Fox River, part 3

June 14, 2009

This video has been a little while in coming, but it represents the next step in what will be a five part series on the Fox River. This time we are looking at the world along the Fox in what is known locally as the "Heart of the Valley." The footage in this video was taken during winter so it also shows presents the Fox from another seasonal vantage point.

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Trying to Throw Your
Mind Around the World

June 14, 2009

I sometimes wonder why I bother trying to understand how the world works.. or perhaps more accurately: how different people perceive the world. Why read a book like An Introduction to Ancient Iranian Religion.. which is sitting on my desk and should be summer reading? I could come up with great explanations as to why this is a socially valuable skill.. but on the other hand there are no prizes handed out at the end of time for understanding these things. In the end it is just what I like to do.

The closest I can get to understanding my desire to figure out the world is my constant attention whenever I am in the bathroom to the shower curtain pictured above. I can't help looking for patterns in this bunch of squares. There is a 9 square by 9 square repeating box on this curtain.. and I have tried hard to locate what the original 9x9 box is. I also long ago figured out where the longest strings of consecutive boxes of the same color are found. I've looked to figure out where squares of the same color are closest to forming different kinds of shapes. I've tried to figure out the ratio of the different colored squares. In short, there is no end of speculation possible by staring at this shower curtain.

There is nothing magical about this curtain. Wherever I am I look for patterns and work to solve or make sense of them. I think my curiosity about people and the world is just an outgrowth of this mental habit. At one time it could have been directed at anything, but it got focused on how people construct and find meaning in their lives.. and then act on those understood meanings. That is the study of religion in a nutshell, and for me it's not something that comes from anything except a strong desire to understand what the underlying logic is to all this strangeness.

Travel more than anything else presents me with a series of challenges. I constantly ask: why is this situation developing like this? What accounts for all this? Why do people choose these things to express themselves? In essence it is a whole bunch of new patterns. I think it is tough to travel in foreign places unless that basic habit is present.. or else this effort to understand will seem like a constant hassle.

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Adomnán's Book on the Holy Places

June 11, 2009

There are lots of academics out there mining rich—if obscure—topics. That may seem obvious, but it's not appreciated enough when it comes to evaluating the creative output of academics. Some stuff is just published for tenure.. and you can recognize the heartless stuff pretty easily. But then there are people who explore odd corners that will just never get reviewed in the New York Times. These academic books are engaged in the project of imagining the terms by which the world was experienced in a distant time or place. This stretch of the imagination exemplifies the values promoted here at Old Roads.. and over the summer I want to search for some ways to spotlight recent academic books you will never run into in mainstream reviews.

An example of a book like this is Adomnan and the Holy Places by Thomas O'Loughlin, although strictly speaking it is not a new publication since it came out in 2007. It was published by T & T Clark, and I happened to come across it in some catalog and then requested that our library pick it up. Adomnán was a monastic and theologian from the 7th century AD. He is best known for his life of Columba, available as a Penguin Classic. He also wrote On the Holy Places, which is a topographic description of the Holy Land as recalled by Arculf, a mysterious figure who was supposedly shipwrecked near Iona (in Scotland) on his return from the Holy Land.. and then described that distant land to a rapt Adomnán (at least that is the story).

O'Loughlin's book tries to establish On the Holy Places as a serious work of theology.. instead of allowing it to remain as just a curiosity. This attempt to rejuvenate a genre is relevant to my own work since I would like to make a parallel argument about Maqrizi's Khitat (a description of Cairo). At one point O'Loughlin writes some pointed lines about methodology:

One can always be tempted to start with modernity and see all earlier work as simply leading toward this finale. We can see this trend when modern maps of Palestine and the Mediterranean are used as the end-papers to the most widely used critical edition of the Greek New Testament, inviting the reader to imagine that those who wrote about those places in the text had the same view of the interrelationships of places that we have. This is the assumption that their world is just a a less accurate version of our world. [39]

I like the way O'Loughlin evokes the maps on the flyleaves of modern editions of the Bible. It is a reminder how even the physical apparatus of our books pushes us to wrongly imagine the views of the world held by ancient authors. It lets us get away with not asking the really hard question: what are the points of reference within which these authors lived and experienced their world? The answer to that question will not be a fuzzier version of a modern map, but something else entirely.. perhaps resembling the schematic "mental maps" that O'Loughlin supplies in this book.

O'Loughlin goes on to more exactly diagnose the issue:

A failure to recognize the genre to which [On the Holy Places] belongs and the dynamics of that tradition is indeed a failure to understand what is being read by assuming Arculf's worldview—Adomnán is effectively eliminated within this approach—and that of a modern observer are identical. A historian might call this the error of anachronism; a theologian might see in it the essence of fundamentalism; but at the very least it is a case of lack of attention and of despising the text, ignoring its richness and complexity, by reducing it to a quarry for one's own concerns. [40]

An central part of "despising the text" is the assumption of a common cognitive and cultural frame shared across time. Everyone realizes that technology and modes of life change drastically as we move back in time.. but commonly when we think about the past we just imagine ourselves dressed kind of funny and riding a horse.. or something. In this case the complexities of texts are inconsequential.. and can mostly be ignored. If one takes seriously the idea that human beings perceive the world in vastly different ways, then the complexities of the text are not there to be overlooked, but rather are to be carefully sifted with the goal of arriving at an understanding of this historical person/community.

Unfortunately none of this comprises a recipe for success in contemporary best-seller charts. Those books thrive by making us feel as if the past is a mirror in which we can see ourselves.

Thomas O'Loughlin. Adomnan and the Holy Places. T&T Clark, 2007.

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Student Final Projects

June 9, 2009

Students in my Intro to Religious Studies course turned in their final projects over the weekend. They created a visual essay that commented on a system of symbols (in the Clifford Geertz sense). They could focus on a single religious tradition, an event or place, or develop a comparison across religious traditions. As usual when I leave the assignment open like this, I was amazed at some of the projects. Conveniently some of these projects also can be re-posted by me. Here are some samples:

1. Consumer Culture and Religion

The South Seas in the Holy Land

June 7, 2009

The trajectory of Herman Melville's chosen subjects at first seems odd. With Typee and continuing on to Moby Dick he mines his own experiences at sea. We then move on to some Americanist works like Pierre or the fascinating novel The Confidence Man. When Melville settles into poetry he produces a volume of Civil War poetry and then composes his great epic poem Clarel, which is set in the Holy Land. It would seem that we are about as far away from the South Seas as possible. But in fact the South Seas are present throughout Clarel..

The simile has been a feature of the epic since Homer. In the hands of a master the simile works to break up the narrative pull and infuses the poem with something like lyric breakouts. In Homer the battles become waves beating on the surf and the armies squadrons of bees. In Clarel, which is landscape oriented to begin with, the similes help to get the mind of the reader out of the dusty and hot trails of the Holy Land. Melville chooses to present inset sea scenes.. which have enough specificity to convince the reader that they are drawn from intimate knowledge of life at sea.

Some examples of these sea similes:

(Like ship-boy at mast-head alone)
[1.18.41]

As when upon a misty shore
The watchful seaman marks a light
Blurred by the fog, uncertain quite;
And thereto instant turns the glass
And studies it, and thinks it o'er
By compass: Is't the cape we pass?
[3.2.59-64]

At night upon the darkling main
To ship return with muffled sound
The rowers without comment vain—
The messmate overboard not found...
[3.6.1-4]

Such freshening redolence divine
As mariners upon the brine
Inhale, when barren beach they pass
By night...
[3.15.37-40]

It is a strange sensation to be wandering in the imagination through dry landscapes of the Holy Land, only to find oneself pushed out to the open sea.. and imagining the experience of passing an uninhabited island at night. By the end of Clarel I came to accept this as an effective use of the epic simile.

There are two more lengthy references to Melville's Polynesian experience, as exemplified in Typee. In both of these cases the South Seas serve to reinforce the symbol system that supports the book. In canto 2.10 Cain is likened to a savage, and the character Rolfe likens Cain's planned altar to ones found "on far island-chains." We are reminded, perhaps, that when Melville was describing the Marquesas Islands he was re-writing and re-thinking the biblical narratives of Genesis. And now when he is in the land of those biblical narratives, it is fitting that he draw into his work the world where he found these biblical tropes living on.

The second reference I find more significant. In Bethlehem Rolfe recalls the South Seas:

"For me," Rolfe said,
"From Bethlehem here my musings reach
Yes—frankly—to Tahiti's beach."
[4.18.34-6]

It is again the kind of mental leap that makes Melville so breathtaking at times. The liberal Derwent responds with our own surprise at the distance his comrade's mind has traveled, and Rolfe explains:

That vine-wreathed urn of Ver, in sea
Of halcyons, where no tides do flow
Or ebb, but waves bide peacefully
At brim, by beach where palm trees grow
That sheltered Omai's olive race—
Tahiti should have been the place
For Christ in advent.
[4.18.39-45]

As this thought plays out, another character speculates that perhaps God had sent Jesus to be born in the land most representing faction and strife. But the point stands that the natural home for Jesus and what he represents would have been an island in the South Seas. And conversely maybe Jesus represents the South Seas coming to rest awkwardly in the heart of the Old World? In any case, we again see Melville tying his earlier career and fascinations to the elaborate faith-drama that is Clarel.

Herman Melville. Clarel. Northwestern UP, 2008.

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The Certitude of Bah'u'llah

June 5, 2009

After reading a biography of Baha'u'llah I was curious to take a look at the actual writing of this Manifestation of God. That, by the way, is the technical term for Baha'u'llah and his prophetic forerunners (Moses, Jesus, Muhammad). It marks them as representing "a level of existence which is an intermediary between God and humans" (Wikipedia). The Bahai Manifestation of God is less than the divine Jesus but more than a simple bearer of a divine message.

Baha'u'llah's Book of Certitude sets out the thinking behind the Bahai view of earlier religions. It was apparently completed during his time in Baghdad, before leaving for exile in Istanbul and then Akka (although I don't get the references to Ridvan if that is the chronology). The Bahais maintain a useful online library, and you can find the complete text for the Book of Certitude here.

The goal of the Book of Certitude is to draw a basic connecting line between the different prophets of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition:

Every discerning observer will recognize that in the Dispensation of the Qur’án both the Book and the Cause of Jesus were confirmed. As to the matter of names, Muḥammad, Himself, declared: “I am Jesus.” He recognized the truth of the signs, prophecies, and words of Jesus, and testified that they were all of God. In this sense, neither the person of Jesus nor His writings hath differed from that of Muḥammad and of His holy Book, inasmuch as both have championed the Cause of God, uttered His praise, and revealed His commandments. Thus it is that Jesus, Himself, declared: “I go away and come again unto you.” [8]

This builds pretty directly upon the Islamic view of the prophetic tradition. Properly understood, Moses and Jesus and all the biblical prophets brought the exact same message as Muhammad. Baha'u'llah in this passage pushes the identification of message into nearly an identity of being. Apparently drawing on some hadith, Baha'u'llah cites Muhammad declaring himself to be Jesus. Then Jesus' words "I go away and come again unto you" are understood as pointing to his reappearance in the form of Muhammad—another claim of identity.

This discussion of prophetic being is brought to a point by the metaphor of the sun:

Consider the sun. Were it to say now, “I am the sun of yesterday,” it would speak the truth. And should it, bearing the sequence of time in mind, claim to be other than that sun, it still would speak the truth. In like manner, if it be said that all the days are but one and the same, it is correct and true. And if it be said, with respect to their particular names and designations, that they differ, that again is true. For though they are the same, yet one doth recognize in each a separate designation, a specific attribute, a particular character. [8]

This is again pushing to a new extreme the system set up by Islam. In the Qur'an the various prophets appear as mirror images of Muhammad, but now they are likened to the sun. The sun yesterday was in some sense different from the sun today, but they are also the same in a deep way. The prophets of course differ in name and other specifics, but an essential being overwhelms these differences.

We can already see that Baha'u'llah builds his doctrines on an interior reading of scriptures. How fluently he can re-work a passage from scripture is evident in his extended exegesis of this verse from the Gospel of Matthew:

And when they asked Jesus concerning the signs of His coming, He said unto them: “Immediately after the oppression of those days shall the sun be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, and the stars shall fall from heaven, and the powers of the earth shall be shaken: and then shall appear the sign of the Son of man in heaven: and then shall all the tribes of the earth mourn, and they shall see the Son of man coming in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory. And he shall send his angels with a great sound of a trumpet.” [Matt 24.29-31]

This passage might immediately strike you as a reference to the apocalyptic end of the world. The images of the sun being darkened, moon not giving light, and stars falling to earth are familiar to anyone who knows the apocalyptic language of the Bible and extra-canonical literature. But Baha'u'llah finds a reference to the cyclical nature of revelation. After some elaboration he sets down a straightforward interpretation of the sun, moon, and stars:

Thus, it hath become evident that the terms “sun,” “moon,” and “stars” primarily signify the Prophets of God, the saints, and their companions, those Luminaries, the light of Whose knowledge hath shed illumination upon the worlds of the visible and the invisible. [12]

Every prophet is a sun and he brings a host of lesser luminaries, but eventually that tradition falls into darkness, and that final age is characterized by oppression. In this waning state of an older revelation the new revelation steps in.. and a new Manifestation of God arrives. The "Son of Man coming in the clouds of heaven" is of course an image of this new Manifestation.. appearing and re-booting history.

If religious history is cyclical in this manner, then the key point for members of any tradition is to recognize when it is time to jump ship. According to Bahais a problem with our world is that people are still living according to religions that were good for their time, but should be left behind in light of later revelation. Remember, revelation is progressive for Bahais. The problem of missing the new revealed message is outlined here:

As the adherents of Jesus have never understood the hidden meaning of these words, and as the signs which they and the leaders of their Faith have expected have failed to appear, they therefore refused to acknowledge, even until now, the truth of those Manifestations of Holiness that have since the days of Jesus been made manifest. They have thus deprived themselves of the outpourings of God’s holy grace, and of the wonders of His divine utterance. [27]

In other words Christians have read that passage in Matthew about the dimming of sun, moon, and stars and the arrival of the Son of Man, and thought it was talking about a literal return of Jesus. The true interior meaning is that at the end of each age, in the midst of oppression, a new radiant Manifestation appears. Christians happen to be two steps behind the times as they missed Muhammad and then refused Baha'u'llah as well. They are thus "deprived of the outpourings of God's holy grace."

It is an eccentric reading of the Bible.. that's for sure. But if you are a lover (as I am) of eccentric readings, then this is good stuff.

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Garden of Ridvan Everywhere

June 4, 2009

The 19th century gave us two lasting new religious traditions: the Mormons and the Bahais. Both traditions have a complex relationship with the dominant tradition out of which they sprang, Christianity and Islam. Both claim to continue an earlier tradition yet correct its departure from truth. These new religious traditions are particularly helpful in the study of religion since they allow for close observation of the strategies by which they distinguish themselves doctrinally and visually from the earlier tradition.

What has to happen for a new religion to come to exist? First, and perhaps most obviously, there must be an intellectual framework that steps sufficiently away from the earlier dominant tradition. In the case of the Bahais that dominant tradition would be Islam and more specifically twelver Shiism. The Shia concept of religious authority has always made it more easy for religious sects to spin out of it.. and in contrast to the stability of Sunni Islam there are numerous branches of Shiism. The Druze are a textbook example of how easily a belief in the divine authority of an Imam can spin off into a new religion. Something similar happened with the Bahai, whose movement has ties to the movement that began with the Báb, the forerunner of Bah'u'llah. At first the Báb saw himself as the "gate" (the meaning of Báb) to the 12th Imam.. in other words a religiously giften leader with the tradition of Twelver Shiism. But eventually the Báb and his follower Baha'u'llah break out of this gravitational pull and developed their own distinct claims to revelation.

This intellectual history gets pretty complicated, but the important thing is to see that the first step of a religion is to differentiate itself intellectually from the dominant tradition out of which it comes. But then it immediately faces a second challenge: how to express those beliefs in a unique and distinctive system of symbols. Intellectual independence has to be matched by symbolic independence. And that is the drama of a new religious tradition. And traditions that are recent, such as the Bahais and Mormons, go through this process in the light of history and so we actually get to see it happening.

The Bahais now have a distinctive look.. and you can watch this video tour of the Bahai temples throughout the world if you want to get to know that look:

The architecture with its emphasis on nines and the calligraphic seal at the pinnacle of those domes.. even the acapella music in the video.. all these things carry symbolic meaning. Something else that is evident from these videos is the importance of gardens and garden imagery (roses, greenery, birds). This pervasive imagery goes back to the Garden of Ridvan outside Baghdad where Baha'u'llah first announced his mission:

Four days before the caravan was to set out, the Blessed Perfection called [Abdu'l-Baha] into his tent and told him that he himself was the one whose coming had been promised by the Báb... A little later, and before leaving the garden, he selected from among his disciples four others, to whom he made the same declaration. He further said to these five that for the present he enjoined upon them secrecy as to this communication, as the time had not come for public declaration. [63]

During his twelve days in Ridvan he announced on a limited basis his divine mission. These twelve days are now celebrated annually by Bahais as a twelve day festival. A new religion needs to have holy days that distinguish it from other traditions.. and if a new religion is going to have any chance of breaking permanently out of the gravitational pull of a previous tradition, it will need to find events like this with the help of which a new unity for believers can be built.

As with many things in the Bahai faith, it is important to keep one eye on the Islamic tradition, and in this case Ramadan is an important parallel. Ramadan is a month-long fast to celebrate the month in which Muhammad received his first revelation from God. That revelation came while he was in a cave on a mountain outside Mecca.. but the Islamic tradition does not worry too much about the site of the revelation.. just the time. Ridvan on the other hand is about the time, but it is also mined for its visual content. The garden imagery that pervades Bahai self-representations is an evocation of Ridvan.

Later as Baha'u'llah is under arrest in Akka, in present day Israel, he recapitulates this earlier experience:

Abdu'l-Baha, knowing how much Baha'u'llah loved greenery, having grown up in the lush vegetation of Mazandaran in Iran, and how much he missed this in the dusty, barren streets of Akka, rented an island in the middle of a small river, which he developed into a beautiful garden and which Baha'u'llah later named the garden of Ridvan, in remembrance of the garden outside Baghdad where he had made the declaration of his mission. [120]

So there is the fact that Baha'u'llah loved gardens, but that would be meaningless if it were not for the symbolic significance that gardens were invested in as they got caught up in the festival of Ridvan. To be clear: what food, scenery, or interior designs Baha'u'llah enjoyed is not particualarly important to anyone. But as that scenery gets attached to a recapitulation of a founding religious event, it gets raised to another level. And an evocation of birds or a rose or quiet running water is now a religious symbol. This symbolic use of garden elements is clear in the video at the top of this post.. and will be clear to anyone who visits a Bahai temple.

Moojan Momen. Baha'u'llah: A Short Biography. One World, 2007.

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Tariq Ramadan

June 1, 2009

The more I listen to and read Tariq Ramadan the more impressed I am with his message. This is the future of Islam, and I would bet that in a generation his way of thinking about the Qur'an and Islamic law will be mainstream. He accomplishes exactly what is needed: he takes absolutely seriously the claims of the Qur'an as revelation, yet makes use of an interpretive frame that allows him great flexibility in applying the particulars to modern life. Also, he does not arrive at merely convenient conclusions, but sees in the guiding principles of Islam challenges to the modern world.

The central burden of his new book Radical Reform is to open up Islamic law to outside knowledge. Ramadan imagines the ideal education of Muslim religious leaders as consisting not only of textual studies, but also "one field of human activity or another" (121). He thus would require all Islamic scholars to double major in something—it could be the sciences, medicine, economics, psychology, or art. This would begin to correct the gap that has arisen between knowledge of texts and the realities of the world.

Those realities of the world have an important place in Ramadan's thought. He begins with an explanation of natural theology as evident in the Qur'an by its reference to elements of the natural world as "signs" that can be read by the learned (ulema). The natural world is thus a text that can be rationally understood, and this leads to the acceptance of scientific knowledge as a legitimate way to understand the world. Then Ramadan points out that while hard science has gotten a foothold in Islamic thought, the social sciences have been mostly dismissed. However, with the complexity of the modern world this form of knowledge cannot be ignored and must be taken into account when formulating social rules.

The result of his acceptance of the social sciences is clear in his well known call for a moratorium on capital punishment, explained here:

Discussion about the unfair application of capital punishment to minorities and the social inequalities that make "stealing" hard to define would hardly have as much force without the social sciences. Ramadan is seeing the world through the kind of systemic theoretical lens that is important in the social sciences.

Ramadan is a figure that is very important.. and whose thought will change the way people think about the Quran and its application to life. Yet he also skirts issues that could challenge his faith. What if after acknowledging and valuing the work of scholars from outside Islam those investigative tools are turned on the history of Islam and the Quran itself? There are reasons that religious groups have learned to shield themselves from the findings of all kinds of scientific and academic knowledge. Eventually Darwin and evolution come knocking.. and then later basic assumptions about psychology and history get challenged. And the whole edifice starts to look shaky.

I would applaud a strong Evangelical leader who spoke honestly and directly about the environment and global warming, even if I ultimately found his or her reasoning specious. That person would be doing something important by addressing and convincing a large group of people who are otherwise skeptical. In the same way I think Ramadan represents the future and I admire him for his defense of the depth of the Islamic tradition.. but I don't find him a thinker who speaks directly to me.. or gives me ideas about the world around me.

It is fascinating to discover what an Internet presence Ramadan has. He has videos of speeches and interviews.. and a popular multi-part debate with Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Below is a video of Ramadan addressing an Austrian group of Muslims:

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