabled intellects from describing the creation which He placed openly before the eyes and which they see bounded, shaped, arranged and colored. He also disabled tongues from briefly describing its qualities and also from expanding in its praise."
('Ali b. Abu Talib, "On the wonderful creation of the peacock," {Sermon 163(4) } Nahj al-balagha translated by Sayed 'Ali Reza, Karachi 1973)

"Is the U.S. Ready for Egyptian Democracy?"

2005-09-22T15:37:00.000-05:00

f.y.i.
A recent article from the Washington Post by Geneive Abdo.

Is the U.S. Ready for Egyptian Democracy?

"the monotheists"

2005-09-19T14:48:00.000-05:00

"The intent of this work is not to make peace or to stir up war, or even ill feelings, among the three religious communities, but simply to lay out their comon roots, their evolution over time, and what I see as their striking resemblances and their equally striking differences. I am not so foolish as to think this is a value-free exercise. Comparisons can of course be read as invidious; certain resemblances can be parsed as reductive,, or relativizing, particularly among believers who are characterized by thier conviction of their own unique destiny, as these three certainly are. But this same approach can also broaden understanding in quite remarkable ways. It is a little like experiencing one's own personality in one's offspring, where traits may appear far less endearing and charming than we imagine them in ourselves. It is one of the more salutary effects of forcing these three particular siblings to pose, however briefly, for a family portrait."
(from the preface of F.E. Peters's new book, The Monotheists: Jews, Christians and Muslims in Conflict and Competition - vol. II The Words and Will of God, Princeton UP, 2003)

On the sayings of Jesus (al-Masih)

2005-09-19T09:25:00.000-05:00

Abu 'Uthman al-Jahiz (d.255/868) reports in his al-Bayan (3:157) that Jesus said:
"Wo unto you, slaves of this world! How your practices contradict your principles, and your whims your reason! Your words are a remedy which cures disease, but your actions are a disease which defies cure. You are not like the vine, which has fine leaves, tasty fruit, and is easy to reach, but are in truth like the acacia tree, which has few leaves, many thorns, and is difficult to reach! Woe unto you, slaves of this world! You have placed good works beneath your feet, [thinking] that they can be attained by whoever so wishes, and have placed this world far above your heads [thinking] that it cannot be reached. You are neither pious slaves nor worthy freemen. Woe unto you, wage-earners of sin! You take your wages and spoil the work. You shall meet with what you most fear, for the Taskmaster will soon see the work you have spoilt and the wages you have taken. Woe to you, debtors of evil! You begin with gifts before discharging your debt, you volunteer to perform what is superfluous but do not perform what you have been commanded to do. The owner of the debt will not accept gifts until his debt has been discharged."

al-Jahiz reports in the al-Mahasin wa-l-Addad that Jesus said to his disciples:
"Man is created into this world in four stages, in three of whihch he feels secure and in the fourth of which he is ill-disposed and fears that God will forsake him. In the first stage, he is born in three darknesses: the darkness of the belly, the darkness of the womb, and the darkness of the placenta. GOd provides for him in the darkness of the cavity of the belly. WHen he is brought out from the darkness of the belly, he falls upon milk which he does not advance toward on foot or leg, or obtain with his hand or move stronly towrd, but he is forced to it and rewarded with it until flesh and blood grow upon him. Weaned from milk, he falls upon the third stage: food provided by his parents, who earn it either lawfully or unlawfully. When his parents die, people take pity on him, one person feeding him, another giving him drink, another sheltering him, and another clothing him. When he fals upon the fourth stage and has grown strong and erect and has become a man, he fears that he will not be provided for, so he attacks people, betrays their trust, robs their belongings, and carries away their wealth, fearing that God Almighty might forsake him."

(excerpts taken from the collection of translations by Tarif Khalidi, The Muslim Jesus: Sayings and Stories in Islamic Literature, Harvard UP, 2001)

chapel at the top of jabal musa

2005-09-18T17:42:00.000-05:00

The chapel at the top of Jabal Musa- Mt. Sinai

in the beginning...

2005-09-18T15:25:00.000-05:00

باسم الله الرحمن الرحيم

i am an immigrant in this brave new world of blogging - "'a stranger in a strange land." only in the last few months have i begun to explore some of the sites which dot the landscape as innumerably as grains of sand in the desert. perhaps it was the sheer number of other postings which gave me the courage to so quickly offer my own humble reflections to such a cacophonous realm of discourse...for whomever might care to listen.

i am a son and brother, a husband and father, a student and teacher, a patient and a physician. this web-log will record and publish my thoughts and musings on subjects as personal as these aspects of my life, as well as on subjects more socially relevant like religion, politics and literature.

an award-winning photograph: my radiant wife doing yoga along lake michigan, nine months pregnant

that is a picture of my daughter on her first birthday...and this one is of my brother's son and me...

in 1998, i lived outside of jerusalem, on the road to bethlehem, at tantur ecumenical institute and i studied at both hebrew university on mt. scopus and bethlehem university near manger square. in that time i traveled a great deal, both around israel and palestine, as well as jordan, sinai and egypt. although the land called holy had occupied an enormous amount of my religious imagination and spiritual life before that year, my physical relationship with that inspiring region began during that adolescent pilgrimage of mine.

i have been a student of arabic language and literature since that time, spending a lot of time at the univeristy of notre dame concentrating on theological and liturgical treatises of ninth century arab-christian authors. i am now a phd student at the university of chicago, spending more time reading the poetry of al-Mutanabbi, the sermons of the Nahj al-Balagha by 'Ali b. Abu Talib, or the modern novels of Naguib Mahfouz.

Rasa'il Ikhwan al-Safa'

2005-09-18T13:43:00.000-05:00

MS Title page: Rasa'il ikhwan al-saffa wa khullan al-wafa'