[ by Charles Cameron — different styles of online communication, main topic: Istanbul in three Islamic videos ]
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There’s passionate and visceral communication, and there’s communication that’s more scholarly, dispassionate and calm. Let’s begin and end with calm.
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Visceral communication is essential for getting people out of a theater on fire, but a 30% application of scholarly distance and calm may be prerequisite for avoiding panic — and scholarly communication may be important for conveying in detail the high-dimensionality of a complex topic, but a drop of visceral may ease the salient points into more general circulation.
In an earlier, text heavy post — Damascus, Dearborn, Rome, Vienna? — I belabored you with details as to just how much ambiguity and fog surrounds the use of place names in scriptural and prophetic contexts. Here I’d like to give you a visceral sense of what some prophetic voices are doing with those place names.
One of the easiest ways to move from scholarly to visceral is to switch from text quotation to video clip, so that’s what I’ll do here — but my first video clip will be relatively calm and scholarly as video clips go, the next one more visceral and exhortatory, while the third and final clip will use all the tricks of the feature movie trade to provide a Tolkien-heroic account of the Muslim siege and taking of then-Christian Constantinople in 1453.
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First, a very short clip from Adnan Oktar, aka Harun Yahya, widely known in the Islamic world for his lavishly illustrated books, CDs and DVDs presenting an Islamic version of creationism, the Mahdist end times — which he sees as entirely peaceable — and more besides.
In this clip, he’s talking about Istanbul, and he means that very city, even if it has sometimes been called Byzantium or Constantinople — or even on occasion, Rome.
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My second clip is far longer, and presents an interview with Sheikh Imran Nazar Hosein, Islamic scholar, sometime Trinidadian diplomat and sometimes fiery YouTube preacher, whom I have quoted previously in Al-Awlaki and the former and latter rains and elsewhere.
Hosein discusses the prophecies of the conquest of Constantinople by Muslim forces as part of the background for a grand sweep overview of what he terms the first and second Arab Springs — which he locates a century apart and views as both engineered by an Anglo-American alliance to advance a Zionist agenda — and contemporary events in Bahrain, Saudi, Syria, Iran, Israel, and Russia:
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It’s an hour-long interview, perhaps you didn’t watch the whole way through. Hosein concludes this interview, centered in Islamic prophecy about Constantinople, with a Saudi-American alliance facing off against an Iranian-Russian alliance in service to very long term Zionist interests, making the video a window not only on the Sheikh’s own worldview but also on how widely perceptions of the world situation can diverge:
I want the viewing audience to know that a situation is evolving in the world before our eyes, and we must understand it, that the two major powers in the world are now moving in a collision course, that collision course between these two major powers, the American-led alliance and the Russian-led alliance, is going to lead to nuclear warfare of such a magnitude that there is only one word that we can look for in the vocabulary to fit it, and that’s called Armageddon, that is, millions and millions and millions are going to die, most of them probably in North America and Europe, Europe of the East and Europe of the West — and what is left of the world after that, the Zionists hope that they can cope with it, and they can somehow survive and come out on top and Israel will rule the world, the rump that is left after the two giants engage in a war of mutual destruction, That is what we are facing now…
Is that what you thought scholarly Islamists were thinking? By what paths did a highly educated and world traveled man come to that conclusion?
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My third clip speaks for itself. It is a trailer for an upcoming motion picture about the siege of Constantinople, presented as heroic spectacle with improbable but striking feats of arms, beautiful but not excessively modestly dressed women, obligatory mass choruses of Allahu Akbar, and at least one reference to the Antichrist.
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I can’t wait to see it — but I expect to do so with mixed emotions. Perhaps they will stir up a decent blog post or two.
What emotions will they stir in those who identify with the heroic Mehmet II, and how much of an echo will those emotions find in the world around us? Long shot — any Turkey-NATO impact?
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To return to a calmer clime:
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Byzantium, Constantinople, Istanbul. I have prayed in the Sultan Ahmed — click image above to glimpse its beauty — I have relaxed deliciously at a nearby hammam.
The history of Istanbul could be the rich study of many lifetimes, its promise — for better or worse or a little of both — may have been variously prophesied or predicted, but remains to be seen.
[ by Charles Cameron — games in education — written in 1996 for friends on the Magister-L mailing list — for background, see In response to Lewis Shepherd ]
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I’ve been thinking about education, “edutainment” and games, with special reference to Myst-type games, Glass Bead Games and Universities not unlike my own alma mater, Oxford…
Here are some preliminary ideas…
I: Proposal
There is no reason why the books in a MYST-like game shouldn’t be real books.
Yeah? So?
There is no reason why studying the books in a MYST-like game to gain access to the information needed to “solve puzzles” within the game structure and gain access to more advanced levels of the game should be any different from studying the same books in an OXFORD-like university to gain access to the information needed to “pass exams” within the academic structure and gain access to more advanced levels of knowledge…
There is no reason why education and game should not merge. OXFORD is a walk-thru MYST, and the puzzles are exams. Education is Game, the supreme Game of life itself.
The only thing needed to make the future of computer game playing and the future of computer education one thing is a concept of gaming which extends as far as the concept of education — and Hermann Hesse’s Glass Bead Game does this.
A future Glass Bead Game with Myst-like properties could encompass the entirety of education, because (a) unlike chess it deals in the sum of human culture and knowledge while (b) its own skills involve a chess-like mastery: its game aspect stretches as high as its knowledge base.
We already know from such things as Sesame Street that learning about “fiveness” can take place at the intersection of education and entertainment, with a kangaroo bouncing five oranges on a trampoline and gleefully calling out “five, five”. We suspect that at this level, the entertainment element adds to the student’s interest in learning.
We also suspect that at higher levels of learning, entertainment quite naturally gives way to the “more important” educational element. No need to entertain, the subject itself fascinates…
But Feynmann — the Nobel Prize man, the drummer, the CalTech fellow — entertains while he educates, educates while he entertains: it’s an aspect of the nature of his genius…
The future of education lies in a Game involving mastery in the acquiring and manipulating of knowledges, both in depth within individual disciplines, and in breadth across them. This is the future of the Glass Bead Game…
It is stored on megacomputers. It is accessible through cable lines coming into your home. It is displayed on your new hi-res TV screen. Think of a terabyte holographic storage device which could transfer info in or out a gigabyte per second… Its architecture contains “rooms” at all levels of learning from K through post doctoral, in all subject areas. Any student of whatever age can access any “room” to which he has solved the “prerequisite” puzzles. The “rooms” contain a massive library of “books” and an equally impressive video library…
Imagine a world in which the very best classes taught at Harvard, Yale, MIT, CalTech, Stanford, Oxford, Cambridge, Heidelberg, the Sorbonne are accessible on the web in video form…
Imagine a world in which students can supplement their “live” classes with access to a virtual environment of this sort…
The arts — at the level of a Mozart, a Bach, a Yeats, a Shakespeare, a Leonardo, a Michelangelo — are games. Creative play with a very high order of skill…
Imagine the Great Game…
II: Background
That’s the main thrust of where I’m going, but it may help if I add in some background, in the form of the following notes:
I am wondering about a number of “threads” that seem to come together somewhere hereabouts:
(i) a recent effort in California to put together all the information in a “geography” curriculum from kindergarten through — I think — the second year of college on videodisks, in such a way that a student of any age could move as far and as fast through it as his/her ability to give “correct” answers to the quizzes along the way permitted…
(ii) the notion that large film archives such as those maintained by the studios may in the not too distant future be accessible on-line, with real time delivery along fiber optic “phone” cable for display on the “tv” screen…
(iii) the notion that all the classes in, say, Harvard, Yale, Stanford, MIT, CalTech, Oxford, Cambridge, Heidelberg… could be videotaped, also in the not too distant future, and be made available in a similar fashion…
(iv) efforts to put large libraries online in toto: I gather from an IBM commercial (!), for instance, that the Indiana musicological library is now available to the daughters of Italian vineyard owners over the net…
Putting these all together, I see the possibility of computers storing and delivering enough in the way of first class lectures and libraries to allow students of whatever age to move as far and as fast through self-education as their interest and capacity to pass quizzes permits…
III: Invitation
The “proposal” and “background” above, taken together, represent the thinking I’ve done so far, and the direction I hope to take — they’re my personal “state of the art” on all this. I suspect there are people already working on many of the ideas that go into this mix — but that the overall vision here is a “gourmet” version, and that we’ll get pretty thin soup if we leave it to people outside the GBG environment to do all the cooking.
There’s further background on the origins of Myst-like games in the classical Art of Memory in my piece The Mysts of Antiquity.
Please feel free to contact me if you are interested in discussing these ideas in more detail.
[ by Charles Cameron — religious law espoused in Judaism, Christianity and Islam ]
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I came across this first video, featuring Dov Lior, Chief Rabbi of the Kiryat Arba settlement outside Hebron, yesterday, and thought it would be worthwhile to seek out companion pieces proposing divinely sanctioned legal systems in the two other Abrahamic traditions:
There are naturally differences as well as similarities between the three messages and the relative levels of influence of their respective messengers. A scholar of comparative religion might be concerned with their selections of canonical texts to enforce and the techniques of interpretation variously applied to them, an historian might compare our second speaker, the Chalcedon Institute’s (late) RJ Rushdoony‘s view of the applicability of Biblical law with that of Calvin in Geneva, a strategist consider the groundswells of popular opinion attaching to each of these speakers, their political and military potentials…
All three speakers claim that law should be based on a divinely authored and thus authoritative text — but the books so considered differ. Anjem Choudary, the third speaker, brings vividly to mind the impact that such doctrines can have on those who do not share his religious convictions when he proposes that Buckingham Palace could become a mosque…
I think it important to be aware that such men exist, and have followings. There are members of all three religions that I count as friends, events of horrific, divinely sanctioned violence in the histories of all three religions, and figures in the history of each religion from whom I take inspiration. I would not wish to live in a land where any one of these three men wielded power, and I do not believe that any one of them is fully representative of the grand sweep of his own tradition.
My intent in posting these three videos is to inform, not to inflame, and I invite you to view them in that spirit.
On a cold winter night, a big snow storm hit the city and the temple where Dan Xia served as a Monk got snowed in. Cut off from outside traffic, the coal delivery man could not get to the Zen Monastery. Soon it ran out of heating fuel after a few days and everybody was shivering in the cold. The monks could not even cook their meals.
Dan Xia began to remove the wooden Buddha Statues from the display and put them into the fireplace.
“What are you doing?” the monks were shocked to see that the holy Buddha Statues were being burnt inside the fire place. “You are burning our holy religious artifacts! You are insulting the Buddha!”
“Are these statues alive and do they have any Buddha nature?” asked Master Dan Xia.
“Of course not,” replied the monks. “They are made of wood. They cannot have Buddha Nature.”
“OK. Then they are just pieces of firewood and therefore can be used as heating fuel,” said Master Dan Xia. “Can you pass me another piece of firewood please? I need some warmth.”
The next day, the snow storm had gone and Dan Xia went into town and brought back some replacement Buddha Statues. After putting them on the displays, he began to kneel down and burn incense sticks to them.
“Are you worshiping firewood?” ask the monks who are confused for what he was doing.
“No. I am treating these statues as holy artifacts and am honouring the Buddha.” replied Dan Xia.
with this video (I don’t think you need to see all of it, just a taste perhaps?) titled The Beheading of the Buddha, posted on YouTube and “presented” by Al-Muhaajiroun:
and both of those with this third video, of Pastor Jones, discussing both his own burning of the Qur’an and GEN Petraeus‘ powerful and intelligent response…
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I think we should discuss these matters in an open and respectful way, and hope that this post will provide an appropriately respectful and open-minded framing for such a discussion.
As to my own view – I see a consideration that whatever opens us up to compassion and clarity is an icon and a grace, and another consideration that whatever closes us off from clarity and compassion is an idol or a poison…
[ by Charles Cameron — of [almost] no military or intelligence interest, this is a post for computer scientists, historians, scientists, artists, contemplatives and other creatives ]
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I’ve been on a bit of a binge about medieval and renaissance diagrams recently, putting together an anthology of early “semantic networks” for the Sembl game site – but also thinking about the alternate track of art history which would focus on diagrams rather than paintings (I’m thinking of two dimensions here, hence no mention of sculpture) – an alternate history which may have something to teach our richly diagrammatic and data-visual times.
My interest in all this tracks back at least to my early encounter with an essay by the computer scientist Margaret Masterman in Theoria to Theory (1967).
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Yesterday brought me a post from Jason Wells, a scientist and bright all-rounder I follow on Google+, in which he posted an image of the cosmos from the Ptolemaic (pre-Copernical) point of view, which I’ve put at the head of this post.
Jason commented on this diagram:
As pretty as this is, this is not how your universe works.
That is all.
The diagram Jason posted purports to be mathematically and astronomically based: it is, if you like, a quantitative diagram. I don’t happen to think it’s pretty, although the two creatures (angels, goddesses?) up towards the top of the circle may be, and the serpent eating its tail around it is nicely done -– I think it has a rather austere beauty to be honest, but I’m likely to concede to Jason that it isn’t “true” in the sense of being an accurate representation of the (abstract) laws of celestial motion.
But then I also think there’s more to truth than accuracy, useful though that may be – there’s also a qualitative element to truth, and perhaps “beauty” is (among other things) a name for it.
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Yesterday also brought me a news bulletin that ties into that same interest in medieval and renaissance diagrams. From the Vatican Information Service (via Chant Cafe) , we learn that Hildegarde of Bingen (1098 – 1179) is now a saint of the Catholic Church with universal cultus:
Vatican City, 10 May 2012 (VIS) – The Holy Father today received in audience Cardinal Angelo Amato S.D.B., prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints. During the audience he extended the liturgical cult of St. Hildegard of Bingen (1089-1179) to the universal Church, inscribing her in the catalogue of saints.
Consider, then, in contrast to Jason’s mechanistic Ptolemaic diagram, this diagram which today’s fresh-minted saint produced in the late 1140s or early 1150s to illustrate her visionary intuitions of the universe in the first of three books, Scivias:
and these two, from Liber divinorum operum:
and:
These, I take it, are purely qualitative images in contrast to the Ptolemaic diagram — making no propositional claims as to physical or mathematical accuracy, but portraying Hildegarde’s sense of cosmic order. And just as we would not argue whether it is Van Gogh or El Greco who is “right” about the skies in their respective paintings, so I don’t think Hildegarde is worried about which of her diagrams is “right” in its portrayal of the world she lived and prayed in – each one illustrates some aspect of her vision of the world, and one does not necessarily contradict another.
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Here are two descriptions of Hildegarde’s world, which may give us some insight into the diagrams above. For the top one:
For Hildegard of Bingen, twelfth century German Benedictine abbess, the universe is like an egg in the womb of God. Her view of the universe, conditioned as it is by her times and her education, represents her visionary understanding of God’s motherhood of this sphere that we call the universe. Hers is a view that is organic and holistic, coloured neither by Greek philosophy nor Enlightenment rationalism, refreshing and strikingly “true” in its perceptions around the source of created life.
God created the world out of the four elements, to glorify His name. He strengthened the world with the wind. He connected the world to the stars. And he filled the world with all kinds of creatures. He then put human beings throughout the world, giving them great power as stewards of all Creation. Human beings cannot live without the rest of nature, they must care for all natural things.
It’s probably worth mentioning that three of the “four elements” of the ancients are still known to us, though we call them “states” rather than “elements” at this point — the solid, liquid and gaseous states correspond with what the ancients called “earth”, “water” and “air”, respectively — and it has even been suggested that their “fire” corresponds to the fourth state we now term “plasmas” — not my line of business, however, so who knows?
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Hildegarde picked up the word “viriditas” from Gregory the Great and made it peculiarly her own. It means greeness, literally, and freshness by extension — but for Hildegarde’s integral view of all that is, it also carries a theological dimension, Christ being the greening of the world for her:
For Hildegard, viriditas was an attribute of the Divine nature, a reflection of God’s goodness and beauty. It stood for vitality, fertility, fruitfulness and growth; in fact all the things that we now associate with the “greenness” of nature. For us today “greenness” is a sign that the Earth is healthy and flourishing. Similarly, for Hildegard, viriditas was synonymous with physical and spiritual health, with the continuing vivifying force of the Holy Spirit.
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Dr Carmel Bendon Davis, Hildegard of Bingen: Eco-warrior and Superwoman
This greening or freshening is not, for Hildegarde, just a matter of earth and water, of river and forest, it is also infused with fire and air:
I am likewise the fiery life of the substance of divinity. I flame over the beauty of the fields and sparkle in the waters, and I burn in sun, moon, and stars. And with an airy wind that sustains all things with invisible life, I raise them up vitally. For air lives in greenness and flowers, waters flow as if alive, the sun, too, lives in his light, and when the moon comes to her decline she is kindled by his light, as it were to live again… Thus I, the fiery force, am hidden in [the winds], and they take fire from me, just as breath continually moves a man, and as a windy flame exists in fire. All of these live in their essence and are not found in death, because I am life.
Understanding in the soul is like the Veriditas of the branches and the leaves of the tree
It is, in fact, neither exclusively natural nor supernatural, but non-dual.
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Dylan Thomas, being a Welshman and a poet, thus has an insight that bears a family resemblance to Hildegarde’s, but phrases it in a way that leaves the “force” neither personified nor otherwise… and thus with no necessary doctrinal implication:
The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.
For Hildegarde, this “force” is also Christ — for he himself is the “the fiery life of the substance of divinity” — and his coming to earth a greening and freshening of a world until then barren of the love he brought.
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Hildegarde was the abbess in charge of a small flotilla of nuns — but also a mystic, a visionary, philosopher, poet, painter and songstress…
Her song of creation, O Viriditas, bears comparison in spirit with St Francis‘ Canticle of the Sun. She writes to her “green” Christ and his “green” planet:
O greenness of God’s finger
with which God built a vineyard
that shines in heaven
as an established pillar:
You are glorious in God’s preparation.
And o height of the mountain
that will never be dispersed
in the judgment of God,
you nevertheless stand from afar as an exile,
but it is not in the power
of the armed man
to seize you.
You are glorious in God’s preparation.
Glory be to the Father and to the Son
and to the Holy Spirit.
You are glorious in God’s preparation.
And she sets her words to the music of the times:
Indeed, her music is sung even today…
How’s that for a twelfth century statement of what we’d these days call “ecology”?
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But all this risks getting far too ethereal, I have wandered far along my own epicycles from Jason Wells’ point, and methinks I should bring us back down to earth.
Dennis The Constitutional Peasant, in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, meets King Arthur and complains, “What I object to is you automatically treatin’ me like an inferior.” It’s understandable — but so, perhaps, is king Arthur’s response: “Well, I am king.”
Two worldviews clash here — and in the ensuing debate, Arthurian myth meets contemporary politics:
Dennis’ Mother: Well how’d you become king, then?
Arthur: The Lady of the Lake,… [Angel chorus begins singing in background] her arm clad in the purest shimmering samite, held aloft Excalibur from the bosom of the water signifying by Divine Providence that I, Arthur, was to carry Excalibur. [Angel chorus ends] That is why I am your king!
Dennis: Listen. Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
Arthur: Be quiet!
Dennis: You can’t expect to wield supreme power just ’cause some watery tart threw a sword at you!
Arthur: Shut up!
Dennis: I mean, if I went ’round saying I was an emperor just because some moistened bint had lobbed a scimitar at me, they’d put me away!
Or if some bint told me the universe was a cosmic egg in the womb of God, for that matter — even if Benedict XVI did just add her to the calendar of saints.
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Here you go, courtesy of YouTube:
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Frankly I appreciate both modes of thinking — the mythic and the scientific — and believe we’re in the sort of territory here that Nils Bohr was thinking of when he said:
The opposite of a true statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may be another profound truth.
Zenpundit is a blog dedicated to exploring the intersections of foreign policy, history, military theory, national security,strategic thinking, futurism, cognition and a number of other esoteric pursuits.
