Dusty Mosques in Cairo
August 31, 2009
Even as a big fan of Cairo, I still have to admit that I envy the mosques in other places.. like Iran. I love colorful mosques such as the Shah Mosque in Isfahan. We could throw in lots of wonderful mosques in Turkey with iznik tiles.. beautiful! Visit Cairo and you will not find that same color. It's almost like traditional Cairene architects did not like bright colors.
In fact Cairo does have some nice tile work. The first example is from the Mosque of Sultan Nasir Muhammad on the Citadel (see here for a past blog on this mosque).
Ignore the monstrosity on the right, which gets all the attention. The real interest is the green domed mosque on the left. It has two minarets that have green and blue tiling. That is not the original dome, which collapsed in the 16th century, but its green tiles replicate the original. This tiling was completed under Persian influence and is quite striking in the context of Cairo. There are moments when I should be happy: "Ah, here is my colorful Persian architecture!" But it never looks as colorful as it should. That green dome looks awfully dusty and the minarets hardly make an impression.
Here is a second example, the Mosque of Aqsunqur (see here for past blog on this mosque). This mosque is known as the "blue" mosque for a reason that becomes obvious as you look around inside:
So again I should be happy. This is a little bit of Istanbul added to the mosque by the Ottomans. But take another look at those tiles. They are kind of dusty.. just a little.
You might be catching my drift. I am not sure if colors work well in Cairo. With the wind delivering desert sand into the city and with rain being exceedingly rare, I'm not sure vibrant colors were ever a great choice for architects. As the above two example show, colorful styles popular in other countries were indeed imported into Cairo, but they are notably ineffective when you look at them. Cairo's mosques have to be able to take a layer of dust and still look good.
The use of different colored stone to create emblems or designs is a handsome feature of many mosques in Cairo. Below, for example, is the front of the Mosque of Sultan Hasan:
That adds a beautiful and intricate touch to the front of the mosque, but it is hardly vibrant and the layer of dust is obvious. But that's my point: architecture in Cairo works best when it can take a layer of dust and not look distractingly dirty. A layer of colorful tiles here would just look filthy, but this kind of stone work comes through OK. The upshot is the possibility that architectural style is to some degree molded by the characteristics of the environment. Looked at from that angle, Cairene mosques are quite successful.
The Good Samaritan Engine
August 30, 2009
Some books take me right back to childhood, and The Little Engine That Could is one of those. Above is the page with an illustration of all the toys being carried to the children over the mountain. This's why it is so important to get one of the passing trains to help out and pull them over the mountain. Children need their toys! It's just an illustration of popular toys from that time, but now they all look like antiques.
The story of The Little Engine That Could went through a number of transformations, but it appears that the book as it now stands goes back to 1930.
One thing that leaps out at me now is the way it is a re-telling of the parable of the Good Samaritan. In the biblical story a man is attacked by bandits and left for dead, then lying there in need of help a priest and then a temple assistant pass him by. A lowly Samaritan then finally offers help.
The Little Engine That Could is almost identical: a train breaks down leaving toys stranded and then three trains come by, and each in turn finds an excuse not to help even though they are able. Finally a small blue train comes by that is used only for switching trains in the yard and has never gone over the mountain. It's an outsider train in comparison with the ones that have come by. But this small blue train is willing to give it a try and helps out the toys.
At the point when the little blue train starts huffing and puffing to get over the hill the book morphs into its second theme: positive thinking can-doism. The little train tells itself: "I think I can, I think I can, I think I can.." And the genius of it is that if you repeat that a few times it sounds like a train.
The moral is right there on the surface: work hard and you will succeed. Second, and somewhat in tension, is the moral of helping out someone in need. That "I think I can" theme is the one that gets remembered most readily, but the second "Good Samaritan" theme is right there throughout. I tend to be a bit didactic when reading to my daughter, and try to point out the lessons. She had an easy time grasping the idea of helping someone when broken down. (When we got outside she even pretended that her little bike had broken down and that she needed to wait for the little blue engine to help her.) The more "American" theme of positive thinking was a little abstract for her yet.
The story as a whole somewhat tempers the can-do spirit. In the opening pages we see a red train break down:
Then all of a sudden she stopped with a jerk. She simply could not go another inch. She tried and she tried, but her wheels would not turn.
So the story begins with an irretrievable breakdown. It's evidently not the case that every good engine will be able to say "I think I can, I think I can, I think I can.." and get over the mountain. But that red train disappears once the little blue train arrives. Somehow it is just gone. That disappearance is what sets up the exaltation of getting up the mountain:
I read this book a lot when I was a child, and I wonder the extent to which this spirit of hard work and positive thinking takes root in a child. It's something of a moral poem.. and one that I need to keep in mind now as I climb my own mountain.
Australia at Second Hand
August 28, 2009
One point about Émile Durkheim's Elementary Forms of Religious Life is the extent to which it relies on other people's accounts of religion in Australia. The book is almost entirely based on religious life among Australian aboriginal tribes, but Durkheim feels no need to even apologize for the fact that he has never visited or seen these tribes. Nor does he even hint that he wants to. Other people have been there and written big books on the topic, and that is good enough for him. He gets to experience Australia at second hand and then theorize about it.
I'm not sure one could write a book like his today, although I think that's terrible. There should be acceptance of scholars working at different levels of expertise (as I argued here). Why should a social theorist not be able to "borrow the eyes" of a scholar who has spent a lot of time in the field? If Durkheim's book came out now it would be, I think, classified as unserious for his complete lack of expertise on the subject of Australian religion.. and specialists would feel resentful of his appropriation of their material.
The books he relies on for information on Australian religious traditions are those by Carl Strehlow and then those by Sir Walter Baldwin Spencer and Francis James Gillen. They published their work at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. The books by Spencer and Gillen are mostly available in full on Google Books (here, here, and here), which should make us stop and think: the raw material for Durkheim's theory of religion is sitting fully available on Google.. ready for anyone interested.
In the introduction to Northern Tribes of Central Australia Spencer and Gillen note something about their methodology:
That would appear to be the enabling factor for the work of someone like Durkheim. Spencer and Gillen provide so much bulk documentation that a reader is free to "view" the experience and then disagree with the authors about its significance. Since Spencer and Gillen thank James Frazer effusively for his help, it's clear that on their own they would have thought along different lines than Durkheim when it comes to religion.
Copyright is a total hassle, but since works such as those by Spencer and Gillen were published prior to 1922, they are available. For many places in the world there are early and important descriptive volumes. And the thing is, there will never be replacements for these volumes because the world changed so quickly after the first scholarly and Western contacts. If one wanted to know about Australian religious traditions it would actually be better to content oneself with reading Spencer and Gillen via Google instead of traveling to Australia now.. one hundred years later. Lots to see in Australia. In other words, better eyes for viewing this traditional world will never be found.. and this holds true for other parts of the world, which also have their classic accounts.
Gleanings from Maqrizi III:
A Sultan Orders a Mosque
August 25, 2009
Three years ago I wrote a post about the Mosque of al-Zahir Baybars in Cairo. It's an infrequently visited mosque since it lies well to the north of standard Islamic Cairo. The mosque is currently moldering away, but it was ambitiously constructed and the first monumental construction of the Mamluk period, built by the Sultan whose lengthy and vigorous reign—from 1260-77 AD—settled the Mamluk system into place.
Most every mosque in Cairo is known by the title of its builder, who was inevitably a ruler or very high official. A mosque in Cairo thus functioned as a lasting tribute to the person who built it. But to what extent did a Sultan participate in the design of a mosque? Or was the entire process delegated to a specialist? Maqrizi's description of this mosque gives an unusually clear—and probably accurate—depiction of the relationship between Sultan and mosque. Maqrizi mentions at the opening of this section that he is working from a biography of Sultan al-Zahir Baybars.. and presumably that explains the source for his details.
Choosing a location was the first step:
[Sultan al-Zahir Baybars] sent out his commander in chief... and a group of engineers to search for a fitting place where he might put a mosque. They went their way to that end and agreed upon the halting place for the Sultan’s camels. The Sultan replied when he heard this: “By God, I’m not going to build a mosque at the place for camels! I would prefer to place it at the square where I play polo; it’s my place for relaxation.”
The Sultan formulated the idea for building a mosque and then sent out deputies to decide on a location. The Sultan was actively involved enough to find the first choice disagreeable (the stopping place for camels!) and to offer an alternative. We sense the biographer at work behind these details, setting his subject in a good light (sacrificing a polo field!), but a level of involvement and choice on the part of the Sultan remains likely.
Next the Sultan supplied basic structural ideas for the mosque:
He drew in front of him the outline of the mosque, ordered that its entrance be like the entrance to his madrasa, and specified that over its mihrab be a dome on the model of the dome at the tomb of Imam al-Shafi‘a...
We would hardly expect a Mamluk Sultan to busy himself too much with architecture, but he needs no technical knowledge to specify three things: 1) size and layout, 2) style of entrance, and 3) a dome like at the tomb of Imam Shafi'a. The Sultan knew a few standout features from other structures in Cairo and asks for these elements to be incorporated into his mosque. Presumably his engineers would take it from there and then artists and stone workers would work out the details of the design.
Much of the reign of Sultan Al-Zahir Baybars was spent in warfare, but even outside of Cairo he had an eye out for materials that could be used in the prestige construction of his mosque. Having taken Acre from the Franks he razes its citadel.. and in the process he saw some materials that could be useful:
He took for himself all the wood from the citadel along with any panels of marble that were found inside it. He loaded some of the ships found at Yaffa with this material and sent them on to Cairo, ordering that the wood be used to make a maqsura for his mosque... and that the marble panels be used for the mihrab.
The Sultan had nothing to say about the designing of the marble or the wood. Those were details outside his interest. But he recognized valuable materials for his mosque.
In each of these example the picture is of a Sultan actively involved with the construction of his mosque, but at a fair conceptual distance. He has something to say about the placement, design, and materials, but nothing about the real details of the mosque. It happens that this mosque was the first to feature the striped masonry, a style known as ablaq. We can surmise that the Sultan had nothing to say about a detail like that.. an innovation that probably would have stemmed from the actual artists and builders at work on the mosque.
So What Is Theory?
August 24, 2009
I will shortly have more to say about Ernest Gellner's book Muslim Society. The opening essay is an ambitious attempt to work out a social theory for the central Islamic lands. He makes interesting use of the idea of "theory".. a vague word for both students and teachers.
The first passage comes during the opening examination of David Hume's Natural History of Religion. Hume begins by drawing attention to the way polytheism precedes monotheism. Gellner then comments:
The attribution of unilinealism to Hume is based on an opening remark of Hume which can just as well be interpreted as a simple assertion of fact rather than as theory. It does indeed so happen that in the past two millennia mankind has shifted from polytheism to monotheism, on balance. But is that a law or a trend, which could justify extrapolation? [8, emphasis Gellner]
Gellner thus raises a question about Hume's reportage: did he mean it as a fact or as a theory? The idea that these two things—fact and theory—could be confused at all I found surprising for a moment. One thinks of "theory" as something airy and abstract and "fact" as the opposite, specific and concrete. The key in this case is that it would be possible to extrapolate from a theory, while a fact just kind of sits there inert.
Let me try out this differentiation on a statement of my own: "In 2008 president Barack Obama won the Presidency after running on the theme of Change against an unpopular Republican Party that had been in power for the last eight years." That is a "fact," —with some possible minor alterations I think everyone would agree to it. On the other hand one might be able to see in the statement a "theory" as well, perhaps about the use of a certain theme at the close of an unpopular governing party. In that case you could call this an American electoral theory (obvious as it may be). Or if someone extrapolated even further to some tendency for cyclical change in political dynasties the world over, then we would be dealing with a broader theory of power.
The essential element of "theory" is thus its ability to serve as a paradigm. It can come in the form of a specific case that can be applied across to other cases, or as a pure abstraction that can be related down to specific cases. With the help of a theory one can look at the messy events of the world and find particulars that can be aligned and given at least a semblance of coherence.
Theory in this sense is, finally, what scholarship is about. The alternative is unthinkable: we are stuck in a world with lots of concrete particulars that occur in no particular order and with no particular coherence. Gellner tries to fend off this critique:
The theory has been constructed partly on the assumption that any intelligible model is better than none: at the very least, it highlights data which are in conflict with it, and raises problems. The assumption is made that one or possibly two types of balance between political, religious, and economic institutions prevailed in the arid zone for many centuries... [83]
Having gone through the possible objections to his overall theory, Gellner provides that quick defense of the utility of any theory at all. Note how the word "model" comes up. If we had no model (or paradigm) by which to filter and compare data from different times and places, then we would be left with just a vast confusion and all scholars could do is talk about individual cases.
For all its difficulty, theory is the only way to talk about our world. And there are lots of submerged and unconscious theories out there. One wonders if today there is not some folk "Nazi" theory in the popular mind by which all current events are run through the Nazi model. We need to be more conscious of our folk theories, I would say.
These comments refer to what I might qualify as "social theory." I am talking about models that can be applied to historical particulars to make sense of them. What gets called "Theory" with a capital T is literary theory (Derrida, De Man, Cixous). Briefly, I will just say that literary theory is similar in its emphasis on models and patterns, but it is not the field of human life in the world to which those patterns are applied, but rather to literature and written texts—although those models are able to metastasize from written texts to lived texts. But this happens at the expense of textualizing the world.. and at best I find that an indirect way of talking about what is going on in the world. I much prefer Gellner and Weber..
Ernest Gellner. Muslim Society. Cambridge UP, 1981.
Victorian Cultural Niches
August 21, 2009
This week I stepped into the Bergstrom-Mahler Museum in Neenah, Wisconsin. It's an example of a museum that serves to preserve a vanity project.. in this base a collection of Victorian glass baskets and glass paper weights put together by Evangeline Bergstrom from about 1935-44. Maybe "vanity project" is too harsh, but it resembles the Angel Museum in Beloit, Wisconsin—a museum formed around a collection of decorative angels. This work of collecting and spending is something for which I have little sympathy; it's a pursuit of the wealthy and doesn't do anyone much scholarly good.
But this does not mean I didn't enjoy the beauty of the Victorian glass baskets. The historical background supplied by the museum was helpful in giving a context to the baskets:
Baskets were a popular decorating form and utilitarian item during this period that began during the 1860's by placing a bowl or basket of fruit in the middle of the dining table. This complemented a new method of serving food from the sideboard. This new service fostered the making of elaborate objects to elegantly present the dessert course, much to the delight of dinner guests.
These baskets can be understood as filling a cultural niche: a new way of serving food "fostered" the use of a new class of luxury objects.
I define a "cultural niche" as a material need that arises from following the expected acts of a culture. So, for example, a table is an object that's demanded by our mode of eating meals. The table fills a cultural niche (one that may not always be with us). A cultural niche, once firmly established, will tend to become an object that becomes ever more elegant.. all in an attempt to make the table a signifier for class or some other identity. Much that we think of in terms of "craft" is related to this process of giving social meaning to objects that fill cultural niches. It is precisely because an object fills a cultural niche that a workshop can develop around making a certain item. Since at least one is needed for every household, craftsmen set their mind to making a more desirable version of it.
These Victorian glass baskets were never as central as a table or silverware, but for a brief period they held a cultural niche and craftsmen spent a lot of time finding a way to make them beautiful. Looking at these baskets (after watching the introductory video at the museum) it's obvious a tremendous amount of individual effort went into making them. That's an example of the way a cultural niche leads to employment and industry. It is funny, though, how as I look around my own material existence, I cannot put my eyes on anything that is a unique creation by a craftsman. We have no equivalent of these Victorian baskets in our world anymore. I feel that as a loss..
But things are still beautiful. I was looking at brightly designed bed covers for a young girl this afternoon.. and a stroll through Target reveals plates and glasses and picture frames that are creative. These all fill cultural niches, but the craftsmanship has disappeared.. even if the design element is still there. But the upward drive to make something physically nicer and more beautiful is gone. So bring back Victorian glass baskets! Think what that would do for the economy if there were items we needed that people nearby could devote their lives to making. That's how you get these beautiful things in life.
Breaking for Indian Mounds
August 18, 2009
One under-appreciated fact about Wisconsin is that the southern half of the state was once the center for effigy mound building (see my video here). Effigy mounds are low mounds that take the shape of various animals—although sometimes which animal is not entirely clear. It's thought there is some connection between these mound shapes and clan organization among the Native American builders. Wisconsin once had thousands of these effigy mounds, but many have been plowed under or otherwise destroyed. You can see in the image above of the Nitschke Mounds County Park how the rich line of mounds abruptly ends at the top as they run into a field of corn. That's the general story for these effigy mounds: plowed under whenever they come into conflict with someone's plans for a rectangular field.
My current interest revolves around the presentation of these mounds. How does one present them to visitors in a way that makes them interesting? The usual approach is to plant the mounds with grass and then mow along the edge of the mound to achieve a kind of tonsured effect. The mound stands out visually, and so that counts as success. The downside to this approach is that there is nothing authentic or historical about this presentation of the mounds. We don't know how the Native Americans kept up these mounds, but we know they weren't lawn mowing the edges.
Inevitably in the presentation of the mounds comes the sign that gives an outline of what one is looking at. This can be quite humorous as in the midst of all the growth it can sometimes bm's Antiquities of Wisconsin (text here, definitely worth a look) e impossible to make out any kind of design.. let alone a clear bear or turtle. It makes me want to read Increase Lapham to see exactly how he made out these shapes.
The need to make the mounds visible for visitors leads to an effort to clear trees and growth. This mounds park is in the process of creation, so it's possible to see the extent of the re-working of the landscape that has to happen. In the above picture you can see the stumps and the cut wood.. all to make that water spirit mound more clear to your eyes.
These mounds are related to a nearby spring that feeds this shallow pool. The effigy mounds were never randomly strewn across the landscape, but built onto meaningful places. Roads and cars dominate our mental map of the landscape.. but the mental map of Native Americans was structured by resources and natural sites.. and those sites they in turn marked with their social system of clan symbolism.
Moving on from this fledgling mounds park, I arrived in the city of Horicon ("City on the Marsh"). I was surprised to that this small town has a lot of John Deere buildings. It turns out that John Deere makes Lawn and Garden Tractors, Gator Utility Vehicles, and Golf and Turf Reel Mowers right here.
It was a contrast to move from Indian Mounds just beginning to gain visibility to a town dominated by a corporation that literally is dedicated to moving earth. It's because we have grown accustomed to massive modern earthworks that we so easily pass by the much more modest earth constructions of Native Americans who lived a millennium or more ago. Increase Lapham a century and a half ago knew a landscape in which there were no real constructive competitors to these mounds.. that is hard to imagine. Could humble mounds once have caused a crisis in faith, as Melville described? (see here).
Near the John Deere factory on the outskirts of Horicon I stopped and took this panoramic video clip. Note the heavily landscaped quality of the scene and the well cut grass on all sides. There's nothing natural to be seen. I notice these industrial parks outside many small towns that I drive through. There will be a quaint and even historic downtown and then a strip of land where the jobs must be.
Reflections on Reflections
August 17, 2009
Reflections on the Revolution in Europe by Christopher Caldwell is the kind of book I feel somewhat obligated to read.. although I almost always regret following such obligations. It's not a screed against Muslims or immigrants more broadly, but the book comes to about the same conclusion: "The rest of this book will ask whether you can have the same Europe with different people. The answer is no" (26). The point is that Muslims are different people with a different culture and their presence in large numbers in Europe means inevitably a different Europe.
Change is a fact of our contemporary world. I don't mean that in a trite way. Stand pretty much anywhere in the world 50 years ago and you would be on solid ground if you looked around and said: "This is all going to change." Cairo is a different place; London is a different place; Beijing is a different place. The pace of demographic and technological change over the past 50 years is unprecedented in human history. Traditional—or seemingly traditional—towns and neighborhoods have been transformed. That has been a stressful process, but it is a process being experienced in common all around the world.
With this in mind it's possible to admit that yes, Europe is in the process of transformation. So is everyplace else. I understand the nostalgia for old things and places (hence the name of this website), but that nostalgia should not be allowed to become an anger at the signs of change. One sign of change that seems to get attention is the brown faces of immigrants.. who are somehow a threat to the old world. But immigrants (whether in Los Angeles, London, or Cairo) are the result of global economic change and not by any stretch of the imagination the cause of those changes. That is an essential point, in my view.
Here is an example of how Caldwell frames the issue:
There have always been Western European countries that contain multiple European peoples with distinct linguistic and cultural identities—Belgium, Britain, Finland, France, Spain, and Switzerland in particular. Intercontinental immigration on the present scale, however, is unheard of. And it is unpopular. In no country in Europe does the bulk of the population aspire to live in a bazaar of world cultures. Yet all European countries are coming to the wrenching realization that they have somehow, without anyone's actively choosing it, turned into such bazaars. [11]
Caldwell makes the point that even major European countries like France and Spain are products of complex cultural mixing. Notions of cultural purity are usually illusionary. That admitted (although the implications unexplored), he goes on to say there is something unprecedented about the current situation. And here's the thing: he's right, but he has framed it in a misleading way. It's not the case that we are in the midst of some immigration invasion that could have happened in the past but luckily didn't (the point of Caldwell's passage). It's rather the case that the means of international movement (technological and social) are now historically unprecedented.. and current levels of immigration flow from these wider changes.
Caldwell calls the presence of Muslims in European countries "unpopular" and notes that the situation occurred without "anyone's actively choosing it." But that's not the deepest way of thinking about the issue. I would argue that collective economic choices are a way of "choosing." By embracing cell phones, air travel, and computers current European citizens are daily choosing to support the global economic system with its advantages. The same choice has been made for decades. If you buy into the global economic system then you have to deal with all it entails, which includes the kind of demographic transformations we see all around us. Arguably the only possible way for a European country to have avoided demographic change would have been to disengage from the world economy.. and become another Albania.
I was particularly disappointed with the way Caldwell dismisses Tariq Ramadan (who I like a lot). He does not deal squarely with Ramadan's engagement with the West, but fixates on the issue of double language. I see that as an excuse to step away from the fact that Ramadan's vision of Islam in Europe is a direct challenge to the thesis of his book.. and one which readers should know about, but won't get. Here is a particularly enraging passage on Ramadan:
Ramadan explicitly rejects the usage of jihad to mean holy war. This puts him in line with a couple of dozen academic spokesmen for Islam in the West, who claim that the "greater jihad" is a struggle for self-mastery. But it is really accurate to say that a majority of Muslims think of a "spiritual effort" when they hear the word jihad? Why is it so desperately important to keep this word in common circulation, when it is understood by Muslims' Western interlocutors, not to mention many ordinary Muslims, as a call to battle? Diffident modern Westerners tend to purge such words from their vocabulary altogether. [296]
OK, the idea that jihad is about self-mastery is all over the place in medieval Islamic literature and is not the invention of a "couple of dozen academic spokesmen." And yes, Muslims that I have talked with in the Middle East do see this battle with self as the primary, although not exclusive, meaning of the word. Why does Ramadan not "purge" the word jihad? Well, it's tough to purge a word from the Qur'an, so the winning tactic would seem to be to emphasize the important peaceful side of the word. Caldwell here is at his worst.
Christopher Caldwell. Reflections on the Revolution in Europe. Doubleday, 2009.
Trail with Commentary
August 15, 2009
This afternoon I explored Horicon Marsh and came across a short trail that included commentary. This is called an "interpretive trail".. and I always like these. Today I was thinking about the extent to which a trail like this depends upon assumptions about the printed commentary.
A commentary becomes necessary as a text is perceived to be distant from a reader. Homer and the Qur'an were once immediate and direct in their communication to an audience, but as Greek and Arabic developed they came to be difficult texts. They also became the center of controversies between different schools of thought. So over time the need for a commentary arose. These commentaries generally work by citing a text and then stopping to explain the meaning of that text.
The second paragraph on the above sign reads: "Twenty-six interpretive signs will introduce you to the history, wildlife, and management of these habitats at Horicon Marsh." Underlying that paragraph is the notion that the natural world is distant from us.. that there's something in the way. We need an occasional sign to explain a difficult passage that would otherwise elude us.
This was the first sign on the trail. It points out the kinds of trees right in front of the visitor. The idea is that a visitor could just walk through these trees and process the scene as "another forest." It's easy to read books this way too.. and a commentary will work to point out genre choices that are being signaled at the outset. The result is that the visitor gives a second look at what might not get noted:
And this is exactly what I looked at—and thought about—right after I read that first sign. Pretty plain and unexciting, but this is exactly where commentaries are most helpful.
A little ways further down the trail came across a sign that made specific reference to the process of reading: "Look at the size and types of trees surrounding you. You can 'read' that the forest beyond this sign is in an earlier stage of succession." The landscape of the forest is a text about which meaningful things can be said.. and the signs help those of us who are too far away from this language. This way of organizing space and making demands upon the visitor would be unthinkable without specific habits related to book reading.
Through the undergrowth you can glimpse a row of large stones. The sign above points these out and calls them the "remains of an old stone fenceline." It's kind of an obscure reference, but it made clear the complex nature of this forest text. This would be further emphasized by another sign:
It's funny to be walking down a trail and coming across signs that work to break down the experience: "What you're looking at is not original! Don't be fooled into thinking this is the way it always was!" It's kind of like reading about the book of Isaiah in the Bible.. and beginning to see the layers of composition and editing. Eventually that becomes the fun of reading, but critical literature has to break through that initial illusion of encountering a pristine message.
But I can't forget about the pleasures of the text either. Reading should have a critical edge, but then there are also moments of pure pleasure.. when those quick grasshoppers darting away from your treading feet turn out to be small frogs. Sometimes things are just beautiful.
Science Acting Like Belief
August 13, 2009
Near the end of Émile Durkheim's Elementary Forms of Religious Life comes an important statement on the relationship of science to religious belief:
It is not enough for [scientific concepts] to be true for them to be believed. If they are not in harmony with other beliefs, other opinions, in a word with the whole gamut of collective representations, they will be denied; minds will be closed to them; they will be as if they never were. [333-4]
We run into this now all the time, but its dynamic is not often understood. On the one hand there is the question of what is true about some aspect of reality. Science can come up with convincing answers to these questions. But on the other hand the spread and acceptance of those answers among a plurality of the population has nothing to do with the correctness of the science and everything to do with belief. In other words whether people believe in global warming will be a question that operates in the same sphere as "Will the Rapture occur next year?" This does not mean that a religious claim has the same validity as science, it just means that scientific ideas act like a religious claim when they hit the marketplace of ideas. People have a strong tendency to adopt the beliefs that fit in best with their interests.
This is a discouraging fact. It explains why evolution and global warming, despite broad empirical evidence, do not have a strong hold on the minds of millions of Americans. And unfortunately science is not always furnished with the best tools to win on the open marketplace, as Durkheim notes:
...for faith is above all an impulse to act, and science, even pushed to its limits, always remains at a distance from action. Science is fragmentary, incomplete; it progresses slowly and is never finished; life cannot wait. [326]
It's true! Life can't wait. We need to do something about the carbon in the atmosphere! To overcome this inherent slowness about science Al Gore or other environmental activists work to get the information out.. and they accomplish this by acting more like a religious organization.
The importance of associations and popular acceptance of ideas is largely underplayed.. as we like to imagine it as a fight between knowledge and ignorance, which misses the social dynamic. An example of this dynamic is in Naguib Mahfouz's Cairo Trilogy, during an extended (and hilarious) discussion about Darwin. The father al-Sayyid Ahmed is upset about an article his son has written on this guy Darwin, and demands heatedly:
All religions believe in Adam. What sect does this Darwin belong to? He's an atheist, his words are blasphemous, and reporting his theory's a reckless act. Tell me: Is he one of your professors at the college? [891]
Of course Darwin did not teach at the University of Cairo. He was an Englishman.. but that turns out to be the worst of all:
Let you stance in regard to English science be the same as yours toward their occupation of Egypt. Do not admit the legality of either, even when imposed on us by force. [895]
That's a perfect example of what Durkheim was talking about. A scientist from England had a specific theory based on empirical evidence, but the association between England and the occupation of Egypt meant that this theory would be rejected out of hand. Like it or not, this is how things work in our world.
The American history of anti-evolution resembles this little vignette from the Cairo Trilogy. Remember that Origin of Species was published in 1859, and that this coincides with our Civil War. Evolution first arrived and found acceptance in the North, but it arrived in the South at a point when all things northern were suspect—rejected out of hand. And as the South came to dominate American religious life over the course of the next century, anti-evolutionism spread apace. That, at least, is the way I recall the story going. The point being that ideas are subject to historical and social forces that are often unforeseeable.
The Genealogy of Fundamentalism
August 11, 2009
Novels work through depictions of characters, but their ambitions often exceed the straightforward portrayal of individuals. Especially in an ambitious novel, the author is often laboring to connect characters to larger social movements or historical eras. This tendency often exists in tension with mimetic realism. In Mahfouz's Cairo trilogy this tendency repeatedly appears:
Strangely enough, Kamal found that the political activities of the day presented an enlarged version of his life. [776]
Mahfouz goes on to explicitly clarify these parallels as they occur in Kamal's mind. Of course there is nothing "strange" about this parallel, it is a device to alert the reader to what is being actively planted in the novel.
One concern for Mahfouz is to explain the rise of fundamentalism in Egypt.. you could say the trilogy has a secret theory of fundamentalism (see here for an analysis of another Egyptian novel). He was writing the trilogy long before al-Qaeda and its brand of active terrorism—which put fundamentalism in a different light. Mahfouz would have known the fundamentalism reflected in Sayyid Qutb's Social Justice in Islam and the early Muslim Brotherhood. To explain how this movement fits into Egyptian history Mahfouz gives us something akin to a genealogy of fundamentalism. By understanding the characters of the Cairo trilogy we can grasp the bloodline of this style of thinking about Islam.
The central character of the trilogy is al-Sayyid Ahmed, the patriarch of the family that sprawls through these pages. Al-Sayyid Ahmed is marked by an ability to hold together actions and thoughts that would feel contradictory to most people. He is a womanizing and hard drinking shop owner, who is at the same time a paralyzingly strict, religious father. Mahfouz does his best to work over this character, who is convincingly drawn:
...he had successfully balanced the animal within him that was voracious for pleasure with the man in him that looked up to higher principles. He had succeeded in harmoniously joining there two sides of his personality in a compatible whole... he was also able to merge piety and debauchery successfully into a unity free of any hint of either sin or repression. [240]
It remains a mystery how these parts of his personality cohere, but Mahfouz explains that he is not given to rationalizing his approach to life. He simply lives: he loves women and song; he loves God and prayer. The result is a character who everyone looks up to.. even with his tyrannical side. And who is unfailingly genuine.
The problem, as Mahfouz sees it, is that the progeny of al-Sayyid Ahmed cannot keep these elements in tension. His son Yasin is a spineless pleasure seeker who cannot control his lusts.. and Yasin is in turn the father of Ridwan, the character who is homosexual. This line represents a decline from al-Sayyid Ahmed because of its lack of self control in seeking pleasure.
Another line from the father runs through the daughter Khadija, who fully embraces the religious and familial face of the father. She shuts her ears to the well-founded stories of her father's excesses when out with his friends. The father that lives in her mind is the strict Hanbali moralist. One of her sons, Abd al-Muni'm, is attracted to fundamentalism.. and joins the Muslim Brotherhood. His path is shown by Mahfouz to be marked by an inability to embrace the tension present in the faith of al-Sayyid Ahmed. This inability is highlighted in a few scenes portraying his discomfort with sex. On returning home he meets with a sweetheart on the darkened stairs, and finds it impossible to push away the pleasures of sex:
Afterward he sat cross-legged on the prayer rug and lost himself in deep meditation. There was a sad look to his eyes, his breast was aflame with grief, and he felt like crying. He prayed that his Lord would come to his aid to help him combat temptation and to drive Satan away, that Satan he encountered in the shape of a girl who inspired a raging lust in him.
His mind always said, "No," but his heart, "Yes." The fearful struggle he experienced invariably ended with defeat and regret. [1068]
That is a fascinating passage for several reasons. First, the Christian overtones are deep. Satan appearing in the shape of a girl is from St. Anthony's desert experiences. The mental struggle that pitches a mind that says "No" against a heart that says "Yes" is straight out of Romans 7:
So I find it to be a law that when I want to do what is good, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind, making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! [Romans 7.21-4]
These references allow Mahfouz to build the case that Abd al-Muni'm has left behind the traditional version of Islam and embraced something that in its guilt resembles nothing so much as Christianity. Al-Sayyid Ahmed could have enjoyed the sensual pleasures of meeting a sweetheart on the darkened stairs and solemnly devoted himself to his prayers the next day. He would never have even thought about it. For Mahfouz the possibility of that rich tension between the sensual and the spiritual is precisely the greatness of Islam. That Islam is forfeited by the grandson who inherits only one part of al-Sayyid Ahmed's rich personality. And it is easy to see how this criticism could be enlarged to encompass fundamentalism as a whole: it is a narrowed and moralistic version of Islam.
Gleanings from Maqrizi II:
The Mosque of Qalawun and Bad Poetry
August 8, 2009
At the heart of Bayn al-Qasrayn in Cairo is the mosque of Sultan Qalawun, built in 1284-5 AD. Last time I was in Cairo this mosque was covered in scaffolding and the street in front of it was being torn up. This time the street-front of the mosque was free of any obstructions and I could take in the stately rhythm of arched windows:
This is the most cathedral-like of any mosque you'll ever see, and the Western influence was pointed out a long time ago by Creswell. The closest surviving parallel is the architecture of Norman Sicily in the 12th century (Behrens-Abouseif 135).
This mosque was really three institutions right next to each other. The monumental entrance is easy enough to see:
Walking through those bronze doors the visitor comes upon a hallway that heads straight back. At the end of that hallway is where the hospital once stood. Walking back toward the hospital there are two entrances, one on the right for the mausoleum, and one on the left for the madrasa. As amazing as the exterior of the mosque is, the interior—especially in the mausoleum— was as beautiful as anything I've ever seen in Cairo. The standout feature was the ornate stucco work. The photo at the top of this post is from the mausoleum, while the one below is from the madrasa next door:
As usual for Maqrizi, in his sections on mosques from the Khitat, he does not spend any time describing the mosque. It would be impossible, in fact, to recreate anything about these mosques from his descriptions. He gives accurate information about when they were built and who built them.. as well as important details about renovations. But artistic design is not his interest; he contents himself with abstract praise for "most sublime" buildings.
Some of Maqrizi's reports do help a reader to imagine what it would have been like to approach the mosque:
In this mausoleum are Qur’an readers who alternate night and day in reading at the tall windows along the street.
So walking past those tall windows the medieval Cairene would have heard the constant repetition of the Quran from a group of readers who alternated turns.
The mausoleum was a ceremonially charged location staffed by royal eunuchs. This was apparently a highly sought after position, which brought some wealth and ease for servants.. enough, I guess, to compensate for the loss of other pleasures. These servants kept up the royal ceremonies related to the deceased Sultan. That sounds morbid, but it was also here, to the tomb of Sultan Qalawun, that a Mamluk came to be made a prince. Maqrizi has a description of what that was like:
It was customary that when the Sultan invested one of the princes of Egypt or Syria, that person came down from the Citadel wearing a robe of honor. Cairo was roused up for him... The prince would take an oath beside the tomb of Qalawun. The head chamberlain attended to the oath. A great repast would be spread out at the mausoleum. Then the prince would depart and the people of wealth would attend to him for the length of the street from Cairo to the Citadel for the procession...
The upkeep of this rich ceremonial world was the task of those royal eunuchs.
Maqrizi gives a colorful story set in this mausoleum. Again, you see that his writing about mosques is not oriented toward description of buildings but toward the maintenance of a communal memory of the personalities connected to them. In this story Sultan al-Ashraf returns from Palestine having engaged in jihad against the Franks. He is victorious and there is a great reception and celebration for him at the mosque of Qalawun. All appears to be going right.. until the poet stands up to deliver a poem of praise. Unfortunately for the poet, his words strike the Sultan as bad-omened:
[The Sultan's] passage into Cairo was through the Nasser Gate, and Cairo was decorated up exceedingly. When he came up to the entrance to the hospital, he entered the mausoleum of Qalawun, which was choked with judges, elites, readers, shaykhs, and legal scholars. All of them met him with prayer until he sat down and the readers began their Qur’an recitation. Then... [the poet] ibn ‘Anbari... stood, climbed the minbar set up for him, and sat down upon it. He began to recite a poem making mention of jihad and its reward. He did not have the good fortune himself to have a share in that reward though, because he opened by saying:
Visit while the cock stands upon those two tombs,
It is as if I, with you, were transferred to them.
The Sultan next to him was perceptive and understood the meaning of the poetry. So when al-Ashraf heard this line he saw in it a bad omen. He rose and stood there cursing the prince Baydara... on account of the strength of his rage. The Sultan said to him: “This guy couldn’t find anything to say except this line?”
That seems to have ruined the celebration, for Maqrizi records that the Sultan rode back to the Citadel immediately and the crowds dispersed. It is a story that should be studied by everyone charged with giving an introduction or toast.
Doris Behrens-Abouseif. Cairo of the Mamluks. I.B. Tauris, 2007.
Bands, Tribes, and the Origin of Religion
August 5, 2009
I had not realized the extent to which Émile Durkheim relied on Australian Aborigines in his argument about the origin of religion. He deploys it as his trump card as he works through various theories of religion. He explains on the very first page that by finding the most archaic religion in the world we can arrive at "an essential and permanent aspect of humanity." For Durkheim Aboriginal religion is the most archaic precisely because it has the most archaic social structure.
Now, clan-based organization is the simplest we know... Therefore, no society is more rudimentary—since I believe no trace of a society consisting of a single clan has yet been found. A religion so closely allied with a social system of such surpassing simplicity can be considered the most elementary we know. [126]
This idea allows him to bypass the encyclopedism of James Frazer and his Golden Bough. Durkheim will not amass a stack of details, but sweep aside that stack by an examination of the most archaic religion, which gets behind theories of animism or naturism.
It happens that it might actually be possible to think about human beings prior to clan or tribal organization. We just have to look for evidence from the past.. the deep past. The claim of The Nature of Paleolithic Art by R. Dale Guthrie is that the cave paintings from a site like Lascaux or Chauvet make sense only if we imagine human beings living in bands. These bands would be self-contained and number no more than 40 people. They would have the age group spread of the picture at the top of this post. Guthrie's point is that for a band there was not yet any such thing as "us" and "them." Human social organization was on a scale that kept relationships personal and intimate. And what we see in the art of the caves is a preoccupation with animals and their realistic representation.. to the exclusion of much that we recognize as "symbolic."
Guthrie looks ahead to the Holocene and the changes in human social organization that come with it. Along with those changes in social organization comes a shift in artistic style, as is shown in Guthrie's illustration below:
These images are from different cultures, but they are instantly recognizable as being a long way from paleolithic art. The abstractions and stylization give away the added symbolic freight that these works are carrying, and point to the need to separate and differentiate one group from others.
You could say that a simple tribal organization is the starting point for Durkheim, who asks at one point what the origin of the totem might be:
It is obvious that for any kind of group an emblem is a useful rallying point. Expressing social unity in a material form makes it more tangible to everyone; for this reason the use of emblematic symbols must have quickly spread once the idea took shape. [175]
The totem for Durkheim is the ur-symbol, that spread and formed the human view of the world.. but it is possible to imagine religion a step more archaic than that in terms of social structure.
Émile Durkheim. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Oxford UP, 2001.
R. Dale Guthrie. The Nature of Paleolithic Art. U Chicago Press, 2005.
Confidence in Mahfouz
August 4, 2009
Reading through the Cairo Trilogy I meditated on what it is that gives an author authority. Sure, this is Naguib Mahfouz, lifetime denizen of Cairo, so of course I trust him. But say I didn't know about Mahfouz, how would his work strike me? From the start of the first novel, in English Palace Walk, there is such a wealth of details about topography, the residence, and social practices that I immediately trust Mahfouz as a guide. That deep sense that Mahfouz is writing about a world he knows intimately makes the trilogy so rewarding.
Authors lose their authority with me as a reader if their representation stops jibing with other things I know. In this case I found confirmation in a book I was reading at the same time, Whatever Happened to the Egyptians by the sociologist Galal Amin. In one of the early chapters Amin reflects on changing social values over the last century:
When at the beginning of the First World War, more than eighty years ago, my father came to ask for my mother's hand in marriage, one of the merits that recommended him to her family was the fact that he had a 'miri job," that is, that he worked for the government. He was a teacher in the Sharia Law School and therefore subject to the governmental rules of appointment, confirmation, promotion, and retirement. [65]
Amin makes clear how civil service jobs with the government were the ticket to the middle class and respectability. The reality in contemporary Egypt is quite the reverse: private commercial enterprises are most respected, while civil service pay has languished.
Mahfouz provides a directly parallel view of life in the 1920s as he describes one character's thinking about a choice of schools in this way:
But this was not the main reason for his lack of interest in the School of Commerce. The fact was that he looked up to the civil service and bureaucrats. He perceived their significance and importance in public life. He had observed this personally with his friends who were civil servants... It was no secret to him that businessmen received only a fraction of the respect that government employees did. [595]
This positive attitude toward the civil service is a small point, but when I came upon it I recalled that passage from Amin, and had for the umpteenth time my confidence in Mahfouz reaffirmed. I felt free to read and think: Wow, that's how people perceived their world in the 1920s or 30s! Authority in a writer is something of a commodity. A good writer shows you he or she knows the landscape or a topic.. and keeps proving that.
This reveals some of my biases with respect to fiction: I like novels that could almost double as ethnography. I mean 1,313 pages is a big commitment to a trilogy, and I like the feeling that I'm being shown a world this guy knows inside and out. If it's just a bunch of characters bopping around on a random or made-up canvas, then I'm not interested.
I picked up a novel in Cairo that serves as a good counter example: Muntaha by Hala el Badry. The fly leaf for this translated novel states that it is "...a vibrant portrait of rural life in Egypt." I'm interested in rural portraits of Egypt, and I've read several other novels from this Egyptian genre. But I was disappointed because it struck me as fanciful and imagined representation. Maybe I was wrong to put that novel down after a few pages.. maybe she is the world expert on Egyptian rural life. But her fiction writing did not make me feel like I was getting anything real from it.
Travel Writing Now
August 2, 2009
The New Yorker this week is running the first of a two part series by Ian Frazier on traveling through Siberia. It is an article that has gotten me thinking about the nature of travel writing now. This is the kind of travel essay I come across infrequently. God knows there are plenty of essays and articles on travel, but often they are inflated tourist brochures. They focus on the "must-see" aspects of a place: great nature preserves and exotic culture. And to be fair, most writing on travel is meant for would-be travelers to such places. Oddly I've found that the contemporary travel writing I most enjoy has allowed me to cross off places from my mental list of places to see.
And no, I don't think a car trek through Siberia is in my future. It is too far afield from my interests. But that does not mean it wouldn't be fascinating. Frazier succeeds in communicating what it is actually like to travel through this space called Siberia. He is not a cultural insider, and his Russian is not strong, but he is clearly curious about what is around him and concentrates on the experience of space: how much trash lines the road, what one sees in these God forsaken areas, the changes in the natural world.
Frazier is quite good at translating what he sees in Siberia into terms that can be understood by someone who has never been there. When you think about it, this is essential in travel writing. If I am looking at some strange do-dad I can either go about exactly describing it (and bore the reader) or I can think of some analogy ("it's like this familiar do-dad only with an extra widget"). That search for a familiar point of reference is the work of the travel writer.. especially in a print medium.
Two places in Frazier's essay stand out to me for the facility with which he translates what he experiences. The first is when he talks about a roadside plant named morkovnik. He encountered it from one end of Russia to the other, so it is part of what one wants to know about travel through Siberia. But how to describe it? Frazier lands on the helpful comparison of morkovnik to Queen Anne's lace, only greatly enlarged. The second example comes when describing what it felt like to cross the Ural Mountains. I definitely want to know that. Frazier wonderfully writes:
For a while the scenery had been getting hillier. Sometimes the road ran on ridge tops above pine forests, and beyond Perm the land reminded me of the Rocky Mountain foothills along Interstate 90 near Bozeman, Montana. Just when I was expecting the sight of the mighty Urals themselves rising above their hilly prologue, we were on flat ground again.
I don't know Bozeman and I-90 specifically, but I know what it's like to go through the foothills on the way to the Rockies.. and what it's like to look up and see the distant mountains. So Frazier succeeds, at least with me, in finding a point of reference. I get it.. I see a new part of the world.
One nearly universal trait of good modern travel writing is the strong consciousness of the routes of past travelers. Lots of examples of this, but two stand out to me: 1) Passage to Juneau by Jonathan Raban and 2) The Shark God by Charles Montgomery (my review here). Both works foreground how the authors follow in the footsteps of some earlier traveler. The books carefully measure out the transformations brought on by the passage of time.
In this essay on Siberia Frazier similarly locates the footsteps of past travelers. This is most notable at the end of this first half of the essay, where he works to follow, for a little while, George Kennan and his 1885 experience in Siberia. Frazier writes: "I got interested in Kennan because he grew up in Norwalk, Ohio, where some of my family came from. Admiration for him was one of the reasons I had wanted to travel in Siberia in the first place." (You can download Kennan's Siberia and the Exile System here on Google Books.)
Finally I want to note my admiration for the way Frazier manages to both be fully concrete in his description of what he sees in Siberia (remember morkovnik) and at the same time conscious of the cultural meaning of "Siberia." Siberia may be sort of like the West for America: a land of resources that shaped the nation's consciousness of itself. But whereas the West conjures up freedom and openness for most Americans, Siberia is about exile and punishment. It's not necessarily the case that individuals living in Tobolsk will see their home this way, but in the broader economy of places Siberia fills an interesting symbolic niche. Part of the work of travel writing is first to be conscious of that symbolic niche, and second to engage with it critically and knowingly.
The New Yorker essay is behind a pay-wall, but it is worthwhile to listen to Frazier narrate his sketches from Siberia.
