zenpundit.com

[ by Charles Cameron — poetry in time of war, symbolism / semiotics of blood and martyrdom, analogies with Jefferson and St Augustine, sacramental nature of reality ]
.

Felix Kuehn and Alex Strick van Linschoten’s book The Poetry of the Taliban (Hurst, Columbia UP) contains a remarkable poem composed in the 1990s by one Bismillah Sahar:
.

Change

The spring of change needs blood to rain down,
It requires the irrigation of the gardens with blood.
Valuing the blood of the people of the past
Requires the price of human blood.
Each drop of it has become a Nile of the dawn’s blood;
The Pharaohs want to fill the Nile with blood

Sitting here in California seven thousand miles and many cultures distant and more than a decade later, the phrase “spring of change” has an interesting ring to it – but it was likely not the not-yet-deposed Mubarak that Sahar was thinking of when he penned his lyric about the Pharaoh, but “the Oppressor” — whomever that might be. The imagery of the Pharaoh is a common enough trope, in fact, used for instance by the Taliban to describe President GW Bush in their magazine Al-Sumud [ link is to preview, relevant chapter of Master Narratives of islamist Extremism.

And while it is true that, as Asim Qureshi notes, “poetry links the ancient past with the modern day”, neither the trope itself nor the reference to the plight of the Jews in Egypt is exclusive to Afghanistan in specific or Islam in general. Indeed, Martin Luther King explicitly views himself as what theology would term a “type” of Moses when he says:

We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter with me now. Because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people will get to the promised land. And I’m happy, tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.

These sacramental bleedings of the past into the present as in a palimpsest are native to the imagination and powerful in their poetic impact, as MLK’s life, final speech and death eloquently testify.

But there is a second layer of sacramental reality at work in the poem, and it lies in the repeated mention of blood. – the transition between past an present itself being presented in terms of blood spilled in the lines:

Valuing the blood of the people of the past
Requires the price of human blood.

The past requires a price from the present, then, and that price is paid in blood.

*

The poem is six lines long, and there is not a line of it that does not contain the word blood. Again:

The spring of change needs blood to rain down,
It requires the irrigation of the gardens with blood.
Valuing the blood of the people of the past
Requires the price of human blood.
Each drop of it has become a Nile of the dawn’s blood;
The Pharaohs want to fill the Nile with blood.

*

Zeus “poured bloody drops earthwards, honoring his own son, whom Patroklos was soon to destroy in fertile Troy far from his homeland”, Homer writes in the Iliad, 16.459, and the associations of rain with tears, and of spilled blood with spilled life, are ancient and pervasive.

Blood lust, blood sacrifice – the word blood is as powerful as any in the human vocabulary, so much less abstract that birth or death yet richly associated with both, while the sight or thought of blood stirs us at some archaic level of primal imagination. And what of the “irrigation of the gardens with blood”?

The gardens, first, are paradise. Next, they are paradise on earth, perhaps in one’s own village. I have written before of my memories of:

one small white-walled mosque way out on a dry stretch of road between Herat and Kandahar and its small, lush, green garden, all these years later: whatever it was to the inhabitants of that small village, to me it was “oasis” and “paradise” in perfect miniature, and it remains so in memory.

The rivers of Islam’s paradise flow with water, milk, honey and wines: so what place has blood there?

One answer would be found in the hadith, “Know that paradise is under the shade of swords”.

In his book The Shade of Swords: Jihad and the Conflict Between Islam and Christianity, named after the hadith in question, the noted journalist MJ Akbar writes:

The only reason why a person could ever want to leave paradise for this earth would be to get martyred again. Death was only a welcome release; there was no possible deed in this life that could equal jihad in reward after death. The Prophet urged Muslims to seek Firdaus, the best and brightest part of paradise, just below Allah’s throne. Allah had reserved one hundred grades of paradise only for the martyrs. The blood of the wounded would smell like musk on the day of resurrection; and nothing could interfere with Allah’s reward.

The blood of the wounded would smell like musk…

For more on musk, blood, martyrdom and the “odor of sanctity”, see my Of war and miracle: the poetics, spirituality and narratives of jihad.

And so blood is linked to paradise by martyrdom.

*

The spring of change “requires the irrigation of the gardens with blood” the poet tells us, much as Thomas Jefferson told William Stephens Smith in a letter of November 13, 1787:

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it’s natural manure.

But hold on, the same trope is found in St. Augustine‘s City of God, xx.7:

Through virtue of these testimonies, and notwithstanding the opposition and terror of so many cruel persecutions, the resurrection and immortality of the flesh, first in Christ, and subsequently in all in the new world, was believed, was intrepidly proclaimed, and was sown over the whole world, to be fertilized richly with the blood of the martyrs.

And the imagery continues, in the West, into our own day. When Pope Benedict XVI visited Mexico earlier this year, he was treading on “land that was wet with the blood of martyrs” according to Mgr. Fidel Hernández Lara, Episcopal Vicar of the Mexican Archdiocese of León.

*

The very earliest Christian accounts of martyrdom, indeed, have a distinctly sacramental flavor, as one sees by juxtaposing Ignatius of Antioch (quoted by Carolyn Forche in Susan Bergman, ed., Martyrs):

I am God’s wheat ground fine by the lion’s teeth to become purest bread for Christ

with Tertullian (Apologeticum in the translation by Lewis Carroll‘s father):

The blood of the Christians is their harvest seed

*

Joseba Zulaika subtitles his book Basque Violence — which Leah Farrall kindly pointed me to — with the words “Metaphor and Sacrament”.

Sacrament is a key word for me, obviously, and for the sake of those disinclined to religion, may I point to Gregory Bateson‘s comment in the first paragraph of the Introduction to his Mind and Nature:

Even grown-up persons with children of their own cannot give a reasonable account of concepts such as entropy, sacrament, syntax, number, quantity, pattern, linear relation, name, class, relevance, energy, redundancy, force, probability, parts, whole, information, tautology, homology, mass (either Newtonian or Christian), explanation, description, rule of dimensions, logical type, metaphor, topology, and so on. What are butterflies? What are starfish? What are beauty and ugliness?

The concept of “sacrament” occupies a place of honor second only to “entropy” in Bateson’s listing.

I am not arguing the pros and cons of publishing these poems, although I side firmly with the publisher on this. Nor am I attempting to assess the poetic value of the one poem I have quoted and examined. What I am trying to do is to give that poem the kind of reading I would want to give to any poem that interested me — one that seeks out its resonances in both local and world cultures as far as my wits can manage, showing, if possible, what power it gains from archetype, authority and form… If the poem were from the South English Legendary, for instance — which expresses similar sentiments — I’d have no hesitation calling its worldview “sacramental”.

But this is a poem from Afghanistan and Islam, not from medieval Christian England, so I should perhaps explain that in my view, any perspective which views the world as a series of legible “signs from God” — ayat, in the Arabic of the Qur’an — is a sacramental view, under the definition of sacrament that calls it “an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace”.

Blood is such a sign — of life, of its value, of its continuity by descent, and of its redemptive power even in death.

It is in sensing this semiotic / sacramental quality to Islam that we begin to grasp what translations such as these can point us to, but not directly reveal.

*****

Further reading:

From today’s NYT: Why Afghan Women Risk Death to Write Poetry
Poetry reading in Afghan culture: Reading Poetry In Kandahar
Afghan poetics: Poetry: Why it Matters to Afghans? Understanding Afghan Culture [.pdf], NPS, 2009
Talib poetry as propaganda: Johnson & Waheed, Analyzing Taliban taranas (chants): an effective Afghan propaganda artifact, Small Wars & Insurgencies, 2011
And finally, Afghans Build Peace, One Stanza at a Time

One of the nice things about this blog is that periodically, smart folks will send me their unpublished material for feedback and private commentary. This comes in a wide variety of formats – manuscripts, articles, book chapters, powerpoint, sometimes an entire book or novel! It is flattering and almost always informative, so I try to help where I can or at least point the sender in the direction of someone more appropriate.

Recently, I was given a peek at a very intriguing paper on “Transition Operations” by Dr Rich Ledet, LTC Jeff Stewart and Mr. Pete Turner, who blogs occasionally at quesopaper.  Pete has spent a good chunk of the past ten years in a variety of positions and capacities in Iraq and Afghanistan, where he currently is with American troops in a remote rural district and it was he who passed their draft to me. They have taken a fresh look at the subject.

While I can’t give away their “secret sauce” in detail,  I particularly liked the fact that while the  focus and advice for executing transition operations is aimed at field grade officers and their civilian agency counterparts, their vision is in sync with the ideal of having policy-strategy-operations and tactics as a seamless “whole-of-government” garment. If only we could get our politicians to think in these terms, half the battle would be over.

Their paper is now headed to a professional journal; when it is published ( as I think it will be), I will definitely be linking to it here and hopefully, that will be soon.

My reason for my bringing this up – I have the permission of the authors to do so – is that the trio have put their finger on the major doctrinal problem faced by the United States military in Afghanistan – “transition operations” being a politically charged topic, laden as it is with implied foreign policy decision making by heavyweight policy makers, is treated in very scanty fashion by FM 3-24. Compared to other aspects of COIN, very little guidance is given to the the commander of the battalion or brigade in the effort to coordinate “turnover” of responsibilities and missions to their Afghan Army, police and government allies.

This at a time when the “readiness” of Afghan units and officials to accept these burdens in the midst of a war with the Taliban is questionable, variable, controversial at home and politically extremely sensitive in Afghanistan.

And at a point where, ten years after September 11, the US State Department is no more able in terms of personnel and vision or sufficiently funded by Congress, to step up their game and take the lead role in Afghanistan from the Pentagon than it was on September 10, 2001.  SECSTATEs Condi Rice and Hillary Clinton deserve great praise for making State do more with less, but State needs wholesale reform to fit the needs of the 21st century and the money and budgetary flexibility to split foreign policy tasks more equitably with the Defense Department.

State is not going to be playing a major role on the ground in our transition out of Afghanistan, which makes guidance to our majors and colonels – and in turn to their company and platoon leaders stationed there-  all the more important.

The Hunt for KSM: Inside the Pursuit and Takedown of the Real 9/11 Mastermind by Terry McDermott and Josh Meyer

This courtesy review copy just arrived from Machette Book Group. The authors are investigative journalists, one of whom, Meyer, has extensive experience reporting on terrorism, while McDermott is also the author of the 9-11 highjackers book, Perfect Soldiers. Thumbing through the pages, I note the authors have little time and much contempt for the cherished DoD-State canard that the Pakistani government and the ISI are an ally of the United States, which has already given me a warm feeling.

The review copy index pages are blank, something I usually see only before a book has been finalized for mass printing. Odd.

I will be reading and reviewing this soon – Shlok advises that “it reads like a novel”

[ by Charles Cameron — burning and blasphemy ]
.

The question here is a simple one: which is the more blasphemous? burning holy scripture — or burning oneself, a human being?

Now I imagine you think the answer to that’s quite obvious, and I do too. But there are people with the opposite opinion to mine — and when we burn their scriptures, even by mistake, even making apologies afterwards, they get enraged, and kill people. There may be many other factors that contribute to their rage, but this is the trigger, the religious sanction, the thing that pushes them over the top.

Someone tweeted the other day:

Souls are being burned alive in Homs & others riot over ink & paper. Where’s the logic?!

It is not my purpose to attack or defend anyone’s beliefs or opinions here — what I would like to do instead is to see through the rage and glimpse that logic: I would like us to avoid needlessly triggering it.

I want to bring what may at first seem utterly incomprehensible to us, a little closer to our comprehension.

1.

In the Quran 5.32, we read:

We ordained for the Children of Israel that if any one slew a person – unless it be for murder or for spreading mischief in the land – it would be as if he slew the whole people: and if any one saved a life, it would be as if he saved the life of the whole people.

On the one hand, that sets an extremely high value on human life — the Jewish equivalent is found in the Talmud, Tractate Sanhedrin 37a — and on the other hand, it can be claimed that that high value is set not by humans but by their Creator in his revealed Word, the Qur’an.

2.

What metaphor or analogy would allow me to understand that logic in terms of my own culture? Not the rage itself, not the killings — but the logic that potentiates them?

3.

If you think, as the melancholy Jaques has it in As You Like It, that all the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players – and as Hamlet might think, pondering what more things might be in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in philosophy – why then —

How does one weigh the value of the life of a Jaques, or Hamlet, of one of us, one single human being – of whom Shakespeare, again through his Hamlet, said:

how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! ..

against the value of a single copy of the Works of one William Shakespeare – who then continued on, through that same Hamlet’s voice, to ask:

And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?

4.

Shakespeare, the First Folio, Hamlet?
God, the Scripture, you or me?

5.

It is said the imperishable Quran is writ in heaven before time was, and there is a hadith of Tirmidhi that describes Allah reciting Suras 20 and 36, Taha and Ya Sin, upon hearing which the angels responded “Happy are the people to whom this comes down, happy are the minds which carry this, and happy are the tongues which utter this”.

I am not a literalist, I am a poet — so that makes poetic sense to me, the way Shakespeare’s “all the world’s a stage” makes sense.

In reading these words, I see for a moment the beauty, the devotion that is possible towards this book, the fervent dedication.

I am not about to kill people in the name of Shakespeare or the Gospels — yet I can understand a reverence for that which is greater than I, for that which is more than we dream of, and for that which “comes down” from thence.

6.

Suppose the body is a perishable scaffolding, and the book an eternal transcript written in the immortal soul…

And now recall what that eternal transcript says:

We ordained for the Children of Israel that if any one slew a person – unless it be for murder or for spreading mischief in the land – it would be as if he slew the whole people: and if any one saved a life, it would be as if he saved the life of the whole people.

The paradox here, surely, is that we are each of us the quintessence of dust – each of us more than is dreamt of in philosophy.

7.

May the soul of Mohamed Bouazizi rest at last.

[ by Charles Cameron — ISAF apologizes to Afghans, Taliban thinks the Ummah is offended, and an insight from Bernard Lewis ]
.
.

Responding to the burning of “religious materials, to include Qurans” by coalition forces in an incinerator at Bagram, Gen. John R. Allen, commander of ISAF, is quoted in an ISAF release as saying:

On behalf of the entire International Security Assistance Force, I extend my sincerest apologies to the people of Afghanistan.

Commenting on the same incident, an Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan / Taliban statement said:

Last night, the American invaders, in accordance with their barbaric characteristics once again burnt copies of the sacred book of the Muslims (Holy Quran) with the purpose of desecration and with this perverted action, aroused the sensitivities of one billion Muslims worldwide including the Afghans.

*

As is often the case, the devil is in the details.

Note that the ISAF addresses its apology to “the people of Afghanistan” while the Islamic Emirate describes those offended by such actions as “one billion Muslims worldwide including the Afghans”.

I am reminded of Bernard Lewis‘ observation:

For a long time now it has been our practice in the modern Western world to define ourselves primarily by nationality, and to see other identities and allegiances—religious, political, and the like—as subdivisions of the larger and more important whole. The events of September 11 and after have made us aware of another perception—of a religion subdivided into nations rather than a nation subdivided into religions…

*

The converse of this is that those in Afghanistan and elsewhere who identify more readily with the Ummah than with an individual nationality will also more easily think of a war seemingly fought against the Ummah as being the work of Christendom aka “the Crusaders” — an idea that fits well with a centuries-long sense of history — rather than by a UN-mandated coalition that includes troops from Jordan, Turkey, and the Emirates…

Not that the 2,000-odd ISAF troops from those particular countries are likely to be the ones who burn Qur’ans.