[ by Charles Cameron — is that a Jefferson reference in Morsi’s speech? ]
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Can someone tell me whether that phrase in Morsi‘s speech about those who “who watered the tree of freedom with their blood” is a decent translation of Morsi’s own text, or a transposition into a well-known western metaphor? Because if that’s word for word what Morsi said, we’re either looking at something pretty archetypal and universal, or it’s a subtle shout out to Thomas Jefferson and the US…
Coincidence? Contrivance?
I’m asking because I notice, but don’t know.
FWIW, Morsi got his doctorate at USC and taught for a while at Cal State, Northridge…
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I don’t do transliteration, btw — I usually use whatever the person I’m quoting uses: Juan Cole has Mursi, Borzou Daragahi has Morsi, and Allah knows best.
I know it’s just an artefact of Juan Cole choosing a very light blue for “Classic Liberals” in his blog post on Mursi and the Brotherhood in a Pluralist Egypt — but his image of the Egyptian political landscape irresistably conjured up Pac-Man — and viewed in the light of Mursi‘s victory today, Pac-Mac begins to look a lot like a westernized, stylized portrayal of the star and crescent…
Maybe we’re hoping the Ikhwan will go chasing the djenoun…
For those who don’t remember Bill Watterson’s game theory masterpiece, Calvinball is a game defined by the absence of rules — or, rather, that the rules are made up as they go along. Calvinball sometimes resembles recognizable games such as football, but is quickly revealed to be something else entirely. The rules change in mid-play, as do the goals (“When I learned you were a spy, I switched goals. This is your goal and mine’s hidden.”), the identities of the players (“I’m actually a badminton player disguised as a double-agent football player!”) and the nature of the competition (“I want you to cross my goal. The points will go to your team, which is really my team!”). The only permanent rule is that the game is never played the same way twice. Is there any better analogy for Egypt’s current state of play?
Let me do a DoubleQuote on that. The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre wrote a while back:
Not one game is being played, but several, and, if the game metaphor may be stretched further, the problem about real life is that moving one’s knight to QB3 may always be replied to by a lob over the net
[ by Charles Cameron — fear, hope, the Egyptian military, the Supreme Court, the Muslim Brotherhood, certainty and roulette ]
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The Apocalypse is a trump card — the Final Trump card if you will.
And because we so often associate “apocalyptic” with devastation and “post-apocalyptic” with a glowing nuclear waste-land, I’d like to establish first the joyous feelings the word “apocalypse” can also evoke. From Handel‘s Messiah, then, the glorious sound of the apocalyptic trumpet:
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That sounds pretty terrific, granted, but as we all know, apocalypse also has a darker side — in fact it is a two-sided business, offering both maximal terror and optimal hope.
On the one hand, as Yeats puts it:
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
While on the other, as John of Patmos says, “I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.”
Utmost disintegration and devastation — and the immaculate hope of a new heaven and a new earth.
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As we watch events unfolding in Egypt, then, there are some specifically apocalyptic themes in the air, both on the Egyptian Islamic side…
… where a vision-swept crowd can chant for the triumph of Islam in Jerusalem … and on the Christian side, where an apocalyptic writer such as Joel Richardson can use that same clip to reinforce a message of the lateness of the hour from the other side of the apocalyptic coin:
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We can, it seems to me, react to the clip of the TV preacher Safwat Hijazi in at least four ways — with jubilation, as the crowd in the video does; with quiet satisfaction, as the politicians of the MB who stand to gain from his support presumably do; with fear, as those of us roused by the video to a vision of the Middle East plunging headlong, unavoidably, into war are likely to do; or with concern — a more temperate approach, and one that await further details, further indicators, further events unfolding.
I don’t think it’s time, yet, to place any bets. Dr. Hegazi’s statement, and the crowd’s response, certainly concern me. The motif of a victorious march of Islam to retake Jerusalem is and end times motif, and I can think of few things more terrifying than a Mahdist army on the march.
But we are not there yet, Dr Hegazi is articulating a dream, not a party political program. And between that dream — a powerful one, to which many Egyptians are clearly susceptible — and its realization we have the moderating factors of realpolitik, of the Supreme Court rulings just a day or two ago — and of the power and entrenched financial interests of the Egyptian military.
In watching the video of Dr Hegazi it is possible to forget all this and be swept up by fear, just as the crowd was swept up by hope of conquest.
And as I’ve said before, I take comfort also in the fact that Joel Richardson is at pains not only to argue, from his own perspective, for the conversion of Muslims — but also to renounce the use of explicitly Christian force until that Trumpet sounds:
I explained to my host that unless a supernatural man bursts forth from the sky in glory, there is absolutely nothing that the world needs to worry about with regard to Christian end-time beliefs. Christians are called to passively await their defender. They are not attempting to usher in His return. Muslims, on the other hand, are actively pursuing the day when their militaristic leader comes to lead them on into victory. Many believe that they can usher in his coming.
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From my point of view, then, we should be cautious, informed and deliberative. This is not the time to be leaping to conclusions.
I am no expert on Egypt. What I am attempting here is to be aware of the apocalyptic current that was stirring in that Egyptian crowd — and of the apocalyptic currents stirring here, also, in the United States — with calm, with moderation, with an eye to the other influences, some of them both powerful and entrenched, which will themselves tend to divert, moderate, arouse or inflame the situation.
The Supreme Court. The election and whatever comes of it in terms of both power and backlash. The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces. American dollars. Israeli nukes. The inevitable ebbing away at some point of heightened emotions. The economics of tourism…
[ by Charles Cameron — in memory of Carlos Fuentes, requiescat in pace ]
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Carlos Fuentes‘ great novel, Terra Nostra, opens with these words:
Incredible the first animal that dreamed of another animal.
It’s a sentence to stop you in your tracks, a sentence to give pause to time itself, circling back on itself like the serpent that eats its own tail, a dream of a sentence, a dream sentence.
Fuentes continues:
Monstrous the first vertebrate that succeeded in standing on two feet and thus spread terror among the beasts still normally and happily crawling close to the ground through the slime of creation. Astounding the first telephone call, the first boiling water, the first song, the first loincloth.
How does a mind move so agilely among these many and diverse firsts — the sleeping, the archeo-anthropological, the technical, the musical, the shameful or sinful or perhaps decorative, even erotic? In a single paragraph — the first in a book that will run 890 pages and not tire?
And Fuentes continues:
About four o’clock in the morning one fourteenth of July, Pollo Phoibee, asleep in his high garret room, door and windows flung wide, dreamed these things, and prepared to answer them himself.
Pollo Phoibee dreamed these things, Carlos Fuentes dreamed Pollo Phoibee…
And we are in Paris, Paris of the artists, of the garret, and yet a Paris where the Seine is boiling, where the Louvre has become crystalline, the black eyes of the gargoyles of Notre Dame see “a much vaster panorama”…
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Carlos Fuentes died today, and I am saddened — remembering him signing my short, fat British Penguin paperback of Terra Nostra (its fondly remembered cover image above) and commenting that it was his preferred English edition, since one could slip it into one’s pocket…
And Terra Nostra was special to me, both as a great and tumultuous fiction, and as a fiction that quoted Norman Cohn‘s In Pursuit of the Millenniun, the book that back in my Oxford days introduced me to the history of apocalyptic thought… a fiction also familiar with Frances Yates, another scholar I greatly admire, and her writings on the Memory Theater…
Carlos Fuentes, the imagination that conceived Terra Nostra, is no longer with us.
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He had been a diplomat, this great imagination. Born into a diplo family, he had served as Mexican ambassador to Paris — Paris of the diplomatic banquets, but also of the artist’s garret, of this New World imagination spanning continents and centuries as though they were a playground, the playground of a single, multiple, cosmopolitan and erudite mind.
The poet Paul Claudel, French ambassador to Japan, was reproved by the Surrealists in 1925 with the words:
One cannot be both ambassador for France and poet!
The poet Saint-John Perse was secretary to the French Embassy in Peking, and later General Secretary of the French Foreign Office. The poet Giorgos Seferis was Royal Greek Ambassador to the United Kingdom. The poet Pablo Neruda was Chilean ambassador to France… The poet Octavio Paz, Mexico’s ambassador to India.
Among novelists, it was Lawrence Durrell — an Englishman born in India with what he described as “a Tibetan mentality” — one who found life in England itself “like an autopsy … so, so dreary” — who was British press attaché in Alexandria, Egypt, during World War II, where as they say:
Ostensibly working, Durrell was in reality closely observing the assortment of sights, sensations, and people that wartime Alexandria, a crossroads of the East and West, had to offer.
Fuentes is heir to many lineages: of Mexico, of the world, of literature, of diplomacy, of the imagination.
In honoring him today, my researches turned up this apposite quote from Aldo Matteucci at the Reflections on Diplomacy blog:
To survive, a diplomat needs poetry. Filed amidst the many layers of the brief, the short poem will refresh the bleary mind. Poetry brings distance – hence perspective and insight. Poetry reminds the diplomat that the best professional is the amateur.
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.
