Monday, November 30, 2009

With The Right Mindset

By Joe Tangari, *Various Artists Ouled Bambara: Portraits of Gnawa; Drag City / Twos & Fews; 2009* - Pitchfork Media - Chicago, IL, USA
Monday, November 23, 2009

To build a truly deep understanding of Gnawa music, its history, the story of the people who play it, and the religious and superstitious beliefs that inform it and determine its structure, you'd probably have to read a few books or live your whole life in Morocco. I'll give the digest version here.

There, Gnawa are practitioners of a musical-spiritual tradition rooted in Sufism, a mystical strain of Islam. The Gnawa tradition has its deepest roots in the Arab slave trade, in which sub-Saharan Africans were kidnapped and brought north over the desert to the Maghreb, in modern-day Morocco and Algeria, though today there is no ethnic dimension to it.

Gnawa musicians, mystics, and dancers provide a communication conduit between people and the jinn, unseen beings of smokeless fire that are important not to anger. The word is the source of our "genie," and one particular type of jinn, the mluk (literally, "the owners") is said to possess people who cross its path. One of the purposes of Gnawa ceremony is to negotiate with the mluk and send it packing-- it dovetails with the Sufi quest for spiritual purity.

An "Ouled Bambara" is a suite of Gnawa songs played during the Fraja, or entertainment, phase of a Gnawa ceremony. This set of field recordings made in Marrakesh by Caitlin McNally offers samplings of both this phase and the actual mluk phase. The recording carries the sonic flavor of the courtyards in which it was made, and the musical ingredients are simple.

The singing is essentially a series of solo and group chants, and it doesn't follow any song forms familiar to Western ears. The whole body of music evolves as one, pushed along by hand claps on some tracks, and iron castanets or shakers on others, and at the heart of the sound is the guimbri, a three-stringed, guitar-like instrument with a large, closed rectangular resonating box. The instrument has loose, thick strings and plays in a bass register, and the musicians frequently drum on the resonator while playing.

While it provides a harmonic outline, the primary function of the guimbri is rhythmic, and the musicians favor gradually shifting patterns, changing tempos and rhythmic emphasis as the song suites unfold.

The CD offers about an hour of recorded ceremonial music, and it's very transporting. Even without the extensive liner notes, it's an interesting experience to sit in on a ceremony so different from any of our own.

The accompanying half-hour DVD adds a visual dimension, showing the playing techniques for the guimbri and castanets, giving us a glimpse of the dances and trance states, including one somewhat frightening moment where a trancing dancer collapses. It includes interviews with each performer and brief insight into their lives. Mohamed Hamada, the same dancer who collapses, works a day job stoking the flames of a furnace, while Brahim Belkani shows off photos of himself with Dizzy Gillespie, Robert Plant, and Jimmy Page.

It's hard to rate a recording like this in the context of a bunch of indie rock and hip hop records, because it comes from a different angle entirely-- music in this world is spiritual currency, not a product or a showcase, and it's important not to go into listening to it expecting something catchy or straightforwardly funky. It's a genuine field recording and makes no concessions to pop convention or avant-garde ideas.

Of course, that's also what makes it a fantastic document of a unique and thriving cultural tradition, one that has a curious place in Moroccan society as neither mainstream nor outcast. Come to listen with the right mindset, and you'll learn a lot about it.

Sunday, November 29, 2009

Kubbe-i Hadra

By Anatolia News Agency, *Mevlana Museum undergoing largest-ever restoration* - Hürriyet Daily News - Istanbul, Turkey

Saturday, November 21, 2009

Konya: The Mevlana Museum, Turkey's third most visited museum after Topkapı Palace and the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, is located in the central province of Konya and is currently undergoing its largest-ever restoration.

The museum, also known as the Green Mausoleum or Green Dome, is the original lodge of the Mevlevi whirling dervishes, a mystical Sufi Muslim group. It contains the tomb and shrine of the Mevlana, or Jalaluddin Rumi, founder of the Sufi order.

As part of the restoration works launched three months ago, the renovation of the minaret was completed and now dervish cells will be restored to their original 16th century state. Experts will also replace old tiles with new ones and fix damaged tiles on the inner part of the dome, the Kubbe-i Hadra, or the Green Dome, which is the symbol of the historical monument. Lighting fixtures and the museum’s courtyard will also be restored, museum officials said.

Museum's director Yusuf Benli said that restoration works are expected to be completed in two years.

"Usually, museums all over the world are closed during restoration works but we preferred to keep the museum open. The number of foreign visitors in October 2008 was 24,000 but it doubled in October 2009, which shows us that restoration works have not negatively affected the number of visitors," Benli said.

The museum was visited by 2 million people in 2008 and visitors are still welcome despite ongoing restoration works, he added.

Photo by AA

Saturday, November 28, 2009

Closer To Tasawwuf

By HDN Editor, *'Religion loves tolerance, but is not tolerant'* - Hürriyet Daily News - Istanbul, Turkey
Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Although Turks identify themselves as religiously tolerant, they do not behave that way in practice, according to a survey. There has been an increase in the number of people identifying themselves as religious since 1999, which might be related to the political atmosphere in Turkey, an academic says.

Turkish people strongly identify themselves as religious and also regard religion as a source of tolerance. But when it comes to religious worship, a significant number are not as tolerant of people from other religions, concludes a survey released Tuesday.

Prominent political scientists Ersin Kalaycıoğlu and Ali Çarkoğlu from Sabancı University reported the research findings on religiosity in Turkey under the framework of the International Social Survey Program, or ISSP, which measures religious values from 43 different countries.

International research was conducted three times in the past; the last available data was from 1998. International data from the 2008 research is expected to be available in 2010. Turkey first participated in the survey in 2008 and is the first and only country surveyed with a Muslim majority population.

Eighty-three percent of Turks identify themselves as religious, with 16 percent saying they are extremely religious, 39 percent saying they are highly religious and 32 percent saying they are somewhat religious.

Of the 43 countries surveyed, Turkey, Poland, the Philippines and the United States are among the most religious. Almost half of Turks say they practice religious prayers and also identify themselves as religious. Twenty-eight percent say they pray, but do not regard themselves as highly religious.

According to Çarkoğlu, there has been a significant increase since 1999 in the number of people who identify as religious. “This is the most striking conclusion of this survey, though it is not alarming,” he said. He added that the change could be related to peoples’ attitudes toward behaving in accordance with the current political climate.

Another striking discovery made by the survey was that 60 percent of Turks said there is only one true religion, while 34 percent said most religions hold basic truths.

The findings on tolerance toward religions are remarkable as well. Ninety percent of the Turkish population reported having a positive view toward Muslims, but this ratio dropped to 13 percent for Christians and around 10 percent for Jews. Those who said they have highly positive views about non-believers of any religion totaled 7 percent.

When it comes to accepting political candidates from different religions, 37 percent of Turks said they would absolutely not accept this and 12 percent said they would most likely not accept it. However, 23 percent said they would absolutely accept it and 24 percent say they would probably accept it. Eleven percent of Turks said people from different religions should absolutely be allowed to organize public meetings to express their ideas, while 24 percent said they should be allowed to do so.

Thirty-six percent said people from different religions absolutely should not be allowed to organize such meetings, while 23 percent said they should not be allowed to do so.

Following religious rules
Another striking discovery dealt with obeying laws that contradict religious rules. A majority of the participants in the research, 67 percent, said they would continue acting in accordance with their religious beliefs if the Parliament passed a law that contradicted religious laws. Twenty-six percent said they would obey the country’s law in this case.

When it comes to the perception of God, Turks identify with a God who is more like a father than a mother, but as a lover rather than a judge. The perception of God for Turks is closer to the tasawwuf, or Islamic Sufism, tradition in Anatolia.

Turks are more inclined to identify with God as a friend rather than a sultan or a spouse, or as the master of the house.

Dialogue Movement

By Eva Arnott, *Turkish Delight* - Fairfield County Weekly - Norwalk, CT, USA
Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Walking the streets St. Paul walked in beautiful, multi-faith Turkey

We were a strange trio of pilgrims as we arrived at the Istanbul airport. There was the 30-ish tall, dark Turkish Imam, Ibrahim Sayar; the 60-ish American Episcopalian, Chuck; and the 70-ish Viennese-born Catholic, me.

Ibrahim leads the local chapter of the world-wide Dialogue Movement, which includes millions of moderate and observant Muslims inspired by the writings of philosopher Fethullah Gulen. Gulen's goal is to have a positive and peaceful relationship with non-Muslims. Chuck and I belong to Boston-area parishes that have ongoing social and educational relationships with this group.

Our trip to Turkey included daytime sightseeing in this beautiful, historically fascinating and orderly country, and evenings spent enjoying the hospitality of supporters of the movement.

The Blue Mosque, with its cool filtered light and reverent visitors standing quietly in personal prayer, was inspiring even to a non-Muslim. There were none of the chattering tourists with flash cameras who often spoil the atmosphere in Western European cathedrals. Some of the icons at Hagia Sophia, the massive former Byzantine cathedral, could still be seen clearly in the huge building, which has a different kind of beauty.

Out of all the major European and Middle Eastern cities I've visited, Istanbul is by far the cleanest and best kept. No one ever seems to even throw away a candy wrapper. There were no beggars and apparently no homeless people, and residents of all ages were walking around in the evenings with no concern about crime. There were none of the disheveled party-goers who can make riding on public transport unpleasant in London and Paris. About half the local women had their hair covered but there was only a very occasional burka. Usually the scarf would be carefully color-coordinated with a modestly calf-length dress or skirt.

We had dinner with members of the administration of Fatih University, a fairly new private university 20 miles north of Istanbul which is run by the movement. The thousands of students study through the medium of English with faculty who often have PhDs from U.S. universities.

After Istanbul, we flew to Izmir and visited Ephesus, which had a population of 100,000 at its height but was abandoned when the harbor silted up. As it was neither destroyed nor buried under a modern city, it is easy to imagine how it was when St. Paul was there.

We drove east to Konya, the birthplace of Rumi, where a dervish, a pleasant young man in a long white robe, told us about Sufism. Dervishes don't really whirl but have a ritual dance whose movements reminded me of Chinese group aerobics. Further east, we saw Cappadocia, where 10,000 early Christians had lived like gerbils in several layers of caves connected by secret passages while they were hiding from Roman persecution.

Throughout the trip, I was impressed by the way Ibrahim and our hosts and guides punctuated their day with prayers. When the call to prayer came from the minaret, they would find a quiet place to pray and return obviously refreshed. Even the gas stations out in the country had a prayer room behind the convenience store to which customers would go after they had pumped their gas.

Religion survived here in spite of decades of actively atheistic governments when the Koran could only be taught behind closed doors. Throughout the trip, we were met with hospitality and openness to discussion about our respective religions.

Picture: Istanbul, Sultan Ahmed Mosque (The Blue Mosque). Photo by Istock

Friday, November 27, 2009

Strings and Wings

By Ishrat Hyatt, *Tunisian violinist’s performance enthrals audience* - The News International - Karachi, Pakistan
Sunday, November 22, 2009

Islamabad: On the occasion of the 22nd anniversary of the ‘Change of November 07, 1987’ the ambassador of the Republic of Tunisia and Mrs Mourad Bourehla organised a performance by well known Tunisian violinist, Anis Kelibi titled ‘Strings and Wings.’

The event was held at the Pakistan National Council of the Arts (PNCA) and well attended by music lovers of the capital.

Addressing the gathering the ambassador said it was an honour and pleasure to address them on the exceptional occasion of the celebration of the 22nd anniversary of change of November 7th that was an act of salvation and had ushered in a new era of development and modernisation led by President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali.

He gave a brief account of Tunisia’s achievements during this period; spoke of the traditional and deep rooted and multi-faceted relationship between Pakistan and his country and saying they wanted to show a new side of Pakistan to the world, he thanked the sponsors and the PNCA for their support.

PNCA Director General Tauquir Nasir also spoke of the ties between the two countries with special reference to cultural ones and thanked the hosts for bringing a well-known artiste to Pakistan.

On behalf of embassy of Tunisia, Dr Seema Khan welcomed the guests and gave a brief history of Tunisian music before introducing the artiste.

The music of Tunisia is well known for its particular form, known as ‘malouf.’ This genre of Tunisian music bears similarities to the types of music prevalent in other North African countries. It has evolved through generations and its contemporary form has its own distinctive traits. However, it can be traced back to Spain and it was the Spanish conquest in the 15th century that brought this ‘Andalucian’ music to Tunisia.

There has been rise and fall of many genres of music in Tunisia including the Sufi form called ‘al-Hadra’, an interesting fact since Sufi music holds a lot of significance in Pakistan as well.

A number of music festivals are held in Tunisia and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, the famous ‘qawal’ from Pakistan has performed on more than one occasion in the Cartage festival.

Anis Kelibi is a well-known violinist, composer and researcher in music, qualified from the music high school of Tunis. He has performed both nationally and internationally for Tunisia and in places like the Arabic music forum and the festival opera house of Cairo in Egypt, at the international violin meeting of Jarash festival in Jordan and at an international song and music event in Kuwait. He describes himself as ‘a bird with wings, which starts floating with music and knows no boundaries.’

In the first half Anis Kelibi performed his own compositions while in the second half he performed some popular, classical Tunisian pieces of other famous composers and singers. The first half performance was in a fusion format with .Ashiq Hussain on the tabla; Salman Adil on the flute; Mr Hazravi on the keyboard and Imran Khan on the violin.

The surprise of the evening was Menel, (violin) and Melek, (pianist) daughters of the ambassador who have been Anis Kelibi pupils, accompanying him in paying tribute to the greatest Tunisian violinist and singer, composer Mohammad Jamoussi amongst others.

The applause after each piece was played indicated that the performance was enjoyed very much by the audience, with the one featuring the flute and the violin imitating birds, winning the hearts and minds of everyone present.

“It was beautiful,” said the Godins, who are a family with a background in music. “Very well played and music to the ears in the true sense of the word.”

[Visit the PNCA]

Hicret

By Roberta Davenport, *‘Sufi rocker’ Kağan Tayanç blends spirituality and rock in İstanbul* - Today's Zaman -

Sunday, November 22, 2009

An unusual act took to the stage on Wednesday night at the İstanbul Metropolitan Municipality’s Ali Emiri Cultural Center -- a rock band including a neyzen that sang spiritually themed lyrics to Western harmonics.

The six-man act is known by the name of the lead singer and guitarist, Kağan Tayanç. With three guitars, a keyboard and a drum set in addition to vocals, the band generates a powerful sound onstage. A person approaching the concert hall entrance would doubtless understand that a rock concert was taking place, but unless they were to catch a slip of the ney -- a wailing reed flute instrument that in Turkey evokes thoughts of Sufi mysticism and the Mevlevi Sufi order -- they would have no idea that the songs being played are laden with spiritual themes.

The soft-spoken rocker spoke to Sunday’s Zaman at the concert venue and was careful to draw a distinction between the music he and his band make and “ilahi” music -- Sufi religious hymns.

“Ilahis are arabesque, and we’re very distant from that [style],” Tayanç said. “Ilahis are calm, tasawwuf music -- and our musical style is very loud, and so the two musical styles don’t come together. Our commonality is that our band includes a neyzen; but our [band’s] harmonies are Western.” Asked to describe what defines his band’s “Sufi rock” style, Tayanç says: “It’s rock music that contains spirituality. It’s oriented toward Islam and spirituality but is also a synthesis, including Western beats and harmony.”

And perhaps it may be said that rock is more suited for the themes Tayanç’s music is centered around. With lyrics reflecting the ups and downs human beings face throughout their lives and in their spiritual development, the band’s music seems appropriate -- sometimes fast, sometimes slow, with raging drums mixed in with furious strumming of the guitar overlaid by the soft sound of the ney -- the music is as tumultuous as life itself. There are ebbs and flows, and together with meaningful lyrics, it comes together beautifully.

The band’s repertoire comprised tracks from the “Yunus Gibi” (Like Yunus) album -- which takes its name from Yunus Emre, a 13th century Turkish poet and mystic.

Appropriately, though the band is known only by Kağan Tayanç’s name, its nickname is “Hicret,” a word that means journey and is also the name of the Prophet Muhammad’s exodus with the early Muslim community from Mecca to Medina to escape religious persecution. The name is meaningful in that it reflects the album’s contents -- chronicling a long and arduous journey with the aim of learning about God and steeping one’s self in Islam, Tayanç said.

The album cover reads: “Hicret is a difficult journey, one that leads from not knowing to knowing…” Tayanç says the lyrics in the album, when listened to carefully, also track his own journey from a non-religious leftist to a practicing Muslim:

“There were questions within me that were unasked,
And there was fear of the answers that would come,
From time to time thoughts are destroyed and broken,
But it’s difficult to turn back from some mistakes.”
(Gemiler/Yunus Gibi)

The Sufi rock concept

The idea of setting ilahi-type lyrics to rock or pop music is not a new one, but a band that specializes in this is new to the Turkish music scene. There have been examples of single-track covers by rock and pop bands of classic ilahis that everyone knows the words to, but nothing on the Turkish market is quite like Kağan Tayanç. The band’s music includes jazz, rock and ilahi elements, but in a new form; it also differs from the Anatolian rock genre in that it concerns itself with maintaining a spiritual outlook.

The term Sufi rock is new to Turkey, with conventional rock music combined with lyrics featuring Sufi music and imagery mostly an Indo-Pakistani phenomenon, with Pakistan’s wildly popular Sufi rock band Junoon being an example of widespread success of the genre.

And there are also parallels to be drawn between Sufi rock and the Christian rock subset in the United States. For now, though, it remains to be seen how the Kağan Tayanç group, which has been playing together for about six months, will be received by audiences as their name and reputation spreads. The audience at Ali Emiri was diverse, with attendees sporting everything from Led Zeppelin T-shirts to headscarves.

Tayanç explained that a follow-up album to “Yunus Gibi” was in the works and, conceding the difficulty of breaking out into the music scene with an entirely new genre and establishing a fan base would take some time, said that he saw the potential for his music to become popular in Turkey but that it would only be with the second or third album that this would be seen.

For those interested in checking out their eclectic new sound, Kağan Tayanç’s final concert of the year is set for 8 p.m. on Dec. 16 at the Ali Emiri Cultural Center in İstanbul’s Fatih district. For more information on the group and their music, visit http://www.yunusgibi.com [in Turkish].

Thursday, November 26, 2009

Transforming The Space

By Ismail Fajrie Alatas, *Reclaiming South Jakarta’s Sacred Streets* - Jakarta Globe - Jakarta, Indonesia
Monday, November 16, 2009

Those who live in South Jakarta would undoubtedly have experienced a traffic disruption on a Saturday night caused by a lengthy and extensive motorcade of youngsters dressed in white shirts, sarongs and skullcaps. They pervade the cityscape with flags and banners written in Arabic script unintelligible to many inhabitants of the capital. Behind them were several trucks overflowing with youth singing paeans to God and blessings to the prophet, accompanied by melodious drumming. To make this carnivalesque picture complete, stretches of road were filled with banners and billboards showing a picture of a man of Hadhrami extraction garbed in a colored robe and white turban.

This was a procession of Majelis Taklim Nurul Musthafa, one of many new Muslim study groups that appeared in the late 1990s. Since 1998, Habib Hasan bin Ja’far Assegaf has been proactive in visiting slums on the outskirts of Jakarta, preaching to the youth. Over the years, the Bogor-born preacher’s network has expanded and the once modest Nurul Musthafa now attracts literally thousands of devotees to its weekly gatherings.

Most of Habib Hasan’s followers are young people who come from the lower rung of the social hierarchy. In the meetings, the young and charismatic Habib Hasan leads his congregation in reciting Sufi liturgical texts and poetry, complete with drums and fireworks. Far from being radical or anarchic, however, the Nurul Musthafa study group has been proactive in steering the youth away from the more radical elements of Islamic activism.

The name of the study group, Nurul Musthafa (Prophetic Light), refers to the Sufi cosmological concept of the pre-existing light of the Prophet Muhammad as a direct manifestation of the divine, which was then carried on by the prophet and his descendants. An energetic speaker who combines religious learning with showmanship aided by high-tech stereo amplification, Habib Hasan has been successful in captivating his audience.

In this study group, time-honored Sufi tradition and authority are cast anew through direct access to the youth facilitated by technology and modern organizational models. Although the means of conveying the message has changed, the form of authority itself remains the same. In this way, Habib Hasan is able to harness the support of the youth from lower economic and educational backgrounds, while excluding those with higher education.

The reason for Habib Hasan’s failure to garner support from educated youth is his inability to present his message in a way that is palatable to the reformist religious discourses dominant among university students. The fragmentation of Islam into various ideologically conflicting groups means that traditional scholarship has ceased to be the only authoritative source of religious knowledge.

Such is the case among the secular university-educated students who are more attracted to Salafism and favor direct access to the scriptures. With inclinations to international revivalist organizations such as the Muslim Brotherhood and Hizb al-Tahrir, these students have become increasingly hostile to local variants of Islam and pursue an agenda of Islamizing Indonesian society.

Rather than advocating for the implementation of Islamic law or the establishment of an Islamic state, Habib Hasan is seemingly more interested in reconstituting South Jakarta — a part of the capital known for its nouveau riche inhabitants and glaring entertainment spots — into a sacred space.

Such a process is undertaken precisely through the motorcades and processions replete with devotional chants (zikir). This mobile zikir can be seen as an interruption; an interjection into the dominant spatial configuration. Following from the oft-quoted dictum that God remembers the place where his name has been called out, the procession can be viewed as a process of remaking the secular space into an Islamic one.

By leading his mobile rituals through South Jakarta, Habib Hasan is temporarily transforming the space into a sacred site, akin to a site of worship. In the course of the processions, his followers are able to sacralize the space through devotional gestures and visible spirituality on Saturday nights, when the middle and upper-class youth of Jakarta are on their way to the entertainment complexes.

There is also a temporal dimension to this performance. Many people I know express apprehension toward Habib Hasan and his followers, mainly for creating traffic jams on Saturday night. This, I would argue, is where the efficacy of Habib Hasan’s movement lies. By staging the motorcades, Habib Hasan is not only sacralizing space, but he is also able to inflict a temporal caesura to the dominant time, by freezing the movements of people on the road going elsewhere.

It is important, however, not to perceive Habib Hasan’s followers as automatons. The motorcades should not be seen as uniformly conceived and consisting of people with a shared agenda. Aryo Danusiri, an anthropologist who is currently studying Habib Hasan and his followers, opines that the motorcades can be seen as a tactic by lower-class youngsters from the outskirts of Jakarta to establish their visibility in South Jakarta — a space dominated by the more prosperous — thereby equipping them with a sense of strength and centrality. In other words, the motorcades empower these young people and bestow visibility in a space usually dictated by the wealthy.

Finally, however one chooses to interpret Habib Hasan and Nurul Musthafa, one thing is clear. By establishing this movement, Habib Hasan has been instrumental in attracting thousands of youth to his peaceful Sufi teachings, thereby channeling them away from the more radical elements of contemporary Islamic activism.

Ismail Fajrie Alatas is a doctoral student in anthropology and history at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

[Picture from http://www.nurulmusthofa.org/]

Wednesday, November 25, 2009

Devotional Objects

By Shahid Husain, *‘Sufism best way to understand different cultures’* - The News International - Karachi, Pakistan
Sunday, November 15, 2009

Karachi: French Consul-General in Karachi, Pierre Seillan, has said that Sufism is a treasure for Pakistan and the best way to understand different cultures.

Speaking as a chief guest at a seminar titled “Artifacts of Devotion: Approaching through material culture,” organised by the Department of Architecture and Planning, NED University of Engineering and Technology on Saturday, Seillan said that Sufism was the “best way to fight misunderstanding between countries.”

“I have been to the shrine of Lal Shahbaz Qaladar at Sehwan and I found it totally different from other shrines, especially during the night,” he said. Earlier, Prof Michel Biovin, a research fellow at the Centre for South Asian Studies, University of Paris, presented a slide show of different artifacts at the mausoleum of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar, and gave an overview of the culturally diverse and rich history of Sindh. He explained how Sufism pervades local cultures through the dissemination of different kinds of “devotional objects”.

His lecture focused on the case study of Sehwan Sharif and the evolution of the urban space around the mausoleum of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar. Explaining about the significance of “devotional objects” at the mausoleum of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar, he said the “Kashkol” (begging bowl), used by Sufis from 13th century onwards was metaphorically called “Kashti” (boat) and was not only used for begging food but also for drinking wine and it was thought to have spiritual significance.

“You will find two “Kashtis” at the mausoleum of Lal Shabaz and you will find differences in their decorations,” he said. One could find Persian poetry on these “Kashtis”, besides fish, he said. He said that “Kashti” was popular in India and Bangladesh. On some of them, however, one finds motifs but no fish. Then one would find “golden Kashti” in 16th and 17th century artifacts at these shrines. He said that the artifacts have special significance because after three days of “Urs” at the mausoleum of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar, there was a big meeting there and “Faqirs” touch the “Kashti” respectfully.

Omar Kasmani, an architect by profession, was drawn to the idea that objects were enmeshed with the person of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar. He said these objects become a depository of data. He said that Alfred Gell’s art nexus comprises index or object or inferred sign of index; artist or author of the index; prototype or what the index represents and recipient or the receiver of the index and pointed out the saint becomes the artist of the “Kashti.”

He said that “Kashti” created legitimacy because it was kept by a certain saint.

He said that these objects could not be read independently of the agents and their social positions. It was the social context of these objects that give them meaning, he explained.

Vice Chancellor of the NED University, Engineer Abul Kalam said that Pakistan has so much architectural heritage and the department of architecture and planning was working hard to protect the heritage.

Earlier, in his welcome address, Chairman, Department of Architecture and Planning, Dr Noman Ahmed explained the background of the History Group of the NED University of Engineering and Technology that aims to encourage cultural and historical study amongst the university’s academic environment and the overall context of Karachi.

[Visit NED University]

[Picture: A Dervish taming a lion and a tiger. Mughal painting, c. 1650. Photo from Wiki/Dervish]

Tuesday, November 24, 2009

The Tabaqat Of Shaykh Mohamed Daif-Allah

By Mahgoub El-Tigani, *Sufi-Brotherhood conflicts are eminent in Sudan elections and democratic politics* - Sudan Tribune - Roubaix, France
Sunday, November 15, 2009

The issues concerning our Nation these days are multi-faceted: (effective ending of the escalated crisis in Darfur to the advantage of the victimized population of the region; democratic transition by fair elections and consensual security measures; faithful procession of the optional unity referendum; due prosecution and eradication of the government’s self-incited corruption; and continuous principled application of the unfulfilled agenda of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) by restructured workable relations with the Sudanese opposition forces and the International Community, especially the United States and the International Criminal Court, among many other national and international concerns).

Politicians have already burdened their agenda with the issue of national elections as a key factor to complete the transition to democratic rule. Political sociologists, including this writer, however, are more concerned with the structural situation of the country, namely the possibilities of harmonizing the North-South state relations to end increasing tensions in the level of state authority and the constitutional jurisdictions of state-managers. But the roles to be played by opposition groups and the International Community are indeed prominent: The latter entities, opposition and internationals, would have to work closely with both Federal (Central) Government and the South Sudan Government to bring about a flexible formula to accomplish the outstanding agenda for the ongoing democratic transition.

A fact often left out in the political formulae of the country’s state of affairs, nevertheless, is that both opposition groups and the International Community would have to consider seriously the urgent need to appreciate indigenous components of the formula in terms of two realities: 1) The Old Society of Sudan led by the Sufi large traditional forces in the North, and 2) the New Sudan’s aspiring groups [of which the anti-democratic extremist NIF/NCP MB ruling party is de facto authority body] the Self-Autonomy Armed Groups (SAAG) chiefly the SPLM, as well as Darfur and the East self-autonomy armed groups manifested a different path of political development in the light of the CPA.

Uniquely different from both groups, the 1930s-2000s Democratic Modern Forces (DMF), namely the secular trades unions, liberal political parties, and voluntary human rights and democracy groups, constituted an independent political category that has consistently forced an independent path of development in the state and society relations. At this point, it is worthy to mention the genius efforts Joseph Garang, the first minister of the newly-established South Affairs Ministry, exerted in the late 1960s to boost DMF relationships in the two parts of the Nation.

The SAAG has shown in the post-CPA years (2005-9) mounting influence in the public life as they evolved in the regions with significant connections in the national and the international space. Except for the NIF/NCP MB hegemony over the State and the national economy, which has been further characterized by financial corruption, abuses of authority (up to the most recent partisan intrusions in the elections’ registration process), and an unprecedented record of human rights violations, the SAAG leading the South, East, and Darfur regions has not yet offered clear democratic styles of governance; instead, they often acted in reaction to the NIF/NCP offensive practices.

Of particular significance, the national and the international media and diplomacy have largely defaulted in appreciating the key issue of highlighting the Old Sudan statuses and roles before and after the CPA and in the future affairs of the country. Because our post-independence national elections revealed the persistent influence of the Umma and the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) traditional parties as leading constituencies in the democratic national elections, we will discus briefly the situation of the Old Sudan popular constituencies, which based on Sufi Islam remain the sole real competitor of the NIF/NCP state-supported party in the northern, eastern, western, and central regions of North Sudan.

THE SUDANESE INDIGENOUS MUSLIMS
The international media and diplomacy must first of all recognize that the significance of Islam for the social life of the majority Muslim populations is omnipotent. Over long centuries of cultural and religious adaptations with the deeply rooted African origins of the Nation, the Sudanese society has creatively incorporated principal teachings of Islam, whatever adoptable, in accordance with African cultures and social structures. The only doctrines that most competently contained such adoptions were those of the Sufi traditions of the Sunni Islam that exerted a great effort by their founding jurists to be part of the Sudanese-African belief systems, the prevalent administrative and political self-autonomous arrangements (as in the Darfur agricultural hakorat), and the matrilineal family relations that carried with them tremendous respect to the women as well as the extended family/tribal solidarity communalities in the context of an overwhelming Bedouin and agrarian norms of the social life.

Since the advent of Islam and its peaceful penetration in the indigenous life of the 5-centuries old Nubia Christendom’s, the politics of the country have been firmly founded on this socio-religious amalgam, which is most articulated in the Sufi traditions of the North. This writer disagrees with the opinion that the Sudanese Islam was solely brought into the country by famous Egyptian, Iraqi, and Moroccan jurists. The impact of the Nubian Christians, the inhabitants of the land that basically adopted Islam, and their once-committed clergy of the Church, as well as the influences of Sudanese African cultures, were major sources of the rituals, spiritualities, and beliefs of the post-Christian Sufi traditions together with the worshipping and transactional jurisprudence of classical Islam. The most important inherited authority that documented this fact indirectly by its own unique style was the Tabaqat of Sheikh Mohamed Daif-Allah which reflected a massive mythology of the Sudanese medieval African, Christian, and Islamic heritages. This research area is unnecessarily neglected, although it reveals significant aspects of Sudanese personality and Sufi Islam.

The Sudanese Sufi Islam’s glorious tendencies of peaceful co-existence, equalitarianism, tolerance of social differences, and emphasis on humanitarian relations was nothing but a huge product of the African-Christian-Islamic merges of the country’s cultures and beliefs. In the colonial and the post-independence times, even the secular DMF collaborated openly with prevailing Sufi traditions of the Nation that pervaded both the Muslim and the non-Muslim communities of the North, in particular, in religious, social, and political terms. Still in the South, small groups in the provincial towns exercised the Khatmiya, Ansar, and other Sufi traditions, thus maintaining political commitments to the Umma and the DUP political parties rather than acquiring memberships of the southerner political groups. Besides the warring environment by a prolonged civil war, the lacking of large urban and industrial settings, moreover, precluded the spread of DMF in the villages and towns of the South.

THE MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD
The Muslim Brotherhood (MB) did not share the same concerns of the Sufi traditions of Sudan. Influenced by the foreign thought of Egyptian, Iranian, and other fundamentalist doctrines, the Brotherhood was destined to align with governments and authorities rather than the Sufi groups throughout the MB experiences with the state and society. Early in the October Revolution 1964, the MB leadership supported the generals of the defunct November 1957-64 dictatorship to enable them to escape legal prosecution. Repeatedly in the 1970s and 1980s of the Nimeiri era, the MB cooperated with the falling regime to inherit almost all its ruling apparatuses only to persecute people.

Later in the April Uprising 1985, the MB collaborated with the Transitional Military Council to ensure political dominance over the upcoming national elections and the ensuing Constituent Assembly. But the biggest victory of the MB striving to monopolize power and wealth was achieved evidently by the June coup 1983 by which the MB monopolized state powers to favor an Islamic Project supported vehemently by international allies in Iran and other Middle East societies. The face of the Sudanese politics indicates prolonged control by the MB over state politics, even after the CPA. Still, the societal conditions, intellectual resistance, and above all Sufi foundation of the Nation persisted as concrete fire walls versus the foreign indoctrination of the NIF/NCP MB rulers.

To understand this situation, we sketch the long-enduring structure of the Sufi life exemplified by the Ansar and the Khatmiya Muslim groups whose religious formulations provided the Umma and the DUP (the major coalition governments succeeding all democratic elections in Sudan) with incomparable sources of support since the early 1930s of the 20th century. Here, the lesson is that the future of a democratically unified Sudan might well hinge on the establishment of a strong political alliance between these two parties, rather than a coalition government that the NIF/NCP MB is most eager to make with them in 2010. In our opinion, such government would inevitably fall into the same authoritative rule the MB thus far exercised throughout the 1990s and the 2000s. The experience of a coalition government of these three parties in the late 1980s produced nothing but the notorious 1989’s MB extremist coup and dictatorial regime.

The Sufi-based Umma and DUP parties should live up to the requirements of removing the dangerous state of affairs of the Nation. Despite 20 years of exclusion from participation in the national decision making of the country, added to unfair representation in the CPA, the International Community must be aware that a stable future of Sudan will never come about without full restoration of the Umma/DUP moderate politics and the Muslim Sufi tolerance of the Sudanese cultural and political diversity. It is always important to ascertain the political impact of this reality with due reference to the results of the democratic elections of Sudan by geographical constituences. In 1958, the Umma won 57 seats and the Unionists [lately DUP] 14. In 1965, Umma received 76 out of 173 seats and the DUP 52. In 1986, the Umma won 97 of 207 seats in Constituent Assembly to form a coalition government with the DUP, the second largest group.

Skipping the vital roles the Old Sudan Umma/DUP large constituencies play in the national elections will always weaken the validity and the reliability of possible analyses of the situation, as it produces nothing but poor insights into the realities and the prospects of a smooth democratic transition in the whole country.

THE OLD SUDAN SUFI MUSLIMS
The aim of this article is to draw attention to the need to assess the influence of major political forces in the 2010 elections with a view to incite sufficient willingness from the part of Western Powers to earn the trust and confidence of the Sudanese in the process of enhancing international cooperation and friendship by diplomatic, trade, and cultural relations as determining factors in the world peace and progression. Interestingly, President Obama approach in his address to the Muslim World in Cairo (June 2009) made a fine example of this desirable action. Earlier, many Western thinkers, including Gouldner, Geertz, Eisenstadt, Rueschemeyer, Huntington, and the Lobbans, to mention a few, observed the top priority of Western foreign services to appreciate the religious beliefs, cultural settings, different languages, and the long list of social domains that characterized the identities of overseas nations differently from the Greek-based civilizations of the West.

Alvin Gouldner (1970: 5) put it eloquently in his masterpiece “The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology”: “The profound transformation of society that many radicals seek cannot be accomplished by political means alone; it cannot be confined to a purely political embodiment… the old society is not held together merely by force and violence, or experience and prudence. The old society maintains itself also through theories and ideologies that establish its harmony over the minds of men, who therefore do not merely bite their tongues but submit to it willingly. It will be impossible either to emancipate men from the old society or to build a humane new one, without beginning, here and now, the construction of a total counter-culture, including new social theories; and it is impossible to do this without a critique of the social theories dominant today.”

A major question, then, is pertinent to: 1) the preparedness of the Sudanese society to accomplish the wisdom of peaceful co-existence within two contradictory forms of the political life, i.e., a spiritual non-worldly order and a secular worldly system of international norms; and 2) the competencies of foreign powers to work with due respect to the cultural particularities and political realities of the country. This means that Western foreign powers, as well as the Arab League and the African Union, must play active roles in close consultation with the People of Sudan, not only the ruling parties, to help the transition to democratic rule.

The democratic opposition’s striving to voice grievances of the vast majority of people culminated in the successful meetings of the Juba Conference (September 2009), which allowed the Old Sudan Umma and DUP opposition groups to share with SAAG and the DMF to discuss key national strategies in conference to redress the CPA faltering implementation towards the overdue establishment of democratic transition and a real implementation of the right to self determination in the South, as well as autonomous rule in the other marginal regions.

Following the Juba Conference (Juba: September 2009), the Khatmiya Guide Mohamed Osman al-Mirghani announced unreserved support to the resolutions of the conference in which the Democratic National Forces (a political umbrella embodying the National Democratic Alliance, Umma, and other opposition groups) expressed irrevocable support to the right of the South to optional unity and the right of Darfur to enjoy peace and development vis-à-vis the MB brutalities and genocide, and the national consensus on a straightened population census and fair democratic elections, of which only the NIF/NCP MB was renegade.

Significantly, the Juba Conference unified the Nation’s willingness to enforce a principled implementation of the CPA that alone shall end the steeping failures geared and engineered by the MB dictatorship. The technically granted parliamentary veto to the NIF, which scored less than 20 percent of the national vote in the latest democratic elections in 1986 before occurrence of the June coup, has been consistently criticized as a source of continuous tensions between the opposition and the NIF/NCP-controlled government. The message is that CPA bilateral deals between the NIF/NCP and the SPLM should be democratically restructured to accommodate fair representation of the Sudanese political forces indiscriminately.

The Western World is not equally aware of this overriding fact, or perhaps the West is too slow to move efficiently to ally with Sufi Muslims, the most enduring social forces of North Sudan, the dynamic SAAG and DMF of the Sudan. The resistance of Sufi Muslims to the Brotherhood demagogic authority is a fact that has been permeating the social structure, the consciousness of masses, and the ever-increasing popular willingness to eliminate the alienating authority patterns the MB dictatorship initiated and developed in the state-society relationships for two consecutive decades by the continuous persecution of the Old Sudan reformists and the New Sudan revolutionaries.

THE MB FUTURE THREATS
The consequences of the NIF/NCP MB implementation of the CPA, however, revealed the breadth and depth of the political crisis the country is currently suffering as the MB insists on prolonging al-Bashir rule of terror: repressing the country unrelentingly; abusing the CPA to escalate tensions with the peace partner and the South Sudan Government; fixing the notorious security and intelligence apparatus and the Public Order Act; extending the MB authoritative rule beyond constitutional limits; and applying a series of illegal actions in the registration proceedings to monopolize the vote.

The MB political striving to monopolize political power will continue to pose a constant threat to the country’s regular democracy and just peace. The ruling party dictates to entrench anti-democratic traditions continued to terrorize both the Muslim and the non-Muslim populations by the consistent use of institutionalized intrusions in the free press, and the popular activities of civil society groups, irrespective of the CPA treaty and the Interim Constitution.

Added to gross violations of the right to religious belief specially for the non-Muslim population, the freedom of the press, and the other human rights and fundamental freedoms, anti-democratic campaigns never ceased to occur against the Ansar and the Khatmiyya, the SSAG, and the DMF who comprised a multiplicity of indigenous cultures and spiritual practices illegally curtailed in the North by the National Security and Intelligence Department (NSID), despite unauthorized jurisdiction by the Interim Constitution to exercise police powers. These uninterrupted decades of routine repression perpetuated gross abuses of authority against the cultural and religious life of people. Most importantly, incriminating fatawi [religious decrees] by the NIF Shura Council and ‘Ulama [jurist] Committees enjoyed unprecedented support by the government controlled-media to intimidate secular thinking and to apply continuous measures that terrorized the opposition and sterilized the free exchange of intellectual works.

Empowering the Brotherhood’s rank-and-file with this flagrant overriding of the Interim Constitution’s Bill of Rights, including security powers to a variety of non-professional demagogic supporters, has already jeopardized the essential fairness of the scheduled national elections in April 2010. Not only that the fatawi condemned university professors or civil society activists with blasphemy for simply opposing the government’s policies and practices in all spheres of the social and political life; but the MB ‘ulama controlled hundreds of mosques with regular preaching against secular thought and the need to support the “Islamic authorities” against the “enemies of Islam.” Most recently, however, brave Imams of Sufi Islam in Khartoum and other cities criticized publicly the MB authorities and asked for justice and fairness in all processes of national elections.

The failure of the NIF/NCP MB theological state to boost the economic and political development of the country does not mean that the MB incompetency has been completely exhausted, or that they might surrender to an alternative democracy. The MB might perhaps live as a religious social group much longer than the Bashir NIF/NCP ruling or the NIF/NCP split group which joined the opposition ranks as soon as it was removed from government. Unlike the NIF/NCP state beneficiary (1978-1985, 1989 to the present), the MB developed ideological and political support among college students, businesses, and several professional groups since the mid-fifties that, supported by government security and administrative authorities, never ceased to use violence against civil society groups. The MB has adequately maintained social existence in the urban quarters of cities, besides modest influence amongst the non-secular communities of the Bedouin side of the country that had been largely controlled still are by the Ansar and the Khatmiya.

Remarkably limited in size and scope, the MB might never be able to compete largely with the Khatmiya or the Ansar Sufi constituencies in democratic elections, let alone replacing them via non-democratic alliance with the June army officers. A pro-terrorist group, notwithstanding, the MB will always beg for political control by state power rather than democratic competition. Most likely, new terrorist leaderships, including non-Sudanese elements, might emerge in non-democratic alliances inside the Sudan with armed groups that yearn to control civil society by the repressive power of the state versus the voluntary will of civilian population, in spite of the CPA prospects for peace and stable democracy.

The Khatmiya and the Ansar communities have persistently maintained social and religious structures independently from state control, at the time serious political divisions wracked the political parties of the UP and the DUP. True, dictatorial attacks never ceased against popular Islam since independence. Led by MB groups in and outside Sudan, the most recent attempt to dismantle the Ansar/UP and the Khatmiya/DUP entities has completely failed to “inherit” the powerful machinery of these groups by decree.

The NIF war-mongering state managers have feverishly persecuted the Ansar and the Khatmiya, sometimes more than the UP or the DUP, to undermine the Sufi Muslims’ long-enduring self-sufficient economic, spiritual, and ideological existence in the social life. In this destructive process, the authoritative rulers used both containment and exclusionary policies to subdue the Ansar/Khatmiya popular institutions, to no avail. This failure is related to the fact that the Sudanese Muslim society has consistently condemned the state attempts that abused the country’s human resources and national wealth to establish artificial bodies to undermine community organizations, or to control popular voluntary activities.

The NIF/NCP tyrannous rule converted the small portion of the Sudan MB to one of the wealthiest sections of the population by the direct use of government monies and the confiscation of opposition property. The immediate result of these ill-practices reflected in the reduction of the UP-DUP financial power in the market and the impoverishment of large sections of the Khatmiya and the Ansar businesspeople, as well as their farming and working forces. Updated studies indicated the great economic and financial loss of the “traditional conservative business groups” in the production and business sectors to the MB government-supported businesses throughout the 1990s and the early 2000s.

In the recent 2000s, the constitutional office of the Auditor-General’s Chamber charged the central government, top public service employees, and several private companies with annual embezzlements of the public money in billions of dollars (see shro-cairoupdated.org). Moreover, escalated disputes erupted repeatedly between the CPA peace partner, the SPLM ruling party in the South, and the NIF/NCP government about the oil sales and returns. In this respect, the World Bank (2008) noted that, “While the discovery and exploitation of oil resources has facilitated an increase in national wealth, it has also brought a myriad of problems.”

THE FAILURES OF MB REPRESSION
The miserable failure of the MB international movement to indoctrinate the Sudanese society with the MB political ideology should analytically help to separate clearly between the authoritative doctrine of the MB to suppress society by state powers on the one hand, and the daily exercise of religious faith as a fundamental human right exercised by the Ansar, the Khatmiya, and the other Sufi sects as well as the Muslim groups not subscribing in compliance with the structure and functioning of popular Islam to the MB fundamentalist doctrine or their partisan State theology that attempts to govern the whole population by religious discrimination.

While the UP and the DUP party conferences in and outside the country acknowledged the necessity of implementing a national constitution to guarantee the freedom of religious belief as urgent political agenda, the UP and the DUP dissident elements cooperated with the NIF government to subdue the Ansar, the Khatmiya, and the other opposition groups only to fall prey to un-resolvable disputes with large sections of the masses that did not want them to collaborate with the NIF rulers. The few elements of the UP-DUP that became presidential advisers, governors of wilayat [states or provinces], junior state ministers, or winners of some business deals in the service of the NIF rule might have unwittingly helped the Umma/DUP to clear their rank and file of the NIF supporters infiltrating their political or religious bodies.

One of the main results of the NIF failures to override the Sudanese popular institutions was that the Sudanese Sufi groups held strongly to the traditional leadership of the Ansar and the Khatmiya, regardless of the deteriorating economic and financial situation of the sects. Notwithstanding, the Old Sudan Ansar and the Khatmiya institutions, the SAAG, and MDF must be financially supported to be able to compete with the NIF/NCP MB monopolies over both state and market businesses.

Another obvious result was that the NIF policies and practices to succeed the leadership of these large communities by state violence have been neatly defeated, judged by the sustainable independence of the Umma/DUP, SAGG, and DMF from the NIF/NCP MB state monopolies, and the mounting opposition to the MB state and party by students, professionals, and many other working groups, women and men, of whom a majority belongs to the Sufi Muslim groups and the opposition parties against the NIF all over the country. A third result is that the Ansar and the Khatmiya solid representation of popular Islam prevailed consistently over the NIF/NCP MB Iranian-modeled authoritative rule.

If consistently encouraged, the Ansar and the Khatmiya Sufi Islam would survive in strong alliances with the secular forces of Sudan in the post-democratic transition rather than those alliances previously experienced under the MB unpopular order. The MB doctrine works strictly in deep hatred of both western democracy and the Sudanese Sufi Islam and cultural traditions that have been symbolically represented and politically acceptable by the two Old Sudan parties, besides alliances with the SSAG and DMF. The Sufi Islam of the Khatmiya and the Ansar is firmly grounded on a liberal life that had been closely coexisting with western democracy and capitalist democracy for long decades since the closing years of colonial times.

The Ansar, the Khatmiya, the Umma, and the DUP shared increasing national interests with several partners of the secular umbrella of the NDA, notably the communist party, the SPLM, the non-governmental unions and professional associations, the East groups, and the Darfur civilians and armed groups versus the NIF common enemy. In our opinion, these opposition groups might make partial alliances with one another in the elections and the post-elections Sudan. All in all, however, they will continue to struggle, in principle, to stop the NIF/NCP BM state managers from transgressing the right of self-determination, regional autonomous rule, and the other basic public freedoms and fundamental rights.

CONCLUSIONS
In the light of the NIF repressive policies, it might be predicted that the Sudanese current struggles to establish the regular democracy and the permanent and just peace would either end up successfully, or that, regrettably, the NIF/NCP tyrannous rule might engage the country in a renewed eruption of civil war with a strong possibility of regional and international intervention, which could possibly transcend the South-North conflict to the detriment of the continental, inter-continental, and world peace.

To strengthen the positive possibility of a successful democratic transition to an era of post-elections permanent peace and sustainable development, let us repeat the call voiced in the Juba Conference (2009) on the NIF/NCP government by the National Front, the NDA, SPLM, UP-DUP, Darfur civilian and military groups, and civil society organizations to establish an all-Sudanese government to run the next elections. Furthermore, these political forces, including the NIF/NCP MB government, must improve democratic performance and organizational structures to be prepared for the elections and the post-elections era.

A significant step to facilitate this program is for the Ansar and the Khatmiya leaderships to take effective steps to democratize the structural relationships of their organizational activities to touch more deeply upon the general popular movement of their political allies, the democratic modernist parties including the SAAG and DMF versus the NIF/NCP MB extremism and political repression.

To allow Sufi Islam as a vital structural component of the cultural heritage of the Muslim population to act strongly in favor of democracy, all systems of rule, regardless of their ideological or political orientation, must comply with the Bill of Rights and the other constitutional provisions that guarantee the full enjoyment of civil, political, economic, and cultural rights to all citizens, indiscriminately. To facilitate this democratic transformation, the Sudanese ruling systems must fully adhere to the right of people to select freely their own leaderships and organizational settings.

While this writer appreciates the concerns of some thinkers to establish democratic governance by periodical succession, the fundamental principle of democracy, i.e., the people’s voluntary will to keep in office whoever they wish to govern their public affairs, should not give way to the necessary emphasis on periodical succession. This fact applies to the succession issue in most African nations. It is only when the elected leader decides to step down within a legal period of office that the electorate would find another leader. With more implementation of democratic rules on the basis of this fundamental principle, the Sudanese people will certainly enjoy voluntarily greater levels of democracy than those thus far attained.

* The author is a sociologist at the Department of Social Work & Sociology in Tennessee State University, Nashville TN, USA. He can be reached at emehawari@hotmail.com

[Picture: Map of Northeast Africa, highlighting the Darfur region of Sudan. Photo: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudan]

Monday, November 23, 2009

A Great Loss

RK Editor, *Naaz passes away * - Rising Kashmir - Srinagar, J&K, India
Saturday, November 14, 2009

Condolences pour in from across valley

Noted Sufi poet, Aziz Naaz passed away on Friday at his ancestral home in Hib-Dangarpora, Rafiabad Sopore. He was 75.

Besides being the founder member of Rafiabad Adbi Markaz, Naaz served as the general counsel member of Adbi Markaz Kamraz. His poetry portrayed all the sensitivities of Sufism.

One of his famous poems ‘Kral Nama’ which speaks about the ups and downs of human life was not only acclaimed by the poets and the literary people but was praised by commoners as well.

The demise of Naaz has come as a great loss to the field of art and literature as rich tributes poured in from the literary quarters of the valley.

Many organizations including Adbi Markaz Kamraz, Rafiabad Adbi Markaz, Mehboob Cultural Society, Kashmir Writers Forum, Director Doordarshan and Patron Rafiabad Adbi Markaz, Dr. Rafiq Masoodi, Aziz Hajini, Syed Shujaat Bukhari and Shahnaz Rashid while terming the death as a great loss have expressed solidarity with the bereaved family.

“It takes thousands of years for a poet of his caliber to be born,” said people who were close to Naaz.

[Picture: Sunset on Dal Lake]

Sunday, November 22, 2009

Rock’n’Roll Jehad

By Vaibhav Jain, *Quick 7 With Salman Ahmad* - Nazar - Austin, Texas
Friday, November 13, 2009

On November 7, 2009, Nazar representative Vaibhav Jain spoke with Salman Ahmad backstage just after he performed alongside Pt Vishwa Mohan Bhatt, Pt. Samir Chatterjee and Daniel Weiss in a fusion concert at Westlake High Shool in Austin. The concert was organized by Aid-Austin, which is a voluntary non-profit organisation that focuses on tackling problems faced by rural India.

1) What has touring America been like for you?

You know, what I love about touring America is the diversity of the audience. As you saw tonight - I mean we had people from India, from Pakistan; we had people from Texas. It’s a mini planet Earth and it’s always fun to play your music to a diverse collection of people because you really find out – is the music speaking to everybody or not. And tonight what we saw, was amaz … I mean I had an amazing feeling, you know. I feel we were connected to the audience, the audience connected to the music, and we all became a circle of light.

2) What has your experience, and I know that you came here a couple of years ago, with the Austin crowd been like?

I mean … it’s so hip and I remember the last time we came – I think it was Samirji and me, right? And … everyone singing along, knowing each of the words and enthusiastic. Great audience, awesome audience! Awesome Austin.

3) What dimensions has playing Sufi Music had on you and your musical self?

Well, you know, my earliest memory – I write in my book coming up; it’s called Rock’n’Roll Jehad; comes out in January – my earliest memory is – I’m four years old and I see a Qawwal singing taans. And, you know, a four year old kid doesn’t have any, sort of, comprehension of words but the emotion was so incredibly powerful that I just knew that something had to do with Qawwali in my heart. And then, when I listened to the Blues and Led Zeppelin, I found a connection there. Led Zeppelin, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan – you know I could hear in my head a natural connection happening there. So, Sufi music for me, really, is a foundation. It’s a foundation to build things on and then, obviously, so many influences, you know – Jazz, Classical Rock, Bollywood, you know. It’s a … I mean it’s an ocean. It’s a cliché, but it’s an ocean of vivid colors – sound colors, you know. And Qawwali is like the, you know, they call the unity – sort of holding everything down.

4) How successful, according to you, is the marriage between music and spirituality?

Well, look, music is the highest form of spirituality. You know music sometimes – I’m not saying that it should replace religion – music is a way to access the spirit in which there’s all-inclusiveness, na? You don’t have to sort of …. There’s no right of passage. The only right of passage is that you breathe and you connect with the heart.

5) You’ve made music with so many other artists from so many different traditions and backgrounds. What’s been your most memorable performance, or a stand out musician you played with – something that really stands out and makes you go, “Woah man! That was the best one”?

You know, in my career, so many incredible moments. But if I were to pick out right now, playing the first ever rock concert in Srinagar at the edge of the Dal Lake, surrounded by the Himalayas and having 10-15,000 college kids going crazy – you know, singing louder than the band was an incredible experience. The other thing about it was that we had death threats against because they said that if you play a rock concert here, we’re going to shoot you. So, we still went. And the kids jumped over barbed wire to come see the show. So that was an amazing thing. And then, just now, a concert at the United Nations General Assembly on September 12 was incredible. There’s going to be a DVD coming out – pretty intense. I have a charity organization called SSGWI (ssgwi.org)* and if people go there, they will be able to access that. It was a multi-artist concert – we had … Junoon was there but there was Samirji, Samirji’s son Divyakar on Dholak, Klezmer artist Yale Strom. Then we had the hip-hop band Outlandish, and Gavin Rossdale.

6) What are your personal feelings and expectations from a concert of this nature? Expectations before it and feelings after and during, I guess.

Yeah, you know the expectations, for me are that we are, as musicians, able to honestly connect with one another. Because, you know, the thing is you can’t lie through music. The moment you try to lie through music, people see it, you know. So the expectation was that if we can connect on-stage, then I knew the audience was going to connect. And that’s what happened. And the other thing is, I have never performed with Danny and Mohanji before. So, it was like jumping into water … into the ocean and just swimming, you know. I hope that we can do this more often because I think people feel how easy it is for a musician to have a conversation, you know. And if people could do that as well with each other, with strangers – that would be an awesome place, you know.

7) Even as we speak, Pakistan is grappling with militants. There was an article in the NY Times about how Sufi music can be used to counter the Taliban in Afghanistan. Even as I say this to you, what’s your first impression, what do you think? Are you more like, “Yeah man, it can!” or “Wait! No way”?

Well, it has! You see, Sufi music has been there for 700 years in India and Pakistan, right? And many, many people came who wanted to stamp it out. And we were having this conversation … I believe … do you know why the Taliban hate music? Because they realize the power of Sufi music. It frees the soul, it frees the mind and there is no fear. When the lights are all turned on, you can’t be scared of anything. So I believe that music – Sufi music – needs to be promoted in Pakistan. This concert that I did at the UN was a concert about bringing souls together. It was for the IDP’s3 in Northern Pakistan who are escaping the Taliban. And when that whole concert is going to run on Pakistan television, the Taliban are going to freak out because this is what they fear. That if people start uniting themselves through arts and culture, where the hell are we gonna go?

Glossary
1. Qawwali - form of Sufi devotional music popular in South Asia
Qawwal - Qawwali singer
2. Taan – rapid melodic phrase
3. IDP - Internally Displaced Person (here, from the Swat Valley)

*Visit SSGWI, Salma & Samina NGO

Picture: Salman Ahad. Photo by:
Jsome1

Saturday, November 21, 2009

A Voice In Government

By Martin Bright, *Whitehall in turmoil over Muslim advisers* - The Jewish Chronicle - London, UK
Thursday, November 12, 2009

An ideological battle has broken out in Whitehall [*] over the advice given to ministers on Islamic radicalism.

A series of recent changes of personnel and promotions at key departments has led to concerns that the government is moving away from a policy of dialogue with moderates towards a policy of engagement with more radical groups.

The Department of Communities and Local Government (DCLG) confirmed that Azhar Ali, one of Hazel Blears’s advisers and an influential voice for dialogue with moderate “Sufi” Muslims, was leaving the department at the end of November. The department has advertised for two new advisers. A second DCLG adviser, Mohammed Abdul Aziz, has close links to the Muslim Council of Britain and is hotly tipped to be re-appointed.

At the same time, the DCLG, which has responsibility for community cohesion, confirmed that Communities Secretary John Denham was talking to the former secretary-general of the MCB, Sir Iqbal Sacranie, about bringing the organisation in from the cold.

The MCB fell out of favour under Mr Denham’s predecessors at the Department of Communities and Local Government, Ruth Kelly and Hazel Blears, who promoted organisations from the moderate “Sufi” tradition of Islam. As he explained in an interview with the JC in October, he believes the MCB should have a voice in government. The organisation has been barred from Whitehall since March, when its deputy secretary-general, Daud Abdullah, signed the Istanbul declaration, pledging support for Hamas and supporting attacks on British shipping.

A DCLG spokeswoman said: “John Denham has met Iqbal Sacranie and many other members of Muslim communities. Regarding the Muslim Council of Britain, John Denham has made it clear that the MCB represents a number of Muslim voices with which any government would wish to engage; however, as issues raised earlier this year have not yet been resolved, relations with the MCB remain suspended.”

The department denied that funding has been withdrawn from the Sufi Muslim Council, which represents moderate mosques across the country. However, its present grant runs out in March 2010 and the organisation has been told that it is unlikely to be renewed.

In recent years, Muslim advisers have been employed at the Home Office, the Foreign Office and the Department for Communities and Local Government to ensure that ministers are kept informed of grassroots responses to government foreign and domestic policy. This has been seen as a priority since the events of July 2005.

The JC last week reported the appointment of Islamist Asim Hafeez to the post of head of intervention at the Office of Security and Counter-Terrorism in the Home Office.
The MCB’s spokesman Inayat Bunglawala responded to the JC by asking this newspaper to disclose its source: “I don’t suppose you want to share with me the name of the ‘Muslim adviser’ who sh**ed on Asim Hafeez?” he wrote in a colourfully-worded message on the social networking site Facebook. “I thought it was a disgraceful piece and quite McCarthyite. Does it not trouble your conscience? ”

Meanwhile, a controversial Foreign and Commonwelath Office adviser who recommended a visa for the radical Palestinian cleric Yusuf al–Qaradawi, has been promoted and given a key role across government working on the anti-extremist Prevent strategy.

Mockbul Ali has become “Head of Prevent, Counter Ideology” at the FCO but also retains his job as Islamic adviser to the Foreign Secretary.

Mr Ali was exposed after a series of leaks, which showed that he believed Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood to be a moderate organisation. He also recommended a visa for the Bangladeshi politician Delwar Hossain Sayeedi, who described Hindus as excrement. He described Sheikh al-Qaradawi, who has spoken in favour of suicide bombing and the execution of homosexuals, as “a highly respected Islamic scholar”.

Mr Ali is an increasingly influential figure across government, although some believe he has moderated his views in recent years.

[* Whitehall is a metonym for Overall UK Governmental Administration]

Picture: John Denham Martin

Friday, November 20, 2009

“I Am Not Mine / I Am Not Mine”

By Robyn Creswell, *Mourning Tongues* - The National - Abu Dhabi, UAE
Thursday, November 12, 2009

After his death at age 67, the late poems of Mahmoud Darwish have found new life in translation

A little more than a year after his death it seems fair to say that Mahmoud Darwish, one of the past century’s signal poets, has finally arrived in English. Six substantial collections of his work have been translated in the past three years and several others are on the way, a level of attention publishers usually reserve for Nobel Prize winners. With a little luck, Darwish might one day join that small group of foreign poets – like Lorca, Cavafy, or Mandelstam – whose idiom becomes a touchstone for peers writing in English. But the Darwish that has begun to come into view for English language readers is, of course, quite different from the one his Arab audience is familiar with.

Darwish became famous as a young man in the 1960s as “the poet of the resistance”. His early lyrics were angry, eloquent and in-your-face. They were crowd pleasers, and the crowds that attended his readings in Nazareth and Acre were large and delirious. Darwish cut a dashing figure. In the opening poem of his first collection, published in 1964, he warned the reader that there were black flowers in his heart and fire on his lips. A Communist, he demanded poetry that was directly engaged in political struggle. “Creativity in the Revolution and revolution in creativity,” was one of his slogans, and he kept up his side of the bargain (the politicians, however, did not).

To have missed the opening scenes of Darwish’s career, or to know of them only in summary form, does make a difference in one’s sense of him as a poet.

It is difficult for the English reader to appreciate, for example, the extent to which Darwish’s late poetry is a complex mode of self-criticism. Darwish was always his own severest judge. He never allowed any one style, however successful, to harden into a method. His final lyrics are very distinct from the plainspoken, confrontational poetry that made him a celebrity while he was still in his early twenties. They are also distinct from the poetry he wrote in Beirut during the Civil War, or during the first Intifada, or the long foundering and bitter aftermath of the Oslo Accords. Indeed, Darwish’s late poetry is in an important sense a reaction against his earlier work, an attempt to escape the prisons of his former personae.

Darwish regarded the late poetry as his finest, and it is this corpus that has been most comprehensively translated into English. By contrast, the early poems that first established his reputation among Arab readers and critics are largely unavailable. The few translations that do exist are out-of-print and hard to find. So the English reader is like a theatregoer who arrives at intermission and tries to deduce, from the denouement, what happened in the first act.

Darwish’s last period begins, most critics would agree, with Mural, a long poem published in 2000, two years after the poet underwent open heart surgery that nearly killed him (and eight years before another heart operation finally did take his life). Mural is a scarred monument to this brush with extinction, and much of the verse that followed it is also concerned with the imminence of death, an eventuality the poet regards with a combination of defiance, gallows humour and stylised indifference. In one late lyric an idiot questioner asks the poet what he would do if he knew he would die that evening. “I will comb my hair,” Darwish answers, “and throw the poem, this poem / in the rubbish bin / put on the latest shirt from Italy / say my final farewell to myself with a backing of Spanish violins / then / walk / to the graveyard!”

Such intimations of mortality are symptomatic of the inward turn in Darwish’s late poetry. The political polemics and allegories of Darwish’s earlier work are here replaced by a dialectics of the self: the self in conversation with its other, with its earthly shadow or intimate enemy. This private, almost esoteric sensibility is of a piece with Darwish’s engagement, in the late poems, with Sufism. The mystical tradition certainly informs Darwish’s fondness for paradox, his search for self-knowledge and states of ecstasy: the famous, concluding statement of Mural, “I am not mine / I am not mine,” can certainly be read along these lines. And Darwish also invokes, more than once, the mystic’s habit of austerity, his gradual casting off of worldly goods and cares. Darwish’s final poems are graced by a mood of disburdenment, a ghostly lightheartedness. It is as if the poet felt himself liberated at last from all his prior performances, or as if the long siege of history had momentarily lifted and set him free.

Darwish’s inward turn reaches a climax in the poems of A River Dies of Thirst, the last book he published before his death. It is a remarkable collection, expertly translated by Catherine Cobham. Here, Darwish figures the creative process itself as a playful, almost solipsistic exercise (an idea that would have been violently rejected in his earlier engagé work). Yet these private and imaginative pleasures are constantly harried by larger, less forgiving forces. The ascetic’s attempt to withdraw from the world is thwarted and mocked by the incursions of history, the facts on the ground.

A River Dies of Thirst is subtitled “Yawmiyat,” meaning that Darwish viewed the book as a diary or journal rather than a straight diwan, or collection of poems (the title recalls Yawmiyat al Huzn al ‘Adi [Diary of an Ordinary Sorrow], Darwish’s early memoir, published in 1973 and now being translated into English by Archipelago Press). The poet of this collection is typically involved in everyday tasks: household chores, walks in the hills, watching the news. The texts alternate between prose poems – a form well-suited to the prosaic subject matter – and relatively formal lyrics (a distinction that Darwish was more and more concerned to deconstruct.)

The hero of these poems is a solitary wanderer, a distant descendant perhaps of the romantic archetype one finds in Wordworth’s Prelude, or Whitman’s Song of the Open Road, whose speaker, a progenitor of all later nationalist poets, chants: “From this hour I ordain myself loos’d of limits and imaginary lines..../ Pausing, searching, receiving, contemplating, / Gently, but with undeniable will, divesting myself of the holds that would hold me.” The poet of Darwish’s collection is also a lonely rambler, walking among the hills outside Ramallah, “on my way to no where in particular”, “not looking for anything, not even for myself in all this light”, climbing up from valley to peak, “making my own way, unaided”.

But if the poet of A River Dies of Thirst belongs to this tradition of romantic questers, then he is a latecomer and not entirely at ease with the company. The wisdom of Darwish’s poet is autumnal rather than innocent; his voice has been schooled by experience. In one of the collection’s opening prose poems, Darwish reveals that his solitary walker is actually a convalescent and that his walks are a form of therapy. Artistic inspiration, he suggests, is not his primary concern: “He walks because the doctors have advised him to walk, with no particular goal, to train the heart in a kind of indifference necessary for good health. Any idea that occurs to him will be purely gratuitous.”

“Indifference” [la-mubala] is among the keywords of this collection. It is even, I think, a name for the poet’s final philosophy. Indifference signals, on the one hand, the serenity of old age, the renunciation of passion, and the arrival of maturity (“a light-hearted stage of life,” Darwish calls it, when “we are neither optimistic nor pessimistic”). Indifference in this sense is a form of autonomy, “the freedom of the self-sufficient”. The poet who achieves this state, Darwish tells us, is “like an idea unencumbered by argumentation”.

But there is another aspect to indifference, one that is linked to creativity, playfulness and even a kind of eroticism. This is the subject of a prose poem called A Colored Cloud, which describes the poet at home washing his dishes, an everyday chore that nevertheless fills him with “an invigorating emptiness”. “I amuse myself with soap bubbles,” Darwish writes, “I play with the lather, which is like a cloud in which seasonal colors gleam then fade. I grasp the cloud in my hand and distribute it over the plates, glasses, cups, spoons and knives. It inflates as drops of water run over it. I scoop it up and make it fly through the air.” This childlike form of self-amusement and spontaneity leads gradually to a state of trance, in which the poet is visited by images of his past, now freed of all their former associations: “My mind is blank, as indifferent as the noonday heat. But images of memories descend from afar and land in the bowl of water, neutral memories, neither painful nor joyful, such as a walk in the pine forest, or waiting for a bus in the rain, and I wash them as intently as if I had a literary crystal vase in my hands.”

A Colored Cloud is, I think, the most concentrated statement of Darwish’s late aesthetic. It gives us a persuasive image of creative solitude and virtuosic self-absorption. But what makes A River Dies of Thirst especially remarkable is that this image of the poet-at-play is embedded in a collection of other texts that constantly challenge its implications, that never allow “indifference” to slide into complacency. For Darwish, the yawmiyat is not merely a journal for recording the poet’s private experience. Interspersed among the lyrics of the solitary walker and soap bubble sculptor is another series of poems that record a more troubled history. Most of the texts in A River Dies of Thirst were written in 2006 and 2007, years that encompassed the worst period of sectarian fighting in Iraq, the latest Israeli invasion of Lebanon, and the beginnings of civil war between Hamas and Fatah. This trio of conflicts – scenes from what Darwish calls “this long American movie” – forms an ominous backdrop to the poet’s ruminations on poetry, his lonely treks through the West Bank. Darwish’s response to these political events does not usually come in the form of a public, oratorical poem, though odes such as “Iraq’s night is long,” or “From now on you are somebody else,” show that Darwish can still deliver a jeremiad when he wants. Instead, and in keeping with the diary form, Darwish tends to refract these political events through the experience of the poet, mired in the un-heroic everyday. The opening poems concern the invasion of Lebanon, which inevitably reminds Darwish of an earlier invasion – “In 1982 the same thing happened to us as is happening now” – when he was among the besieged. In 2006, however, he can only follow the war on the news, as helplessly as any other onlooker: “I sit in front of the television, since I can’t do anything else. There, in front of the television, I discover my feelings and see what’s happening to me.”

The poet of this late collection is by turns indifferent and impassioned, in search of the sublime yet hemmed in by history. These qualities aren’t reconciled by Darwish, but simply set side by side, like entries in a diary. No matter how deeply the poet withdraws into himself, or attempts to climb above the everyday, he finds history laying its traps. In one especially haunting episode from a prose poem called A sort of loss, the poet climbs a steep hill “to see the sea”, amusing himself with various impossibilities such as “dodging my shadow and thinking cheerfully about where a rainbow ends”. But at the top of his climb he does not find larger vistas, but rather a dark and claustrophobic landscape: “The clouds grow thicker and cover the low ground and the outlying areas and the sea, which has been taken prisoner in one of the wars. Night falls, and the lights of the settlements appear on all sides.” Or, as he writes elsewhere, “How much a peak resembles an abyss.”

********************************

Darwish’s strong preference for his later work has often been mirrored by his critics and translators. Fady Joudah, a Palestinian-American doctor and award-winning poet, has emerged as Darwish’s most consistent, sure-footed English translator. The Butterfly’s Burden, which included three translated volumes of Darwish’s late poetry, was published two years ago and Joudah has now published a further selection of late poems, If I Were Another. The poems in this new volume, chosen by Joudah, are taken from four separate collections, two from the early nineties (I See What I Want and Eleven Planets), and two from the past decade, (Mural and Almond Blossoms and Beyond). Almost all the poems have been translated before, chiefly in two collections edited by Munir Akash, The Adam of Two Edens and Unfortunately, It Was Paradise. There is nothing wrong with having more than one translation; on the contrary, a poet survives by being re-translated, and the earlier versions of these poems were often unsatisfactory and even inaccurate. Still, Joudah’s selection is puzzling given that so much of Darwish’s early work remains unavailable in English.

Joudah calls If I Were Another a tribute to Darwish’s “lyric epic”, an oxymoron that Darwish borrowed from the Greek poet Yannis Ritsos, whom he met in Athens in 1982 following the PLO’s expulsion from Beirut. Darwish found that Ritsos’s phrase captured what he was aiming for with his own verse at the time: a fusion of the private voice with “the expression of a collective conscience faced with loss and mourning”. Many of the long poems that Darwish wrote in the 1990s are lyric epics in this sense. They are allegories of Palestinian experience as seen through the prism of Andalusian history, the dispossession of Native Americans, or the Sufi myth of the Persian poet al-Attar’s Conference of Birds. And just as, in this last text, the 30 birds who go in search of the fabled Simurgh discover, at the end of their journey, that they themselves are the Simurgh, a bird made up of birds, so in Darwish’s poetry from this period there is an effort to reconcile the poet’s voice with a collective history or myth.

But Darwish’s later poems, beginning with Mural in 2000, do not appear to be lyric epics in this sense, though Joudah believes they belong together with the allegorical poetry of the 1990s. It seems to me that the intense, even ecstatic solitude of Darwish’s final works belongs to a different sensibility, more intimate and less reconciled. Where allegory aims at a degree of intellectual clarity, and at a certain mastery of its materials, Darwish’s late poetry is increasingly vagrant, bemused and improvisatory. Here, the poet seems willing to risk being misunderstood, which may simply be the price one pays for “indifference” in his special sense.

Whatever one thinks of Joudah’s selection, however, it is a delight to have his version of Mural, a poem that Darwish regarded as his masterpiece (“the one magnum opus of which he was certain,” according to Joudah). It is a further delight – and instructive, too – that we have a second version of the poem, also recently published, by a pair of British translators, Rema Hammami and John Berger, the distinguished art critic and novelist, who was a close friend of Darwish.

The two versions are subtly different. Hammami and Berger’s translation is looser and more colloquial. They have done away with most punctuation – there are very few periods or commas – and rearranged the original’s line breaks to make a more punchy, readable, and epigrammatic text. Their translation is at its best during the celebrated middle episode, where the poet addresses Death in a monologue that is by turns welcoming, defiant, mocking, and supplicatory.

Sit
Put down your hunting things outside under the awning
Hang your set of heavy keys above the door!...
Don’t stand on the threshold like a beggar or tax collector
Don’t be an undercover policeman directing traffic
Be strong like shining steel and take off the fox’s mask
Be chivalrous glamorous fatal...
Death wait
take a seat
drink a glass of wine.

Hammadi and Berger’s version, it must be said, has a number of errors. “Ulqi bi-nafsi janiban”, in the poem’s second stanza, does not mean, “I meet myself at my side,” but “I threw myself aside” (ulqi, not alqi); “udi‘a dakhili fi kharijla”, at the end of the poet’s conversation with death, does not mean “I can say farewell to my inside from my outside,” but rather “I store my interior in my exterior” (udi‘a, not uwaddi‘a); and there are other misreadings.

Joudah is a more reliable guide through these semantic thickets. His version, while it does not always achieve the liveliness of Hammami and Berger’s, is also better attuned to the music of Darwish’s text, its quietly rising and falling cadences. One hears as much in this passage, whose first line echoes the murmured refrain of Federico García Lorca’s somnambulist (“Verde, que te quiero verde”):

Green, my poem’s land is green,
And the lyricists carry it from one time to another faithful to its fertility...
And I have serenity. A small grain of wheat
is enough (for me and my enemy brother).
My hour hasn’t arrived yet. Nor has
harvest. I must shadow absence
and believe my heart first, follow it
to Cana in Galilee. My hour hasn’t arrived yet.
Perhaps there’s something in me that banishes me, perhaps
I am other than me.

“He became his admirers,” is how Auden famously glossed the death of Yeats in his elegy for the older poet. What he meant, among other things, was that a poet survives physical extinction through the medium of friends and readers. A translator is, in this way, a rather special case of the admirer, one who ensures survival by way of a necessary betrayal, a making-other or making-strange. We might even speculate that every translation is a kind of elegy: that is, a survival purchased by the original’s passing (“By mourning tongues,” Auden writes, “The death of the poet was kept from his poems”).

I suggested above that Darwish might one day become a resource or touchstone for poets writing in English. In fact this has already begun to happen in a fascinating and unpredictable way. Voice Over by the South African poet and novelist Breyten Breytenbach, is not quite an elegy for Darwish, and it is not quite a translation either, but it is a little bit of both. It is the rare work that is both intelligently experimental and full of feeling. The book is a series of twelve poems written by Breytenbach in the months after the death of Darwish, who was a friend. During this time, Breytenbach tells us, he read Darwish’s poetry in English and French “approximations.” His own poems, the poems of Voice Over, are grounded in Darwish’s writings, but “with my own voice woven into the process.” The poems were originally composed in Afrikaans and later translated, by Breytenbach himself, into English.

This exercise of reading, meditation, and composition, with its many degrees of distance and intimacy – involving translations and near-translations from Arabic to French to Afrikaans to English – strikes me as a unique and unexpectedly moving instance of the mourning rite, in which death is both faced and deflected, named and transformed. It is also a markedly secular, improvised example of that rite. The poet is laid to rest and new life is found only in someone else’s language, a resurrection for which there are no established protocols.

Of course Darwish’s late verse is, in its own way, a meditation on the ways in which the self becomes a stranger to itself, becomes full of voices that are not its own. One of his most charming poems on this subject is The Dice Player (also translated by Hammami and Berger in their edition of Mural). In this long, quasi-autobiographical lyric, Darwish reflects on the many accidents of genealogy and history that conspired to make him who he is, or was, and how easy it would have been for him to turn out otherwise, or never to have existed at all. (“It’s possible that poetry might have gained more / if precisely this poet hadn’t existed,” he wryly shrugs.) In this way, the poem also becomes a matter of chance: not an act of random creation but, like the self, a complicated result of the place where one happens to be born, the language one happens to speak, the poems one has read, and the friends one makes along the way. The Dice Player is, appropriately, the centrepiece of Breytenbach’s collection. His voice over ensures that the poem never really comes to an end, that it remains open to further transformations and translations, further accidents of history and strokes of luck. Here is Darwish, via Hammami and Berger (and Mallarmé):

This poem is a dice throw
onto a board of darkness
that glows and doesn’t glow
words fall like feathers on sand.

I don’t think it was me who wrote the poem.

And here is Breytenbach’s answering coup de dés:

The poem is but a geeing of dice
Shimmering in a dancer-dark cone
Or maybe not and words flutter
Like feathers to the sand
I have no role in this writing.

Robyn Creswell, a regular contributor to The Review, is a doctoral candidate in comparative literature at New York University

Picture: Palestinians mourn Darwish at a vigil in the West Bank city of Nablus. Photo: AFP

Monday, November 30, 2009

With The Right Mindset
No comments:
By Joe Tangari, *Various Artists Ouled Bambara: Portraits of Gnawa; Drag City / Twos & Fews; 2009* - Pitchfork Media - Chicago, IL, USA
Monday, November 23, 2009

To build a truly deep understanding of Gnawa music, its history, the story of the people who play it, and the religious and superstitious beliefs that inform it and determine its structure, you'd probably have to read a few books or live your whole life in Morocco. I'll give the digest version here.

There, Gnawa are practitioners of a musical-spiritual tradition rooted in Sufism, a mystical strain of Islam. The Gnawa tradition has its deepest roots in the Arab slave trade, in which sub-Saharan Africans were kidnapped and brought north over the desert to the Maghreb, in modern-day Morocco and Algeria, though today there is no ethnic dimension to it.

Gnawa musicians, mystics, and dancers provide a communication conduit between people and the jinn, unseen beings of smokeless fire that are important not to anger. The word is the source of our "genie," and one particular type of jinn, the mluk (literally, "the owners") is said to possess people who cross its path. One of the purposes of Gnawa ceremony is to negotiate with the mluk and send it packing-- it dovetails with the Sufi quest for spiritual purity.

An "Ouled Bambara" is a suite of Gnawa songs played during the Fraja, or entertainment, phase of a Gnawa ceremony. This set of field recordings made in Marrakesh by Caitlin McNally offers samplings of both this phase and the actual mluk phase. The recording carries the sonic flavor of the courtyards in which it was made, and the musical ingredients are simple.

The singing is essentially a series of solo and group chants, and it doesn't follow any song forms familiar to Western ears. The whole body of music evolves as one, pushed along by hand claps on some tracks, and iron castanets or shakers on others, and at the heart of the sound is the guimbri, a three-stringed, guitar-like instrument with a large, closed rectangular resonating box. The instrument has loose, thick strings and plays in a bass register, and the musicians frequently drum on the resonator while playing.

While it provides a harmonic outline, the primary function of the guimbri is rhythmic, and the musicians favor gradually shifting patterns, changing tempos and rhythmic emphasis as the song suites unfold.

The CD offers about an hour of recorded ceremonial music, and it's very transporting. Even without the extensive liner notes, it's an interesting experience to sit in on a ceremony so different from any of our own.

The accompanying half-hour DVD adds a visual dimension, showing the playing techniques for the guimbri and castanets, giving us a glimpse of the dances and trance states, including one somewhat frightening moment where a trancing dancer collapses. It includes interviews with each performer and brief insight into their lives. Mohamed Hamada, the same dancer who collapses, works a day job stoking the flames of a furnace, while Brahim Belkani shows off photos of himself with Dizzy Gillespie, Robert Plant, and Jimmy Page.

It's hard to rate a recording like this in the context of a bunch of indie rock and hip hop records, because it comes from a different angle entirely-- music in this world is spiritual currency, not a product or a showcase, and it's important not to go into listening to it expecting something catchy or straightforwardly funky. It's a genuine field recording and makes no concessions to pop convention or avant-garde ideas.

Of course, that's also what makes it a fantastic document of a unique and thriving cultural tradition, one that has a curious place in Moroccan society as neither mainstream nor outcast. Come to listen with the right mindset, and you'll learn a lot about it.
Read More

Sunday, November 29, 2009

Kubbe-i Hadra
No comments:
By Anatolia News Agency, *Mevlana Museum undergoing largest-ever restoration* - Hürriyet Daily News - Istanbul, Turkey

Saturday, November 21, 2009

Konya: The Mevlana Museum, Turkey's third most visited museum after Topkapı Palace and the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, is located in the central province of Konya and is currently undergoing its largest-ever restoration.

The museum, also known as the Green Mausoleum or Green Dome, is the original lodge of the Mevlevi whirling dervishes, a mystical Sufi Muslim group. It contains the tomb and shrine of the Mevlana, or Jalaluddin Rumi, founder of the Sufi order.

As part of the restoration works launched three months ago, the renovation of the minaret was completed and now dervish cells will be restored to their original 16th century state. Experts will also replace old tiles with new ones and fix damaged tiles on the inner part of the dome, the Kubbe-i Hadra, or the Green Dome, which is the symbol of the historical monument. Lighting fixtures and the museum’s courtyard will also be restored, museum officials said.

Museum's director Yusuf Benli said that restoration works are expected to be completed in two years.

"Usually, museums all over the world are closed during restoration works but we preferred to keep the museum open. The number of foreign visitors in October 2008 was 24,000 but it doubled in October 2009, which shows us that restoration works have not negatively affected the number of visitors," Benli said.

The museum was visited by 2 million people in 2008 and visitors are still welcome despite ongoing restoration works, he added.

Photo by AA
Read More

Saturday, November 28, 2009

Closer To Tasawwuf
No comments:
By HDN Editor, *'Religion loves tolerance, but is not tolerant'* - Hürriyet Daily News - Istanbul, Turkey
Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Although Turks identify themselves as religiously tolerant, they do not behave that way in practice, according to a survey. There has been an increase in the number of people identifying themselves as religious since 1999, which might be related to the political atmosphere in Turkey, an academic says.

Turkish people strongly identify themselves as religious and also regard religion as a source of tolerance. But when it comes to religious worship, a significant number are not as tolerant of people from other religions, concludes a survey released Tuesday.

Prominent political scientists Ersin Kalaycıoğlu and Ali Çarkoğlu from Sabancı University reported the research findings on religiosity in Turkey under the framework of the International Social Survey Program, or ISSP, which measures religious values from 43 different countries.

International research was conducted three times in the past; the last available data was from 1998. International data from the 2008 research is expected to be available in 2010. Turkey first participated in the survey in 2008 and is the first and only country surveyed with a Muslim majority population.

Eighty-three percent of Turks identify themselves as religious, with 16 percent saying they are extremely religious, 39 percent saying they are highly religious and 32 percent saying they are somewhat religious.

Of the 43 countries surveyed, Turkey, Poland, the Philippines and the United States are among the most religious. Almost half of Turks say they practice religious prayers and also identify themselves as religious. Twenty-eight percent say they pray, but do not regard themselves as highly religious.

According to Çarkoğlu, there has been a significant increase since 1999 in the number of people who identify as religious. “This is the most striking conclusion of this survey, though it is not alarming,” he said. He added that the change could be related to peoples’ attitudes toward behaving in accordance with the current political climate.

Another striking discovery made by the survey was that 60 percent of Turks said there is only one true religion, while 34 percent said most religions hold basic truths.

The findings on tolerance toward religions are remarkable as well. Ninety percent of the Turkish population reported having a positive view toward Muslims, but this ratio dropped to 13 percent for Christians and around 10 percent for Jews. Those who said they have highly positive views about non-believers of any religion totaled 7 percent.

When it comes to accepting political candidates from different religions, 37 percent of Turks said they would absolutely not accept this and 12 percent said they would most likely not accept it. However, 23 percent said they would absolutely accept it and 24 percent say they would probably accept it. Eleven percent of Turks said people from different religions should absolutely be allowed to organize public meetings to express their ideas, while 24 percent said they should be allowed to do so.

Thirty-six percent said people from different religions absolutely should not be allowed to organize such meetings, while 23 percent said they should not be allowed to do so.

Following religious rules
Another striking discovery dealt with obeying laws that contradict religious rules. A majority of the participants in the research, 67 percent, said they would continue acting in accordance with their religious beliefs if the Parliament passed a law that contradicted religious laws. Twenty-six percent said they would obey the country’s law in this case.

When it comes to the perception of God, Turks identify with a God who is more like a father than a mother, but as a lover rather than a judge. The perception of God for Turks is closer to the tasawwuf, or Islamic Sufism, tradition in Anatolia.

Turks are more inclined to identify with God as a friend rather than a sultan or a spouse, or as the master of the house.
Read More
Dialogue Movement
No comments:
By Eva Arnott, *Turkish Delight* - Fairfield County Weekly - Norwalk, CT, USA
Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Walking the streets St. Paul walked in beautiful, multi-faith Turkey

We were a strange trio of pilgrims as we arrived at the Istanbul airport. There was the 30-ish tall, dark Turkish Imam, Ibrahim Sayar; the 60-ish American Episcopalian, Chuck; and the 70-ish Viennese-born Catholic, me.

Ibrahim leads the local chapter of the world-wide Dialogue Movement, which includes millions of moderate and observant Muslims inspired by the writings of philosopher Fethullah Gulen. Gulen's goal is to have a positive and peaceful relationship with non-Muslims. Chuck and I belong to Boston-area parishes that have ongoing social and educational relationships with this group.

Our trip to Turkey included daytime sightseeing in this beautiful, historically fascinating and orderly country, and evenings spent enjoying the hospitality of supporters of the movement.

The Blue Mosque, with its cool filtered light and reverent visitors standing quietly in personal prayer, was inspiring even to a non-Muslim. There were none of the chattering tourists with flash cameras who often spoil the atmosphere in Western European cathedrals. Some of the icons at Hagia Sophia, the massive former Byzantine cathedral, could still be seen clearly in the huge building, which has a different kind of beauty.

Out of all the major European and Middle Eastern cities I've visited, Istanbul is by far the cleanest and best kept. No one ever seems to even throw away a candy wrapper. There were no beggars and apparently no homeless people, and residents of all ages were walking around in the evenings with no concern about crime. There were none of the disheveled party-goers who can make riding on public transport unpleasant in London and Paris. About half the local women had their hair covered but there was only a very occasional burka. Usually the scarf would be carefully color-coordinated with a modestly calf-length dress or skirt.

We had dinner with members of the administration of Fatih University, a fairly new private university 20 miles north of Istanbul which is run by the movement. The thousands of students study through the medium of English with faculty who often have PhDs from U.S. universities.

After Istanbul, we flew to Izmir and visited Ephesus, which had a population of 100,000 at its height but was abandoned when the harbor silted up. As it was neither destroyed nor buried under a modern city, it is easy to imagine how it was when St. Paul was there.

We drove east to Konya, the birthplace of Rumi, where a dervish, a pleasant young man in a long white robe, told us about Sufism. Dervishes don't really whirl but have a ritual dance whose movements reminded me of Chinese group aerobics. Further east, we saw Cappadocia, where 10,000 early Christians had lived like gerbils in several layers of caves connected by secret passages while they were hiding from Roman persecution.

Throughout the trip, I was impressed by the way Ibrahim and our hosts and guides punctuated their day with prayers. When the call to prayer came from the minaret, they would find a quiet place to pray and return obviously refreshed. Even the gas stations out in the country had a prayer room behind the convenience store to which customers would go after they had pumped their gas.

Religion survived here in spite of decades of actively atheistic governments when the Koran could only be taught behind closed doors. Throughout the trip, we were met with hospitality and openness to discussion about our respective religions.

Picture: Istanbul, Sultan Ahmed Mosque (The Blue Mosque). Photo by Istock
Read More

Friday, November 27, 2009

Strings and Wings
No comments:
By Ishrat Hyatt, *Tunisian violinist’s performance enthrals audience* - The News International - Karachi, Pakistan
Sunday, November 22, 2009

Islamabad: On the occasion of the 22nd anniversary of the ‘Change of November 07, 1987’ the ambassador of the Republic of Tunisia and Mrs Mourad Bourehla organised a performance by well known Tunisian violinist, Anis Kelibi titled ‘Strings and Wings.’

The event was held at the Pakistan National Council of the Arts (PNCA) and well attended by music lovers of the capital.

Addressing the gathering the ambassador said it was an honour and pleasure to address them on the exceptional occasion of the celebration of the 22nd anniversary of change of November 7th that was an act of salvation and had ushered in a new era of development and modernisation led by President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali.

He gave a brief account of Tunisia’s achievements during this period; spoke of the traditional and deep rooted and multi-faceted relationship between Pakistan and his country and saying they wanted to show a new side of Pakistan to the world, he thanked the sponsors and the PNCA for their support.

PNCA Director General Tauquir Nasir also spoke of the ties between the two countries with special reference to cultural ones and thanked the hosts for bringing a well-known artiste to Pakistan.

On behalf of embassy of Tunisia, Dr Seema Khan welcomed the guests and gave a brief history of Tunisian music before introducing the artiste.

The music of Tunisia is well known for its particular form, known as ‘malouf.’ This genre of Tunisian music bears similarities to the types of music prevalent in other North African countries. It has evolved through generations and its contemporary form has its own distinctive traits. However, it can be traced back to Spain and it was the Spanish conquest in the 15th century that brought this ‘Andalucian’ music to Tunisia.

There has been rise and fall of many genres of music in Tunisia including the Sufi form called ‘al-Hadra’, an interesting fact since Sufi music holds a lot of significance in Pakistan as well.

A number of music festivals are held in Tunisia and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, the famous ‘qawal’ from Pakistan has performed on more than one occasion in the Cartage festival.

Anis Kelibi is a well-known violinist, composer and researcher in music, qualified from the music high school of Tunis. He has performed both nationally and internationally for Tunisia and in places like the Arabic music forum and the festival opera house of Cairo in Egypt, at the international violin meeting of Jarash festival in Jordan and at an international song and music event in Kuwait. He describes himself as ‘a bird with wings, which starts floating with music and knows no boundaries.’

In the first half Anis Kelibi performed his own compositions while in the second half he performed some popular, classical Tunisian pieces of other famous composers and singers. The first half performance was in a fusion format with .Ashiq Hussain on the tabla; Salman Adil on the flute; Mr Hazravi on the keyboard and Imran Khan on the violin.

The surprise of the evening was Menel, (violin) and Melek, (pianist) daughters of the ambassador who have been Anis Kelibi pupils, accompanying him in paying tribute to the greatest Tunisian violinist and singer, composer Mohammad Jamoussi amongst others.

The applause after each piece was played indicated that the performance was enjoyed very much by the audience, with the one featuring the flute and the violin imitating birds, winning the hearts and minds of everyone present.

“It was beautiful,” said the Godins, who are a family with a background in music. “Very well played and music to the ears in the true sense of the word.”

[Visit the PNCA]
Read More
Hicret
No comments:
By Roberta Davenport, *‘Sufi rocker’ Kağan Tayanç blends spirituality and rock in İstanbul* - Today's Zaman -

Sunday, November 22, 2009

An unusual act took to the stage on Wednesday night at the İstanbul Metropolitan Municipality’s Ali Emiri Cultural Center -- a rock band including a neyzen that sang spiritually themed lyrics to Western harmonics.

The six-man act is known by the name of the lead singer and guitarist, Kağan Tayanç. With three guitars, a keyboard and a drum set in addition to vocals, the band generates a powerful sound onstage. A person approaching the concert hall entrance would doubtless understand that a rock concert was taking place, but unless they were to catch a slip of the ney -- a wailing reed flute instrument that in Turkey evokes thoughts of Sufi mysticism and the Mevlevi Sufi order -- they would have no idea that the songs being played are laden with spiritual themes.

The soft-spoken rocker spoke to Sunday’s Zaman at the concert venue and was careful to draw a distinction between the music he and his band make and “ilahi” music -- Sufi religious hymns.

“Ilahis are arabesque, and we’re very distant from that [style],” Tayanç said. “Ilahis are calm, tasawwuf music -- and our musical style is very loud, and so the two musical styles don’t come together. Our commonality is that our band includes a neyzen; but our [band’s] harmonies are Western.” Asked to describe what defines his band’s “Sufi rock” style, Tayanç says: “It’s rock music that contains spirituality. It’s oriented toward Islam and spirituality but is also a synthesis, including Western beats and harmony.”

And perhaps it may be said that rock is more suited for the themes Tayanç’s music is centered around. With lyrics reflecting the ups and downs human beings face throughout their lives and in their spiritual development, the band’s music seems appropriate -- sometimes fast, sometimes slow, with raging drums mixed in with furious strumming of the guitar overlaid by the soft sound of the ney -- the music is as tumultuous as life itself. There are ebbs and flows, and together with meaningful lyrics, it comes together beautifully.

The band’s repertoire comprised tracks from the “Yunus Gibi” (Like Yunus) album -- which takes its name from Yunus Emre, a 13th century Turkish poet and mystic.

Appropriately, though the band is known only by Kağan Tayanç’s name, its nickname is “Hicret,” a word that means journey and is also the name of the Prophet Muhammad’s exodus with the early Muslim community from Mecca to Medina to escape religious persecution. The name is meaningful in that it reflects the album’s contents -- chronicling a long and arduous journey with the aim of learning about God and steeping one’s self in Islam, Tayanç said.

The album cover reads: “Hicret is a difficult journey, one that leads from not knowing to knowing…” Tayanç says the lyrics in the album, when listened to carefully, also track his own journey from a non-religious leftist to a practicing Muslim:

“There were questions within me that were unasked,
And there was fear of the answers that would come,
From time to time thoughts are destroyed and broken,
But it’s difficult to turn back from some mistakes.”
(Gemiler/Yunus Gibi)

The Sufi rock concept

The idea of setting ilahi-type lyrics to rock or pop music is not a new one, but a band that specializes in this is new to the Turkish music scene. There have been examples of single-track covers by rock and pop bands of classic ilahis that everyone knows the words to, but nothing on the Turkish market is quite like Kağan Tayanç. The band’s music includes jazz, rock and ilahi elements, but in a new form; it also differs from the Anatolian rock genre in that it concerns itself with maintaining a spiritual outlook.

The term Sufi rock is new to Turkey, with conventional rock music combined with lyrics featuring Sufi music and imagery mostly an Indo-Pakistani phenomenon, with Pakistan’s wildly popular Sufi rock band Junoon being an example of widespread success of the genre.

And there are also parallels to be drawn between Sufi rock and the Christian rock subset in the United States. For now, though, it remains to be seen how the Kağan Tayanç group, which has been playing together for about six months, will be received by audiences as their name and reputation spreads. The audience at Ali Emiri was diverse, with attendees sporting everything from Led Zeppelin T-shirts to headscarves.

Tayanç explained that a follow-up album to “Yunus Gibi” was in the works and, conceding the difficulty of breaking out into the music scene with an entirely new genre and establishing a fan base would take some time, said that he saw the potential for his music to become popular in Turkey but that it would only be with the second or third album that this would be seen.

For those interested in checking out their eclectic new sound, Kağan Tayanç’s final concert of the year is set for 8 p.m. on Dec. 16 at the Ali Emiri Cultural Center in İstanbul’s Fatih district. For more information on the group and their music, visit http://www.yunusgibi.com [in Turkish].
Read More

Thursday, November 26, 2009

Transforming The Space
No comments:
By Ismail Fajrie Alatas, *Reclaiming South Jakarta’s Sacred Streets* - Jakarta Globe - Jakarta, Indonesia
Monday, November 16, 2009

Those who live in South Jakarta would undoubtedly have experienced a traffic disruption on a Saturday night caused by a lengthy and extensive motorcade of youngsters dressed in white shirts, sarongs and skullcaps. They pervade the cityscape with flags and banners written in Arabic script unintelligible to many inhabitants of the capital. Behind them were several trucks overflowing with youth singing paeans to God and blessings to the prophet, accompanied by melodious drumming. To make this carnivalesque picture complete, stretches of road were filled with banners and billboards showing a picture of a man of Hadhrami extraction garbed in a colored robe and white turban.

This was a procession of Majelis Taklim Nurul Musthafa, one of many new Muslim study groups that appeared in the late 1990s. Since 1998, Habib Hasan bin Ja’far Assegaf has been proactive in visiting slums on the outskirts of Jakarta, preaching to the youth. Over the years, the Bogor-born preacher’s network has expanded and the once modest Nurul Musthafa now attracts literally thousands of devotees to its weekly gatherings.

Most of Habib Hasan’s followers are young people who come from the lower rung of the social hierarchy. In the meetings, the young and charismatic Habib Hasan leads his congregation in reciting Sufi liturgical texts and poetry, complete with drums and fireworks. Far from being radical or anarchic, however, the Nurul Musthafa study group has been proactive in steering the youth away from the more radical elements of Islamic activism.

The name of the study group, Nurul Musthafa (Prophetic Light), refers to the Sufi cosmological concept of the pre-existing light of the Prophet Muhammad as a direct manifestation of the divine, which was then carried on by the prophet and his descendants. An energetic speaker who combines religious learning with showmanship aided by high-tech stereo amplification, Habib Hasan has been successful in captivating his audience.

In this study group, time-honored Sufi tradition and authority are cast anew through direct access to the youth facilitated by technology and modern organizational models. Although the means of conveying the message has changed, the form of authority itself remains the same. In this way, Habib Hasan is able to harness the support of the youth from lower economic and educational backgrounds, while excluding those with higher education.

The reason for Habib Hasan’s failure to garner support from educated youth is his inability to present his message in a way that is palatable to the reformist religious discourses dominant among university students. The fragmentation of Islam into various ideologically conflicting groups means that traditional scholarship has ceased to be the only authoritative source of religious knowledge.

Such is the case among the secular university-educated students who are more attracted to Salafism and favor direct access to the scriptures. With inclinations to international revivalist organizations such as the Muslim Brotherhood and Hizb al-Tahrir, these students have become increasingly hostile to local variants of Islam and pursue an agenda of Islamizing Indonesian society.

Rather than advocating for the implementation of Islamic law or the establishment of an Islamic state, Habib Hasan is seemingly more interested in reconstituting South Jakarta — a part of the capital known for its nouveau riche inhabitants and glaring entertainment spots — into a sacred space.

Such a process is undertaken precisely through the motorcades and processions replete with devotional chants (zikir). This mobile zikir can be seen as an interruption; an interjection into the dominant spatial configuration. Following from the oft-quoted dictum that God remembers the place where his name has been called out, the procession can be viewed as a process of remaking the secular space into an Islamic one.

By leading his mobile rituals through South Jakarta, Habib Hasan is temporarily transforming the space into a sacred site, akin to a site of worship. In the course of the processions, his followers are able to sacralize the space through devotional gestures and visible spirituality on Saturday nights, when the middle and upper-class youth of Jakarta are on their way to the entertainment complexes.

There is also a temporal dimension to this performance. Many people I know express apprehension toward Habib Hasan and his followers, mainly for creating traffic jams on Saturday night. This, I would argue, is where the efficacy of Habib Hasan’s movement lies. By staging the motorcades, Habib Hasan is not only sacralizing space, but he is also able to inflict a temporal caesura to the dominant time, by freezing the movements of people on the road going elsewhere.

It is important, however, not to perceive Habib Hasan’s followers as automatons. The motorcades should not be seen as uniformly conceived and consisting of people with a shared agenda. Aryo Danusiri, an anthropologist who is currently studying Habib Hasan and his followers, opines that the motorcades can be seen as a tactic by lower-class youngsters from the outskirts of Jakarta to establish their visibility in South Jakarta — a space dominated by the more prosperous — thereby equipping them with a sense of strength and centrality. In other words, the motorcades empower these young people and bestow visibility in a space usually dictated by the wealthy.

Finally, however one chooses to interpret Habib Hasan and Nurul Musthafa, one thing is clear. By establishing this movement, Habib Hasan has been instrumental in attracting thousands of youth to his peaceful Sufi teachings, thereby channeling them away from the more radical elements of contemporary Islamic activism.

Ismail Fajrie Alatas is a doctoral student in anthropology and history at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

[Picture from http://www.nurulmusthofa.org/]
Read More

Wednesday, November 25, 2009

Devotional Objects
No comments:
By Shahid Husain, *‘Sufism best way to understand different cultures’* - The News International - Karachi, Pakistan
Sunday, November 15, 2009

Karachi: French Consul-General in Karachi, Pierre Seillan, has said that Sufism is a treasure for Pakistan and the best way to understand different cultures.

Speaking as a chief guest at a seminar titled “Artifacts of Devotion: Approaching through material culture,” organised by the Department of Architecture and Planning, NED University of Engineering and Technology on Saturday, Seillan said that Sufism was the “best way to fight misunderstanding between countries.”

“I have been to the shrine of Lal Shahbaz Qaladar at Sehwan and I found it totally different from other shrines, especially during the night,” he said. Earlier, Prof Michel Biovin, a research fellow at the Centre for South Asian Studies, University of Paris, presented a slide show of different artifacts at the mausoleum of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar, and gave an overview of the culturally diverse and rich history of Sindh. He explained how Sufism pervades local cultures through the dissemination of different kinds of “devotional objects”.

His lecture focused on the case study of Sehwan Sharif and the evolution of the urban space around the mausoleum of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar. Explaining about the significance of “devotional objects” at the mausoleum of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar, he said the “Kashkol” (begging bowl), used by Sufis from 13th century onwards was metaphorically called “Kashti” (boat) and was not only used for begging food but also for drinking wine and it was thought to have spiritual significance.

“You will find two “Kashtis” at the mausoleum of Lal Shabaz and you will find differences in their decorations,” he said. One could find Persian poetry on these “Kashtis”, besides fish, he said. He said that “Kashti” was popular in India and Bangladesh. On some of them, however, one finds motifs but no fish. Then one would find “golden Kashti” in 16th and 17th century artifacts at these shrines. He said that the artifacts have special significance because after three days of “Urs” at the mausoleum of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar, there was a big meeting there and “Faqirs” touch the “Kashti” respectfully.

Omar Kasmani, an architect by profession, was drawn to the idea that objects were enmeshed with the person of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar. He said these objects become a depository of data. He said that Alfred Gell’s art nexus comprises index or object or inferred sign of index; artist or author of the index; prototype or what the index represents and recipient or the receiver of the index and pointed out the saint becomes the artist of the “Kashti.”

He said that “Kashti” created legitimacy because it was kept by a certain saint.

He said that these objects could not be read independently of the agents and their social positions. It was the social context of these objects that give them meaning, he explained.

Vice Chancellor of the NED University, Engineer Abul Kalam said that Pakistan has so much architectural heritage and the department of architecture and planning was working hard to protect the heritage.

Earlier, in his welcome address, Chairman, Department of Architecture and Planning, Dr Noman Ahmed explained the background of the History Group of the NED University of Engineering and Technology that aims to encourage cultural and historical study amongst the university’s academic environment and the overall context of Karachi.

[Visit NED University]

[Picture: A Dervish taming a lion and a tiger. Mughal painting, c. 1650. Photo from Wiki/Dervish]
Read More

Tuesday, November 24, 2009

The Tabaqat Of Shaykh Mohamed Daif-Allah
No comments:
By Mahgoub El-Tigani, *Sufi-Brotherhood conflicts are eminent in Sudan elections and democratic politics* - Sudan Tribune - Roubaix, France
Sunday, November 15, 2009

The issues concerning our Nation these days are multi-faceted: (effective ending of the escalated crisis in Darfur to the advantage of the victimized population of the region; democratic transition by fair elections and consensual security measures; faithful procession of the optional unity referendum; due prosecution and eradication of the government’s self-incited corruption; and continuous principled application of the unfulfilled agenda of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) by restructured workable relations with the Sudanese opposition forces and the International Community, especially the United States and the International Criminal Court, among many other national and international concerns).

Politicians have already burdened their agenda with the issue of national elections as a key factor to complete the transition to democratic rule. Political sociologists, including this writer, however, are more concerned with the structural situation of the country, namely the possibilities of harmonizing the North-South state relations to end increasing tensions in the level of state authority and the constitutional jurisdictions of state-managers. But the roles to be played by opposition groups and the International Community are indeed prominent: The latter entities, opposition and internationals, would have to work closely with both Federal (Central) Government and the South Sudan Government to bring about a flexible formula to accomplish the outstanding agenda for the ongoing democratic transition.

A fact often left out in the political formulae of the country’s state of affairs, nevertheless, is that both opposition groups and the International Community would have to consider seriously the urgent need to appreciate indigenous components of the formula in terms of two realities: 1) The Old Society of Sudan led by the Sufi large traditional forces in the North, and 2) the New Sudan’s aspiring groups [of which the anti-democratic extremist NIF/NCP MB ruling party is de facto authority body] the Self-Autonomy Armed Groups (SAAG) chiefly the SPLM, as well as Darfur and the East self-autonomy armed groups manifested a different path of political development in the light of the CPA.

Uniquely different from both groups, the 1930s-2000s Democratic Modern Forces (DMF), namely the secular trades unions, liberal political parties, and voluntary human rights and democracy groups, constituted an independent political category that has consistently forced an independent path of development in the state and society relations. At this point, it is worthy to mention the genius efforts Joseph Garang, the first minister of the newly-established South Affairs Ministry, exerted in the late 1960s to boost DMF relationships in the two parts of the Nation.

The SAAG has shown in the post-CPA years (2005-9) mounting influence in the public life as they evolved in the regions with significant connections in the national and the international space. Except for the NIF/NCP MB hegemony over the State and the national economy, which has been further characterized by financial corruption, abuses of authority (up to the most recent partisan intrusions in the elections’ registration process), and an unprecedented record of human rights violations, the SAAG leading the South, East, and Darfur regions has not yet offered clear democratic styles of governance; instead, they often acted in reaction to the NIF/NCP offensive practices.

Of particular significance, the national and the international media and diplomacy have largely defaulted in appreciating the key issue of highlighting the Old Sudan statuses and roles before and after the CPA and in the future affairs of the country. Because our post-independence national elections revealed the persistent influence of the Umma and the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) traditional parties as leading constituencies in the democratic national elections, we will discus briefly the situation of the Old Sudan popular constituencies, which based on Sufi Islam remain the sole real competitor of the NIF/NCP state-supported party in the northern, eastern, western, and central regions of North Sudan.

THE SUDANESE INDIGENOUS MUSLIMS
The international media and diplomacy must first of all recognize that the significance of Islam for the social life of the majority Muslim populations is omnipotent. Over long centuries of cultural and religious adaptations with the deeply rooted African origins of the Nation, the Sudanese society has creatively incorporated principal teachings of Islam, whatever adoptable, in accordance with African cultures and social structures. The only doctrines that most competently contained such adoptions were those of the Sufi traditions of the Sunni Islam that exerted a great effort by their founding jurists to be part of the Sudanese-African belief systems, the prevalent administrative and political self-autonomous arrangements (as in the Darfur agricultural hakorat), and the matrilineal family relations that carried with them tremendous respect to the women as well as the extended family/tribal solidarity communalities in the context of an overwhelming Bedouin and agrarian norms of the social life.

Since the advent of Islam and its peaceful penetration in the indigenous life of the 5-centuries old Nubia Christendom’s, the politics of the country have been firmly founded on this socio-religious amalgam, which is most articulated in the Sufi traditions of the North. This writer disagrees with the opinion that the Sudanese Islam was solely brought into the country by famous Egyptian, Iraqi, and Moroccan jurists. The impact of the Nubian Christians, the inhabitants of the land that basically adopted Islam, and their once-committed clergy of the Church, as well as the influences of Sudanese African cultures, were major sources of the rituals, spiritualities, and beliefs of the post-Christian Sufi traditions together with the worshipping and transactional jurisprudence of classical Islam. The most important inherited authority that documented this fact indirectly by its own unique style was the Tabaqat of Sheikh Mohamed Daif-Allah which reflected a massive mythology of the Sudanese medieval African, Christian, and Islamic heritages. This research area is unnecessarily neglected, although it reveals significant aspects of Sudanese personality and Sufi Islam.

The Sudanese Sufi Islam’s glorious tendencies of peaceful co-existence, equalitarianism, tolerance of social differences, and emphasis on humanitarian relations was nothing but a huge product of the African-Christian-Islamic merges of the country’s cultures and beliefs. In the colonial and the post-independence times, even the secular DMF collaborated openly with prevailing Sufi traditions of the Nation that pervaded both the Muslim and the non-Muslim communities of the North, in particular, in religious, social, and political terms. Still in the South, small groups in the provincial towns exercised the Khatmiya, Ansar, and other Sufi traditions, thus maintaining political commitments to the Umma and the DUP political parties rather than acquiring memberships of the southerner political groups. Besides the warring environment by a prolonged civil war, the lacking of large urban and industrial settings, moreover, precluded the spread of DMF in the villages and towns of the South.

THE MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD
The Muslim Brotherhood (MB) did not share the same concerns of the Sufi traditions of Sudan. Influenced by the foreign thought of Egyptian, Iranian, and other fundamentalist doctrines, the Brotherhood was destined to align with governments and authorities rather than the Sufi groups throughout the MB experiences with the state and society. Early in the October Revolution 1964, the MB leadership supported the generals of the defunct November 1957-64 dictatorship to enable them to escape legal prosecution. Repeatedly in the 1970s and 1980s of the Nimeiri era, the MB cooperated with the falling regime to inherit almost all its ruling apparatuses only to persecute people.

Later in the April Uprising 1985, the MB collaborated with the Transitional Military Council to ensure political dominance over the upcoming national elections and the ensuing Constituent Assembly. But the biggest victory of the MB striving to monopolize power and wealth was achieved evidently by the June coup 1983 by which the MB monopolized state powers to favor an Islamic Project supported vehemently by international allies in Iran and other Middle East societies. The face of the Sudanese politics indicates prolonged control by the MB over state politics, even after the CPA. Still, the societal conditions, intellectual resistance, and above all Sufi foundation of the Nation persisted as concrete fire walls versus the foreign indoctrination of the NIF/NCP MB rulers.

To understand this situation, we sketch the long-enduring structure of the Sufi life exemplified by the Ansar and the Khatmiya Muslim groups whose religious formulations provided the Umma and the DUP (the major coalition governments succeeding all democratic elections in Sudan) with incomparable sources of support since the early 1930s of the 20th century. Here, the lesson is that the future of a democratically unified Sudan might well hinge on the establishment of a strong political alliance between these two parties, rather than a coalition government that the NIF/NCP MB is most eager to make with them in 2010. In our opinion, such government would inevitably fall into the same authoritative rule the MB thus far exercised throughout the 1990s and the 2000s. The experience of a coalition government of these three parties in the late 1980s produced nothing but the notorious 1989’s MB extremist coup and dictatorial regime.

The Sufi-based Umma and DUP parties should live up to the requirements of removing the dangerous state of affairs of the Nation. Despite 20 years of exclusion from participation in the national decision making of the country, added to unfair representation in the CPA, the International Community must be aware that a stable future of Sudan will never come about without full restoration of the Umma/DUP moderate politics and the Muslim Sufi tolerance of the Sudanese cultural and political diversity. It is always important to ascertain the political impact of this reality with due reference to the results of the democratic elections of Sudan by geographical constituences. In 1958, the Umma won 57 seats and the Unionists [lately DUP] 14. In 1965, Umma received 76 out of 173 seats and the DUP 52. In 1986, the Umma won 97 of 207 seats in Constituent Assembly to form a coalition government with the DUP, the second largest group.

Skipping the vital roles the Old Sudan Umma/DUP large constituencies play in the national elections will always weaken the validity and the reliability of possible analyses of the situation, as it produces nothing but poor insights into the realities and the prospects of a smooth democratic transition in the whole country.

THE OLD SUDAN SUFI MUSLIMS
The aim of this article is to draw attention to the need to assess the influence of major political forces in the 2010 elections with a view to incite sufficient willingness from the part of Western Powers to earn the trust and confidence of the Sudanese in the process of enhancing international cooperation and friendship by diplomatic, trade, and cultural relations as determining factors in the world peace and progression. Interestingly, President Obama approach in his address to the Muslim World in Cairo (June 2009) made a fine example of this desirable action. Earlier, many Western thinkers, including Gouldner, Geertz, Eisenstadt, Rueschemeyer, Huntington, and the Lobbans, to mention a few, observed the top priority of Western foreign services to appreciate the religious beliefs, cultural settings, different languages, and the long list of social domains that characterized the identities of overseas nations differently from the Greek-based civilizations of the West.

Alvin Gouldner (1970: 5) put it eloquently in his masterpiece “The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology”: “The profound transformation of society that many radicals seek cannot be accomplished by political means alone; it cannot be confined to a purely political embodiment… the old society is not held together merely by force and violence, or experience and prudence. The old society maintains itself also through theories and ideologies that establish its harmony over the minds of men, who therefore do not merely bite their tongues but submit to it willingly. It will be impossible either to emancipate men from the old society or to build a humane new one, without beginning, here and now, the construction of a total counter-culture, including new social theories; and it is impossible to do this without a critique of the social theories dominant today.”

A major question, then, is pertinent to: 1) the preparedness of the Sudanese society to accomplish the wisdom of peaceful co-existence within two contradictory forms of the political life, i.e., a spiritual non-worldly order and a secular worldly system of international norms; and 2) the competencies of foreign powers to work with due respect to the cultural particularities and political realities of the country. This means that Western foreign powers, as well as the Arab League and the African Union, must play active roles in close consultation with the People of Sudan, not only the ruling parties, to help the transition to democratic rule.

The democratic opposition’s striving to voice grievances of the vast majority of people culminated in the successful meetings of the Juba Conference (September 2009), which allowed the Old Sudan Umma and DUP opposition groups to share with SAAG and the DMF to discuss key national strategies in conference to redress the CPA faltering implementation towards the overdue establishment of democratic transition and a real implementation of the right to self determination in the South, as well as autonomous rule in the other marginal regions.

Following the Juba Conference (Juba: September 2009), the Khatmiya Guide Mohamed Osman al-Mirghani announced unreserved support to the resolutions of the conference in which the Democratic National Forces (a political umbrella embodying the National Democratic Alliance, Umma, and other opposition groups) expressed irrevocable support to the right of the South to optional unity and the right of Darfur to enjoy peace and development vis-à-vis the MB brutalities and genocide, and the national consensus on a straightened population census and fair democratic elections, of which only the NIF/NCP MB was renegade.

Significantly, the Juba Conference unified the Nation’s willingness to enforce a principled implementation of the CPA that alone shall end the steeping failures geared and engineered by the MB dictatorship. The technically granted parliamentary veto to the NIF, which scored less than 20 percent of the national vote in the latest democratic elections in 1986 before occurrence of the June coup, has been consistently criticized as a source of continuous tensions between the opposition and the NIF/NCP-controlled government. The message is that CPA bilateral deals between the NIF/NCP and the SPLM should be democratically restructured to accommodate fair representation of the Sudanese political forces indiscriminately.

The Western World is not equally aware of this overriding fact, or perhaps the West is too slow to move efficiently to ally with Sufi Muslims, the most enduring social forces of North Sudan, the dynamic SAAG and DMF of the Sudan. The resistance of Sufi Muslims to the Brotherhood demagogic authority is a fact that has been permeating the social structure, the consciousness of masses, and the ever-increasing popular willingness to eliminate the alienating authority patterns the MB dictatorship initiated and developed in the state-society relationships for two consecutive decades by the continuous persecution of the Old Sudan reformists and the New Sudan revolutionaries.

THE MB FUTURE THREATS
The consequences of the NIF/NCP MB implementation of the CPA, however, revealed the breadth and depth of the political crisis the country is currently suffering as the MB insists on prolonging al-Bashir rule of terror: repressing the country unrelentingly; abusing the CPA to escalate tensions with the peace partner and the South Sudan Government; fixing the notorious security and intelligence apparatus and the Public Order Act; extending the MB authoritative rule beyond constitutional limits; and applying a series of illegal actions in the registration proceedings to monopolize the vote.

The MB political striving to monopolize political power will continue to pose a constant threat to the country’s regular democracy and just peace. The ruling party dictates to entrench anti-democratic traditions continued to terrorize both the Muslim and the non-Muslim populations by the consistent use of institutionalized intrusions in the free press, and the popular activities of civil society groups, irrespective of the CPA treaty and the Interim Constitution.

Added to gross violations of the right to religious belief specially for the non-Muslim population, the freedom of the press, and the other human rights and fundamental freedoms, anti-democratic campaigns never ceased to occur against the Ansar and the Khatmiyya, the SSAG, and the DMF who comprised a multiplicity of indigenous cultures and spiritual practices illegally curtailed in the North by the National Security and Intelligence Department (NSID), despite unauthorized jurisdiction by the Interim Constitution to exercise police powers. These uninterrupted decades of routine repression perpetuated gross abuses of authority against the cultural and religious life of people. Most importantly, incriminating fatawi [religious decrees] by the NIF Shura Council and ‘Ulama [jurist] Committees enjoyed unprecedented support by the government controlled-media to intimidate secular thinking and to apply continuous measures that terrorized the opposition and sterilized the free exchange of intellectual works.

Empowering the Brotherhood’s rank-and-file with this flagrant overriding of the Interim Constitution’s Bill of Rights, including security powers to a variety of non-professional demagogic supporters, has already jeopardized the essential fairness of the scheduled national elections in April 2010. Not only that the fatawi condemned university professors or civil society activists with blasphemy for simply opposing the government’s policies and practices in all spheres of the social and political life; but the MB ‘ulama controlled hundreds of mosques with regular preaching against secular thought and the need to support the “Islamic authorities” against the “enemies of Islam.” Most recently, however, brave Imams of Sufi Islam in Khartoum and other cities criticized publicly the MB authorities and asked for justice and fairness in all processes of national elections.

The failure of the NIF/NCP MB theological state to boost the economic and political development of the country does not mean that the MB incompetency has been completely exhausted, or that they might surrender to an alternative democracy. The MB might perhaps live as a religious social group much longer than the Bashir NIF/NCP ruling or the NIF/NCP split group which joined the opposition ranks as soon as it was removed from government. Unlike the NIF/NCP state beneficiary (1978-1985, 1989 to the present), the MB developed ideological and political support among college students, businesses, and several professional groups since the mid-fifties that, supported by government security and administrative authorities, never ceased to use violence against civil society groups. The MB has adequately maintained social existence in the urban quarters of cities, besides modest influence amongst the non-secular communities of the Bedouin side of the country that had been largely controlled still are by the Ansar and the Khatmiya.

Remarkably limited in size and scope, the MB might never be able to compete largely with the Khatmiya or the Ansar Sufi constituencies in democratic elections, let alone replacing them via non-democratic alliance with the June army officers. A pro-terrorist group, notwithstanding, the MB will always beg for political control by state power rather than democratic competition. Most likely, new terrorist leaderships, including non-Sudanese elements, might emerge in non-democratic alliances inside the Sudan with armed groups that yearn to control civil society by the repressive power of the state versus the voluntary will of civilian population, in spite of the CPA prospects for peace and stable democracy.

The Khatmiya and the Ansar communities have persistently maintained social and religious structures independently from state control, at the time serious political divisions wracked the political parties of the UP and the DUP. True, dictatorial attacks never ceased against popular Islam since independence. Led by MB groups in and outside Sudan, the most recent attempt to dismantle the Ansar/UP and the Khatmiya/DUP entities has completely failed to “inherit” the powerful machinery of these groups by decree.

The NIF war-mongering state managers have feverishly persecuted the Ansar and the Khatmiya, sometimes more than the UP or the DUP, to undermine the Sufi Muslims’ long-enduring self-sufficient economic, spiritual, and ideological existence in the social life. In this destructive process, the authoritative rulers used both containment and exclusionary policies to subdue the Ansar/Khatmiya popular institutions, to no avail. This failure is related to the fact that the Sudanese Muslim society has consistently condemned the state attempts that abused the country’s human resources and national wealth to establish artificial bodies to undermine community organizations, or to control popular voluntary activities.

The NIF/NCP tyrannous rule converted the small portion of the Sudan MB to one of the wealthiest sections of the population by the direct use of government monies and the confiscation of opposition property. The immediate result of these ill-practices reflected in the reduction of the UP-DUP financial power in the market and the impoverishment of large sections of the Khatmiya and the Ansar businesspeople, as well as their farming and working forces. Updated studies indicated the great economic and financial loss of the “traditional conservative business groups” in the production and business sectors to the MB government-supported businesses throughout the 1990s and the early 2000s.

In the recent 2000s, the constitutional office of the Auditor-General’s Chamber charged the central government, top public service employees, and several private companies with annual embezzlements of the public money in billions of dollars (see shro-cairoupdated.org). Moreover, escalated disputes erupted repeatedly between the CPA peace partner, the SPLM ruling party in the South, and the NIF/NCP government about the oil sales and returns. In this respect, the World Bank (2008) noted that, “While the discovery and exploitation of oil resources has facilitated an increase in national wealth, it has also brought a myriad of problems.”

THE FAILURES OF MB REPRESSION
The miserable failure of the MB international movement to indoctrinate the Sudanese society with the MB political ideology should analytically help to separate clearly between the authoritative doctrine of the MB to suppress society by state powers on the one hand, and the daily exercise of religious faith as a fundamental human right exercised by the Ansar, the Khatmiya, and the other Sufi sects as well as the Muslim groups not subscribing in compliance with the structure and functioning of popular Islam to the MB fundamentalist doctrine or their partisan State theology that attempts to govern the whole population by religious discrimination.

While the UP and the DUP party conferences in and outside the country acknowledged the necessity of implementing a national constitution to guarantee the freedom of religious belief as urgent political agenda, the UP and the DUP dissident elements cooperated with the NIF government to subdue the Ansar, the Khatmiya, and the other opposition groups only to fall prey to un-resolvable disputes with large sections of the masses that did not want them to collaborate with the NIF rulers. The few elements of the UP-DUP that became presidential advisers, governors of wilayat [states or provinces], junior state ministers, or winners of some business deals in the service of the NIF rule might have unwittingly helped the Umma/DUP to clear their rank and file of the NIF supporters infiltrating their political or religious bodies.

One of the main results of the NIF failures to override the Sudanese popular institutions was that the Sudanese Sufi groups held strongly to the traditional leadership of the Ansar and the Khatmiya, regardless of the deteriorating economic and financial situation of the sects. Notwithstanding, the Old Sudan Ansar and the Khatmiya institutions, the SAAG, and MDF must be financially supported to be able to compete with the NIF/NCP MB monopolies over both state and market businesses.

Another obvious result was that the NIF policies and practices to succeed the leadership of these large communities by state violence have been neatly defeated, judged by the sustainable independence of the Umma/DUP, SAGG, and DMF from the NIF/NCP MB state monopolies, and the mounting opposition to the MB state and party by students, professionals, and many other working groups, women and men, of whom a majority belongs to the Sufi Muslim groups and the opposition parties against the NIF all over the country. A third result is that the Ansar and the Khatmiya solid representation of popular Islam prevailed consistently over the NIF/NCP MB Iranian-modeled authoritative rule.

If consistently encouraged, the Ansar and the Khatmiya Sufi Islam would survive in strong alliances with the secular forces of Sudan in the post-democratic transition rather than those alliances previously experienced under the MB unpopular order. The MB doctrine works strictly in deep hatred of both western democracy and the Sudanese Sufi Islam and cultural traditions that have been symbolically represented and politically acceptable by the two Old Sudan parties, besides alliances with the SSAG and DMF. The Sufi Islam of the Khatmiya and the Ansar is firmly grounded on a liberal life that had been closely coexisting with western democracy and capitalist democracy for long decades since the closing years of colonial times.

The Ansar, the Khatmiya, the Umma, and the DUP shared increasing national interests with several partners of the secular umbrella of the NDA, notably the communist party, the SPLM, the non-governmental unions and professional associations, the East groups, and the Darfur civilians and armed groups versus the NIF common enemy. In our opinion, these opposition groups might make partial alliances with one another in the elections and the post-elections Sudan. All in all, however, they will continue to struggle, in principle, to stop the NIF/NCP BM state managers from transgressing the right of self-determination, regional autonomous rule, and the other basic public freedoms and fundamental rights.

CONCLUSIONS
In the light of the NIF repressive policies, it might be predicted that the Sudanese current struggles to establish the regular democracy and the permanent and just peace would either end up successfully, or that, regrettably, the NIF/NCP tyrannous rule might engage the country in a renewed eruption of civil war with a strong possibility of regional and international intervention, which could possibly transcend the South-North conflict to the detriment of the continental, inter-continental, and world peace.

To strengthen the positive possibility of a successful democratic transition to an era of post-elections permanent peace and sustainable development, let us repeat the call voiced in the Juba Conference (2009) on the NIF/NCP government by the National Front, the NDA, SPLM, UP-DUP, Darfur civilian and military groups, and civil society organizations to establish an all-Sudanese government to run the next elections. Furthermore, these political forces, including the NIF/NCP MB government, must improve democratic performance and organizational structures to be prepared for the elections and the post-elections era.

A significant step to facilitate this program is for the Ansar and the Khatmiya leaderships to take effective steps to democratize the structural relationships of their organizational activities to touch more deeply upon the general popular movement of their political allies, the democratic modernist parties including the SAAG and DMF versus the NIF/NCP MB extremism and political repression.

To allow Sufi Islam as a vital structural component of the cultural heritage of the Muslim population to act strongly in favor of democracy, all systems of rule, regardless of their ideological or political orientation, must comply with the Bill of Rights and the other constitutional provisions that guarantee the full enjoyment of civil, political, economic, and cultural rights to all citizens, indiscriminately. To facilitate this democratic transformation, the Sudanese ruling systems must fully adhere to the right of people to select freely their own leaderships and organizational settings.

While this writer appreciates the concerns of some thinkers to establish democratic governance by periodical succession, the fundamental principle of democracy, i.e., the people’s voluntary will to keep in office whoever they wish to govern their public affairs, should not give way to the necessary emphasis on periodical succession. This fact applies to the succession issue in most African nations. It is only when the elected leader decides to step down within a legal period of office that the electorate would find another leader. With more implementation of democratic rules on the basis of this fundamental principle, the Sudanese people will certainly enjoy voluntarily greater levels of democracy than those thus far attained.

* The author is a sociologist at the Department of Social Work & Sociology in Tennessee State University, Nashville TN, USA. He can be reached at emehawari@hotmail.com

[Picture: Map of Northeast Africa, highlighting the Darfur region of Sudan. Photo: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudan]
Read More

Monday, November 23, 2009

A Great Loss
No comments:
RK Editor, *Naaz passes away * - Rising Kashmir - Srinagar, J&K, India
Saturday, November 14, 2009

Condolences pour in from across valley

Noted Sufi poet, Aziz Naaz passed away on Friday at his ancestral home in Hib-Dangarpora, Rafiabad Sopore. He was 75.

Besides being the founder member of Rafiabad Adbi Markaz, Naaz served as the general counsel member of Adbi Markaz Kamraz. His poetry portrayed all the sensitivities of Sufism.

One of his famous poems ‘Kral Nama’ which speaks about the ups and downs of human life was not only acclaimed by the poets and the literary people but was praised by commoners as well.

The demise of Naaz has come as a great loss to the field of art and literature as rich tributes poured in from the literary quarters of the valley.

Many organizations including Adbi Markaz Kamraz, Rafiabad Adbi Markaz, Mehboob Cultural Society, Kashmir Writers Forum, Director Doordarshan and Patron Rafiabad Adbi Markaz, Dr. Rafiq Masoodi, Aziz Hajini, Syed Shujaat Bukhari and Shahnaz Rashid while terming the death as a great loss have expressed solidarity with the bereaved family.

“It takes thousands of years for a poet of his caliber to be born,” said people who were close to Naaz.

[Picture: Sunset on Dal Lake]
Read More

Sunday, November 22, 2009

Rock’n’Roll Jehad
1 comment:
By Vaibhav Jain, *Quick 7 With Salman Ahmad* - Nazar - Austin, Texas
Friday, November 13, 2009

On November 7, 2009, Nazar representative Vaibhav Jain spoke with Salman Ahmad backstage just after he performed alongside Pt Vishwa Mohan Bhatt, Pt. Samir Chatterjee and Daniel Weiss in a fusion concert at Westlake High Shool in Austin. The concert was organized by Aid-Austin, which is a voluntary non-profit organisation that focuses on tackling problems faced by rural India.

1) What has touring America been like for you?

You know, what I love about touring America is the diversity of the audience. As you saw tonight - I mean we had people from India, from Pakistan; we had people from Texas. It’s a mini planet Earth and it’s always fun to play your music to a diverse collection of people because you really find out – is the music speaking to everybody or not. And tonight what we saw, was amaz … I mean I had an amazing feeling, you know. I feel we were connected to the audience, the audience connected to the music, and we all became a circle of light.

2) What has your experience, and I know that you came here a couple of years ago, with the Austin crowd been like?

I mean … it’s so hip and I remember the last time we came – I think it was Samirji and me, right? And … everyone singing along, knowing each of the words and enthusiastic. Great audience, awesome audience! Awesome Austin.

3) What dimensions has playing Sufi Music had on you and your musical self?

Well, you know, my earliest memory – I write in my book coming up; it’s called Rock’n’Roll Jehad; comes out in January – my earliest memory is – I’m four years old and I see a Qawwal singing taans. And, you know, a four year old kid doesn’t have any, sort of, comprehension of words but the emotion was so incredibly powerful that I just knew that something had to do with Qawwali in my heart. And then, when I listened to the Blues and Led Zeppelin, I found a connection there. Led Zeppelin, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan – you know I could hear in my head a natural connection happening there. So, Sufi music for me, really, is a foundation. It’s a foundation to build things on and then, obviously, so many influences, you know – Jazz, Classical Rock, Bollywood, you know. It’s a … I mean it’s an ocean. It’s a cliché, but it’s an ocean of vivid colors – sound colors, you know. And Qawwali is like the, you know, they call the unity – sort of holding everything down.

4) How successful, according to you, is the marriage between music and spirituality?

Well, look, music is the highest form of spirituality. You know music sometimes – I’m not saying that it should replace religion – music is a way to access the spirit in which there’s all-inclusiveness, na? You don’t have to sort of …. There’s no right of passage. The only right of passage is that you breathe and you connect with the heart.

5) You’ve made music with so many other artists from so many different traditions and backgrounds. What’s been your most memorable performance, or a stand out musician you played with – something that really stands out and makes you go, “Woah man! That was the best one”?

You know, in my career, so many incredible moments. But if I were to pick out right now, playing the first ever rock concert in Srinagar at the edge of the Dal Lake, surrounded by the Himalayas and having 10-15,000 college kids going crazy – you know, singing louder than the band was an incredible experience. The other thing about it was that we had death threats against because they said that if you play a rock concert here, we’re going to shoot you. So, we still went. And the kids jumped over barbed wire to come see the show. So that was an amazing thing. And then, just now, a concert at the United Nations General Assembly on September 12 was incredible. There’s going to be a DVD coming out – pretty intense. I have a charity organization called SSGWI (ssgwi.org)* and if people go there, they will be able to access that. It was a multi-artist concert – we had … Junoon was there but there was Samirji, Samirji’s son Divyakar on Dholak, Klezmer artist Yale Strom. Then we had the hip-hop band Outlandish, and Gavin Rossdale.

6) What are your personal feelings and expectations from a concert of this nature? Expectations before it and feelings after and during, I guess.

Yeah, you know the expectations, for me are that we are, as musicians, able to honestly connect with one another. Because, you know, the thing is you can’t lie through music. The moment you try to lie through music, people see it, you know. So the expectation was that if we can connect on-stage, then I knew the audience was going to connect. And that’s what happened. And the other thing is, I have never performed with Danny and Mohanji before. So, it was like jumping into water … into the ocean and just swimming, you know. I hope that we can do this more often because I think people feel how easy it is for a musician to have a conversation, you know. And if people could do that as well with each other, with strangers – that would be an awesome place, you know.

7) Even as we speak, Pakistan is grappling with militants. There was an article in the NY Times about how Sufi music can be used to counter the Taliban in Afghanistan. Even as I say this to you, what’s your first impression, what do you think? Are you more like, “Yeah man, it can!” or “Wait! No way”?

Well, it has! You see, Sufi music has been there for 700 years in India and Pakistan, right? And many, many people came who wanted to stamp it out. And we were having this conversation … I believe … do you know why the Taliban hate music? Because they realize the power of Sufi music. It frees the soul, it frees the mind and there is no fear. When the lights are all turned on, you can’t be scared of anything. So I believe that music – Sufi music – needs to be promoted in Pakistan. This concert that I did at the UN was a concert about bringing souls together. It was for the IDP’s3 in Northern Pakistan who are escaping the Taliban. And when that whole concert is going to run on Pakistan television, the Taliban are going to freak out because this is what they fear. That if people start uniting themselves through arts and culture, where the hell are we gonna go?

Glossary
1. Qawwali - form of Sufi devotional music popular in South Asia
Qawwal - Qawwali singer
2. Taan – rapid melodic phrase
3. IDP - Internally Displaced Person (here, from the Swat Valley)

*Visit SSGWI, Salma & Samina NGO

Picture: Salman Ahad. Photo by:
Jsome1
Read More

Saturday, November 21, 2009

A Voice In Government
No comments:
By Martin Bright, *Whitehall in turmoil over Muslim advisers* - The Jewish Chronicle - London, UK
Thursday, November 12, 2009

An ideological battle has broken out in Whitehall [*] over the advice given to ministers on Islamic radicalism.

A series of recent changes of personnel and promotions at key departments has led to concerns that the government is moving away from a policy of dialogue with moderates towards a policy of engagement with more radical groups.

The Department of Communities and Local Government (DCLG) confirmed that Azhar Ali, one of Hazel Blears’s advisers and an influential voice for dialogue with moderate “Sufi” Muslims, was leaving the department at the end of November. The department has advertised for two new advisers. A second DCLG adviser, Mohammed Abdul Aziz, has close links to the Muslim Council of Britain and is hotly tipped to be re-appointed.

At the same time, the DCLG, which has responsibility for community cohesion, confirmed that Communities Secretary John Denham was talking to the former secretary-general of the MCB, Sir Iqbal Sacranie, about bringing the organisation in from the cold.

The MCB fell out of favour under Mr Denham’s predecessors at the Department of Communities and Local Government, Ruth Kelly and Hazel Blears, who promoted organisations from the moderate “Sufi” tradition of Islam. As he explained in an interview with the JC in October, he believes the MCB should have a voice in government. The organisation has been barred from Whitehall since March, when its deputy secretary-general, Daud Abdullah, signed the Istanbul declaration, pledging support for Hamas and supporting attacks on British shipping.

A DCLG spokeswoman said: “John Denham has met Iqbal Sacranie and many other members of Muslim communities. Regarding the Muslim Council of Britain, John Denham has made it clear that the MCB represents a number of Muslim voices with which any government would wish to engage; however, as issues raised earlier this year have not yet been resolved, relations with the MCB remain suspended.”

The department denied that funding has been withdrawn from the Sufi Muslim Council, which represents moderate mosques across the country. However, its present grant runs out in March 2010 and the organisation has been told that it is unlikely to be renewed.

In recent years, Muslim advisers have been employed at the Home Office, the Foreign Office and the Department for Communities and Local Government to ensure that ministers are kept informed of grassroots responses to government foreign and domestic policy. This has been seen as a priority since the events of July 2005.

The JC last week reported the appointment of Islamist Asim Hafeez to the post of head of intervention at the Office of Security and Counter-Terrorism in the Home Office.
The MCB’s spokesman Inayat Bunglawala responded to the JC by asking this newspaper to disclose its source: “I don’t suppose you want to share with me the name of the ‘Muslim adviser’ who sh**ed on Asim Hafeez?” he wrote in a colourfully-worded message on the social networking site Facebook. “I thought it was a disgraceful piece and quite McCarthyite. Does it not trouble your conscience? ”

Meanwhile, a controversial Foreign and Commonwelath Office adviser who recommended a visa for the radical Palestinian cleric Yusuf al–Qaradawi, has been promoted and given a key role across government working on the anti-extremist Prevent strategy.

Mockbul Ali has become “Head of Prevent, Counter Ideology” at the FCO but also retains his job as Islamic adviser to the Foreign Secretary.

Mr Ali was exposed after a series of leaks, which showed that he believed Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood to be a moderate organisation. He also recommended a visa for the Bangladeshi politician Delwar Hossain Sayeedi, who described Hindus as excrement. He described Sheikh al-Qaradawi, who has spoken in favour of suicide bombing and the execution of homosexuals, as “a highly respected Islamic scholar”.

Mr Ali is an increasingly influential figure across government, although some believe he has moderated his views in recent years.

[* Whitehall is a metonym for Overall UK Governmental Administration]

Picture: John Denham Martin
Read More

Friday, November 20, 2009

“I Am Not Mine / I Am Not Mine”
No comments:
By Robyn Creswell, *Mourning Tongues* - The National - Abu Dhabi, UAE
Thursday, November 12, 2009

After his death at age 67, the late poems of Mahmoud Darwish have found new life in translation

A little more than a year after his death it seems fair to say that Mahmoud Darwish, one of the past century’s signal poets, has finally arrived in English. Six substantial collections of his work have been translated in the past three years and several others are on the way, a level of attention publishers usually reserve for Nobel Prize winners. With a little luck, Darwish might one day join that small group of foreign poets – like Lorca, Cavafy, or Mandelstam – whose idiom becomes a touchstone for peers writing in English. But the Darwish that has begun to come into view for English language readers is, of course, quite different from the one his Arab audience is familiar with.

Darwish became famous as a young man in the 1960s as “the poet of the resistance”. His early lyrics were angry, eloquent and in-your-face. They were crowd pleasers, and the crowds that attended his readings in Nazareth and Acre were large and delirious. Darwish cut a dashing figure. In the opening poem of his first collection, published in 1964, he warned the reader that there were black flowers in his heart and fire on his lips. A Communist, he demanded poetry that was directly engaged in political struggle. “Creativity in the Revolution and revolution in creativity,” was one of his slogans, and he kept up his side of the bargain (the politicians, however, did not).

To have missed the opening scenes of Darwish’s career, or to know of them only in summary form, does make a difference in one’s sense of him as a poet.

It is difficult for the English reader to appreciate, for example, the extent to which Darwish’s late poetry is a complex mode of self-criticism. Darwish was always his own severest judge. He never allowed any one style, however successful, to harden into a method. His final lyrics are very distinct from the plainspoken, confrontational poetry that made him a celebrity while he was still in his early twenties. They are also distinct from the poetry he wrote in Beirut during the Civil War, or during the first Intifada, or the long foundering and bitter aftermath of the Oslo Accords. Indeed, Darwish’s late poetry is in an important sense a reaction against his earlier work, an attempt to escape the prisons of his former personae.

Darwish regarded the late poetry as his finest, and it is this corpus that has been most comprehensively translated into English. By contrast, the early poems that first established his reputation among Arab readers and critics are largely unavailable. The few translations that do exist are out-of-print and hard to find. So the English reader is like a theatregoer who arrives at intermission and tries to deduce, from the denouement, what happened in the first act.

Darwish’s last period begins, most critics would agree, with Mural, a long poem published in 2000, two years after the poet underwent open heart surgery that nearly killed him (and eight years before another heart operation finally did take his life). Mural is a scarred monument to this brush with extinction, and much of the verse that followed it is also concerned with the imminence of death, an eventuality the poet regards with a combination of defiance, gallows humour and stylised indifference. In one late lyric an idiot questioner asks the poet what he would do if he knew he would die that evening. “I will comb my hair,” Darwish answers, “and throw the poem, this poem / in the rubbish bin / put on the latest shirt from Italy / say my final farewell to myself with a backing of Spanish violins / then / walk / to the graveyard!”

Such intimations of mortality are symptomatic of the inward turn in Darwish’s late poetry. The political polemics and allegories of Darwish’s earlier work are here replaced by a dialectics of the self: the self in conversation with its other, with its earthly shadow or intimate enemy. This private, almost esoteric sensibility is of a piece with Darwish’s engagement, in the late poems, with Sufism. The mystical tradition certainly informs Darwish’s fondness for paradox, his search for self-knowledge and states of ecstasy: the famous, concluding statement of Mural, “I am not mine / I am not mine,” can certainly be read along these lines. And Darwish also invokes, more than once, the mystic’s habit of austerity, his gradual casting off of worldly goods and cares. Darwish’s final poems are graced by a mood of disburdenment, a ghostly lightheartedness. It is as if the poet felt himself liberated at last from all his prior performances, or as if the long siege of history had momentarily lifted and set him free.

Darwish’s inward turn reaches a climax in the poems of A River Dies of Thirst, the last book he published before his death. It is a remarkable collection, expertly translated by Catherine Cobham. Here, Darwish figures the creative process itself as a playful, almost solipsistic exercise (an idea that would have been violently rejected in his earlier engagé work). Yet these private and imaginative pleasures are constantly harried by larger, less forgiving forces. The ascetic’s attempt to withdraw from the world is thwarted and mocked by the incursions of history, the facts on the ground.

A River Dies of Thirst is subtitled “Yawmiyat,” meaning that Darwish viewed the book as a diary or journal rather than a straight diwan, or collection of poems (the title recalls Yawmiyat al Huzn al ‘Adi [Diary of an Ordinary Sorrow], Darwish’s early memoir, published in 1973 and now being translated into English by Archipelago Press). The poet of this collection is typically involved in everyday tasks: household chores, walks in the hills, watching the news. The texts alternate between prose poems – a form well-suited to the prosaic subject matter – and relatively formal lyrics (a distinction that Darwish was more and more concerned to deconstruct.)

The hero of these poems is a solitary wanderer, a distant descendant perhaps of the romantic archetype one finds in Wordworth’s Prelude, or Whitman’s Song of the Open Road, whose speaker, a progenitor of all later nationalist poets, chants: “From this hour I ordain myself loos’d of limits and imaginary lines..../ Pausing, searching, receiving, contemplating, / Gently, but with undeniable will, divesting myself of the holds that would hold me.” The poet of Darwish’s collection is also a lonely rambler, walking among the hills outside Ramallah, “on my way to no where in particular”, “not looking for anything, not even for myself in all this light”, climbing up from valley to peak, “making my own way, unaided”.

But if the poet of A River Dies of Thirst belongs to this tradition of romantic questers, then he is a latecomer and not entirely at ease with the company. The wisdom of Darwish’s poet is autumnal rather than innocent; his voice has been schooled by experience. In one of the collection’s opening prose poems, Darwish reveals that his solitary walker is actually a convalescent and that his walks are a form of therapy. Artistic inspiration, he suggests, is not his primary concern: “He walks because the doctors have advised him to walk, with no particular goal, to train the heart in a kind of indifference necessary for good health. Any idea that occurs to him will be purely gratuitous.”

“Indifference” [la-mubala] is among the keywords of this collection. It is even, I think, a name for the poet’s final philosophy. Indifference signals, on the one hand, the serenity of old age, the renunciation of passion, and the arrival of maturity (“a light-hearted stage of life,” Darwish calls it, when “we are neither optimistic nor pessimistic”). Indifference in this sense is a form of autonomy, “the freedom of the self-sufficient”. The poet who achieves this state, Darwish tells us, is “like an idea unencumbered by argumentation”.

But there is another aspect to indifference, one that is linked to creativity, playfulness and even a kind of eroticism. This is the subject of a prose poem called A Colored Cloud, which describes the poet at home washing his dishes, an everyday chore that nevertheless fills him with “an invigorating emptiness”. “I amuse myself with soap bubbles,” Darwish writes, “I play with the lather, which is like a cloud in which seasonal colors gleam then fade. I grasp the cloud in my hand and distribute it over the plates, glasses, cups, spoons and knives. It inflates as drops of water run over it. I scoop it up and make it fly through the air.” This childlike form of self-amusement and spontaneity leads gradually to a state of trance, in which the poet is visited by images of his past, now freed of all their former associations: “My mind is blank, as indifferent as the noonday heat. But images of memories descend from afar and land in the bowl of water, neutral memories, neither painful nor joyful, such as a walk in the pine forest, or waiting for a bus in the rain, and I wash them as intently as if I had a literary crystal vase in my hands.”

A Colored Cloud is, I think, the most concentrated statement of Darwish’s late aesthetic. It gives us a persuasive image of creative solitude and virtuosic self-absorption. But what makes A River Dies of Thirst especially remarkable is that this image of the poet-at-play is embedded in a collection of other texts that constantly challenge its implications, that never allow “indifference” to slide into complacency. For Darwish, the yawmiyat is not merely a journal for recording the poet’s private experience. Interspersed among the lyrics of the solitary walker and soap bubble sculptor is another series of poems that record a more troubled history. Most of the texts in A River Dies of Thirst were written in 2006 and 2007, years that encompassed the worst period of sectarian fighting in Iraq, the latest Israeli invasion of Lebanon, and the beginnings of civil war between Hamas and Fatah. This trio of conflicts – scenes from what Darwish calls “this long American movie” – forms an ominous backdrop to the poet’s ruminations on poetry, his lonely treks through the West Bank. Darwish’s response to these political events does not usually come in the form of a public, oratorical poem, though odes such as “Iraq’s night is long,” or “From now on you are somebody else,” show that Darwish can still deliver a jeremiad when he wants. Instead, and in keeping with the diary form, Darwish tends to refract these political events through the experience of the poet, mired in the un-heroic everyday. The opening poems concern the invasion of Lebanon, which inevitably reminds Darwish of an earlier invasion – “In 1982 the same thing happened to us as is happening now” – when he was among the besieged. In 2006, however, he can only follow the war on the news, as helplessly as any other onlooker: “I sit in front of the television, since I can’t do anything else. There, in front of the television, I discover my feelings and see what’s happening to me.”

The poet of this late collection is by turns indifferent and impassioned, in search of the sublime yet hemmed in by history. These qualities aren’t reconciled by Darwish, but simply set side by side, like entries in a diary. No matter how deeply the poet withdraws into himself, or attempts to climb above the everyday, he finds history laying its traps. In one especially haunting episode from a prose poem called A sort of loss, the poet climbs a steep hill “to see the sea”, amusing himself with various impossibilities such as “dodging my shadow and thinking cheerfully about where a rainbow ends”. But at the top of his climb he does not find larger vistas, but rather a dark and claustrophobic landscape: “The clouds grow thicker and cover the low ground and the outlying areas and the sea, which has been taken prisoner in one of the wars. Night falls, and the lights of the settlements appear on all sides.” Or, as he writes elsewhere, “How much a peak resembles an abyss.”

********************************

Darwish’s strong preference for his later work has often been mirrored by his critics and translators. Fady Joudah, a Palestinian-American doctor and award-winning poet, has emerged as Darwish’s most consistent, sure-footed English translator. The Butterfly’s Burden, which included three translated volumes of Darwish’s late poetry, was published two years ago and Joudah has now published a further selection of late poems, If I Were Another. The poems in this new volume, chosen by Joudah, are taken from four separate collections, two from the early nineties (I See What I Want and Eleven Planets), and two from the past decade, (Mural and Almond Blossoms and Beyond). Almost all the poems have been translated before, chiefly in two collections edited by Munir Akash, The Adam of Two Edens and Unfortunately, It Was Paradise. There is nothing wrong with having more than one translation; on the contrary, a poet survives by being re-translated, and the earlier versions of these poems were often unsatisfactory and even inaccurate. Still, Joudah’s selection is puzzling given that so much of Darwish’s early work remains unavailable in English.

Joudah calls If I Were Another a tribute to Darwish’s “lyric epic”, an oxymoron that Darwish borrowed from the Greek poet Yannis Ritsos, whom he met in Athens in 1982 following the PLO’s expulsion from Beirut. Darwish found that Ritsos’s phrase captured what he was aiming for with his own verse at the time: a fusion of the private voice with “the expression of a collective conscience faced with loss and mourning”. Many of the long poems that Darwish wrote in the 1990s are lyric epics in this sense. They are allegories of Palestinian experience as seen through the prism of Andalusian history, the dispossession of Native Americans, or the Sufi myth of the Persian poet al-Attar’s Conference of Birds. And just as, in this last text, the 30 birds who go in search of the fabled Simurgh discover, at the end of their journey, that they themselves are the Simurgh, a bird made up of birds, so in Darwish’s poetry from this period there is an effort to reconcile the poet’s voice with a collective history or myth.

But Darwish’s later poems, beginning with Mural in 2000, do not appear to be lyric epics in this sense, though Joudah believes they belong together with the allegorical poetry of the 1990s. It seems to me that the intense, even ecstatic solitude of Darwish’s final works belongs to a different sensibility, more intimate and less reconciled. Where allegory aims at a degree of intellectual clarity, and at a certain mastery of its materials, Darwish’s late poetry is increasingly vagrant, bemused and improvisatory. Here, the poet seems willing to risk being misunderstood, which may simply be the price one pays for “indifference” in his special sense.

Whatever one thinks of Joudah’s selection, however, it is a delight to have his version of Mural, a poem that Darwish regarded as his masterpiece (“the one magnum opus of which he was certain,” according to Joudah). It is a further delight – and instructive, too – that we have a second version of the poem, also recently published, by a pair of British translators, Rema Hammami and John Berger, the distinguished art critic and novelist, who was a close friend of Darwish.

The two versions are subtly different. Hammami and Berger’s translation is looser and more colloquial. They have done away with most punctuation – there are very few periods or commas – and rearranged the original’s line breaks to make a more punchy, readable, and epigrammatic text. Their translation is at its best during the celebrated middle episode, where the poet addresses Death in a monologue that is by turns welcoming, defiant, mocking, and supplicatory.

Sit
Put down your hunting things outside under the awning
Hang your set of heavy keys above the door!...
Don’t stand on the threshold like a beggar or tax collector
Don’t be an undercover policeman directing traffic
Be strong like shining steel and take off the fox’s mask
Be chivalrous glamorous fatal...
Death wait
take a seat
drink a glass of wine.

Hammadi and Berger’s version, it must be said, has a number of errors. “Ulqi bi-nafsi janiban”, in the poem’s second stanza, does not mean, “I meet myself at my side,” but “I threw myself aside” (ulqi, not alqi); “udi‘a dakhili fi kharijla”, at the end of the poet’s conversation with death, does not mean “I can say farewell to my inside from my outside,” but rather “I store my interior in my exterior” (udi‘a, not uwaddi‘a); and there are other misreadings.

Joudah is a more reliable guide through these semantic thickets. His version, while it does not always achieve the liveliness of Hammami and Berger’s, is also better attuned to the music of Darwish’s text, its quietly rising and falling cadences. One hears as much in this passage, whose first line echoes the murmured refrain of Federico García Lorca’s somnambulist (“Verde, que te quiero verde”):

Green, my poem’s land is green,
And the lyricists carry it from one time to another faithful to its fertility...
And I have serenity. A small grain of wheat
is enough (for me and my enemy brother).
My hour hasn’t arrived yet. Nor has
harvest. I must shadow absence
and believe my heart first, follow it
to Cana in Galilee. My hour hasn’t arrived yet.
Perhaps there’s something in me that banishes me, perhaps
I am other than me.

“He became his admirers,” is how Auden famously glossed the death of Yeats in his elegy for the older poet. What he meant, among other things, was that a poet survives physical extinction through the medium of friends and readers. A translator is, in this way, a rather special case of the admirer, one who ensures survival by way of a necessary betrayal, a making-other or making-strange. We might even speculate that every translation is a kind of elegy: that is, a survival purchased by the original’s passing (“By mourning tongues,” Auden writes, “The death of the poet was kept from his poems”).

I suggested above that Darwish might one day become a resource or touchstone for poets writing in English. In fact this has already begun to happen in a fascinating and unpredictable way. Voice Over by the South African poet and novelist Breyten Breytenbach, is not quite an elegy for Darwish, and it is not quite a translation either, but it is a little bit of both. It is the rare work that is both intelligently experimental and full of feeling. The book is a series of twelve poems written by Breytenbach in the months after the death of Darwish, who was a friend. During this time, Breytenbach tells us, he read Darwish’s poetry in English and French “approximations.” His own poems, the poems of Voice Over, are grounded in Darwish’s writings, but “with my own voice woven into the process.” The poems were originally composed in Afrikaans and later translated, by Breytenbach himself, into English.

This exercise of reading, meditation, and composition, with its many degrees of distance and intimacy – involving translations and near-translations from Arabic to French to Afrikaans to English – strikes me as a unique and unexpectedly moving instance of the mourning rite, in which death is both faced and deflected, named and transformed. It is also a markedly secular, improvised example of that rite. The poet is laid to rest and new life is found only in someone else’s language, a resurrection for which there are no established protocols.

Of course Darwish’s late verse is, in its own way, a meditation on the ways in which the self becomes a stranger to itself, becomes full of voices that are not its own. One of his most charming poems on this subject is The Dice Player (also translated by Hammami and Berger in their edition of Mural). In this long, quasi-autobiographical lyric, Darwish reflects on the many accidents of genealogy and history that conspired to make him who he is, or was, and how easy it would have been for him to turn out otherwise, or never to have existed at all. (“It’s possible that poetry might have gained more / if precisely this poet hadn’t existed,” he wryly shrugs.) In this way, the poem also becomes a matter of chance: not an act of random creation but, like the self, a complicated result of the place where one happens to be born, the language one happens to speak, the poems one has read, and the friends one makes along the way. The Dice Player is, appropriately, the centrepiece of Breytenbach’s collection. His voice over ensures that the poem never really comes to an end, that it remains open to further transformations and translations, further accidents of history and strokes of luck. Here is Darwish, via Hammami and Berger (and Mallarmé):

This poem is a dice throw
onto a board of darkness
that glows and doesn’t glow
words fall like feathers on sand.

I don’t think it was me who wrote the poem.

And here is Breytenbach’s answering coup de dés:

The poem is but a geeing of dice
Shimmering in a dancer-dark cone
Or maybe not and words flutter
Like feathers to the sand
I have no role in this writing.

Robyn Creswell, a regular contributor to The Review, is a doctoral candidate in comparative literature at New York University

Picture: Palestinians mourn Darwish at a vigil in the West Bank city of Nablus. Photo: AFP
Read More