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Turkey — keeping an eye out for Gülen

Saturday, July 16th, 2016

[ by Charles Cameron — a substantial side-current in the coup attempt draws attention to Gülen, who presently lives in the Poconos and is heavily involved in US charter schools ]
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I don’t have anything fresh to say about the situation in Turkey beyond what others can say, but my interest in religious movements has long focused my attention on Fethullah Gülen.

Like his rough contemporary Harun Yahya aka Adnan Oktar — celebrated for his Islamic creationism — Gülen was a student of the late Said Nursi. He is reported to have been influenced by the works of Rumi, Ibn Arabi, and other sufis. Gülen has strengthened one sphere of his considerable influence by encouraging academics to write about him, and I’m not sure as to how much of what has been written as a result is the flattery of courtiers, and how much reliable scholarship — but for what it’s worth, Heon Kim‘s Gülen’s Dialogic Sufism: A Constructional and Constructive Factor of Dialogue, published in the then-Gülenist newspaper, Zaman, discusses both Gülen’ssufism and his interest in interfaith dialogue.

He’s certainly an interesting fellow to watch.

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From Twitter:

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Aha!

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Go figure.

Posted in Charles Cameron, coup, harun yahya, sufi, turkey, twitter, Uncategorized | 11 Comments »

Rumi One: the poet and his poems

Sunday, June 12th, 2016

[ by Charles Cameron — first of four posts on the poet Jalal al-Din Rumi, hugely popular, perhaps soon to be the pivot of a blockbuster movie ]
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Rumi has been in the news recently and in Rumi Three I’ll say a bit about why. But first, in this post, Rumi One, I’ll say something about the poet and his poems — leaving his ineffable spiritual attainments ineffable, since if they’re anything, they’re ineffable — and in Rumi Two I’ll consider a current attack on Rumi and “Rumism” in Turkey, little observed in the western press, which may be of interest to the poet’s many followers here. Rumi Four will contain some recommended readings.

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Let’s start with some praise of Rumi from Will McCants:

It’s a powerful poet who turns a scholar to the study of his language, the better to read him.

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I’ve been reading Rumi at least since the first Arberry translations of his Mystical Poems came out in 1968, and in the mid-eighties between then and now had the delight and privilege of doing a joint poetry reading with his more recent translator / popularizer, Coleman Barks, at Lake Tahoe.

I’m in no way surprised — but yes, delighted — that a scholar of McCants’ stature should appreciate Rumi so warmly, and envious of his ability to read the Divan, the Masnavi, the Discourses in the original. Did not the great poet Jami write of Rumi’s Masnavi that it is “the Qur’an in the Persian tongue”?

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Here’s the poem with which Chicago University Press introduces Arberry’s Mystical Poems of Rumi:

My verse resembles the bread of Egypt—night passes over it, and you cannot eat it any more.
Devour it the moment it is fresh, before the dust settles upon it.
Its place is the warm climate of the heart; in this world it dies of cold.
Like a fish it quivered for an instant on dry land, another moment and you see it is cold.
Even if you eat it imagining it is fresh, it is necessary to conjure up many images.
What you drink is really your own imagination; it is no old tale, my good man.

Set beside this, another comment of Rumi’s, considering his poetry:

I am affectionate to such a degree that when these friends come to me, for fear that they may be wearied I speak poetry so that they may be occupied with that. Otherwise, what have I to do with poetry? By Allah, I care nothing for poetry, and there is nothing worse in my eyes than that. It has become incumbent upon me, as when a man plunges his hands into tripe and washes it out for the sake of a guest’s appetite, because the guest’s appetite is for tripe.

The secular mind may think of that second quote as something of a pose, imagining the poetry of a great poet to be the poet’s own primary concern — but the poems of Rumi themselves, like the poems of St John of the Cross, speak of a love of the divine of which the poetry itself can be but an offshoot, a byproduct.

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There are none so happy, I would suggest, as those who keep company with the lovers of the divine beloved, and it is that companionship that I see depicted in the poem of Rumi’s I most treasure:

Little by little the drunkards congregate, little by little the wine-worshippers arrive.
The heart-cherishers coquettishly come along the way, the rosy-cheeked ones are arriving from the garden.
Little by little from the world of being and not-being the not-beings have departed and the beings are arriving.
All with skirts full of gold as a mine are arriving for the sake of the destitute.
The lean and sick from the pasturage of love are arriving fat and hale.
The souls of the pure ones like the rays of the sun are arriving from such a height to the lowly ones.
Blessed is that garden, where, for the sake of the Mary’s, new fruits are arriving even in winter.
Their origin is grace, and their return is grace; even from the garden to the garden they are coming.

Indeed, that grace, that garden is woven throughout Rumi’s poetry:

The springtide of lovers has come, that this dust bowl may become a garden; the proclamation of heaven has come, that the bird of the soul may rise in flight.

And where is that garden, when is that springtide of lovers?

Alfred North Whitehead was thinking of education as a stepped-down version of that same garden when he wrote:

The present contains all that there is. It is holy ground; for it is the past, and it is the future. … The communion of saints is a great and inspiring assemblage, but it has only one possible hall of meeting, and that is, the present, and the mere lapse of time through which any particular group of saints must travel to reach that meeting-place, makes very little difference.

Posted in Afghanistan, Charles Cameron, education, iran, Islam, poetry, scriptures, turkey, Uncategorized, will mccants | Comments Off on Rumi One: the poet and his poems

Given my propensity for seeing conflicts in sectarian terms

Sunday, June 12th, 2016

[ by Charles Cameron — delicious irony in the twitter stream as a teaching tool re middle east ]
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Given my propensity for seeing conflicts in sectarian terms, it’s a breath of fresh air / splash of wet water for me to read Hayder al-Khoei, scion of the eminent al-Khoei family and Chatham House Fellow, tweeting on the subject of the English football hooliganism in Marseille over the last three days, which has included both bottle-throwing against French riot police and a running battle with a pack of Russian supporters brandishing knives:

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Al-Khoei‘s observations offer us a brilliant parody of the way western analysts, myself included, all too often write about events in the Middle East, and I admire his skill in delivering his reproof — but it’s also worth remarking that England as I understand it seems less and less interested in attendance at its established Protestant church, while France is notable for it’s official laïcité. Indeed, of the three nations involved in this circus, only the Russians appear to be experiencing quite a resurgence of Orthodoxy, coming after decades of official atheism.

Enfin:

The England v Russia match was a 1-1 draw. Game theorists would presumably call the event a zero-sum game, since the two sides do seem to have cancelled each other out — but in the larger context of sectarian rivalry, the entire three days have surely been lose-lose, while al-Khoei‘s wit is a win for us all.

Posted in al qaida, britain, Charles Cameron, christianity, framing, france, iran, iraq, irony, islamic world, map, maps of war, sectarian, shia, sunni, syria, tunisia, turkey, Uncategorized | Comments Off on Given my propensity for seeing conflicts in sectarian terms

Rome, Rome, or Rome?

Thursday, February 25th, 2016

[ by Charles Cameron — on Graeme Wood’s latest, the goals of IS, and geographic slippage ]
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Graeme Wood, who wrote the Atlantic piece that broke the apocalyptic side of the Islamic State’s ideology wide open in March of last year, has a related piece out this month: Donald Trump and the Apocalypse, with the subtitle, Is Rome really ISIS’s “ultimate trophy”? It’s a fun read, discussing the confusion that is possible over the use of the word Rome in Muslim prophetic literature — a topic I’ve discussed before.

Just for the record, then, here’s a screengrab from the Islami State’s magazine Dabiq, issue 4 page 37:

Dabiq 4.37 We will conquer your Rome

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As a Newsweek item from September 2012 notes, there have in fact been three claimants to the title of Rome:

When Ivan the Terrible was crowned the first Tsar of All Russia in 1547, the church announced Moscow to be the “Third and Final Rome,” the inheritor of St. Peter’s Rome and Byzantium, and the last bastion of Orthodox Christianity standing up to a Europe mired in heresy.

Russian commentator Yuliya Latynina quoted..

Filofey of Pskov’s 1510 claim that “Two Romes have fallen; the third stands; and there will not be a fourth”

This was in Novaya gazeta, February 2015, and she suggested that Russia..

many of whose residents view it as the third Rome, may suffer the fate not of the first Rome but of the second, a fate that cannot be reassuring to many of them because in the end the residents of the second Rome in Constantinople “considered that Islam was better than the West.”

Wood mentions in his piece that the Australian jihadist ideologue Cerantonio argues:

The Rum of the end-times hadith is not the Rome of Pope Francis but the Rome of the Republic of Turkey.

Putin might take offense if he knew..

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And then there’s the matter of Quranic translation and the Quranic verse 30.2, as Wood also notes:

Rome Rum translations

Arberry, always interesting to read, translates that verse:

The Greeks have been vanquished.

The historical commentary in The Study Quran, p 984-85, clarifies that this verse refers to Sassanid (Magian) successes against the (Christian) Byzantine empire — which the following verse says will be reversed — and terming it “the only reference in the Quran to political events conetemporary with Muhammad and his followers beyond the Arabian Peninsula”.

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All things considered, oy veh: it seems that history does strange things to geography, time to space.

Posted in Charles Cameron, christianity, Geography, history, IS, ISIS, Islam, italy, pope, russia, scriptures, turkey, Uncategorized | 3 Comments »

DoubleQuoting Jacques Louis David

Wednesday, February 10th, 2016

[ by Charles Cameron — Napoleon at the St Bernard Pass goes to Turkey ]
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Jacques Louis David, Bonaparte, the first Versailles version:

Jacques Louis David, Napoleon 600

Introducing Erdoganist art, tweeted by Mustafa Akyol and RT’d by Hayder al-Khoei:

Erdogan

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Oh, but it gets better. How’s this for a wild DoubleQuote? I found it while rummaging around for a “best version” of the Erdogan pic:

Posted in art, art history, Charles Cameron, Doublequotes, france, propaganda, turkey, Uncategorized | Comments Off on DoubleQuoting Jacques Louis David

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