Of Alice, Angels and Apsaras
[ by Charles Cameron — squeezed between the space of astronomers and the paradise of the believers, is there yet room for the dancing play of poetry, music and imagination? ]
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My first question for you today would be — do you believe in Alice?
And further to that, do you believe in the Red Queen?
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Two things collided to cause me to write this post today. First, Emptywheel opened her blog post on Putin’s outing of an American spy today with a quote from Lewis Carroll:
‘I declare it’s marked out just like a large chessboard!’ Alice said at last. ‘There ought to be some men moving about somewhere–and so there are!’ she added in a tone of delight, and her heart began to beat quick with excitement as she went on. ‘It’s a great huge game of chess that’s being played–all over the world -– if this is the world at all, you know. Oh, what fun it is!’
I can’t really ignore Lewis Carroll when he crops up in my morning feed like that: he’s a Christ Church man and a poet, as I am, and it would be rude of me to ignore him. And besides, what he’s on about here is the world-as-game concept, which is never far from my mind — hence my inclusion of that question about the Red Queen.
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And second, mermaids.
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It gets more interesting, you see. Because what collided with that first question was a conversation @khanserai aka Humera Khan was having with @mujaahid4life aka Abdallah via Twitter, in which the Harry Potter books were discussed and the topic of unimaginative clerical fatwas on games and works of fiction came up. At which point, Abdallah pointed us all to this now-archived fatwa regarding the permissibility of eating mermaid flesh:
Ruling on eating mermaids
A mermaid is a creature that lives in water and looks like a human. As to whether it really exists or it is a mythical being, that is subject to further discussion.
It says in a footnote in al-Mawsoo’ah al-Fiqhiyyah (5/129): From the modern academic resources that are available to us, it may be understood that the mermaid, which is called Sirène in French, is a mythical creature that is described in fairy tales as having an upper body like a woman and a lower half like a fish.
See the French Larousse encyclopédique on the word Sirène.
The encyclopaedia goes on to say: The widespread notion in ancient times was that the wonders and animals of the sea were more and greater than the wonders of dry land, and that there was no kind of animal in the sea that did not have a counterpart on land. This was confirmed by Prof. Muhammad Fareed Wajdi in his encyclopaedia, quoting from modern academic sources. See: Daa’irah Ma’aarif al-Qarn al-‘Ishreen: Bahr – Hayawiyan. End quote.
Al-Dumayri said in Hayaat al-Haywaan al-Kubra: Mermaid: it resembles a human but it has a tail. Al-Qazweeni said: Someone brought one of them in our time. End quote.
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