Hamas has been accused of "betraying its own martyrs and God" during a recent statement issued by al-Qaeda.
A video made by al-Qaeda leader Yahya al-Libi, who is in Afghanistan, was released at the end of April. Ynetnews has obtained the full recording, one of a number of growing scathing verbal attacks on Hamas by al-Qaeda.
"I am sending this message to the people of Palestine, whose blood is being shed by the Jewish occupiers," al-Libi said.
"Hamas has abandoned jihad for politics. It has betrayed its youths. Its main activity is politics. Since its decision to go down the path of politics, Hamas has begun to descend on a downhill slope. They betrayed the dreams of their young fighters and they stabbed them in the back," al-Libi added.
"All of the pretexts Hamas gives for pondering the political path do not even convince Hamas," Libi said. "They don't believe their own rhetoric. They themselves know they are not pursuing the true path of Islam."
'Hamas not listening to us'
Libi complained that "al-Qaeda leaders tried to advise Hamas about its policy and told Hamas leaders that they are not going in right direction. But Hamas has been firm in maintaining that its path is different from that of al-Qaeda."
He bitterly lamented that "Hamas told al-Qaeda they don't need al-Qaeda's advice. Some of their most prominent leaders went as far as making public declarations during a recent visit to the atheist capital of Russia, Moscow, distancing themselves from al-Qaeda. They did so openly after the meeting with the murderous corrupt Russian leaders whose crimes are worse than those of Sharon" Libi said, referring to Hamas politburo head Khaled Mashaal's trip to Moscow.
"Is Putin and his corrupt and murderous regime more relevant to Hamas's political equation for Palestine than advice by our great leader Ayman al-Zawahiri?" the al-Qaeda leader asked.
'Hamas betrayed Chechen cause'
Al-Libi accused Hamas of "betraying the Chechnyan cause" by meeting with the Putin government, and added that Hamas was trying to promote secularism among Palestinians, declaring: "Al-Qaeda cannot remain silent over this, because what Hamas is doing amounts to betraying the martyrs of the Palestinian people and God."
"You call your movement resistance, and then you call it Islamic resistance. If you were really Islamic, you would call it jihad," al-Libi said.
"Can you tell us which Islam you are talking about, and which shariah you are going to implement?" he added.
"Your path has confused the Palestinians, and they can no longer differentiate between you and the secular leaders that you courting," he said.
After pledging that "al-Qaeda will stick to the path of true jihad," al-Libi addressed Hamas' al-Qassam Brigades, saying: "Where are your bombs, where is you fire, which should shine like the sun in the enemy's backyard? Your martyrs used to fight for al-Aqsa, and today you replaced the heavy sword with dialogue. Hamas is a part of the conspiracy against the Palestinians."
"Anyone who takes this path is bound to descend to hell because they are moving away from the true nature of their religion," al-Libi concluded.
Source
Monday, May 7, 2007
The torture of the grave Islam and the afterlife
By Leor Halevi
Friday, May 4, 2007
COLLEGE STATION, Texas:
Hardly a week goes by without front-page news of Muslims dying somewhere in the world in a violent way. Despite all the media attention, there is little understanding among non-Muslims of Islamic views of death and the afterlife.
Everyone knows, of course, that after death martyrs go straight to the Garden of Eden, where they recline on couches, savor meats and fruits and enjoy the company of dark-eyed houris while listening to the sound of flowing rivers.
But what happens to the vast majority of Muslims, those who do not die as martyrs?
According to Islamic doctrine, between the moment of death and the burial ceremony, the spirit of a deceased Muslim takes a quick journey to Heaven and Hell, where it beholds visions of the bliss and torture awaiting humanity at the end of days.
By the time corpse handlers are ready to wash the body, the spirit returns to earth to observe the preparations for burial and to accompany the procession toward the cemetery. But then, before earth is piled upon the freshly dug grave, an unusual reunion takes place: The spirit returns to dwell within the body.
In the grave, the deceased Muslim - this composite of spirit and corpse - encounters two terrifying angels, Munkar and Nakir, recognized by their bluish faces, their huge teeth and their wild hair.
These angels carry out a trial to probe the soundness of a Muslim's faith. If the dead Muslim answers their questions convincingly and if he has no sin on record, then the grave is transformed into a luxurious space that makes bearable the long wait until the final judgment.
But if a Muslim's faith is imperfect or if he has sinned during life by, for example, failing repeatedly to undertake purity rituals before prayer, then the grave is transformed into an oppressive, constricting space.
The earth begins to weigh down heavily upon the sentient corpse, until the rib cage collapses; worms begin to nibble away at the flesh, causing horrible pain.
This torture does not continue indefinitely. It occurs intermittently and ends at the very latest with the resurrection - when God may well forgive Muslims who have endured the punishment.
Surely this violence sounds medieval. Belief in "the torture of the grave" indeed stretches way back in history. It appears in eighth-century epitaphs and in early Islamic traditions, which elevated this belief to the status of dogma.
But pious Muslims today continue to adhere to this belief. In invocations, funeral prayers, sermons, and popular literature, Muslims are frequently reminded to heed this punishment.
Anecdotal evidence suggests that many of them take it seriously. The psychologist Ahmed M. Abdel-Khalek, who has studied anxieties about death among Arab youth, has found that preoccupation with the torture of the grave remains acute.
The Egyptians and Kuwaitis he polled worried about this torture more than they feared losing a dear relative or succumbing to a serious, fatal disease.
Recently, an Islamist Web site posted a picture of an 18-year-old man exhumed by the order of his father. Only three hours had passed since his burial, but already his corpse appeared aged and bruised. Scientists, according to the story, affirmed that this was caused by the torture of the grave; and the father explained that his son had been a sinner.
Many Muslims commenting on the picture took it as a sign from God to stop sinning and as a reminder to pray assiduously for relief from the punishment of the tomb. Several doubted the reality of the picture, prompting the author of the Web site to remove the posting and to apologize for it. But even a skeptic who challenged the "scientific" evidence professed in this public forum his belief in the reality of the torture of the grave.
Muslims can escape the torture of the grave by dying as martyrs. In Islam the category of martyr does not belong exclusively to those who die fighting in God's path. According to Islamic tradition, Muslims who die in a fire, by drowning, in the collapse of a building or in some other way involving great physical suffering merit the rank of martyrs in the afterlife.
This means that immediately after death, their spirits do not return to dwell within mutilated or burned corpses. Instead they enter the Garden of Eden, where they receive new bodies, perfectly reformed, so as to enjoy the rewards of martyrdom until the resurrection. Those who have lost a relative in a violent and shocking death - in the bombings in Baghdad, for instance - may find some consolation in this belief.
Leor Halevi, a professor of history at Texas A&M University, is the author of "Muhammad's Grave: Death Rites and the Making of Islamic Society."
Source
Friday, May 4, 2007
COLLEGE STATION, Texas:
Hardly a week goes by without front-page news of Muslims dying somewhere in the world in a violent way. Despite all the media attention, there is little understanding among non-Muslims of Islamic views of death and the afterlife.
Everyone knows, of course, that after death martyrs go straight to the Garden of Eden, where they recline on couches, savor meats and fruits and enjoy the company of dark-eyed houris while listening to the sound of flowing rivers.
But what happens to the vast majority of Muslims, those who do not die as martyrs?
According to Islamic doctrine, between the moment of death and the burial ceremony, the spirit of a deceased Muslim takes a quick journey to Heaven and Hell, where it beholds visions of the bliss and torture awaiting humanity at the end of days.
By the time corpse handlers are ready to wash the body, the spirit returns to earth to observe the preparations for burial and to accompany the procession toward the cemetery. But then, before earth is piled upon the freshly dug grave, an unusual reunion takes place: The spirit returns to dwell within the body.
In the grave, the deceased Muslim - this composite of spirit and corpse - encounters two terrifying angels, Munkar and Nakir, recognized by their bluish faces, their huge teeth and their wild hair.
These angels carry out a trial to probe the soundness of a Muslim's faith. If the dead Muslim answers their questions convincingly and if he has no sin on record, then the grave is transformed into a luxurious space that makes bearable the long wait until the final judgment.
But if a Muslim's faith is imperfect or if he has sinned during life by, for example, failing repeatedly to undertake purity rituals before prayer, then the grave is transformed into an oppressive, constricting space.
The earth begins to weigh down heavily upon the sentient corpse, until the rib cage collapses; worms begin to nibble away at the flesh, causing horrible pain.
This torture does not continue indefinitely. It occurs intermittently and ends at the very latest with the resurrection - when God may well forgive Muslims who have endured the punishment.
Surely this violence sounds medieval. Belief in "the torture of the grave" indeed stretches way back in history. It appears in eighth-century epitaphs and in early Islamic traditions, which elevated this belief to the status of dogma.
But pious Muslims today continue to adhere to this belief. In invocations, funeral prayers, sermons, and popular literature, Muslims are frequently reminded to heed this punishment.
Anecdotal evidence suggests that many of them take it seriously. The psychologist Ahmed M. Abdel-Khalek, who has studied anxieties about death among Arab youth, has found that preoccupation with the torture of the grave remains acute.
The Egyptians and Kuwaitis he polled worried about this torture more than they feared losing a dear relative or succumbing to a serious, fatal disease.
Recently, an Islamist Web site posted a picture of an 18-year-old man exhumed by the order of his father. Only three hours had passed since his burial, but already his corpse appeared aged and bruised. Scientists, according to the story, affirmed that this was caused by the torture of the grave; and the father explained that his son had been a sinner.
Many Muslims commenting on the picture took it as a sign from God to stop sinning and as a reminder to pray assiduously for relief from the punishment of the tomb. Several doubted the reality of the picture, prompting the author of the Web site to remove the posting and to apologize for it. But even a skeptic who challenged the "scientific" evidence professed in this public forum his belief in the reality of the torture of the grave.
Muslims can escape the torture of the grave by dying as martyrs. In Islam the category of martyr does not belong exclusively to those who die fighting in God's path. According to Islamic tradition, Muslims who die in a fire, by drowning, in the collapse of a building or in some other way involving great physical suffering merit the rank of martyrs in the afterlife.
This means that immediately after death, their spirits do not return to dwell within mutilated or burned corpses. Instead they enter the Garden of Eden, where they receive new bodies, perfectly reformed, so as to enjoy the rewards of martyrdom until the resurrection. Those who have lost a relative in a violent and shocking death - in the bombings in Baghdad, for instance - may find some consolation in this belief.
Leor Halevi, a professor of history at Texas A&M University, is the author of "Muhammad's Grave: Death Rites and the Making of Islamic Society."
Source
Are the Arabs already extinct?
By Spengler
"We [Arabs] have become extinct," said Syrian poet Adonis in a March 11 Dubai television interview transcribed by the Israeli media monitor MEMRI, [1] but ignored by the mainstream Western media. The prognosis by Adonis, the only Arabic writer on the Nobel Prize short list, for the Arab prospect has become more bleak over the years, and his latest pronouncement has a Spenglerian finality.
"We have become extinct ... We have the masses of people, but a people becomes extinct when it no longer has a creative capacity, and the capacity to change its world ... The great Sumerians became extinct, the great Greeks became extinct, and the Pharaohs became extinct," he said.
Poets are given to hyperbole, to be sure, but Adonis (the pen-name of Ali Ahmad Said) makes a deeper point in his writings on Arabic poetry. He argues that Islam destroys the creative capacity of the Arabs, who in turn do not have the capacity to become modern. What he calls the "hell of daily life" is the subject of his poetry, of which a representative sample is available in English translation. [2]
Adonis devoted a long career to creating a literary modernism in Arabic rooted in medieval Arab poetry, leaving a long trail of enemies both among Islamists and secular Arab nationalists. He is reasonably well known in the West. The Arab-American scholar Fouad Ajami profiled him in the widely read Dream Palace of the Arabs, and Thomas Friedman gave him a brief mention in the January 27 New York Times. Evidently Western analysts do not quite know what to make of this most recent apocalyptic pronouncement and averted their eyes. It is easy, but misguided, to dismiss Adonis' doom-saying as an old man's exasperation, for Adonis sees the decisive issues with great clarity.
Nothing less than the transformation of Islam from a state religion to a personal religion is required for the Arabs to enter the modern world, Adonis told Dubai television:
I oppose any external intervention in Arab affairs. If the Arabs are so inept that they cannot be democratic by themselves, they can never be democratic through the intervention of others. If we want to be democratic, we must be so by ourselves. But the preconditions for democracy do not exist in Arab society, and cannot exist unless religion is re-examined in a new and accurate way, and unless religion becomes a personal and spiritual experience, which must be respected.
The trouble, he added, is that Arabs do not want to be free. Asked why Arabs glorify dictatorships, Adonis responded as follows:
I believe it has to do with the concept of "oneness", which is reflected - in practical or political terms - in the concept of the hero, the savior, or the leader. This concept offers an inner sense of security to people who are afraid of freedom. Some human beings are afraid of freedom.
Interviewer: Because it is synonymous with anarchy?
Adonis: No, because being free is a great burden. It is by no means easy.
Interviewer: You've got to have a boss ...
Adonis: When you are free, you have to face reality, the world in its entirety. You have to deal with the world's problems, with everything ...
Interviewer: With all the issues ...
Adonis: On the other hand, if we are slaves, we can be content and not have to deal with anything. Just as Allah solves all our problems, the dictator will solve all our problems.
The fact that the Arab world's most distinguished man of letters has rejected the premise upon which US policy is founded - that traditional Islam and democracy are compatible - one would have expected from American critics a better response than silence. This is particularly true given how large Adonis looms in the Arab world, which translates only a fifth as many books per year as does Greece, with a 30th of the population. Arab writers of global stature are a tiny number, and their importance is disproportionately great.
I do not read Arabic, and have no idea whether Adonis' poetry merits the Nobel Prize (on earlier occasions I argued that a novelist from a Muslim country, Turkey's Orhan Pamuk, well deserved the 2006 award). But I doubt that anyone in the West will make sense of the spiritual condition of the Arab world without Adonis' assistance, and not because what he has to say is difficult: on the contrary, he has the courage to say the obvious: the Arabs do not want freedom because their lives are intolerable. Islam not only suppresses the possibility of poetic expression, Adonis argues, but with it the capacity of the individual to have a personality. It is an astonishing, terrifying, and absolute indictment of his culture.
As a poet, Adonis does not describe the spiritual state of the Arabs, but rather evokes it existentially. The available literature on Islam consists mainly of a useless exchange of Koranic citations that show, depending on whether one is Karen Armstrong or Robert Spencer, that Islam is loving or hateful, tolerant or bigoted, peaceful or warlike, or whatever one cares to show. It is all so pointless and sophomoric; anyone can quote the Koran, or for that matter the Bible, to show whatever one wants. With Adonis one gains access to the inside of the Arab experience of modernity. It is a terrible and frightening one, not recommended for the faint-hearted, but indispensable to anyone who wishes to get beyond the pointless sloganeering of the pundits.
"The Arab poet," he writes, "speaks ever of freedom and democracy as illusions. I say 'illusion' because life itself comes before freedom and democracy. How can I possibly talk about life when I am prevented from being myself, when I am not living, neither within myself nor for myself? [3]
"To be means to mean something," Adonis explains. "Meanings are only appreciated through words. I speak, therefore I am; my existence thus and then assumes meaning. It is through this distance and hope that the Arab poet attempts to speak, ie, to write, to begin."
Life is not possible without meaning, and meaning does not exist outside of culture, especially for a people defined not by political circumstances or territory but by language, namely the Arabs. In his essay "Poetry and Apoetical Culture", Adonis makes the remarkable claim that the nature of Koranic revelation destroys the possibility of poetry, and with it the possibility of life. Before Islam, the Arabic language was rooted in poetry; after the advent of Islam, poetic language became impossible.
When this divine Revelation came to take the place of poetic inspiration, it claimed to be the sole source of knowledge, and banished poetry and poets from their kingdom. Poetry was no longer the word of truth, as the pre-Islamic poets had claimed it was. Nevertheless ... Islam did not suppress poetry as a form and mode of expression. Rather, it nullified poetry's role and cognitive mission, endowing it with a new function: to celebrate and preach the truth introduced by the Koranic Revelation. Islam thus deprived poetry of its earliest characteristics - intuition and the power of revelation and made it into a media tool.
... Poetry in Arab society has languished and withered precisely insofar as it has placed itself at the service of religiosity, proselytism and political and ideological commitments. [4]
Adonis adds:
In part, this explains the dominance in the Arab mentality of what I call "pastism". In the context of this inquiry, pastism means the refusal and fear of the unusual. [5]
This is true, Adonis explains, because the Koran offers a revelation that is final and certain, excluding the possibility of doubt:
The political-religious institution exercised its power as a faithful guardian of the Koranic Revelation. It possessed the absolute certitude that the Revelation spoke and wrote Man and the universe clearly, definitively and without error or imperfection. This certitude, in turn, demanded that the Muslim individual be formed around a faith in an absolute text, one which allowed no interrogation that might give rise on any doubt whatsoever. Under such conditions, alienation is inevitable; the skeptical individual no longer has the right to be a member of the society.
Because Islam - the last message sent by God to mankind - has placed the final seal on the Divine Word, successive words are incapable of bringing humankind anything new. A new message would imply that the Islamic message did not say everything, that it is imperfect. Therefore the human word must, on an emotional level, continually eulogize and celebrate that message; on an intellectual level, a fortiori it can only serve as an explication.
Poetry, the most elevated form of expression, will henceforth be valued only for its obviousness. [6]
With reference to literature rather than theology, Adonis states what amounts to the same thing that Pope Benedict XVI said last year about the finality of Islamic revelation. [7] Westerners will assimilate this view only with great effort, for poetry of devotion is among the most artful and most complex in the literature. One thinks of Dante in Italian, John Donne and John Milton in English, St John of the Cross in Spanish, Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock and Christian Fuerchtegott Gellert in German, and Yehuda Halevi in Hebrew.
To Christians and Jews, God is not a monarch who presents a final and indisputable truth, but a lover whose face is hidden - perhaps the most fruitful subject for poetry in human history. In the tradition of the biblical Song of Songs, St John conveys love for God in distinctly erotic terms. It is inconceivable for a Muslim poet to address Allah with the intimacy of a lover in the language of human passion. If poetry holds a mirror to our inner life, then the inner life of Westerners is profoundly different from that of Muslims, as different as the concepts of a God of Love who exalts the humble, and Allah who loves the strong and rewards the victorious. I have addressed that subject on a dozen other occasions.
One finds counterparts to the mystical-religious poetry of the Western mainstream only in the Sufi fringe of Islam, but never in its central current. Adonis praises in his study of Arab poetics [8] three medieval poets of the Islamic era whose originality of expression inspires him: Abu Nuwas, al-Niffari, and al-Ma'arri. Abu Nuwas "adopts the mask of the clown and turns drunkenness, which frees bodies from the control of logic and traditions, into a symbol of total liberation", Adonis observes. [9] Al-Niffari speaks the language of transcendental bliss; it "eliminates the gap between the human and the sacred, humanizing the sacred and sanctifying this thinking, poeticizing reed: the human being".
But Adonis' greatest fascination is for the 11th-century Nihilist Abul Ala al-Ma'arri.
If poetry was, according to the "method of the Arabs", "the art of words", al-Ma'arri makes it into the art of meaning ... Al-Ma'arri establishes nothing, at the level of either language or meaning. On the contrary, all that he proposes only casts doubt on both of these: for him they are simply two ways of expressing futility and nothingness. He creates his world - if "create" is the right word - with death as his starting point. Death is the one elixir, the redeemer. Life itself is only a death running its course. A person's clothes are his shroud; his house is his grave, his life his death, and his death his true life ... the truth is that the most evil of trees if the one which has borne human beings. Life is a sickness whose cure is death. [10]
We hear the term "culture of death" often enough, but do not normally have a window into a culture truly dominated by death. That is what Adonis, channeling Ma'arri, provides. The English term "despondent" does not begin to characterize the poems of Adonis; they do not express sadness about life so much as the belief that life itself is an impossibility. I cannot fairly represent the author's translated poems in this venue, but a few examples give some of the flavor of his oeuvre:
Each day is a child/ who dies behind a wall/ turning its face to the wall's corners. [11]
When I saw death on a road/ I saw my face in his. My thoughts resembled locomotives/ straining out of fog/ and into fog. [12]
"We must make gods or die./ We must kill gods or die,"/ whisper the lost stones in their lost kingdom. [13]
Strangled mute/ with syllables/ voiceless,/ with no language/ but the moaning of the earth,/ my song discovers death/ in the sick joy/ of everything that is/ for anyone who listens./ Refusal is my melody./ Words are my life/ and life is my disease.
Readers may peruse Adonis' work for themselves to determine whether I am presenting only its dark side; in fact, it only has a dark side. Misery, self-pity and longing for death are the most common themes in Adonis' translated work, but rage figures as well, particularly when he writes of the United States. One of his longest and most frequently cited poems is titled "The Funeral [sometimes The Grave] of New York", and calls it (among many other unpleasant things) "a city on four legs/ heading for murder/ while the drowned already moan/ in the distance".
When Adonis wrote this poem in 1971, he wanted to see the city destroyed, and appealed to the poor people of Harlem, "You shall erase New York,/ you shall take it by storm/ and blow it like a leaf away."
In fairness to Adonis, he rather liked Walt Whitman, along with many other Western modernists (especially Stephane Mallarme and Charles Baudelaire) who, he concedes, helped him understand Arab medieval poetry to begin with. [14] Rhetorically, Adonis sounds a bit like a terrorist, but he harbors no such sentiments. Although he is a fierce anti-Zionist, he has met with Israeli poets and favors some kind of dialogue with Israel.
But as the bard of the Arabs, or at least the closest thing the Arabs currently have to a bard, he helps explain the remarkable willingness of Arabs to kill themselves to inflict harm on their enemies. Caught between a stifling traditional past and a threatening and unwished-for modernity, the Arabs in Adonis' judgment cannot properly form a personality and are susceptible to nihilism, just as the poems of al-Ma'arri evoked it during the 11th century, and Adonis' poems evoke it today.
The "hell of daily life", the Arabs' incapacity to digest the devil's sourdough, instills a wish for death that expresses itself in the horrible events we see in the news daily. Adonis' warning has become an epitaph for a tomb that is prepared, if not yet occupied: the Arabs are extinct.
Notes
1. The Middle East Media Research Institute.
2. For example, The Pages of Day and Night (translated by Samuel Hazo), The Marlboro Press 1994; and The Blood of Adonis, University of Pittsburgh Press 1971. Additional translations are in progress.
3. The Pages of Day and Night, Introduction, p 15.
4. Op cit, pp 101-102.
5. Loc cit.
6. Ibid, pp 102-103.
7. See When even the pope has to whisper, Asia Times Online, January 10, 2006.
8. An Introduction to Arab Poetics (translated by Catherine Cobham), Saqi Books: London 1990.
9. Poetics, p 60.
10. Op cit, p 65.
11. From "The Past", in The Pages of Day and Night.
12. Op cit, p 21.
13. Op cit, p 26.
14. Poetics, pp 80-81.
Source
"We [Arabs] have become extinct," said Syrian poet Adonis in a March 11 Dubai television interview transcribed by the Israeli media monitor MEMRI, [1] but ignored by the mainstream Western media. The prognosis by Adonis, the only Arabic writer on the Nobel Prize short list, for the Arab prospect has become more bleak over the years, and his latest pronouncement has a Spenglerian finality.
"We have become extinct ... We have the masses of people, but a people becomes extinct when it no longer has a creative capacity, and the capacity to change its world ... The great Sumerians became extinct, the great Greeks became extinct, and the Pharaohs became extinct," he said.
Poets are given to hyperbole, to be sure, but Adonis (the pen-name of Ali Ahmad Said) makes a deeper point in his writings on Arabic poetry. He argues that Islam destroys the creative capacity of the Arabs, who in turn do not have the capacity to become modern. What he calls the "hell of daily life" is the subject of his poetry, of which a representative sample is available in English translation. [2]
Adonis devoted a long career to creating a literary modernism in Arabic rooted in medieval Arab poetry, leaving a long trail of enemies both among Islamists and secular Arab nationalists. He is reasonably well known in the West. The Arab-American scholar Fouad Ajami profiled him in the widely read Dream Palace of the Arabs, and Thomas Friedman gave him a brief mention in the January 27 New York Times. Evidently Western analysts do not quite know what to make of this most recent apocalyptic pronouncement and averted their eyes. It is easy, but misguided, to dismiss Adonis' doom-saying as an old man's exasperation, for Adonis sees the decisive issues with great clarity.
Nothing less than the transformation of Islam from a state religion to a personal religion is required for the Arabs to enter the modern world, Adonis told Dubai television:
I oppose any external intervention in Arab affairs. If the Arabs are so inept that they cannot be democratic by themselves, they can never be democratic through the intervention of others. If we want to be democratic, we must be so by ourselves. But the preconditions for democracy do not exist in Arab society, and cannot exist unless religion is re-examined in a new and accurate way, and unless religion becomes a personal and spiritual experience, which must be respected.
The trouble, he added, is that Arabs do not want to be free. Asked why Arabs glorify dictatorships, Adonis responded as follows:
I believe it has to do with the concept of "oneness", which is reflected - in practical or political terms - in the concept of the hero, the savior, or the leader. This concept offers an inner sense of security to people who are afraid of freedom. Some human beings are afraid of freedom.
Interviewer: Because it is synonymous with anarchy?
Adonis: No, because being free is a great burden. It is by no means easy.
Interviewer: You've got to have a boss ...
Adonis: When you are free, you have to face reality, the world in its entirety. You have to deal with the world's problems, with everything ...
Interviewer: With all the issues ...
Adonis: On the other hand, if we are slaves, we can be content and not have to deal with anything. Just as Allah solves all our problems, the dictator will solve all our problems.
The fact that the Arab world's most distinguished man of letters has rejected the premise upon which US policy is founded - that traditional Islam and democracy are compatible - one would have expected from American critics a better response than silence. This is particularly true given how large Adonis looms in the Arab world, which translates only a fifth as many books per year as does Greece, with a 30th of the population. Arab writers of global stature are a tiny number, and their importance is disproportionately great.
I do not read Arabic, and have no idea whether Adonis' poetry merits the Nobel Prize (on earlier occasions I argued that a novelist from a Muslim country, Turkey's Orhan Pamuk, well deserved the 2006 award). But I doubt that anyone in the West will make sense of the spiritual condition of the Arab world without Adonis' assistance, and not because what he has to say is difficult: on the contrary, he has the courage to say the obvious: the Arabs do not want freedom because their lives are intolerable. Islam not only suppresses the possibility of poetic expression, Adonis argues, but with it the capacity of the individual to have a personality. It is an astonishing, terrifying, and absolute indictment of his culture.
As a poet, Adonis does not describe the spiritual state of the Arabs, but rather evokes it existentially. The available literature on Islam consists mainly of a useless exchange of Koranic citations that show, depending on whether one is Karen Armstrong or Robert Spencer, that Islam is loving or hateful, tolerant or bigoted, peaceful or warlike, or whatever one cares to show. It is all so pointless and sophomoric; anyone can quote the Koran, or for that matter the Bible, to show whatever one wants. With Adonis one gains access to the inside of the Arab experience of modernity. It is a terrible and frightening one, not recommended for the faint-hearted, but indispensable to anyone who wishes to get beyond the pointless sloganeering of the pundits.
"The Arab poet," he writes, "speaks ever of freedom and democracy as illusions. I say 'illusion' because life itself comes before freedom and democracy. How can I possibly talk about life when I am prevented from being myself, when I am not living, neither within myself nor for myself? [3]
"To be means to mean something," Adonis explains. "Meanings are only appreciated through words. I speak, therefore I am; my existence thus and then assumes meaning. It is through this distance and hope that the Arab poet attempts to speak, ie, to write, to begin."
Life is not possible without meaning, and meaning does not exist outside of culture, especially for a people defined not by political circumstances or territory but by language, namely the Arabs. In his essay "Poetry and Apoetical Culture", Adonis makes the remarkable claim that the nature of Koranic revelation destroys the possibility of poetry, and with it the possibility of life. Before Islam, the Arabic language was rooted in poetry; after the advent of Islam, poetic language became impossible.
When this divine Revelation came to take the place of poetic inspiration, it claimed to be the sole source of knowledge, and banished poetry and poets from their kingdom. Poetry was no longer the word of truth, as the pre-Islamic poets had claimed it was. Nevertheless ... Islam did not suppress poetry as a form and mode of expression. Rather, it nullified poetry's role and cognitive mission, endowing it with a new function: to celebrate and preach the truth introduced by the Koranic Revelation. Islam thus deprived poetry of its earliest characteristics - intuition and the power of revelation and made it into a media tool.
... Poetry in Arab society has languished and withered precisely insofar as it has placed itself at the service of religiosity, proselytism and political and ideological commitments. [4]
Adonis adds:
In part, this explains the dominance in the Arab mentality of what I call "pastism". In the context of this inquiry, pastism means the refusal and fear of the unusual. [5]
This is true, Adonis explains, because the Koran offers a revelation that is final and certain, excluding the possibility of doubt:
The political-religious institution exercised its power as a faithful guardian of the Koranic Revelation. It possessed the absolute certitude that the Revelation spoke and wrote Man and the universe clearly, definitively and without error or imperfection. This certitude, in turn, demanded that the Muslim individual be formed around a faith in an absolute text, one which allowed no interrogation that might give rise on any doubt whatsoever. Under such conditions, alienation is inevitable; the skeptical individual no longer has the right to be a member of the society.
Because Islam - the last message sent by God to mankind - has placed the final seal on the Divine Word, successive words are incapable of bringing humankind anything new. A new message would imply that the Islamic message did not say everything, that it is imperfect. Therefore the human word must, on an emotional level, continually eulogize and celebrate that message; on an intellectual level, a fortiori it can only serve as an explication.
Poetry, the most elevated form of expression, will henceforth be valued only for its obviousness. [6]
With reference to literature rather than theology, Adonis states what amounts to the same thing that Pope Benedict XVI said last year about the finality of Islamic revelation. [7] Westerners will assimilate this view only with great effort, for poetry of devotion is among the most artful and most complex in the literature. One thinks of Dante in Italian, John Donne and John Milton in English, St John of the Cross in Spanish, Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock and Christian Fuerchtegott Gellert in German, and Yehuda Halevi in Hebrew.
To Christians and Jews, God is not a monarch who presents a final and indisputable truth, but a lover whose face is hidden - perhaps the most fruitful subject for poetry in human history. In the tradition of the biblical Song of Songs, St John conveys love for God in distinctly erotic terms. It is inconceivable for a Muslim poet to address Allah with the intimacy of a lover in the language of human passion. If poetry holds a mirror to our inner life, then the inner life of Westerners is profoundly different from that of Muslims, as different as the concepts of a God of Love who exalts the humble, and Allah who loves the strong and rewards the victorious. I have addressed that subject on a dozen other occasions.
One finds counterparts to the mystical-religious poetry of the Western mainstream only in the Sufi fringe of Islam, but never in its central current. Adonis praises in his study of Arab poetics [8] three medieval poets of the Islamic era whose originality of expression inspires him: Abu Nuwas, al-Niffari, and al-Ma'arri. Abu Nuwas "adopts the mask of the clown and turns drunkenness, which frees bodies from the control of logic and traditions, into a symbol of total liberation", Adonis observes. [9] Al-Niffari speaks the language of transcendental bliss; it "eliminates the gap between the human and the sacred, humanizing the sacred and sanctifying this thinking, poeticizing reed: the human being".
But Adonis' greatest fascination is for the 11th-century Nihilist Abul Ala al-Ma'arri.
If poetry was, according to the "method of the Arabs", "the art of words", al-Ma'arri makes it into the art of meaning ... Al-Ma'arri establishes nothing, at the level of either language or meaning. On the contrary, all that he proposes only casts doubt on both of these: for him they are simply two ways of expressing futility and nothingness. He creates his world - if "create" is the right word - with death as his starting point. Death is the one elixir, the redeemer. Life itself is only a death running its course. A person's clothes are his shroud; his house is his grave, his life his death, and his death his true life ... the truth is that the most evil of trees if the one which has borne human beings. Life is a sickness whose cure is death. [10]
We hear the term "culture of death" often enough, but do not normally have a window into a culture truly dominated by death. That is what Adonis, channeling Ma'arri, provides. The English term "despondent" does not begin to characterize the poems of Adonis; they do not express sadness about life so much as the belief that life itself is an impossibility. I cannot fairly represent the author's translated poems in this venue, but a few examples give some of the flavor of his oeuvre:
Each day is a child/ who dies behind a wall/ turning its face to the wall's corners. [11]
When I saw death on a road/ I saw my face in his. My thoughts resembled locomotives/ straining out of fog/ and into fog. [12]
"We must make gods or die./ We must kill gods or die,"/ whisper the lost stones in their lost kingdom. [13]
Strangled mute/ with syllables/ voiceless,/ with no language/ but the moaning of the earth,/ my song discovers death/ in the sick joy/ of everything that is/ for anyone who listens./ Refusal is my melody./ Words are my life/ and life is my disease.
Readers may peruse Adonis' work for themselves to determine whether I am presenting only its dark side; in fact, it only has a dark side. Misery, self-pity and longing for death are the most common themes in Adonis' translated work, but rage figures as well, particularly when he writes of the United States. One of his longest and most frequently cited poems is titled "The Funeral [sometimes The Grave] of New York", and calls it (among many other unpleasant things) "a city on four legs/ heading for murder/ while the drowned already moan/ in the distance".
When Adonis wrote this poem in 1971, he wanted to see the city destroyed, and appealed to the poor people of Harlem, "You shall erase New York,/ you shall take it by storm/ and blow it like a leaf away."
In fairness to Adonis, he rather liked Walt Whitman, along with many other Western modernists (especially Stephane Mallarme and Charles Baudelaire) who, he concedes, helped him understand Arab medieval poetry to begin with. [14] Rhetorically, Adonis sounds a bit like a terrorist, but he harbors no such sentiments. Although he is a fierce anti-Zionist, he has met with Israeli poets and favors some kind of dialogue with Israel.
But as the bard of the Arabs, or at least the closest thing the Arabs currently have to a bard, he helps explain the remarkable willingness of Arabs to kill themselves to inflict harm on their enemies. Caught between a stifling traditional past and a threatening and unwished-for modernity, the Arabs in Adonis' judgment cannot properly form a personality and are susceptible to nihilism, just as the poems of al-Ma'arri evoked it during the 11th century, and Adonis' poems evoke it today.
The "hell of daily life", the Arabs' incapacity to digest the devil's sourdough, instills a wish for death that expresses itself in the horrible events we see in the news daily. Adonis' warning has become an epitaph for a tomb that is prepared, if not yet occupied: the Arabs are extinct.
Notes
1. The Middle East Media Research Institute.
2. For example, The Pages of Day and Night (translated by Samuel Hazo), The Marlboro Press 1994; and The Blood of Adonis, University of Pittsburgh Press 1971. Additional translations are in progress.
3. The Pages of Day and Night, Introduction, p 15.
4. Op cit, pp 101-102.
5. Loc cit.
6. Ibid, pp 102-103.
7. See When even the pope has to whisper, Asia Times Online, January 10, 2006.
8. An Introduction to Arab Poetics (translated by Catherine Cobham), Saqi Books: London 1990.
9. Poetics, p 60.
10. Op cit, p 65.
11. From "The Past", in The Pages of Day and Night.
12. Op cit, p 21.
13. Op cit, p 26.
14. Poetics, pp 80-81.
Source
Gilad Shalit—A Complex Problem
An Arab publicist says that the Arab world is enviously watching Israel’s determination to return Gilad Shalit safely. It contrasts with the contempt for Arab prisoners’ lives and shows up the contempt for human life in Arab society
Nezar Jaff (5/4/2007)
The author is editor of Payama-Kurd, a Kurdish cultural magazine published in Germany.
The item was published on the Elaph website (April 18 2007).
The story of captured Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, still resonates and captures people’s attention. What is most interesting is the perspective of the Arab media, whose coverage of the story gives it a wider, more profound dimension and shows something far larger, more important, and more sensitive than meets the eye.
A Hero With Backup
Shalit, who the Palestinians are using for a bargaining chip, has in fact become a hero in every sense. That is because of how his story is treated in the Arab media. The media have made Israel a shining example of a powerful country that has not caved to the traditional methods used against it, while the use of these methods shows the failure of the Arab regimes to deal with current needs.
Though the plight of Gilad Shalit is a top priority for Israel, which is doing its utmost to safeguard his life and rescue him from his enemies, it has not highlighted the problem and made as much of it as the Arab satellite channels through their focus on the simple question “Why doesn’t the world show as much interest in the Palestinian prisoners as it does in Gilad Shalit?” But the satellite stations haven’t tried to answer this question. Instead, they try to drum up support in the Arab street with their ridiculous shallow handling of the question, whose important and sensitive issues are not aired.
Arab Prisoners’ Lives are Worthless
When he was in the army, Gilad Shalit carried his gun with a strong sense of his own worth and his consequence because he knew very well that he was not alone on the battlefield, that he was backed by the best army and intelligence service and excellent political and media forces. But, when we look across the fence at the Arab armies, especially the divided Palestinian forces, there are questions. In the Iran-Iraq War, when the Iranian army overran an Iraqi army position and captured its soldiers, the Iraqis told their artillery to “hammer the position”. In other words, the Iraqi forces were ordered to pound the positions captured by the Iranians with the Iraqi prisoners still in them. What makes you angry and frightened about all this is that many of the Iraqi soldiers who were lucky enough to get back from the inferno had been targeted by the Iraqi artillery all along.
What happened to the Egyptian and Syrian soldiers in the war with Israel, their humiliation, and being sent like lambs to the slaughter, without anyone to save them or protect them from their unknown fate, is a story wrapped in a black cloud. This was one of the many tragedies which smote those countries. And, the dozens and hundreds of Egyptian soldiers who died in the Sinai Desert in the Six-Day-War after losing their way in the desert proves the value of the Arab citizen living under regimes that only care about subjugating their citizens to their will and blocking their ears to the citizens’ demands and rights, and even using artillery fire against them if they dare openly stand up for their rights like the city of Homs in Syria, when the Arab regimes had to silence them.
If we look at the Palestinian forces who belong to the imaginary and degenerate army, we see the value of a Palestinian fighter is less than the bullets in the gun he carries and that if he is captured “the right solutions will be found”.
Look at how the Israeli government and all its apparatus is dealing with the capture of Gilad Shalit. The humanity they show will inspire every Israeli soldier who knows that if anything happens to him, he will be treated like a hero, like Shalit, and released for a herd of Palestinian prisoners who will go back to the slaughterhouse and imaginary army which so far hasn’t been able to rid itself of the cancer of divided loyalties.
Source
English translation
Nezar Jaff (5/4/2007)
The author is editor of Payama-Kurd, a Kurdish cultural magazine published in Germany.
The item was published on the Elaph website (April 18 2007).
The story of captured Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, still resonates and captures people’s attention. What is most interesting is the perspective of the Arab media, whose coverage of the story gives it a wider, more profound dimension and shows something far larger, more important, and more sensitive than meets the eye.
A Hero With Backup
Shalit, who the Palestinians are using for a bargaining chip, has in fact become a hero in every sense. That is because of how his story is treated in the Arab media. The media have made Israel a shining example of a powerful country that has not caved to the traditional methods used against it, while the use of these methods shows the failure of the Arab regimes to deal with current needs.
Though the plight of Gilad Shalit is a top priority for Israel, which is doing its utmost to safeguard his life and rescue him from his enemies, it has not highlighted the problem and made as much of it as the Arab satellite channels through their focus on the simple question “Why doesn’t the world show as much interest in the Palestinian prisoners as it does in Gilad Shalit?” But the satellite stations haven’t tried to answer this question. Instead, they try to drum up support in the Arab street with their ridiculous shallow handling of the question, whose important and sensitive issues are not aired.
Arab Prisoners’ Lives are Worthless
When he was in the army, Gilad Shalit carried his gun with a strong sense of his own worth and his consequence because he knew very well that he was not alone on the battlefield, that he was backed by the best army and intelligence service and excellent political and media forces. But, when we look across the fence at the Arab armies, especially the divided Palestinian forces, there are questions. In the Iran-Iraq War, when the Iranian army overran an Iraqi army position and captured its soldiers, the Iraqis told their artillery to “hammer the position”. In other words, the Iraqi forces were ordered to pound the positions captured by the Iranians with the Iraqi prisoners still in them. What makes you angry and frightened about all this is that many of the Iraqi soldiers who were lucky enough to get back from the inferno had been targeted by the Iraqi artillery all along.
What happened to the Egyptian and Syrian soldiers in the war with Israel, their humiliation, and being sent like lambs to the slaughter, without anyone to save them or protect them from their unknown fate, is a story wrapped in a black cloud. This was one of the many tragedies which smote those countries. And, the dozens and hundreds of Egyptian soldiers who died in the Sinai Desert in the Six-Day-War after losing their way in the desert proves the value of the Arab citizen living under regimes that only care about subjugating their citizens to their will and blocking their ears to the citizens’ demands and rights, and even using artillery fire against them if they dare openly stand up for their rights like the city of Homs in Syria, when the Arab regimes had to silence them.
If we look at the Palestinian forces who belong to the imaginary and degenerate army, we see the value of a Palestinian fighter is less than the bullets in the gun he carries and that if he is captured “the right solutions will be found”.
Look at how the Israeli government and all its apparatus is dealing with the capture of Gilad Shalit. The humanity they show will inspire every Israeli soldier who knows that if anything happens to him, he will be treated like a hero, like Shalit, and released for a herd of Palestinian prisoners who will go back to the slaughterhouse and imaginary army which so far hasn’t been able to rid itself of the cancer of divided loyalties.
Source
English translation
Hezbollah: Rockets fired into Israel directed by Iran
JERUSALEM – All of Hezbollah's policies and activities are coordinated with the leadership of Iran, including the firing of rockets into Israeli population centers for which direct Iranian approval is required, said a senior Hezbollah official in a rare admission.
"Even when it comes to firing rockets on Israeli civilians, when they [Israel] bombed the civilians on our side, even that decision requires an in-principle permission from [the ruling jurisprudent]," said Sheikh Naim Qassem, the deputy chief of Hezbollah, in an Arabic language interview translated yesterday by the Information and Terrorism Center at Israel's Center for Special Studies.
According to the Center, "the ruling jurisprudent," or "al-wali al-faqih" in Arabic, is the title of Supreme Iranian Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
In the interview, given last month to the Al-Kawthar, Iranian Arabic-language TV channel, Qassem says Khamenei's authority is crucial for all Hezbollah operations:
"Hezbollah relied and relies still in its Islamic religious position, which has to do with its activity in general and its jihadist activity in particular, on the decision of (Khamenei). The ruling jurisprudent is the one who allows and the one who prohibits."
He said Khamenei approves acts [of] suicide terror.
"We ask, receive answers, and then apply [them]. This is even true for acts of suicide for the sake of Allah – no one may kill himself without a jurisprudent permission (from Khamenei)."
Source
"Even when it comes to firing rockets on Israeli civilians, when they [Israel] bombed the civilians on our side, even that decision requires an in-principle permission from [the ruling jurisprudent]," said Sheikh Naim Qassem, the deputy chief of Hezbollah, in an Arabic language interview translated yesterday by the Information and Terrorism Center at Israel's Center for Special Studies.
According to the Center, "the ruling jurisprudent," or "al-wali al-faqih" in Arabic, is the title of Supreme Iranian Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
In the interview, given last month to the Al-Kawthar, Iranian Arabic-language TV channel, Qassem says Khamenei's authority is crucial for all Hezbollah operations:
"Hezbollah relied and relies still in its Islamic religious position, which has to do with its activity in general and its jihadist activity in particular, on the decision of (Khamenei). The ruling jurisprudent is the one who allows and the one who prohibits."
He said Khamenei approves acts [of] suicide terror.
"We ask, receive answers, and then apply [them]. This is even true for acts of suicide for the sake of Allah – no one may kill himself without a jurisprudent permission (from Khamenei)."
Source
Saturday, May 5, 2007
Tuesday, May 1, 2007
Declare mohammed the superman of the world or we bomb you
Bangladesh railway blasts signed 'al Qaeda'
May 1, 2007
DHAKA, Bangladesh (Reuters) -- Three simultaneous bomb blasts rocked separate railway terminals in Bangladesh on Tuesday, with militant slogans claiming to be from al Qaeda found at two of the sites.
One man was hurt in the blasts, which triggered panic among commuters, who evacuated railway terminals.
Thin metal sheets scribbled with slogans were found at the bomb sites in Dhaka's Kamalapur and Sylhet terminals. The third blast was in the railway terminal of the southeastern city of Chittagong.
"... If Hazrat (Prophet) Mohammad is not declared the superman of the world by May 10, all non-governmental organizations will be blown up," the slogans on the metal sheets read in the Bengali language. They were signed "the al Qaeda network" in English.
"The bombs were kept in cotton sacks, along with the metal sheets. They exploded before anyone detected them," said police Inspector Abu Zafar Alam at Kamalapur, Bangladesh's biggest railway terminal.
"We are puzzled over the motives (of those who planted the bombs). But they dared to take the risk," said another police officer.
No one has been arrested, nor could police immediately confirm any al Qaeda link to the blasts.
Police said Munir Hossain, a rickshaw-puller, was injured at the Chittagong terminal when he tried to open one of the sacks before it exploded.
Outlawed Islamist groups
The outlawed Islamist group, Jamaat-ul-Mujahedeen, carried out a series of bomb blasts across Bangladesh on August 17, 2005, killing three people and injuring more than 100.
In more attacks through the rest of 2005, the Jamaat-ul-Mujahedeen and another outlawed group, Jagrata Muslim Janata Bangladesh, killed nearly 30 more people and wounded 150, including judges, lawyers, police and officials.
Six leaders from the two groups were executed on March 30 for their role in the blasts.
Many commuters fled the terminals, too scared to board trains.
"I am afraid to take on the journey. There may be more bombs around," said Didarul Alam, a bank official waiting to board a train to Chittagong. "They have spoiled my holiday."
Many Bangladeshis were traveling out of Dhaka taking advantage of a two-day public holiday for May Day and a Buddhist religious festival on Wednesday.
Security has been tightened across the country, police said.
Intelligence groups last month alerted the government that Islamist militants were regrouping after the execution of the militant leaders.
"This (Tuesday's blasts) proved they are still active and dared to show their teeth," said one security official who asked not to be named.
The army-backed interim government has imposed a state of emergency in January following deadly political violence that forced the authorities to suspend a scheduled national election.
Tuesday's blasts occurred almost simultaneously around 7:30 a.m. (0130 GMT), police said.
Source
May 1, 2007
DHAKA, Bangladesh (Reuters) -- Three simultaneous bomb blasts rocked separate railway terminals in Bangladesh on Tuesday, with militant slogans claiming to be from al Qaeda found at two of the sites.
One man was hurt in the blasts, which triggered panic among commuters, who evacuated railway terminals.
Thin metal sheets scribbled with slogans were found at the bomb sites in Dhaka's Kamalapur and Sylhet terminals. The third blast was in the railway terminal of the southeastern city of Chittagong.
"... If Hazrat (Prophet) Mohammad is not declared the superman of the world by May 10, all non-governmental organizations will be blown up," the slogans on the metal sheets read in the Bengali language. They were signed "the al Qaeda network" in English.
"The bombs were kept in cotton sacks, along with the metal sheets. They exploded before anyone detected them," said police Inspector Abu Zafar Alam at Kamalapur, Bangladesh's biggest railway terminal.
"We are puzzled over the motives (of those who planted the bombs). But they dared to take the risk," said another police officer.
No one has been arrested, nor could police immediately confirm any al Qaeda link to the blasts.
Police said Munir Hossain, a rickshaw-puller, was injured at the Chittagong terminal when he tried to open one of the sacks before it exploded.
Outlawed Islamist groups
The outlawed Islamist group, Jamaat-ul-Mujahedeen, carried out a series of bomb blasts across Bangladesh on August 17, 2005, killing three people and injuring more than 100.
In more attacks through the rest of 2005, the Jamaat-ul-Mujahedeen and another outlawed group, Jagrata Muslim Janata Bangladesh, killed nearly 30 more people and wounded 150, including judges, lawyers, police and officials.
Six leaders from the two groups were executed on March 30 for their role in the blasts.
Many commuters fled the terminals, too scared to board trains.
"I am afraid to take on the journey. There may be more bombs around," said Didarul Alam, a bank official waiting to board a train to Chittagong. "They have spoiled my holiday."
Many Bangladeshis were traveling out of Dhaka taking advantage of a two-day public holiday for May Day and a Buddhist religious festival on Wednesday.
Security has been tightened across the country, police said.
Intelligence groups last month alerted the government that Islamist militants were regrouping after the execution of the militant leaders.
"This (Tuesday's blasts) proved they are still active and dared to show their teeth," said one security official who asked not to be named.
The army-backed interim government has imposed a state of emergency in January following deadly political violence that forced the authorities to suspend a scheduled national election.
Tuesday's blasts occurred almost simultaneously around 7:30 a.m. (0130 GMT), police said.
Source
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