Peter Lamborn Wilson Interview
Part 1 of 2: On Islam
Notes
Interview conducted by the Affinity Project in December 2005; Published in July 2008.
AP = Affinity Project
PLW = Peter Lamborn Wilson
*
Interview
AP: Would you define yourself as a Muslim, and if so, what kind of Islam would you say you practice amongst the multiplicity of different forms?
PLW: Well, I've been many things in my life and I don't renounce any of them. But I don't necessarily practice any of them on a daily basis either. I never renounced Christianity or if I did, I take it back. I've been involved in Tantric things that I guess you could call Hinduism, although that's a very vague term. I practice Shia Islam. I still consider myself all those things but, obviously that's a difficult position to take vis-a-vis the orthodox practitioners of these different faiths. So, if I had to define my position now in terms that would be historically meaningful in an Islamic context, I would refer to Hazrat Inayat Khan and his idea of universalism, that all religions are true. And if this involves contradiction, as Emerson said, OK. We'll just deal with it on a different level. And the inspiration for this in his case was Indian synchrotism, between Hinduism and Islam especially, although other religions were involved too such as Christianity, Judaism and others. This happened on both a non-literate level of the peasantry and still persists to this day on that level, and also occurred on a very high level of intellectual Sufism which was almost a courtly thing at certain times, especially under some of the wilder Mughal rulers like Akbar who started Din-i Ilahi. So these things have precedents within the Islamic traditions, this universalism, this radical tolerance would be another way of putting it, but nowadays of course it's hard to find this praxis on the ground. I can't practice some Indian village cult here, that would be a little--well I sort of do, you know--but actually (laughs), it's highly personal.
AP: Would you say that it's radically tolerant or radically accepting? I would say that there is a distinction between tolerance and acceptance.
PLW: I know what you're getting at. Tolerance in this sense is a kind of weak position, and acceptance would be a strong position?
AP: I would say that, for example, I can tolerate homosexuals, Muslim homosexuals, or I can say well I accept them in the fold of Islam because they define themselves as Muslim.
PLW: Using the term in that sense, what I mean by radical tolerance is what you're calling acceptance. In other words it's not just ecumenicalism here. It's not a reformist position. It's a pretty radical position. And it got Hazrat Inayat Khan in a lot of trouble amongst orthodox Muslims. This movement still suffers from that today. But in India, there is this tradition of that, it still persists in India more than in other countries where the fundamentalist/reformist/modernist thing has swept away the so-called medieval creations which make up all the charm and difference. That's what they hate.
AP: What is it that interested or intrigued you in Islam in particular? And I believe you were introduced to it in Morocco, was it?
PLW: Well really, in New York. This goes back to the 60s and my involvement in one of the--I guess you could say--new religions of that era which came out of Moor Science tradition. I don't know if you've read any of my stuff on this. So already in New York I was taking an interest in these things.
AP: And why was that?
PLW: Well, because I got contact into that movement and also began to read Al-Ghazali on the recommendation of some of the people in that movement and we all became very interested in trying to find out whether there was such a thing as living Sufism. This was the 60s, there was no 'new-age' there on the ground. None of these people were so visibly active. Anyway, we didn't find them. So that was one of my reasons for going to the East.
AP: Well that's one of the things that is associated with Al-Ghazali, especially with regards to the fact that he was considered, or considered himself to be a Sufi. And then I believe that before he had passed away he had become a Sunni. And then he began to take more of a Sunni sort of path, and highlighted nonetheless of Sufism and the spiritual element with regards to the necessity of spirituality, the return to Islam.
PLW: Yeah sure, he was a great intellectual epitome of that position in a lot of ways. But we weren't reading him from that point of view because we weren't reading him from inside Islam. We were reading The Alchemy of Happiness and it was psychadelic. It was like, "Hey, why are we reading this Tibetan Book of the Dead stuff, this is really far out." And it's only years later that I came to see Al-Ghazali as this bastion of orthodoxy within Sufism. And this is how he's perceived in the tradition, you're quite right. But that isn't how we were reading it. And we got hold of a few other things some Ibn Arabi, very little, but we weren't scholars, we weren't Islamologists. There were such people around but they never would have occurred to us.
AP: But obviously in Islam, and I'm sure you're aware of this, is the concept of Ijithad...
PLW: More in Shi'ism.
AP: ...the fact that it is the duty of every Muslim, male or female, child or eldery, to strive to get to know more about Islam, more about the world, etc., as much as s/he can. Is that one of the things that interested you as well is that it's sort of an infinitum of desire to learn, to know what is the responsibility of every single individual--not just a particular scholar--and therefore removing the element of authority that exists within Islam?
PLW: I don't know whether I grasp that very fully in my initial contacts with the thing, because I wasn't reading Islam, I wasn't reading Sufism per se. So in other words these dialectical aspects that you're pointing out here were not so clear to me at the beginning. They're very clear to me now, I could almost say in a retrospective position, which I might take now. In that sense yes, obviously, this is one of the key elements that makes certain aspects of Islam interesting to certain aspects of anarchism, that precise thing which is often being called 'democracy.' Sociologists would label this as a 'democratic tendency' within Islam as compared to other religions and they would point out that the Ulema, although technically speaking do not occupy an authoritarian position, in practice often do. And especially now.
AP: Why do you think that is? Why do you think that turns out?
PLW: Well, I don't know. It's like the old saying, Sufism was once reality without a name and now it's a name without reality. We could talk about this in a completely Islamic way as the corruption and decline of the true original Islam, which for Sufism is not fundamentalist but is Sufi. The real origins are mystical origins. That's just the sociology of institutions from a secular point of view, what we're looking at is that institutions that become authoritarian, especially when they last for thousands of years. Yes?
AP: Yeah.
PLW: We could go on, we could go into Maxine Rodinson's critique of Islam as not having enough of a doctrinal framework to really be considered as opposed to capitalism. Have you read him?
AP: No, I haven't read him on Islam but I think with regards to the aspect of the anti-capitalist sentiments that exist within Islam, particularly with a pillar of Islam which is Zakat and the way of Islam...
PLW: And again, Shi'ism adds 'social justice' to the pillars, so if you combine those two you get as Ali Shariati did, you get the possibility of an Islamic socialism with strong non-authoritarian tendencies.
AP: Would you say an Islamic socialism or an Islamic anarchism?
PLW: No, in his case socialism. He did not go all the way to anarchism. He was interested, I think, in some anarchist thinkers but he didn't see that as... he was looking for something practical for Iran, I think, and as much as possible he embraced Sufism and anti-authoritarianism. His movement didn't, particularly; I'm talking about him as an individual thinker whom I find quite interesting and even sympathetic in a lot of ways. And I'm sorry I didn't get to know him when I was in Iran.
AP: Tell me, would you see the nodes of intersection that could become, in sort of Deleuze and Guattari's terms, lines of flight between Islam and anarchism? What do you see between both these movements?
PLW: Well, in my own work, I've tended to concentrate on the heretical penumbra. Extreme Sufism, Ishmaelism. If orthodox Sunni Islam is going to be taken as the norm, then this is not the norm. I would question this whole picture, but it is the picture of Islamology so let's just go with it and say, as I myself have said in subtitling my books on Islam and heresy, 'On the Margins of Islam,' and I think it's here in the penumbral aspects, the illumination around the dark body, that the interesting intersections occur. Now I was criticized in Fifth Estate by Barkley, for talking about Sufism as an anarchistoid element in Islam. He proposed a sort of Islamic puritanism and its democratic structure as something closer to anarchism. I was respectful of his critique, but on the other hand I had to disagree. I find the whole puritannical thing unsympathetic. It's freedom on every level that I'm interested in, not just freedom in the assembly. So this I find amongst the wild dervishes.
AP: Well it's the aspect that, if there's no compulsion in religion, how can there be compulsion with regards to anything?
PLW: And it's not often written because of the dangers of writing some of these things. It's expressed in poetry, poetry has the license for this. And you can say, as Mahmud Shabistari said, if Muslims only understood the truth they wouldn't become idol-worshippers. Did he get away with it? I don't think they killed him, because it was poetry.
AP: There's a lot of songs, too.
PLW: Yeah, because all Persian and Urdu, and I suppose Arabic poetry too, if it's written in a traditional meter, it can be sung to traditional modes. And certain meters are connected to certain modes. So you even have the tune already laid out. And then it's just up to you to do interesting variations on it. A Bardic reality which lacks into the Elizabethan period in the West.
AP: I spent some time with Naqshbandi Sufis in Montreal. What astonished me was that after a particular period of time, spending time with them, when I was actually considering embracing more of the Sufi elements that exist within Islam, I was a bit taken back by the issue of the Bayiah, which is the allegiance and the quest for allegiance. What do you think about that?
PLW: Well I've written about this. A very important influence has been the whole Uwaisi tradition, which is the anti-guru tradition within Sufism. This is based on the idea that you can seek initiation on the spiritual plane, such as in dreams or like the the Uwaisis in Turkey were actually influenced by Shamanism, they would actually meet magical animals or ghosts who would initiate them, and Julian Baldic wrote a nice book about this called Imaginary Muslims...
AP: I'm assuming those magical animals were not Djinn.
PLW: Well yeah, sure they were Djinn. And some of the Djinns were believers, too. Dealing with Djinns is not like necromancy, in the Christian West. Dealing with Djinn can be white magic, quite easily. This is why hermeticism is an easier time within traditional Islam than it has been within traditional Christian cultures.
AP: Where do you see Islam going, especially post-9/11? Where do you see Islam going on its own, and I'd like to hear your comments on what you expect that, for example, what Islam can bring to the table that something like anarchism can not bring to the table? Or vice-versa?
PLW: Well that's sort of crystal ball stuff, which has to be taken with a grain of salt (which is also crystal). I don't see much good ahead in Islamic culture or in the Western culture so it's hard to compare them in that sense. Sufism and radical tolerance and all these ideas seem to be on the retreat in the Islamic world. At least as we look at it from here. My finger is not on the pulse of the East here, but I'm looking at what's going on in America where you've got all these people publishing books called 'What's Right with Islam.'
AP: Or Good Muslim, Bad Muslim, that sort of thing.
PLW: I'm already so sick of this. And the liberal Muslims, why are they trying to make Islam in the image of reform Judaism? Why not pick something more exciting, like Sufism? As far as I can tell, these people are ignorant of Sufism and if they know anything about it, they agree with the reformers that it's a medieval ecretion that should be swept away.
AP: Do you believe it's an aspect of literacy that occurs here in the West, especially the new generation of Muslims, that they are born into a Muslim family, their family had migrated to North America, and they essentially know this thing which is called Islam but they sort of take it for granted apart from the ritualistic aspects or cultural aspects that exist within it. They never really truly identity with Islam, all they get is the surface level.
PLW: There are several interesting things going on in this respect. The Muslim punk movement, with Michael Muhammad Knight, he told me recently that his imagination seems to have started to come to life. There are actually Muslim punk bands and there weren't when he wrote the book, which is wonderful. And I hear from people like you're talking about, college students who suddenly realize that they've got roots, and these roots are interesting. But they can't stomach all this crap that's going on, so some of them find their way to my work.
AP: The other side of the coin with regards to college students, from what I've seen, is they actually turn the other way. They become very religious, very pious all of a sudden, and they start to develop a very hard line as to what is there in terms of Islam, and the concepts of Islam, and become very alienating to other Muslims and the people around them.
PLW: I was thinking of that in terms of 'image magic.' It's very hard to struggle against global image. Now we have this global image of Islam. Whether it arouses waves of hatred or desire, that's what we got. To be able to situate oneself even in a critical position to the image is so difficult, much less to exist outside it. That takes some wellspring of Himma. It's so difficult when you're on your own. Islam is a very communitarian religion and to be on your own, yes you can in theory, everyone is their own Imam in theory, but in practice with the sociology of institutions at work, it's so difficult to move against that sludge.
AP: What do you think it will take to break down that sociology of institutions. Do we need another Malcolm X or Elijah Muhammad to come about with reformed knowledge, or does it come with opening up zones or spaces and people become nomads coming in and out of those spaces, and Islam.
PLW: All those things would be nice. It would be nice to have some voices coming from the Islamic world that aren't either fundamentalist or anti-fundamentalist. It would be nice to have voices come from the Islamic world that remember something about the movement of the social, and haven't just given up on it before this wretched fundamentalism. It would be interesting to have young Muslims in America and England and France where it's at least possible to speak, to start working on these alternatives which we don't even know what they are. Maybe they're these seeds, but we can't talk about anything that's actually sprouting. That would be very difficult.
AP: What could Islams learn from anarchisms?
PLW: Phrased that way, we might be able to work with that question a little. The spiritual element within anarchism is already such a tiny minority, both intellectually and historically. It does exist and we could even talk about the Catholic workers, and I do consider myself a part of it, but it's an almost inaudible voice even within anarchism. And again, if we're talking about the wild dervishes within Islam, well most of these guys are living in the Middle Ages, and for their sake I hope they manage to succeed in continuing to do so. But they don't have anything to learn from anarchism, they're practicing it. And anarchists don't particularly have anything to learn from them, it would just be sort of nice to take inspiration, to cross-fertilize while retaining the differences. No ghastly unity, like the ideals of fundamentalism and capitalism, but to embrace difference.
AP: Let's say those dervishes would not be required to identify as muslim anarchists, or as anarchist muslims, but rather retain their identity.
PLW: It would be so historically difficult to make up some hybrid like that, just as it is so historically difficult to deal with the idea of gay Islam. Gay is the wrong word. It's just not a concept in the Islamic world. Really it means shallow Westernization, and naturally that's resisted. The strategy is wrong. The strategy should go to the Sufi love poetry, that's what the strategy should be. And these wacko 19th century pseudo-scientific Greek terms like homosexual and these lifestyle labels like gay should just be ignored.
AP: Should we go back to an oral tradition in Islam, if people aren't reading to the extent they should, is it better to stand on a box and talk to muslims, or go to the mosque to open these forums for discussions. The problem with that is if they don't like what they hear, you become visible.
PLW: Islam is a missionary religion and always has been. We could talk about Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, it's hard to find other such intensely missionary religions, so it would be hard to separate out the element of Tablee’kh, of propaganda of the faith, from any view that Islam might have of itself.
AP: How do reconcile that fact of Tablee'kh, which specifically came out from places like Pakistan, and which you actually see here in North America. You'll have these moments in Toronto or Montreal and they knock at your door in compulsion of religion.
PLW: Well it would be nice if there were counter-organizations, but I don't really see much evidence of it. Maybe you're more in touch with the fine currents here, which I imagine someone has to be on the line to be in touch with, and it would be nice if something would emerge, in terms of a counter-Tablee'kh, I don't know. Agit-prop? And it would have to be couched in Islamic terms. And that's why I'm saying that Sufism could be so important. And it's being ignored by all the counter-moves against Islamism.
AP: With regards to Muslim scholars in the West, I'm not sure you're familiar with Dr. Tariq Ramadan? He's married to the granddaughter of Hassan Al-Banna who started the Muslim brotherhood in 1948. He lives in Switzerland and migrates between Switzerland, France, England, and he often comes to North America and was supposed to teach in the States. As he was about to come in, the Department of Defense or Homeland Security forbid him from coming in. He's done some work on commenting on the left and the aspect of co-operatives as alternatives to capitalist space and organization. The issue with his work is, as far as I know, the lack of exposure to anarchisms. Have you read anything by him?
PLW: I haven't so I can't comment, but it'd be nice if he would read some Charles Fourier. But dream on, right?
AP: How do you feel about post-structuralism and whatever influence it might have on Islam?
PLW: Well I just wrote a little review of this book on Foucault and the Iranian Revolution. I didn't actually see the whole commentary, only Foucault's part, in First of the Month in New York, and I pointed out that it's true that Foucault was quite wrong in assessing the Iranian Revolution, and he had seen Ali Shariati as much more important than he actually turned out to be, sadly. His critics, including Maxime Rodinson, who wrote a very perceptive and not-nasty criticism, but a strong critique that really demolished Foucault's position.
AP: How did he get caught up in the Iranian Revolution? How did it happen to him, of all people?
PLW: He thought he had missed all the other revolutions and this was his chance. Just like Genet who went to the Palestineans in part because 'at least there's something, this is a chance.' Romanticism, and I'm a romantic myself, I sympathize. I compared the two, Genet's book with Foucault's work and said that desire had played a part in both cases. When he got to Tehran they were marching in the street and shouting two names: Ayotallah Khomeini and Sharati. Later on, of course, there was only the one name. By then he realized how wrong he'd been and shut up on the subject. But my point was that he had been wrong but for the right reasons. His heart had been very good on this. His head had let him down. My heart also went out to him, even though I never went through a period of romanticizing the Iranian Revolution because I saw it up close, on the ground and I realized it was in control of the mullahs right from the start. I had to shed a little tear for Foucault and his lost love.
AP: How do you feel with regards to the issue of violence and pacifism in Islam? Do you believe that the concept of "suicide bombings" ... well 9/11 is quite a different example from Palestine... but I'd like to hear you comment on both.
PLW: The only thing that really occurs to me that I can say on this is to point out how fascinating it is that the Hasan Al-Sabah archetype keeps turning up over and over again. If only Burrows were alive now, what a kick he would get out of this. He did realize that Khomeini was the sort of Hasan Al-Sabah type, which he was. And of course Osama is also, even though he's a Sunni which makes the comparison a little weird. Nevertheless, that's the archetype. He disappears up into the mountains and is never seen again. Believe me, he'll never be seen again. He'll live forever because of that. With the long white beard and sending out the Fedayeen to sacrifice themselves. It's an archetype that apparently just keeps popping up in Islam.
AP: I recently did a class talk with regards to Islam and sacrifice. It's interesting to see how the tactics have evolved with Iraq, 9/11 and Palestine. In Iraq the use of footage and videotape, the image and lighting that Deleuze talks about when he's discussing Bergsonian cinema, the aspect of the imagination colliding with reality. It places the viewer in the person who is being sacrificed. The use of the technique in Palestine, when they leave footage behind; now I'm not saying hostage-taking is the same as what happens in Palestine, the two are different in terms of the context, but do you feel sympathy with Palestine and what goes on there?
PLW: I was remembering what happened with Karlheinz Stockhausen after 9/11, when he blurted out his statement about what a fantastic work of art it had been, and I believe the poor sucker is still hiding out somewhere from the fallout of making that statement. But I thought the statement was so obvious, it was a work of art. It was meant to be image manipulation and it succeeded fantastically well.
AP: Like propaganda of the deed?
PLW: It was a viral image, just absolutely did the total Burrowsian thing from the grey room into everybody's head instantly. In a situation like that, it's so difficult to sort out ethical and even moral strands. When you're just being swamped with the grand illusion, the Orwellianism to the degree that would have made Orwell keel over in a dead faint. It's just a gargantuan behemoth of imagery, and it's got everybody.
AP: Do you think it was intentional to get that sort of image to the people?
PLW: Intention is such a.... who cares, does it even matter?
AP: Well I think it does, like Islam says that all actions are but by intention.
PLW: I mean, clearly these people are media mavens. If they hadn't read McLuhan, it must just have seeped into their unconscious through the dreamworld or something. They're manipulating the image, of course they are. And so is the U.S. It's an image war. That's why Baudrillard said about the first Gulf War, a statement he got in so much trouble for, saying it never happened. Which I presume he didn't mean to belittle the deaths and suffering that actually occurred, but he was talking about this aspect of this Manichean spectacle of clashing imagery. Which is sometimes the same imagery which makes it even more complicated. So it's really kinda hard to even answer your question. Yes, I've always been sympathetic to the suffering of the Palestineans. How could one not be? But to say that I have any kind of political insight into it, no.
AP: With regards to the aspect of Islam and desire, let's talk about desire and homosexuality. How do you feel about there being no path with regards to desire, in an Islamic framework. Islam says that not everything you desire can be fulfilled, for example alcohol, hashish or homosexual activities. Do you think a re-interpretation takes that apart?
PLW: You could do this in an Islamic legal context, but would have to call in Ishmaelism and certain kinds of Shiaism, Sufism and so forth in order to do it. I think the way you would do it would be to point out there is no hierarchy in Islam. There's no Pope to call on his cardinals in this. A Fatwah can be issued but whether anybody follows it is a voluntary process. If you issued a Fatwah based on hermeneutic exigesis, on esoteric interpretations of Quran and Hadith, it'd be a question of whether you had the Ummah, whether the community would accept those Fatwahs. Right now we see that it's not likely. Although I understand there's a so-called gay mosque in Toronto, and I wish them well, but that would be the way it would have to be done. Unless we're gonna talk about social disintegration. And again, I think it would be worthwhile talking about this in order to avoid this schizophrenia in the very use of a term like 'gay Muslim.' Gay is about a consumerist lifestyle, and if that's what they're interested, then I'm not sympathetic (terribly). I mean do what you want to do, you know, it's like gay marriage; from an anarchist perspective this is all big head-scratcher, you know what I'm saying? Are we asking permission of the state here or what?
AP: Well it goes back to Lacan, you never escape the structure or image that society has placed for you... the politics of demand... you always go back and forth in circles.
PLW: It's why language is important. What theory is supposed to be about.
AP: Did Muslims waste a lot of time by trying to apologize for 9/11, trying to teach people about Islam to get away from stereotypes of the terrorist Muslim...
PLW: You tell me. Has there been any improvement as a result of these efforts?
AP: There's a lot more reading going on.
PLW: Yeah, but reading of what? Like we talked about.
AP: A lot of people are actually reading the Quran.
PLW: A lot of my teachers say it's a mistake to start with the Quran. Listen to it in Arabic, get the spiritual vibe but save the text for later.
AP: Particularly with regards to the Quran being used by people, who don't know much about Islam, to bring out the elements they consider hateful against Jews and Christians.
PLW: You've got the Christians reading the Quran saying "It's all full of violence!", and unfortunately no Muslims came back with a reading of the Bible but some liberals did it for them. From a scriptual perspective it's always a double-edged sword, which is another reason to leave the Quran for later.
AP: Do you think that Islam, if reinterpreted, would constitute a non-Western form of anarchism? Anarchism that existed before the term was coined?
PLW: I question the idea of non-Western. A lot of people consider Islam one of the Western tradition. After all, it goes all the way up to France. Yes, you can talk about 'the East' in the spiritual sense, but you can take it in the large sense of the whole monotheist tradition which is a kind of Eastern Mediterranean tradition, and also involved Judaism and Christianity, then how do you separate Islam and call it Eastern and the others Western? That would be a difficult road to hoe. Maybe pre-modern? Would that be a better word?
AP: Sure.
PLW: So like a pre-modern form of anarchism, like how the anarchists always look for their forebearers in the Tao Te Ching or what have you? Yeah. There's certainly some elements there that you could play with.
AP: That interpretation of pre-modernity would really be post-modernity, cause what's pre-modernity?
PLW: Yeah. And theory now, everything is up for grabs. This is the postmodern ecstacy, everything is up for grabs. If we don't allow it to fall into a posty-constructionist apathy of relativism. But look on it as a kind of positive thing.
AP: The possibilities. I think looking for more practical relations, in terms of looking at local Muslim communities and speaking with them about the anarchist tradition.
PLW: We're talked about some of the possible points in a constellation that could be presented already.
AP: The aspect of consensus, of social solidarity, of acceptance...
PLW: You could put the emphasis on those things, pre-modern aspects, and you could talk about what we could call medieval aspects, like the wild dervishes. And between those two poles, perhaps something interesting would begin to spark.
AP: How would you deal with those legalistic people who would...
PLW: That's what I said, you get Fatwahs based on an esoteric position as you could, for example from a Shi'ite or Ishmaeli authority. Or someone who is both Sufi and orthodox, like an Algazel, that's the kind of position that's so sadly missing. If that kind of position existed in Islam in a normative way, we wouldn't even be having this conversation.
AP: I think certainly with regards to Sufism, you pointed out with Al-Ghazali particularly, I think it's the aspect of spirituality being blended in or returning back, but unless you get something out of it it just becomes repetitive.
PLW: That would be a good definition of Sufism, you just gave. In this sense it's not a separate tradition of Islam. The Orientalist view of it being that is wrong.
AP: What about the adoption of techniques of innovation? How do you feel it would...
PLW: Well that's Bidi’a, and we can't call it that, we have to call it Ijtihad, then we can do it.
AP: But once again, Umar always said that sometimes there are good Bidi’as and sometimes there are bad Bidi’a.
PLW: Did he say that?
AP: Yeah. Sometimes there are good innovations and sometimes there are bad innovations. I recall the story of Umar and a woman standing up and correcting him, because he had a particular point of view with regards to something… for example with Taraweeh prayers. Taraweeh prayers did not occur during the time of the propet, per se. It was a good Bidi’a in the sense that they prayed during Ramadan, and then the prophet didn't show up the next day. Everyone was worried and they knocked on his door, and they said well you can pray Taraweeh on your own or you can pray it with Jama’a. And if you pray it within Jama’a then well, that's good, but you can pray it on your own.
PLW: This was during the lifetime of the prophet? After the lifetime of the prophet, it becames more problematic, almost synonymous with sin or heresy.That's why you need the Shi'ite ideas of the Noor Mohamed, something that shines through the consciousness of the collectivity--Messiah as collective--the radical view of certain Shi'ites. This could all be done, but the power points for it just don't exist, apparently.
AP: With regards to Shi'ite Islam, and the political apect and the concept of the Khalifa or the hidden Imam (Mehdi).
PLW: Corbin points out you have this hyper-authoritarian structure, based even on blood, but suddenly it flips into esotericism and you can talk about the Imam of one's own being. That's how you do that. Then you combine that with Sunni 'democracy' and come up with an interesting model. Then it's not just ethical culture for Muslims.
http://affinityproject.org/interviews/plw1.html
Friday, April 23, 2010
Overcoming Tourism
Overcoming Tourism
by Hakim Bey
In the Old Days tourism didnt exist. Gypsies, Tinkers and other true nomads even now roam about their worlds at will, but no one would therefore think of calling them «tourists».
Tourism is an invention of the 19th century-a period of history which sometimes seems to have stretched out to unnatural length. In many ways, we are still living in the 19th century.
The tourist seeks out Culture because -in our world-culture has disappeared into the maw of the Spectacle culture has been torn down and replaced with a Mall or a talk show- because our education is nothing but a preparation for a lifetime of work and consumption-because we ourselves have ceased to create. Even though tourists appear to be physically present in Nature or Culture, in effect one might call them ghosts haunting ruins, lacking all bodily presence. They're not really there, but rather move through a mind scape, an abstraction («Nature», «Culture»), collecting images rather than experience. All too frequently their vacations are taken in the midst of other peoples' misery and even add to that misery.
Recently several people were assassinated in Egypt just for being tourists. Behold .... the Future. Tourism and terrorism:-just what is the difference?
Of the three archaic reasons for travel - call them «war», «trade», and «pilgrimage» - which one gave birth to tourism? Some would automatically answer that it must be pilgrimage. The pilgrim goes «there» to see, the pilgrim normally brings back some souvenir; the pilgrim takes «time off» from daily life; the pilgrim has nonmaterial goals. In this way, the pilgrim foreshadows the tourist.
But the pilgrim undergoes a shift of consciousness, and for the pilgrim that shift is real. Pilgrimage is a form of initiation, and initiation is an opening to other forms of cognition.
We can detect something of the real difference between pilgrim and tourist, however, by comparing their effects on the places they visit. Changes in a place-a city, a shrine, a forest-may be subtle, but at least they can be observed. The state of the soul may be a matter for conjecture, but perhaps we can say something about the state of the social.
Pilgrimage sites like Mecca may serve as great bazaars for trade and they may even serve as centers of production, (like the silk industry of Benares) - but their primary «product» is baraka or maria. These words (one Arabic, one Polynesian) are usually translated as «blessing», but they also carry a freight of other meanings.
The wandering dervish who sleeps at a shrine in order to dream of a dead saint (one of the «People of the Tombs») seeks initiation or advancement on the spiritual path, a mother who brings a sick child to Lourdes seeks healing; a childless woman in Morocco hopes the Marabout will make her fertile if she ties a rag to the old tree growing out of the grave; the traveller to Mecca yearns for the very center of the Faith, and as the caravans come within sight of the Holy City the hajji calls out «Labbaïka Allabumma!» «I am here, O Lord!»
All these motives are summed up by the word baraka, which sometimes seems to be a palpable substance, measurable in terms of increased charisma or «luck». The shrine produces baraka. And the pilgrim takes it away. But blessing is a product of the Imagination-and thus no matter how many pilgrims take it away there's always more. In fact, the more they take, the more blessing the shrine can produce (because a popular shrine grows with every answered prayer).
To say that baraka is «imaginal» is not to call it «unreal». It's real enough to those who feel it. But spiritual goods do not follow the rules of supply and demand like material goods. The more demand for spiritual goods, the more supply. The production of baraka is infinite.
By contrast, the tourist desires not baraka but cultural difference. The pilgrim we might say - leaves the «secular space» of home and travels to the «sacred space» of the shrine in order to experience the difference between secular and sacred. But this difference remains intangible, subtle, invisible to the «profane» gaze, spiritual, imaginal. Cultural difference however is measurable, apparent, visible, material, economic, social.
The imagination of the capitalist «first world» is exhausted. It cannot imagine anything different. So the tourist leaves the homogenous space of «home» for the heterogenous space of «foreign climes» not to receive a «blessing» but simply to admire the picturesque, the mere view or snapshot of difference, to see the difference.
The tourist consumes difference.
But the production of cultural difference is not infinite. It is not «merely» imaginal. It is rooted in language, landscape, architecture, custom, taste, smell. It is very physical. The more it is used up or taken away, the less remains. The social can produce just so much «meaning», just so much difference. Once it's gone, it's gone.
Over the centuries perhaps a given sacred place attracted millions of pilgrims - and yet somehow despite all the gazing and admiring and praying and souvenir buying, this place retained its meaning. And now-after 20 or 30 years of tourism-that meaning has been lost. Where did it go? How did this happen?
Tourism's real roots do not lie in pilgrimage (or even in «fair» trade), but in war. Rape and pillage were the original forms of tourism, or rather, the first tourists followed directly in the wake of war, like human vultures picking over battlefield carnage for imaginary booty - for images.
Tourism arose as a symptom of an Imperial ism that was total - economic, political, and spiritual.
What's really amazing is that so few tourists have been murdered by such a meagre handful of terrorists. Perhaps a secret complicity exists between these mirror image foes. Both are displaced people, cut loose from all mooring, drifting in a sea of images. The terrorist act exists only in the image of the act without CNN, there survives only a spasm of meaningless cruelty. And the tourist's act exists only in the images of that act, the snapshots and souvenirs; otherwise nothing remains but the dunning letters of credit card companies and a residue of «free mileage» from some foundering airline. The terrorist and the tourist are perhaps the most alienated of all the products of post imperial capitalism. An abyss of images separates them from the objects of their desire. In a strange way they are twins.
Nothing ever really touches the life of the tourist. Every act of the tourist is mediated. Anyone who's ever witnessed a phalanx of Americans or a busload of Japanese advancing on some ruin or ritual must have noticed that even their collective gaze is mediated by the medium of the camera's multi faceted eye, and that the multiplicity of cameras, videocams, and recorders forms a complex of shiny clicking scales in an armor of pure mediation. Nothing organic penetrates this insectoid carapace which serves as both protective critic and predatory mandible, snapping up images, images, images. At its most extreme this mediation takes the form of the guided tour, in which every image is interpreted by a licensed expert, a psychopomp or guide of the Dead, a virtual Virgil in the Inferno of meaninglessness-a minor functionary of the Central Discourse and its metaphysics of appropriation-a pimp of fleshless ecstasies.
The real place of the tourist is not the site of the exotic, but rather the no place place (literally the «utopia») of median space, liminal space, in between space - the space of travel itself, the industrial abstraction of the airport, or the machine dimension of plane or bus.
So the tourist and the terrorist-those twin ghosts of the airports of abstraction-suffer an identical hunger for the authentic. But the authentic recedes whenever they approach it. Cameras and guns stand in the way of that moment of love which is the hidden dream of every terrorist and tourist. To their secret misery, all they can do is destroy. The tourist destroys meaning, and the terrorist destroys the tourist.
Tourism is the apotheosis and quintessence of «Commodity Fetishism.» It is the ultimate Cargo Cult - the worship of «goods» that will never arrive, because they have been exalted, raised to glory, deified, worshipped and absorbed, all on the plane of pure spirit, beyond the stench of mortality (or morality).
You buy tourism you get nothing but images. Tourism, like Virtual Reality, is a form of Gnosis, of bodyhatred and body transcendence. The ultimate tourist «trip» will take place in Cyberspace, and it will be
CyberGnosis SM_
a trip to paranirvana
and back,
in the comfort of your
very own
«workstation.»
Jack in,
leave Earth
behind!
The modest goal of this little book is to address the individual traveler who has decided to resist tourism.
Even though we may find it impossible in the end to «purify» ourselves and our travel from every last taint and trace of tourism, we still feel that improvement may be possible.
Not only do we disdain tourism for its vulgarity and its injustice, and therefore wish to avoid any contamination (conscious or unconscious) by its viral virulency we also lavish to understand travel as an act of reciprocity rather than alienation. In other words, we don't wish merely to avoid the negativities of tourism, but even more to achieve positive travel, which we envision as a productive and mutually enhancing relation between self and other, guest and host a form of cross cultural synergy in which the whole exceeds the sum of parts.
We'd like to know if travel can be carried out according to a secret economy of baraka, whereby not only the shrine but also the pilgrims themselves have «blessings» to bestow.
Before the Age of the Commodity, we know, there was an Age of the Gift, of reciprocity, of giving and receiving. We learned this from the tales of certain travelers, who found remnants of the world of the Gift among certain tribes, in the form of potlach or ritual exchange, and recorded their observations of such strange practises.
Not long ago there still existed a custom among South Sea islanders of travelling vast distances by outrigger canoe, without compass or sextant, in order to exchange valuable and useless presents (ceremonial art objects rich in mana) from island to island in a complex pattern of overlapping reciprocities.
We suspect that even though travel in the modern world seems to have been taken over by the Commodity - even though the networks of convivial reciprocity seem to have vanished from the map - even though tourism seems to have triumphed - even so - we continue to suspect that other pathways still persist, other tracks, unofficial, not noted on the map, perhaps even «secret»- pathways still linked to the possibility of an economy of the Gift, smugglers' routes for freespirits, known only to the geomantic guerillas of the art of travel.
As a matter of fact, we don't just «suspect» it. We know it. We know there exists an art of travel.
Perhaps the greatest and subtlest practitioners of the art of travel were the sufis, the mystics of Islam. Before the age of passports, immunisations, airlines and other impediments to free travel, the sufis wandered footloose in a world where borders tended to be more permeable than nowadays, thanks to the transnationalism of Islam and the cultural unity of Dar al-Islam, the Islamic world.
The great medieval Moslem travelers, like Ibn Battuta and Naser Khusraw, have left accounts of vast journies - Persia to Egypt, or even Morocco to China-which never set foot outside a landscape of deserts, camels, caravanserais, bazaars, and piety. Someone always spoke Arabic, however badly, and Islamic culture permeated the remotest backwaters, however superficially. Reading the tales of Sinbad the sailor (from the 1001 Nights) gives us the impression of a world where even the terra incognita was still despite all marvels and oddities - somehow familiar, somehow Islamic. Within this unity, which was not yet a uniformity, the sufis formed a special class of travelers. Not warriors, not merchants, and not quite ordinary pilgrims either, the dervishes represent a spiritualization of pure nomadism.
According to the Koran, God's Wide Earth and everything in it are «sacred». not only as divine creations but also because the material world is full of «waymarks» or signs of divine reality, Moreover, Islam itself s is born between two journies, Mohammad's hijra or «Flight» from Mecca to Medina, and his hajj, or return voyage. The hajj is the movement toward the origin and center for every Moslem even today, and the annual Pilgrimage has played a vital role not just in the religious unity of Islam but also in its cultural unity.
Mohammad himself exemplifies every kind of travel in Islam: - his youth with the Meccan caravans of Summer and Winter, as a merchant; his campaigns as a warrior his triumph as a humble pilgrim. Although an urban leader he is also the prophet of the Bedouin and himself a kind of nomad, a «sojourner» - an «orphan». From this perspective travel can almost be seen as a sacrament. Every religion sanctifies travel to some degree, but Islam is virtually unimaginable without it.
The Prophet said, «Seek knowledge, even as far as China». From the beginning Islam lifts travel above all «mundane» utilitarianism and gives it an epistemological or even gnostic dimension. «The jewel that never leaves the mine is never polished», says the sufi Saadi. To «educate» is to «lead outside», to give the pupil a perspective beyond parochiality and mere subjectivity.
Some sufis may have done all their traveling in the Imaginal World of archetypal dreams and visions, but vast numbers of them took the Prophet's exhortations quite literally. Even today dervishes wander over the entire Islamic world-but as late as the 19th century they wandered in veritable hordes, hundreds or even thousands at a time, and covered vast distances. All in search of knowledge.
Unofficially there existed two basic types of wandering sufi: the «gentleman scholar» type, and the mendicant dervish. The former category includes Ibn Battuta (who collected sufi initiations the way some occidental gentlemen once collected masonic degrees); and on a much more serious level - the «Greatest Shaykh» Ibn Arabi, who meandered slowly through the 13th century from his native Spain, across North Africa through Egypt to Mecca, and finally to Damascus.
Ibn Arabi actually left accounts of his search for saints and adventures on the road, which could be pieced together from his voluminous writings to form a kind of rihla or «travel text» (a recognised genre of Islamic literature) or autobiography. Ordinary scholars travelled in search of rare texts on theology or jurisprudence, but Ibn Arabi sought only the highest secrets of esotericism and the loftiest «openings» into the world of divine illumination, for him every «journey to the outer horizons» was also a «journey to the inner horizons» of spiritual psychology and gnosis.
On the visions he experienced in Mecca alone he wrote a 12 volume work (The Meccan Revelations), and he has also left us precious sketches of hundreds of his contemporaries, from the greatest philosophers of the age to humble dervishes and «madmen», anonymous women saints and «Hidden Masters». Ibn Arabi enjoyed a special relation with Khezr, the immortal and unknown prophet, the «Green Man», who sometimes appears to wandering sufis in distress, to rescue them from the desert, or to initiate them. Khezr, in a sense, can be called the patron saint of the travelling dervishes - and the prototype. (He first appears in the Koran as a mysterious wanderer and companion of Moses in the desert.)
Christianity once included a few orders of wandering mendicants (in fact St. Francis organised one after meeting with dervishes in the Holy Land, who may have bestowed upon him a «cloak of initiation» - the famous patchwork robe he was wearing when he returned to Italy) - but Islam spawned dozens, perhaps hundreds of such orders.
As Sufism crystallised from the loose spontaneity of early days to an institution with rules and grades, «travel for knowledge» was also regularised and organised. Elaborate handbooks of duties for dervishes were produced which included methods for turning travel into a very specific form of meditation. The whole Sufi «path» itself was symbolised in terms of intentional travel.
In some cases itineraries were fixed (e.g.,the Hajj); other involved waiting for «signs» to appear, coincidences, intuitions, «adventures» such as those which inspired the travels of the Arthurian knights. Some orders limited the time spent in any one place to 40 days; others made a rule of never sleeping twice in the same place. The strict orders, such as the Naqshbandis, turned travel into a kind of fullt~me choreography, in which every movement was pre ordained and designed to enhance consciousness.
By contrast, the more heterodox orders (such as the Qalandars) adopted a «rule» of total spontaneity and abandon -«permanent unemployment» as one of them called it - an insouciance of bohemian proportions - a«dropping out» at once both scandalous and completely traditional. Colorfully dressed, carrying their begging bowls, axes, and standards, addicted to music and dance, carefree and cheerful (sometimes to the point of «blameworthiness»!), orders such as the Nematollahis of 19th century Persia grew to proportions that alarmed both sultans and theologians - many dervishes were executed for «heresy». Today the true Qalandars survive mostly in India, where their lapses from orthodoxy include a fondness for hemp and a sincere hatred of work. Some are charlatans, some are simply bums - but a suprizing number of them seem to be people of attainment .... how can I put it? .... people of self realization, marked by a distinct aura of grace, or baraka.
All the different types of sub travel we've described are united by certain shared vital structural forces. One such force might be called a «magical» worldview, a sense of life that rejects the «merely» random for a reality of signs and wonders, of meaningful coincidences and «unveilings». As anyone who's ever tried it will testify, intentional travel immediately opens one up to this «magical» influence.
A psychologist might explain this phenomenon (either with awe or with reductionist disdain) as «subjective» ; while the pious believer would take it quite literally. From the sun point of view neither interpretation rules out the other, nor suffices in itself, to explain away the marvels of the Path. In sufism, the «objective» and the «subjective» are not considered opposites, but complements. From the point of view of the two-dimensional thinker (whether scientific or religious) such paradoxology smacks of the forbidden.
Another force underlying all forms of intentional travel can be described by the Arabic word adab. On one level adab simply means «good manners» and in the case of travel these manners are based on the ancient customs of desert nomads, for whom both wandering and hospitality are sacred acts. In this sense the dervish shares both the privileges and the responsibilities of the guest.
Bedouin hospitality is a clear survival of the primordial economy of the Gift - a relation of reciprocity. The wanderer must be taken in (the dervish must be fed) - but thereby the wanderer assumes a role prescribed by ancient custom - and must give back something to the host. For the bedouin this relation is almost a form of clientage: - the breaking of bread and sharing of salt constitute a sort of kinship. Gratitude is not a sufficient response to such generosity. The traveler must consent to a temporary adoption -anything less would offend against adab.
Islamic society retains at least a sentimental attachment to these rules, and thus creates a special niche for the dervish, that of the full time guest. The dervish returns the gifts of society with the gift of baraka. In ordinary pilgrimage the traveler receives baraka from a place, but the dervish reverses the flow and brings baraka to a place. The sufi may think of himself (or herself) as a permanent pilgrim - but to the ordinary stay at home people of the mundane world the sufi is a kind of perambulatory shrine.
Now tourism in its very structure breaks the reciprocity of host and guest. In English, a «host» may have either guests or parasites. The tourist is a parasite for no amount of money can pay for hospitality. The true traveler is a guest and thus serves a very real function, even today, in societies where the ideals of hospitality have not yet faded from the «collective mentality». To be a host, in such societies, is a meritorious act. Therefore, to be a guest is also to give merit.
The modern traveler who grasps the simple spirit of this relation will be forgiven many lapses in the intricate ritual of adab (how many cups of coffee? Where to put one's feet? How to be entertaining? How to show gratitude? etc.) peculiar to a specific culture. And if one bothers to master a few of the traditional forms of adab, and to deploy them with heartfelt sincerity, then both guest and host will gain more than they put into the relation and this more is the unmistakable sign of the presence of the Gift.
Another level of meaning of the word adab connects it with culture (since culture can be seen as the sum of all manners and customs); in modern usage the Department of «Arts and Letters» at a University would be called Adabiyyat. To have adab in this sense is to be «polished» (like that well traveled gem) - but this has nothing necessarily to do with «fine arts» or literacy or being a city slicker or even being «cultured». It is a matter of the «heart».
«Adab» is sometimes given as a oneword definition of schism. But insincere manners (ta 'arof in Persian) and insincere culture alike are shunned by the sufi - «There is no ta'arof in Tasssawuf [Sufism]», as the dervishes say; ..Darvishi» is an adjectival synonym for informality, the laid back quality of the people of Heart - and for spontaneous adab, so to speak. The true guest and host never make an obvious effort to fulfil the «rules» of reciprocity - they may follow the ritual scrupulously, or they many bend the forms creatively, but in either case they will give their actions a depth of sincerity that manifests as natural grace. Adab is a kind of love.
A complement of this «technique» (or «Zen») of human relations can be found in the sufi manner of relating to the world in general. The «mundane» world - of social deceit and negativity, of usurious emotions inauthentic consciousness («mauvaise conscience»), boorishness, ill will, inattention, blind reaction, false spectacle, empty discourse, etc. etc.-all this no longer holds any interest for the traveling dervish. But those who say that the dervish has abandoned «this world» «God's Wide Earth» - would be mistaken.
The dervish is not a Gnostic Dualist who hates the biosphere (which certainly includes the imagination and the emotions, as well as «matter» itself). The early Moslem ascetics certainly closed themselves off from everything. When Rabiah, the woman saint of Basra, was urged to come out of her house and «witness the wonders of God's creation», she replied, «Come into the house and see them», i.e., come into the heart of contemplation of the oneness which is above the manyness of reality. «Contraction» and «Expansion» are both sufi terms for spiritual states. Rabiah was manifesting Contraction: a kind of sacred melancholia which has been metaphorized as the «Caravan of Winter», of return to Mecca (the center, the heart), of inferiority, and of ascesis or selfdenial. She was not a world hating Dualist, nor even a moralistic fleshhating puritan. She was simply manifesting a certain specific kind of grace.
The wandering dervish however manifests a state more typical of Islam in its most exuberant energies. He indeed seeks Expansion, spiritual joy based on the sheer multiplicity of the divine generosity in material creation. (Ibn Arabi has an amusing «proof» that this world is the best world - for, if it were not, then God would be ungenerous - which is absurd. Q.E.D.) In order to appreciate the multiple waymarks of the Wide Earth precisely as the unfolding of this generosity, the sufi cultivates what might be called the theophanic gaze : - the opening of the «Eye of the Heart» to the experience of certain places, objects people, events as locations of the «shining-through» of divine Light.
The dervish travels, so to speak, both in the material world and in the «World of Imagination» simultaneously. But for the eye of the heart these worlds interpenetrate at certain points. One might say that they mutually reveal or «unveil» each other. Ultimately, they are «one»-and only our state of tranced inattention, our mundane consciousness, prevents us from experiencing this «deep» identity at every moment. The purpose of intentional travel, with its «adventures» and its uprooting of habits, is to shake loose the dervish from all the trance effects of ordinariness. Travel, in other words, is meant to induce a certain state of consciousness or «spiritual state» - that of Expansion.
For the wanderer, each person one meets might act as an «angel», each shrine one visits may unlock some initiatic dream, each experience of Nature may vibrate with the presence of some «spirit of place». Indeed, even the mundane and ordinary may suddenly be seen as numinous (as in the great travel haiku of the Japanese Zen poet Basho) - a face in the crowd at a railway station, crows on telephone wires, sunlight in a puddle....
Obviously one doesn't need to travel to experience this state. But travel can be used - that is, an art of travel can be acquired - to maximise the chances for attaining such a state. It is a moving meditation, like the Taoist martial arts. The Caravan of Summer moved outward, out of Mecca, to the rich trading lands of Syria and Yemen. Likewise the dervish is «moving out» (it's always «moving day»), heading forth, taking off, on «perpetual holiday» as one poet expressed it, with an open Heart, an attentive eye (and other senses), and a yearning for Meaning, a thirst for knowledge. One must remain alert, since anything might suddenly unveil itself as a sign. This sounds like a kind of «paranoia» - although «metanoia» might be a better term and indeed one finds «madmen» amongst the dervishes, «attracted ones», overpowered by divine influxions, lost in the Light. In the Orient the insane are often cared for and admired as helpless saints, because «mental illness» may sometimes appear as a symptom of too much holiness rather than too little «reason». Hemp's popularity amongst the dervishes can be attributed to its power to induce a kind of intuitive attentiveness which constitutes a controllable insanity: - herbal metanoia. But travel in itself can intoxicate the heart with the beauty of theophanic presence. It's a question of practise - the polishing of the jewel - removal of moss from the rolling stone.
In the old days (which are still going on in some remote parts of the East) Islam thought of itself as a whole world, a wide world, a space with great latitude within which Islam embraced the whole of society and nature. This latitude appeared on the social level as tolerance. There was room enough, even for such marginal groups as mad wandering dervishes. Sufism itself or at least its austere orthodox and «sober» aspect-occupied a central position in the cultural discourse. «Everyone» understood intentional travel by analogy with the Hail - everyone understood the dervishes, even if they disapproved.
Nowadays however Islam views itself as a partial world, surrounded by unbelief and hostility, and suffering internal ruptures of every sort. Since the 19th century Islam has lost its global consciousness and sense of its own wideness and completeness. No longer therefore can Islam easily find a place for every marginalized individual and group within a pattern of tolerance and social order. The dervishes now appear as an intolerable difference in society. Every Moslem must now be the same, united against all outsiders, and struck from the same prototype. Of course Moslems have always «imitated» the Prophet and viewed his image as the norm - and this has acted as a powerful unifying force for style and substance within Dar al Islam. But «nowadays» the puritans and reformers have forgotten that this «imitation» was not directed only at an early medieval Meccan merchant named Mohammad but also at the insan al kamil (the «Perfect Man» or «Universal Human»), an ideal of inclusion rather than exclusion, an ideal of integral culture, not an attitude of purity in peril, not xenophobia disguised as piety, not totalitarianism, not reaction.
The dervish is persecuted nowadays in most of the Islamic world. Puritanism always embraces the most atrocious aspects of modernism in its crusade to strip the Faith of «medieval accretions» such as popular sufism. And surely the way of the wandering dervish cannot thrive in a world of airplanes and oil wells, of nationalist/chauvinist hostilities (and thus of impenetrable borders), and of a puritanism which suspects all difference as a threat. This puritanism has triumphed not only in the East, but rather closer to home as well. It is seen in the «time discipline» of modern too Late-Capitalism, and in the porous rigidity of consumerist hyperconformity, as well as in the bigoted reaction and sex hysteria of the «Christian Right». Where in all this can we find room for the poetic (and parasitic!) life of Aimless Wandering - the life of Chuang Tzu (who coined this slogan) and his Taoist progeny - the life of Saint Francis and his shoeless devotees - the life of (for example) Nur All Shah Isfahani, a 19th century sufi poet who was executed in Iran for the awful heresy of meandering dervishism?
Here is the flip side of the «problem of tourism»: -the problem of the disappearance of «aimless wandering». Possibly the two are directly related, so that the more tourism becomes possible, the more dervishism becomes impossible. In fact, we might well ask if this little essay on the delightful life of the dervish possesses the least bit of relevance for the contemporary world. Can this knowledge help us to overcome tourism, even within our own consciousness and life? Or is it merely an exercize in nostalgia for lost possibilities - a futile indulgence in romanticism?
Well, yes and no. Sure, I confess I'm hopelessly romantic about the form of the dervish life, to the extent that for a while I turned my back on the mundane world and followed it myself. Because of course, it hasn't really disappeared. Decadent yes - but not gone forever. What little I know about travel I learned in those few years - I owe a debt to «medieval accretions» I can never pay - and I'll never regret my «escapism» for a single moment. BUT - I don't consider the form of dervishism to be the answer to the «problem of tourism.» The form has lost most of its efficacy. There's no point in trying to «preserve» it (as if it were a pickle, or a lab specimen)-there's nothing quite so pathetic as mere «survival».
But: beneath the charming outer forms of dervishism lies the conceptual matrix, so to speak, which we've called intentional travel. On this point we should suffer no embarrassment about «nostalgia». We have asked ourselves whether or not we desire a means to discover the art of travel, whether we want and will to overcome «the inner tourist», the false consciousness which screens us from the experience of the Wide World's waymarks. The way of the dervish (or of the Taoist, the Franciscan, etc.) interests us - finally - only to the extent that it can provide us with a key - not THE Key, perhaps - but . . . . a key. And of course - it does.
One fundamental key to success in Travel is of course attentiveness. We call it «paying attention» in English & «prêter attention» in French (in Arabic, however, one gives attention) suggesting that we're as stingy with our attentiveness as we are with our money. Quite often it seems that no one is «paying attention», that everyone is hoarding their consciousness - what? saving it for a rainy day?-and damping down the fires of awareness lest all available fuel be consumed in a single holocaust of unbearable knowing.
This model of consciousness seems suspiciously «Capitalist» however - as if indeed our attention were a limited resource, once spent forever irrecoverable. A usury of perception now appears: - we demand interest on our payment of attention, as if it were a loan rather than an expense. Or as if our consciousness were threatened by an entropic «heat death», against which the best defense must consist of a dull mediocre trance state of grudging half attention - a miserliness of psychic resources - a refusalto notice the unexpected or to savour the miraculousness of the ordinary - a lack of generosity.
But what if we treated our perceptions as gifts rather than payments? What if we gave our attention instead of paying it? According to the law of reciprocity, the gift is returned with a gift - there is no expenditure, no scarcity, no debt against Capital, no penury, no punishment for giving our attention away, and no end to the potentiality of attentiveness.
Our consciousness is not a commodity, nor is it a contractual agreement between the Cartesian ego and the abyss of Nothingness, nor is it simply a function of some meat machine with a limited warranty. True, eventually we wear out and break. In a certain sense the hoarding of our energies makes sense-we «save» ourselves for the truly important moments, the break throughs, the «peak experiences».
But if we picture ourselves as shallow coin purses - if we barricade the «doors of perception» like fearful peasants at the howling of boreal wolves - if we never «pay attention» - how will we recognise the approach and advent of those precious moments, those openings?
We need a model of cognition that emphasises the «magic» of reciprocity: - to give attention is to receive attention, as if the universe in some mysterious way responds to our cognition with an influx of effortless grace. If we convinced ourselves that attentiveness follows a rule of «synergy» rather than a law of depletion, we might begin to overcome in ourselves the banal mundanity of quotidian inattention, and open ourselves to «higher states.»
In any case, the fact remains that unless we learn to cultivate such states, travel will never amount to more than tourism. And for those of us who are not already adepts at the Zen of travel, the cultivation of these states does indeed demand an initial expenditure of energy. We have inhibitions to repress, hesitations to conquer, habits of introversion or bookishness to break, anxieties to sublimate. Our third rate stay athome consciousness seems safe and cozy compared to the dangers and discomforts of the Road with its eternal novelty, its constant demands on our attention. «Fear of freedom» poisons our unconscious, despite our conscious desire for freedom in travel. The art we're seeking seldom occurs as a natural talent. It must be cultivated practised perfected. We must summon up the will for intentional travel.
It's a truism to complain that difference is disappearing from the world - and it's true, too. But it's sometimes amazing to discover how resilient and organic the different can be. Even in America, land of Malls and tv's, regional differences not only survive but mutate and thrive in the interstices, in the cracks that criss-cross the monolith, beneath the notice of the Media Gaze, invisible even to the local bourgeoisie. If all the world is becoming one dimensional, we need to look between the dimensions.
I think of travel as fractal in nature. It takes place off the map as text, outside the official Consensus, like those hidden and embedded patterns that nestle within the infinite bifurcations of non linear equations in the strange world of chaos mathematics. In truth the world has not been completely mapped, because people and their everyday lives have been excluded from the map, or treated as «faceless statistics», or forgotten. In the fractal dimensions of unofficial reality all human beings - and even a great many «places» - remain unique and different. «Pure» and «unspoiled»? Maybe not. Maybe nobody and nowhere was ever really pure. Purity is a will o the wisp, and perhaps even a dangerous form of totalitarianism. Life is gloriously impure. Life drifts.
In the 1950's the French Situationists developed a technique for travel which they called the derive, the «drift.» They were disgusted with themselves for never leaving the usual ruts and pathways of their habit driven lives; they realised they'd never even seen Paris. They began to carry out structureless random expeditions through the city, hiking or sauntering by day, drinking by night, opening up their own tight little world into a terra incognita of slums, suburbs, gardens, and adventures. They became revolutionary versions of Baudelaire's famous flaneur, the idle stroller, the displaced subject of urban capitalism. Their aimless wandering became insurrectionary praxis.
And now, something remains possible - aimless wandering, the sacred drift. Travel cannot be confined to the permissable (and deadening) gaze of the tourist, for whom the whole world is inert, a lump of picturesqueness, waiting to be consumed - because the whole question of permission is an illusion. We can issue our own travel permits. We can allow ourselves to participate, to experience the world as a living relation not as a themepark. We carry within ourselves the hearts of travelers, and we don't need any experts to define and limit our morethan fractal complexities, to «interpret» for us, to «guide» us, to mediate our experience for us, to sell us back the images of our desires.
The sacred drift is born again. Keep it secret.
first published by
Musée Lilim
french title: voyage intentionnel
Musée Lilim
3 rue St. Jean, 11000 Carcassone, France
by Hakim Bey
In the Old Days tourism didnt exist. Gypsies, Tinkers and other true nomads even now roam about their worlds at will, but no one would therefore think of calling them «tourists».
Tourism is an invention of the 19th century-a period of history which sometimes seems to have stretched out to unnatural length. In many ways, we are still living in the 19th century.
The tourist seeks out Culture because -in our world-culture has disappeared into the maw of the Spectacle culture has been torn down and replaced with a Mall or a talk show- because our education is nothing but a preparation for a lifetime of work and consumption-because we ourselves have ceased to create. Even though tourists appear to be physically present in Nature or Culture, in effect one might call them ghosts haunting ruins, lacking all bodily presence. They're not really there, but rather move through a mind scape, an abstraction («Nature», «Culture»), collecting images rather than experience. All too frequently their vacations are taken in the midst of other peoples' misery and even add to that misery.
Recently several people were assassinated in Egypt just for being tourists. Behold .... the Future. Tourism and terrorism:-just what is the difference?
Of the three archaic reasons for travel - call them «war», «trade», and «pilgrimage» - which one gave birth to tourism? Some would automatically answer that it must be pilgrimage. The pilgrim goes «there» to see, the pilgrim normally brings back some souvenir; the pilgrim takes «time off» from daily life; the pilgrim has nonmaterial goals. In this way, the pilgrim foreshadows the tourist.
But the pilgrim undergoes a shift of consciousness, and for the pilgrim that shift is real. Pilgrimage is a form of initiation, and initiation is an opening to other forms of cognition.
We can detect something of the real difference between pilgrim and tourist, however, by comparing their effects on the places they visit. Changes in a place-a city, a shrine, a forest-may be subtle, but at least they can be observed. The state of the soul may be a matter for conjecture, but perhaps we can say something about the state of the social.
Pilgrimage sites like Mecca may serve as great bazaars for trade and they may even serve as centers of production, (like the silk industry of Benares) - but their primary «product» is baraka or maria. These words (one Arabic, one Polynesian) are usually translated as «blessing», but they also carry a freight of other meanings.
The wandering dervish who sleeps at a shrine in order to dream of a dead saint (one of the «People of the Tombs») seeks initiation or advancement on the spiritual path, a mother who brings a sick child to Lourdes seeks healing; a childless woman in Morocco hopes the Marabout will make her fertile if she ties a rag to the old tree growing out of the grave; the traveller to Mecca yearns for the very center of the Faith, and as the caravans come within sight of the Holy City the hajji calls out «Labbaïka Allabumma!» «I am here, O Lord!»
All these motives are summed up by the word baraka, which sometimes seems to be a palpable substance, measurable in terms of increased charisma or «luck». The shrine produces baraka. And the pilgrim takes it away. But blessing is a product of the Imagination-and thus no matter how many pilgrims take it away there's always more. In fact, the more they take, the more blessing the shrine can produce (because a popular shrine grows with every answered prayer).
To say that baraka is «imaginal» is not to call it «unreal». It's real enough to those who feel it. But spiritual goods do not follow the rules of supply and demand like material goods. The more demand for spiritual goods, the more supply. The production of baraka is infinite.
By contrast, the tourist desires not baraka but cultural difference. The pilgrim we might say - leaves the «secular space» of home and travels to the «sacred space» of the shrine in order to experience the difference between secular and sacred. But this difference remains intangible, subtle, invisible to the «profane» gaze, spiritual, imaginal. Cultural difference however is measurable, apparent, visible, material, economic, social.
The imagination of the capitalist «first world» is exhausted. It cannot imagine anything different. So the tourist leaves the homogenous space of «home» for the heterogenous space of «foreign climes» not to receive a «blessing» but simply to admire the picturesque, the mere view or snapshot of difference, to see the difference.
The tourist consumes difference.
But the production of cultural difference is not infinite. It is not «merely» imaginal. It is rooted in language, landscape, architecture, custom, taste, smell. It is very physical. The more it is used up or taken away, the less remains. The social can produce just so much «meaning», just so much difference. Once it's gone, it's gone.
Over the centuries perhaps a given sacred place attracted millions of pilgrims - and yet somehow despite all the gazing and admiring and praying and souvenir buying, this place retained its meaning. And now-after 20 or 30 years of tourism-that meaning has been lost. Where did it go? How did this happen?
Tourism's real roots do not lie in pilgrimage (or even in «fair» trade), but in war. Rape and pillage were the original forms of tourism, or rather, the first tourists followed directly in the wake of war, like human vultures picking over battlefield carnage for imaginary booty - for images.
Tourism arose as a symptom of an Imperial ism that was total - economic, political, and spiritual.
What's really amazing is that so few tourists have been murdered by such a meagre handful of terrorists. Perhaps a secret complicity exists between these mirror image foes. Both are displaced people, cut loose from all mooring, drifting in a sea of images. The terrorist act exists only in the image of the act without CNN, there survives only a spasm of meaningless cruelty. And the tourist's act exists only in the images of that act, the snapshots and souvenirs; otherwise nothing remains but the dunning letters of credit card companies and a residue of «free mileage» from some foundering airline. The terrorist and the tourist are perhaps the most alienated of all the products of post imperial capitalism. An abyss of images separates them from the objects of their desire. In a strange way they are twins.
Nothing ever really touches the life of the tourist. Every act of the tourist is mediated. Anyone who's ever witnessed a phalanx of Americans or a busload of Japanese advancing on some ruin or ritual must have noticed that even their collective gaze is mediated by the medium of the camera's multi faceted eye, and that the multiplicity of cameras, videocams, and recorders forms a complex of shiny clicking scales in an armor of pure mediation. Nothing organic penetrates this insectoid carapace which serves as both protective critic and predatory mandible, snapping up images, images, images. At its most extreme this mediation takes the form of the guided tour, in which every image is interpreted by a licensed expert, a psychopomp or guide of the Dead, a virtual Virgil in the Inferno of meaninglessness-a minor functionary of the Central Discourse and its metaphysics of appropriation-a pimp of fleshless ecstasies.
The real place of the tourist is not the site of the exotic, but rather the no place place (literally the «utopia») of median space, liminal space, in between space - the space of travel itself, the industrial abstraction of the airport, or the machine dimension of plane or bus.
So the tourist and the terrorist-those twin ghosts of the airports of abstraction-suffer an identical hunger for the authentic. But the authentic recedes whenever they approach it. Cameras and guns stand in the way of that moment of love which is the hidden dream of every terrorist and tourist. To their secret misery, all they can do is destroy. The tourist destroys meaning, and the terrorist destroys the tourist.
Tourism is the apotheosis and quintessence of «Commodity Fetishism.» It is the ultimate Cargo Cult - the worship of «goods» that will never arrive, because they have been exalted, raised to glory, deified, worshipped and absorbed, all on the plane of pure spirit, beyond the stench of mortality (or morality).
You buy tourism you get nothing but images. Tourism, like Virtual Reality, is a form of Gnosis, of bodyhatred and body transcendence. The ultimate tourist «trip» will take place in Cyberspace, and it will be
CyberGnosis SM_
a trip to paranirvana
and back,
in the comfort of your
very own
«workstation.»
Jack in,
leave Earth
behind!
The modest goal of this little book is to address the individual traveler who has decided to resist tourism.
Even though we may find it impossible in the end to «purify» ourselves and our travel from every last taint and trace of tourism, we still feel that improvement may be possible.
Not only do we disdain tourism for its vulgarity and its injustice, and therefore wish to avoid any contamination (conscious or unconscious) by its viral virulency we also lavish to understand travel as an act of reciprocity rather than alienation. In other words, we don't wish merely to avoid the negativities of tourism, but even more to achieve positive travel, which we envision as a productive and mutually enhancing relation between self and other, guest and host a form of cross cultural synergy in which the whole exceeds the sum of parts.
We'd like to know if travel can be carried out according to a secret economy of baraka, whereby not only the shrine but also the pilgrims themselves have «blessings» to bestow.
Before the Age of the Commodity, we know, there was an Age of the Gift, of reciprocity, of giving and receiving. We learned this from the tales of certain travelers, who found remnants of the world of the Gift among certain tribes, in the form of potlach or ritual exchange, and recorded their observations of such strange practises.
Not long ago there still existed a custom among South Sea islanders of travelling vast distances by outrigger canoe, without compass or sextant, in order to exchange valuable and useless presents (ceremonial art objects rich in mana) from island to island in a complex pattern of overlapping reciprocities.
We suspect that even though travel in the modern world seems to have been taken over by the Commodity - even though the networks of convivial reciprocity seem to have vanished from the map - even though tourism seems to have triumphed - even so - we continue to suspect that other pathways still persist, other tracks, unofficial, not noted on the map, perhaps even «secret»- pathways still linked to the possibility of an economy of the Gift, smugglers' routes for freespirits, known only to the geomantic guerillas of the art of travel.
As a matter of fact, we don't just «suspect» it. We know it. We know there exists an art of travel.
Perhaps the greatest and subtlest practitioners of the art of travel were the sufis, the mystics of Islam. Before the age of passports, immunisations, airlines and other impediments to free travel, the sufis wandered footloose in a world where borders tended to be more permeable than nowadays, thanks to the transnationalism of Islam and the cultural unity of Dar al-Islam, the Islamic world.
The great medieval Moslem travelers, like Ibn Battuta and Naser Khusraw, have left accounts of vast journies - Persia to Egypt, or even Morocco to China-which never set foot outside a landscape of deserts, camels, caravanserais, bazaars, and piety. Someone always spoke Arabic, however badly, and Islamic culture permeated the remotest backwaters, however superficially. Reading the tales of Sinbad the sailor (from the 1001 Nights) gives us the impression of a world where even the terra incognita was still despite all marvels and oddities - somehow familiar, somehow Islamic. Within this unity, which was not yet a uniformity, the sufis formed a special class of travelers. Not warriors, not merchants, and not quite ordinary pilgrims either, the dervishes represent a spiritualization of pure nomadism.
According to the Koran, God's Wide Earth and everything in it are «sacred». not only as divine creations but also because the material world is full of «waymarks» or signs of divine reality, Moreover, Islam itself s is born between two journies, Mohammad's hijra or «Flight» from Mecca to Medina, and his hajj, or return voyage. The hajj is the movement toward the origin and center for every Moslem even today, and the annual Pilgrimage has played a vital role not just in the religious unity of Islam but also in its cultural unity.
Mohammad himself exemplifies every kind of travel in Islam: - his youth with the Meccan caravans of Summer and Winter, as a merchant; his campaigns as a warrior his triumph as a humble pilgrim. Although an urban leader he is also the prophet of the Bedouin and himself a kind of nomad, a «sojourner» - an «orphan». From this perspective travel can almost be seen as a sacrament. Every religion sanctifies travel to some degree, but Islam is virtually unimaginable without it.
The Prophet said, «Seek knowledge, even as far as China». From the beginning Islam lifts travel above all «mundane» utilitarianism and gives it an epistemological or even gnostic dimension. «The jewel that never leaves the mine is never polished», says the sufi Saadi. To «educate» is to «lead outside», to give the pupil a perspective beyond parochiality and mere subjectivity.
Some sufis may have done all their traveling in the Imaginal World of archetypal dreams and visions, but vast numbers of them took the Prophet's exhortations quite literally. Even today dervishes wander over the entire Islamic world-but as late as the 19th century they wandered in veritable hordes, hundreds or even thousands at a time, and covered vast distances. All in search of knowledge.
Unofficially there existed two basic types of wandering sufi: the «gentleman scholar» type, and the mendicant dervish. The former category includes Ibn Battuta (who collected sufi initiations the way some occidental gentlemen once collected masonic degrees); and on a much more serious level - the «Greatest Shaykh» Ibn Arabi, who meandered slowly through the 13th century from his native Spain, across North Africa through Egypt to Mecca, and finally to Damascus.
Ibn Arabi actually left accounts of his search for saints and adventures on the road, which could be pieced together from his voluminous writings to form a kind of rihla or «travel text» (a recognised genre of Islamic literature) or autobiography. Ordinary scholars travelled in search of rare texts on theology or jurisprudence, but Ibn Arabi sought only the highest secrets of esotericism and the loftiest «openings» into the world of divine illumination, for him every «journey to the outer horizons» was also a «journey to the inner horizons» of spiritual psychology and gnosis.
On the visions he experienced in Mecca alone he wrote a 12 volume work (The Meccan Revelations), and he has also left us precious sketches of hundreds of his contemporaries, from the greatest philosophers of the age to humble dervishes and «madmen», anonymous women saints and «Hidden Masters». Ibn Arabi enjoyed a special relation with Khezr, the immortal and unknown prophet, the «Green Man», who sometimes appears to wandering sufis in distress, to rescue them from the desert, or to initiate them. Khezr, in a sense, can be called the patron saint of the travelling dervishes - and the prototype. (He first appears in the Koran as a mysterious wanderer and companion of Moses in the desert.)
Christianity once included a few orders of wandering mendicants (in fact St. Francis organised one after meeting with dervishes in the Holy Land, who may have bestowed upon him a «cloak of initiation» - the famous patchwork robe he was wearing when he returned to Italy) - but Islam spawned dozens, perhaps hundreds of such orders.
As Sufism crystallised from the loose spontaneity of early days to an institution with rules and grades, «travel for knowledge» was also regularised and organised. Elaborate handbooks of duties for dervishes were produced which included methods for turning travel into a very specific form of meditation. The whole Sufi «path» itself was symbolised in terms of intentional travel.
In some cases itineraries were fixed (e.g.,the Hajj); other involved waiting for «signs» to appear, coincidences, intuitions, «adventures» such as those which inspired the travels of the Arthurian knights. Some orders limited the time spent in any one place to 40 days; others made a rule of never sleeping twice in the same place. The strict orders, such as the Naqshbandis, turned travel into a kind of fullt~me choreography, in which every movement was pre ordained and designed to enhance consciousness.
By contrast, the more heterodox orders (such as the Qalandars) adopted a «rule» of total spontaneity and abandon -«permanent unemployment» as one of them called it - an insouciance of bohemian proportions - a«dropping out» at once both scandalous and completely traditional. Colorfully dressed, carrying their begging bowls, axes, and standards, addicted to music and dance, carefree and cheerful (sometimes to the point of «blameworthiness»!), orders such as the Nematollahis of 19th century Persia grew to proportions that alarmed both sultans and theologians - many dervishes were executed for «heresy». Today the true Qalandars survive mostly in India, where their lapses from orthodoxy include a fondness for hemp and a sincere hatred of work. Some are charlatans, some are simply bums - but a suprizing number of them seem to be people of attainment .... how can I put it? .... people of self realization, marked by a distinct aura of grace, or baraka.
All the different types of sub travel we've described are united by certain shared vital structural forces. One such force might be called a «magical» worldview, a sense of life that rejects the «merely» random for a reality of signs and wonders, of meaningful coincidences and «unveilings». As anyone who's ever tried it will testify, intentional travel immediately opens one up to this «magical» influence.
A psychologist might explain this phenomenon (either with awe or with reductionist disdain) as «subjective» ; while the pious believer would take it quite literally. From the sun point of view neither interpretation rules out the other, nor suffices in itself, to explain away the marvels of the Path. In sufism, the «objective» and the «subjective» are not considered opposites, but complements. From the point of view of the two-dimensional thinker (whether scientific or religious) such paradoxology smacks of the forbidden.
Another force underlying all forms of intentional travel can be described by the Arabic word adab. On one level adab simply means «good manners» and in the case of travel these manners are based on the ancient customs of desert nomads, for whom both wandering and hospitality are sacred acts. In this sense the dervish shares both the privileges and the responsibilities of the guest.
Bedouin hospitality is a clear survival of the primordial economy of the Gift - a relation of reciprocity. The wanderer must be taken in (the dervish must be fed) - but thereby the wanderer assumes a role prescribed by ancient custom - and must give back something to the host. For the bedouin this relation is almost a form of clientage: - the breaking of bread and sharing of salt constitute a sort of kinship. Gratitude is not a sufficient response to such generosity. The traveler must consent to a temporary adoption -anything less would offend against adab.
Islamic society retains at least a sentimental attachment to these rules, and thus creates a special niche for the dervish, that of the full time guest. The dervish returns the gifts of society with the gift of baraka. In ordinary pilgrimage the traveler receives baraka from a place, but the dervish reverses the flow and brings baraka to a place. The sufi may think of himself (or herself) as a permanent pilgrim - but to the ordinary stay at home people of the mundane world the sufi is a kind of perambulatory shrine.
Now tourism in its very structure breaks the reciprocity of host and guest. In English, a «host» may have either guests or parasites. The tourist is a parasite for no amount of money can pay for hospitality. The true traveler is a guest and thus serves a very real function, even today, in societies where the ideals of hospitality have not yet faded from the «collective mentality». To be a host, in such societies, is a meritorious act. Therefore, to be a guest is also to give merit.
The modern traveler who grasps the simple spirit of this relation will be forgiven many lapses in the intricate ritual of adab (how many cups of coffee? Where to put one's feet? How to be entertaining? How to show gratitude? etc.) peculiar to a specific culture. And if one bothers to master a few of the traditional forms of adab, and to deploy them with heartfelt sincerity, then both guest and host will gain more than they put into the relation and this more is the unmistakable sign of the presence of the Gift.
Another level of meaning of the word adab connects it with culture (since culture can be seen as the sum of all manners and customs); in modern usage the Department of «Arts and Letters» at a University would be called Adabiyyat. To have adab in this sense is to be «polished» (like that well traveled gem) - but this has nothing necessarily to do with «fine arts» or literacy or being a city slicker or even being «cultured». It is a matter of the «heart».
«Adab» is sometimes given as a oneword definition of schism. But insincere manners (ta 'arof in Persian) and insincere culture alike are shunned by the sufi - «There is no ta'arof in Tasssawuf [Sufism]», as the dervishes say; ..Darvishi» is an adjectival synonym for informality, the laid back quality of the people of Heart - and for spontaneous adab, so to speak. The true guest and host never make an obvious effort to fulfil the «rules» of reciprocity - they may follow the ritual scrupulously, or they many bend the forms creatively, but in either case they will give their actions a depth of sincerity that manifests as natural grace. Adab is a kind of love.
A complement of this «technique» (or «Zen») of human relations can be found in the sufi manner of relating to the world in general. The «mundane» world - of social deceit and negativity, of usurious emotions inauthentic consciousness («mauvaise conscience»), boorishness, ill will, inattention, blind reaction, false spectacle, empty discourse, etc. etc.-all this no longer holds any interest for the traveling dervish. But those who say that the dervish has abandoned «this world» «God's Wide Earth» - would be mistaken.
The dervish is not a Gnostic Dualist who hates the biosphere (which certainly includes the imagination and the emotions, as well as «matter» itself). The early Moslem ascetics certainly closed themselves off from everything. When Rabiah, the woman saint of Basra, was urged to come out of her house and «witness the wonders of God's creation», she replied, «Come into the house and see them», i.e., come into the heart of contemplation of the oneness which is above the manyness of reality. «Contraction» and «Expansion» are both sufi terms for spiritual states. Rabiah was manifesting Contraction: a kind of sacred melancholia which has been metaphorized as the «Caravan of Winter», of return to Mecca (the center, the heart), of inferiority, and of ascesis or selfdenial. She was not a world hating Dualist, nor even a moralistic fleshhating puritan. She was simply manifesting a certain specific kind of grace.
The wandering dervish however manifests a state more typical of Islam in its most exuberant energies. He indeed seeks Expansion, spiritual joy based on the sheer multiplicity of the divine generosity in material creation. (Ibn Arabi has an amusing «proof» that this world is the best world - for, if it were not, then God would be ungenerous - which is absurd. Q.E.D.) In order to appreciate the multiple waymarks of the Wide Earth precisely as the unfolding of this generosity, the sufi cultivates what might be called the theophanic gaze : - the opening of the «Eye of the Heart» to the experience of certain places, objects people, events as locations of the «shining-through» of divine Light.
The dervish travels, so to speak, both in the material world and in the «World of Imagination» simultaneously. But for the eye of the heart these worlds interpenetrate at certain points. One might say that they mutually reveal or «unveil» each other. Ultimately, they are «one»-and only our state of tranced inattention, our mundane consciousness, prevents us from experiencing this «deep» identity at every moment. The purpose of intentional travel, with its «adventures» and its uprooting of habits, is to shake loose the dervish from all the trance effects of ordinariness. Travel, in other words, is meant to induce a certain state of consciousness or «spiritual state» - that of Expansion.
For the wanderer, each person one meets might act as an «angel», each shrine one visits may unlock some initiatic dream, each experience of Nature may vibrate with the presence of some «spirit of place». Indeed, even the mundane and ordinary may suddenly be seen as numinous (as in the great travel haiku of the Japanese Zen poet Basho) - a face in the crowd at a railway station, crows on telephone wires, sunlight in a puddle....
Obviously one doesn't need to travel to experience this state. But travel can be used - that is, an art of travel can be acquired - to maximise the chances for attaining such a state. It is a moving meditation, like the Taoist martial arts. The Caravan of Summer moved outward, out of Mecca, to the rich trading lands of Syria and Yemen. Likewise the dervish is «moving out» (it's always «moving day»), heading forth, taking off, on «perpetual holiday» as one poet expressed it, with an open Heart, an attentive eye (and other senses), and a yearning for Meaning, a thirst for knowledge. One must remain alert, since anything might suddenly unveil itself as a sign. This sounds like a kind of «paranoia» - although «metanoia» might be a better term and indeed one finds «madmen» amongst the dervishes, «attracted ones», overpowered by divine influxions, lost in the Light. In the Orient the insane are often cared for and admired as helpless saints, because «mental illness» may sometimes appear as a symptom of too much holiness rather than too little «reason». Hemp's popularity amongst the dervishes can be attributed to its power to induce a kind of intuitive attentiveness which constitutes a controllable insanity: - herbal metanoia. But travel in itself can intoxicate the heart with the beauty of theophanic presence. It's a question of practise - the polishing of the jewel - removal of moss from the rolling stone.
In the old days (which are still going on in some remote parts of the East) Islam thought of itself as a whole world, a wide world, a space with great latitude within which Islam embraced the whole of society and nature. This latitude appeared on the social level as tolerance. There was room enough, even for such marginal groups as mad wandering dervishes. Sufism itself or at least its austere orthodox and «sober» aspect-occupied a central position in the cultural discourse. «Everyone» understood intentional travel by analogy with the Hail - everyone understood the dervishes, even if they disapproved.
Nowadays however Islam views itself as a partial world, surrounded by unbelief and hostility, and suffering internal ruptures of every sort. Since the 19th century Islam has lost its global consciousness and sense of its own wideness and completeness. No longer therefore can Islam easily find a place for every marginalized individual and group within a pattern of tolerance and social order. The dervishes now appear as an intolerable difference in society. Every Moslem must now be the same, united against all outsiders, and struck from the same prototype. Of course Moslems have always «imitated» the Prophet and viewed his image as the norm - and this has acted as a powerful unifying force for style and substance within Dar al Islam. But «nowadays» the puritans and reformers have forgotten that this «imitation» was not directed only at an early medieval Meccan merchant named Mohammad but also at the insan al kamil (the «Perfect Man» or «Universal Human»), an ideal of inclusion rather than exclusion, an ideal of integral culture, not an attitude of purity in peril, not xenophobia disguised as piety, not totalitarianism, not reaction.
The dervish is persecuted nowadays in most of the Islamic world. Puritanism always embraces the most atrocious aspects of modernism in its crusade to strip the Faith of «medieval accretions» such as popular sufism. And surely the way of the wandering dervish cannot thrive in a world of airplanes and oil wells, of nationalist/chauvinist hostilities (and thus of impenetrable borders), and of a puritanism which suspects all difference as a threat. This puritanism has triumphed not only in the East, but rather closer to home as well. It is seen in the «time discipline» of modern too Late-Capitalism, and in the porous rigidity of consumerist hyperconformity, as well as in the bigoted reaction and sex hysteria of the «Christian Right». Where in all this can we find room for the poetic (and parasitic!) life of Aimless Wandering - the life of Chuang Tzu (who coined this slogan) and his Taoist progeny - the life of Saint Francis and his shoeless devotees - the life of (for example) Nur All Shah Isfahani, a 19th century sufi poet who was executed in Iran for the awful heresy of meandering dervishism?
Here is the flip side of the «problem of tourism»: -the problem of the disappearance of «aimless wandering». Possibly the two are directly related, so that the more tourism becomes possible, the more dervishism becomes impossible. In fact, we might well ask if this little essay on the delightful life of the dervish possesses the least bit of relevance for the contemporary world. Can this knowledge help us to overcome tourism, even within our own consciousness and life? Or is it merely an exercize in nostalgia for lost possibilities - a futile indulgence in romanticism?
Well, yes and no. Sure, I confess I'm hopelessly romantic about the form of the dervish life, to the extent that for a while I turned my back on the mundane world and followed it myself. Because of course, it hasn't really disappeared. Decadent yes - but not gone forever. What little I know about travel I learned in those few years - I owe a debt to «medieval accretions» I can never pay - and I'll never regret my «escapism» for a single moment. BUT - I don't consider the form of dervishism to be the answer to the «problem of tourism.» The form has lost most of its efficacy. There's no point in trying to «preserve» it (as if it were a pickle, or a lab specimen)-there's nothing quite so pathetic as mere «survival».
But: beneath the charming outer forms of dervishism lies the conceptual matrix, so to speak, which we've called intentional travel. On this point we should suffer no embarrassment about «nostalgia». We have asked ourselves whether or not we desire a means to discover the art of travel, whether we want and will to overcome «the inner tourist», the false consciousness which screens us from the experience of the Wide World's waymarks. The way of the dervish (or of the Taoist, the Franciscan, etc.) interests us - finally - only to the extent that it can provide us with a key - not THE Key, perhaps - but . . . . a key. And of course - it does.
One fundamental key to success in Travel is of course attentiveness. We call it «paying attention» in English & «prêter attention» in French (in Arabic, however, one gives attention) suggesting that we're as stingy with our attentiveness as we are with our money. Quite often it seems that no one is «paying attention», that everyone is hoarding their consciousness - what? saving it for a rainy day?-and damping down the fires of awareness lest all available fuel be consumed in a single holocaust of unbearable knowing.
This model of consciousness seems suspiciously «Capitalist» however - as if indeed our attention were a limited resource, once spent forever irrecoverable. A usury of perception now appears: - we demand interest on our payment of attention, as if it were a loan rather than an expense. Or as if our consciousness were threatened by an entropic «heat death», against which the best defense must consist of a dull mediocre trance state of grudging half attention - a miserliness of psychic resources - a refusalto notice the unexpected or to savour the miraculousness of the ordinary - a lack of generosity.
But what if we treated our perceptions as gifts rather than payments? What if we gave our attention instead of paying it? According to the law of reciprocity, the gift is returned with a gift - there is no expenditure, no scarcity, no debt against Capital, no penury, no punishment for giving our attention away, and no end to the potentiality of attentiveness.
Our consciousness is not a commodity, nor is it a contractual agreement between the Cartesian ego and the abyss of Nothingness, nor is it simply a function of some meat machine with a limited warranty. True, eventually we wear out and break. In a certain sense the hoarding of our energies makes sense-we «save» ourselves for the truly important moments, the break throughs, the «peak experiences».
But if we picture ourselves as shallow coin purses - if we barricade the «doors of perception» like fearful peasants at the howling of boreal wolves - if we never «pay attention» - how will we recognise the approach and advent of those precious moments, those openings?
We need a model of cognition that emphasises the «magic» of reciprocity: - to give attention is to receive attention, as if the universe in some mysterious way responds to our cognition with an influx of effortless grace. If we convinced ourselves that attentiveness follows a rule of «synergy» rather than a law of depletion, we might begin to overcome in ourselves the banal mundanity of quotidian inattention, and open ourselves to «higher states.»
In any case, the fact remains that unless we learn to cultivate such states, travel will never amount to more than tourism. And for those of us who are not already adepts at the Zen of travel, the cultivation of these states does indeed demand an initial expenditure of energy. We have inhibitions to repress, hesitations to conquer, habits of introversion or bookishness to break, anxieties to sublimate. Our third rate stay athome consciousness seems safe and cozy compared to the dangers and discomforts of the Road with its eternal novelty, its constant demands on our attention. «Fear of freedom» poisons our unconscious, despite our conscious desire for freedom in travel. The art we're seeking seldom occurs as a natural talent. It must be cultivated practised perfected. We must summon up the will for intentional travel.
It's a truism to complain that difference is disappearing from the world - and it's true, too. But it's sometimes amazing to discover how resilient and organic the different can be. Even in America, land of Malls and tv's, regional differences not only survive but mutate and thrive in the interstices, in the cracks that criss-cross the monolith, beneath the notice of the Media Gaze, invisible even to the local bourgeoisie. If all the world is becoming one dimensional, we need to look between the dimensions.
I think of travel as fractal in nature. It takes place off the map as text, outside the official Consensus, like those hidden and embedded patterns that nestle within the infinite bifurcations of non linear equations in the strange world of chaos mathematics. In truth the world has not been completely mapped, because people and their everyday lives have been excluded from the map, or treated as «faceless statistics», or forgotten. In the fractal dimensions of unofficial reality all human beings - and even a great many «places» - remain unique and different. «Pure» and «unspoiled»? Maybe not. Maybe nobody and nowhere was ever really pure. Purity is a will o the wisp, and perhaps even a dangerous form of totalitarianism. Life is gloriously impure. Life drifts.
In the 1950's the French Situationists developed a technique for travel which they called the derive, the «drift.» They were disgusted with themselves for never leaving the usual ruts and pathways of their habit driven lives; they realised they'd never even seen Paris. They began to carry out structureless random expeditions through the city, hiking or sauntering by day, drinking by night, opening up their own tight little world into a terra incognita of slums, suburbs, gardens, and adventures. They became revolutionary versions of Baudelaire's famous flaneur, the idle stroller, the displaced subject of urban capitalism. Their aimless wandering became insurrectionary praxis.
And now, something remains possible - aimless wandering, the sacred drift. Travel cannot be confined to the permissable (and deadening) gaze of the tourist, for whom the whole world is inert, a lump of picturesqueness, waiting to be consumed - because the whole question of permission is an illusion. We can issue our own travel permits. We can allow ourselves to participate, to experience the world as a living relation not as a themepark. We carry within ourselves the hearts of travelers, and we don't need any experts to define and limit our morethan fractal complexities, to «interpret» for us, to «guide» us, to mediate our experience for us, to sell us back the images of our desires.
The sacred drift is born again. Keep it secret.
first published by
Musée Lilim
french title: voyage intentionnel
Musée Lilim
3 rue St. Jean, 11000 Carcassone, France
Saturday, April 17, 2010
Islamist Fundamentalism The Primacy of Unreason
The recent Europe-wide "headscarf debate" has re-ignited controversy about the limits of religious tolerance. Is Germany simply too soft on Islamist fundamentalism? Many moderate Muslims think so, according to Khalil Samir
Samir Khalil Samir
In an interview with the Zeitschrift für KulturAustausch, Khalil Samir analyses the background to the growth of fundamentalism in Muslim countries and describes the frustration felt by many Muslims when they see how Europe responds.
Khalil Samir, when people in this part of the world are talking about Islam, "reason" is not necessarily the first word that comes to mind. Yet you say that Islam, in its heyday, was distinguished by its aspirations towards rationality and logic. Can you expand on this?
Samir Khalil Samir: In its Golden Age, in the 9th and 10th centuries – during the so-called "Islamic Renaissance" – the Islamic world was indeed distinguished by "the primacy of reason". The question, "What is logical?" led to a great openness in the discussion between Muslims and the West. For some time now, however, people have been using religion as a foundation for politics, science and society. Their credo: "Islam is the solution!" This is where it starts to become irrational and fundamentalist – and fatally, it's always done by appealing to the Koran. For the Koran and the Hadiths – the collected deeds and sayings of Mohammed – are astonishingly multifaceted.
In principle, one can take from these books whatever one happens to need and ignore the rest; Mohammed's advocacy of democracy and debate, say, or his clear demand that people should acquire knowledge. The Muslim Brotherhood, founded in 1928, has always been particularly good at producing one-sided interpretations of Islam. When people are miserable or desperate, they're happy to believe what they're told. "The economy's in a mess? Islam is the solution!" Why? Because in the Koran it says that the rich have a duty to help the poor. In this way, it is really possible to find an answer to any problem.
Obviously it works, even though the Muslim Brotherhood is a strictly forbidden organisation even in the Arab world.
Khalil Samir: The more they are repressed, the stronger they become. Not because of their arguments, but thanks to their repressors, the Arab leaders and the West. For all sides are oppressing the Arabs, instead of acting according to the – inherently valuable – principles of the Koran. In the mid-50s, Sayyed Qutb Ibrahim Husain Shadhili, former leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, wrote a six-volume commentary on the Koran. His book was entitled, "In the Shadow of Islam", and he wrote it after spending 18 months studying in the United States. It had been the most traumatic period of his entire life.
To him, the USA was the devil. He simply couldn't get over the fact that – as he saw it – the world's most powerful nation was interested only in suppressing other countries, politically and economically. This experience was the basis for his theory of the "neo-jahiliya". "Jahiliya" is the term used to denote pre-Islamic times, when the Arabs were still heathens who rejected Islam. So, according to Sayyed Qutb, we are currently living in a neo-heathen epoch that refuses to follow the good Islamic path.
And as the Muslim Brothers cling to the Islamic past, they have to oppose today's heathenism in the same way as Mohammed once did – in armed struggle?
Khalil Samir: Yes. "Takfir wa al-Hidjra": "Call them heathens, and then withdraw." What does this mean? Even Arabs often don't know the answer. When Mohammed was confronted with the heathens of Mecca, he simply withdrew from them and went to Medina. Then he returned to Mecca, this time armed. But before he attacked the heathens, he asked them three times whether they wanted to convert to Islam. Only after they had replied three times in the negative did he attack them. With this, he gave Islam clear rules for the conduct of war.
First of all, the declaration to the unbelievers and the withdrawal from them - a withdrawal that gives the believer time to fortify himself against the infidel, i.e. to arm himself. Then the infidel is given three chances to recant and join the faithful. After three refusals, the attack takes place. Today, a sub-grouping of the extremist movement "Gama'a al-Islamiya" actually calls itself "Takfir wa al-Hidjra". Naturally, they don't observe these rules of war. But it's important to understand what once formed the background to this idea of retreat – and to realise that it's now undergoing a revival all over the Arab world.
In Damascus today, one sees a remarkable number of veiled women, certainly more than in recent years. Syria was always comparatively liberal in this respect - much more open than Egypt, for example. But in the last year or so, something seems to have changed. Many Muslim women are not merely wearing a headscarf; they have positively vanished under long, opaque veils. They even wear black gloves, so that not even the tiniest part of their skin can be seen. Is this, too, a kind of retreat or withdrawal? And does it indicate that some kind of an attack is in the offing, on the pattern you've described?
Khalil Samir: The time has not yet come for a concerted attack on so-called infidels. At the moment, we are still in the "retreat" stage.
If and when Islamists do attack, who is likely to be the target?
Khalil Samir: First of all, their own governments. The Islamists know that the Arab Christians believe in God; so they count as believers, even if their faith is "imperfect". But to the Islamists, the worst of all are those who claim to be Muslims yet don't live according to the Sharia – the Islamic law based on the Koran. The Muslim Brotherhood declared war on such Muslims decades ago.
In Egypt, they murdered the Prime Minister, Mahmud Fahmi an-Nuqrashi, and attempted to assassinate Nasser. In Syria, they rose up against the dictator Assad at the start of the Eighties; in1982, he obliterated them in Hama. But they reformed; and for decades, they've been smuggling their ideas into Algeria. In their eyes, all Arab regimes, without exception, are "munafiqun": hypocrites.
The attacks in Riyadh in May of last year took place at a time when the United States were announcing the removal of their troops. It was as if the time had come to act against the regime collaborating with the Americans…
Khalil Samir: The Saudi Arabian regime would be the first up against the wall if the extremists were to gain power. After oil prices exploded in 1973, the Saudi monarchy accumulated a vast amount of wealth. Then they squandered billions of petrodollars on their own highly dubious private pleasures. At the same time, they tried to build a facade of Muslim piety by contributing billions to religious schemes and religious charities - above all to "Da'ua", the propagation of Islam in Koran schools. In fact, their money mainly benefited the Wahhabi fundamentalists, whose most prominent representative is Osama bin Laden.
The Wahhabis have controlled school curricula for decades. They subject Saudi youth to a drip-feed of fanaticism and xenophobia, and they yearn for a return to the original, pristine Islam. In this respect, their vision resembles that of the Muslim Brotherhood, the difference being that the Wahhabis have a great deal of money. For reasons of pure self-interest, the Saudi regime opposes all terrorism - and now it has bred a multi-tentacled terrorist monster, which regards that very regime as its bitterest enemy.
The attacks in Riyadh took place in areas populated mainly by foreigners. It's clear that the fundamentalists sense a threat to their religion from foreigners as such. But how do they see Arab Christians? As stooges and lackeys of Washington?
Khalil Samir: In Lebanon certainly not. In Syria and Egypt too, the situation remains calm, so far. The Christians of the Arab world have adopted a very clear stance against the Iraq war. The Pope's attitude has strengthened them in this, all the more so as he spoke out not just against the Iraq war, but against war in general.
And how does the Islamic world – as opposed to the Islamists – see Western Christians? You once said that the Arabs' former admiration of the West has now completely died away.
Khalil Samir: Yes, because they can't see that the West has any principles at all any more. The United States, for example, famously want to teach us democracy. Aha, say the Arabs; and what about Kyoto? Why are you the only ones who are allowed to pollute the environment with paying? And why are you, and nobody else, allowed to have nuclear bombs? And why is all right for you to use your veto constantly, and then to scream blue murder when France wants to use its veto for once? And why is Israel allowed to violate an endless series of UNO resolutions, while Syria is not even permitted to cough loudly? The Arabs don't understand much about the Western way of life because they aren't acquainted with it.
Thanks to satellite dishes, most Arabs "learn" about the West via sex-and-crime movies, which give them an enduringly twisted image of the West. They see a society without honour and without values; and, to top it all, this image is then thoroughly demonised by the fundamentalists. Should the actual behaviour of the West – for example, of the US – do anything to confirm this demonic image, the result is "Takfir": the conviction that one is dealing with a society of infidels from whom one has to keep one's distance. And I'm afraid this process of withdrawal is already well underway.
Does this also apply to Europe – and, in particular, to Germany?
Khalil Samir: To most Arabs, Europe doesn't look demonic but merely enfeebled. Germany especially appears to have no guts, no backbone, and thus to positively abet the Islamist groups on its own doorstep. Instead of providing Muslims with clear guidelines for integration, Germany simply leaves them in a ghetto situation – a hospitable environment for all those who demand tolerance while themselves pushing intolerant ideas. Germans do indeed tend towards a model of "multiculturalism" that is not so much romantic as neutral, indifferent to values. They are inhibited about expressing any kind of criticism of alien cultures; instead of taking an objective but self-confident stance, they simply say nothing.
But look at the speech given by Federal President Johannes Rau in May 2000: "Without fear, without dreams: living together in Germany." The need for clear rules governing integration could hardly have been stressed with more self-assurance or more objectivity. He made it quite clear that all immigrants to Germany would have to accept the democratically-established rules, and that no-one could deactivate these rules simply by pointing to their own ethnic origins or religious convictions.
Khalil Samir: Universally-valid laws are a good thing. But are they respected by all Muslims in Germany? And what about the Germans themselves? Do they have the courage to live their own democracy? Three million Muslims live in Germany. If they had all really integrated themselves into this secular society and if the Germans were more self-assured - not dodging the issue by escaping into a risky tolerance or an equally risky distance – then there would be nothing to prevent some real, open, rational dialogue.
Rational dialogue about what?
Khalil Samir: First of all: Islam itself is not something anyone should be frightened of. Islamism is, however – although it, in its turn, should not be equated with terrorism. The task is to look very closely at the various groupings in Germany and to distinguish them carefully from one another. Germany is secular, but the Islamic organisations in Germany are not, as a rule. Their system is based on the unity of religion and state, the principle of "Din wa daula". There's nothing wrong with this, but of course the German state can't tolerate two legal systems, its own and the Sharia, side-by-side. This should be a matter of public debate.
Above all, one has to find out whether or not the majority of German Muslims are in favour of two laws – and to see whether they are even familiar with Germany's constitution, its Basic Law. Perhaps educational work is necessary even at this level. For example, the Islamic associations favour a strict separation of the sexes, and this is in conflict with the Basic Law. Until recently, "Hizb ut-Tahrir" was represented at the Frankfurt Book Fair. I find this alarming, as we're talking about an organisation that's banned in all Islamic countries, that approves the use of violence and deliberately seeks out individual recruits. Hizb ut-Tahrir has been forbidden in Germany since 2003, but why did it take so long? With its excessive tolerance, Germany could become a playground for Islamists. That doesn't help the country, and it doesn't help its Muslim citizens.
In what areas do German Muslims require more help?
Khalil Samir: Let's take the notorious headscarf. More and more Muslim women in Germany are wearing it, and this frightens or angers Germans, although they do not address the topic directly and matter-of-factly. Yet this has nothing to do with assimilation or with an attack on religious liberties. Nowhere in the Koran is there any clear mention of a duty to cover the head. Only 30 years ago, most Muslim women all over the world did not wear a headscarf. Real faith requires no visible symbols. In this case, however, we're not talking about real faith, but about fundamentalist repression.
Right now, in Germany too, many Muslims are looking for something to hold on to, and they think they can find it in such apparent solutions. Germans will have to resist this more strongly and actively. They must demonstrate, by the way they live, what a functioning democracy actually looks like. This would also provide a lifeline to Muslims trying to find a firm footing in their adopted homeland. It would be a good basis for a respectful but open dialogue between Germans and Muslim immigrants.
But the Germans don't even dare to ask questions. It seems to me that German democracy is not really strongly rooted. Germany has a weak ego, so to speak. But how should Germany play its role amongst the democratic nations, how should it make its contribution to the development of mankind, if the country doesn't know what it is?
In addressing the question of German identity, you're putting your finger on a wound that still hasn't healed. What with post-war reconstruction, the conflicting aims of the victorious Allied powers and the still-ongoing process of reunification, Germans have not yet achieved a genuine identity.
Khalil Samir: No, the only identities they've allowed themselves have been political and economic. Everything else was a taboo subject. And now the danger is that these taboos might lead to a lack of preventive measures against fundamentalist tendencies. This would also be fatal for Muslims. After September 11th and the absurd equation, "Islam = terrorism", many Muslims were so hurt in their self-image that they became susceptible to "comforting" Islamist slogans. Thus the West's false image of Islam became a self-fulfilling prophecy; and in Germany, the extreme right found that people were prepared to listen to them once again.
What you're describing is two different, damaged identities or self-images facing each other across a divide. But as long as the very phrase "German identity" is tainted with the whiff of nationalism, there is no point in calling on the German people to "strengthen their ego". It's simply asking too much of them. Maybe it's not always possible for outsiders to understand this.
Khalil Samir: But there is no way around this debate. No society, and especially no multicultural society, can survive and remain healthy when it defines itself mainly in terms of "economic patriotism". Particularly when the basis - the strong economy – is crumbling away! Nor is loyalty to the constitution enough as long as it's only a mental attitude, with the heart a mere vacuum or filled with fear. Under such circumstances, individuals would have no moral motivation to defend democracy forcefully.
The German people will themselves conduct this debate, hopefully on as broad a basis as possible. As an Arab, I can only say this: Arabs admire Germany above all for its civilised, democratic values: equality, human rights, freedom and peace. To us, these are the European values, and thus also the values we associate with Germany. That's why it's so disappointing when Germany fails to uphold these values stalwartly, and instead hides behind self-doubt and a false idea of harmony.
Samir Khalil Samir was interviewed by Mona Sarkis.
© Zeitschrift für KulturAustausch 2003
Translation from German: Patrick Lanagan
Khalil Samir is the Director of the "Centre de Documentation et de Recherches Arabes Chrétiennes" in Beirut
Friday, April 16, 2010
Is the Arab world ready for a reading revolution?
Abdo Khal's 'Arabic Booker'-winning novel is effectively banned in his native Saudi Arabia. But he says a new generation of readers is seeking out his work
An 'ambassador for creativity' ... Saudi Arabian writer Abdo Khal
The latest winner of the International prize for Arabic fiction – the "Arabic Booker" – puts Arab countries' censorship in the spotlight. I met the Saudi novelist Abdo Khal in Abu Dhabi, as he picked up his $60,000 award at a gala dinner in March. All his books are effectively banned in his home country, he told me, as well as in Kuwait, Qatar and Jordan. So I was startled to find the Saudi culture minister, Abdul Aziz Khoja, praising Khal as an "ambassador for creativity", whose win is a victory for Saudi literature.
Khal is a teacher and journalist in Jeddah, a prominent columnist and culture editor of the Okaz daily newspaper. Yet ever since he started writing short stories 30 years ago, he, like many Saudi novelists, has had to publish his books abroad (now in Beirut), for broaching what he calls the "trio of taboos" – sex, religion and politics.
While few books are explicitly banned in Saudi Arabia, if the censor's stamp is withheld, imports are barred. Khal's Lebanese publishers, Al Saqi, told me this happens with all his books – hence the euphemism that they are "unavailable" in the kingdom, which allows the government wriggle-room to deny that books are banned or confiscated. As in Egypt, the strategy is to keep shifting the goalposts while pandering to opposite constituencies: religious extremists and those lobbying for openness. Uncertainty about the boundaries fuels self-censorship and the resort to foreign publishers. Countries keep a firm hand on imports, while paying lip-service to freedom of expression. As Khal points out, such are the contradictions that even the novels of the Saudi labour minister, Ghazi al-Gosaibi, are "banned from local markets".
You can see why Khal's novel, Spewing Sparks as Big as Castles (its title is from a Koranic verse about hell), might alarm the censors. A grotesque satire on limitless wealth and the inequalities it spawns, it's about a boy from the Jeddah slums who rises as a henchman in a ruthless tycoon's palace, only to crave salvation for his fallen soul. A translated extract charts a Dante-esque division between The Pit, or slum quarter, and the palace. In Khal's view, "excessive wealth – which is not God-given but acquired – results in serfdom. When someone is excessively rich, he creates slaves to service his desires. It's like a stone used to crush bones and flesh; the reality is horrific. Money has created lords and serfs. In the past, it could buy the whole body. Now it buys a part of the being – but it's still serfdom." He likened wealth to "stagnant water, bringing in many diseases".
Khal was born in 1962 in al-Majanah, near the Yemen border – a mountainous area of Saudi Arabia known for its writers, artists and singers, but also latterly as a cradle of terrorists. The youngest child of an illiterate farming family, whose father died when he was small (he's the only survivor of 11 brothers), he moved to Jeddah then Riyadh. In the 1970s he was recruited into the militant Wahhabi Sunni movement led by Jahayman al-Otaibi, whose followers were to take thousands hostage in the Grand Mosque during Friday prayers in November 1979, in the so-called Siege of Mecca. Yet as a teenage muezzin, Khal was saved by his taste for cinema. He had already been excluded from the movement, he said, for habitually sneaking off to the movies.
He still sees literature and film as liberating alternatives to stifling interpretations of religion. "Art is the only way to open horizons in front of your eyes, instead of being bound by inhibitions and prohibitions. With art you can open up spaces, and make people feel what human beings should feel." Khal, who studied political science at university in Jeddah, sees the Juhayman movement as the source of "all the problems of the country". It was "the first movement to use religion ... against development, progress and modernity". Though the uprising in Mecca was crushed, "the state adopted Juhayman's ideas to placate his religious followers: no TV, no singing, no movies. The result was terrorism – including al-Qaida and 9/11 – which threatens the Saudi state."
Just before his prize was announced, there was an arson attack on the Al-Jouf literary club in Jeddah, of which Khal is a director. The club had been rebuilt after it was burned down in January 2009, partly for hosting women writers. But for Khal, the rise of Saudi book clubs is proof of a revolution among the young. As he wrote in 2004, Saudi society "is no longer as reserved as it used to be. The continuous revolution in communications has engendered a loosening of rigid fanatical attitudes." His novels find readers at home among those who buy books abroad, online or at book fairs in the kingdom, where, he said, the censors "turn a blind eye for 10 days in a game of cat and mouse". Some booksellers acquire stock at these fairs to sell under the counter. "What's beautiful in Saudi Arabia is we have a society of readers. Because of years of preventing people from accessing books and information, there's been a revolution in reading. People seek out authors whose work is unavailable. They feel you're expressing their own thoughts."
Like previous winner of the IPAF, Bahaa Taher, whose Sunset Oasis was published by Sceptre last year and is now longlisted for the Independent foreign fiction prize, and Youssef Ziedan, Khal is now likely to gain readers in many languages. When I asked if the prize might make his books, or those of other banned Saudi writers, more openly available at home, he was far less hopeful. But at least it "opens a window. We sons of the Gulf are looked upon as though we only have reservoirs of oil, not creativity."
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Wednesday, April 14, 2010
The Poem that shook the Islamic Establishment - The Chaos of Fatwas by Hissa Hilal
The Chaos of Fatwas
I have seen evil from the eyes of the subversive fatwas in a time when what is lawful is confused with what is not lawful;
When I unveil the truth, a monster appears from his hiding place;barbaric in thinking and action, angry and blind;
wearing death as a dress and covering it with a belt
He speaks from an official, powerful platform,terrorizing people and preying on everyone seeking peace;
the voice of courage ran away and the truth is cornered and silent,when self-interest prevented one from speaking the truth.
-Hissa Hilal
Somali music ban comes into effect today -- or else
from jihadwatch.org
Giving a whole new meaning to "Don't touch that dial."
There Is No Fun In Islam* Alert: An update on this story. "The day the music died: Somali Islamists ban songs," from AP, April 13 (thanks to Michael):
MOGADISHU, Somalia - Somali radio stations have stopped broadcasting music following an order from Islamist insurgents who say songs are un-Islamic.Somalia has a tradition of music and most residents greeted the ban with dismay. The edict is the latest unpopular order from Islamists, who have also banned bras, musical ringtones and movies.
So will they rise up and throw the bums out? They did it once before, of course. But like all Islamic supremacists, the anti-music forces here resort to a tried-and-true tactic to make that an unappealing option:
Abdulahi Yasin Jama at Tusmo broadcasting says stations had no choice but to comply with the order, which came into force Tuesday. Only one government-controlled station is defying the ban.The Islamists frequently assassinate those who defy them or carry out Shariah-based punishments like amputating limbs.
The ban on music echoes rules enforced by Afghanistan's hardline Taliban regime in the late 1990s.
Yeah, isn't that funny how both the Somalis and the Afghans misunderstand Islam in exactly the same way?
* The Ayatollah Khomeini said that.
http://www.jihadwatch.org/2010/04/somali-music-ban-comes-into-effect-today----or-else.html
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