Category Archives: FTAC – From The Awesome Conversation
If — in my own head — I hit a universal note just about right in Facebook or other conversation, I may simply wrench it from context and publish it here in this category as a mix of observation and, I hope, a writer’s wisdom.
From this I shall probably hear what yeshiva students have to say about the famous apple.
I have never sat in a yeshiva — a school for the study of Torah — and been part of or listened to the arguments over every passage, line, and word.
Moreover, having lived thus far an American life, I’ve missed also the rich literature that has accompanied my religion, apparently, through the ages. Such as Hillel the Elder seems to have done his thinking before the Common Era and a thousand years before Maimonides played physician to the Kurdish General Saladin.
However, one might take a lesson not from the old text and figures varying in their historical placement and stature, but from what they lived and promoted in aggregate: a lively, long, and open argument about considerations involving others, nature, and God.
Such a conversation, whether between two debating partners over a book or a few books on a table or between a whole world diverse in experience, history, and lore, need never end and may be a part of the point of living as men and women: to know life well, take joy in it, and open the passage in time for others to live even better lives, more just, more in beauty, more with nature, ultimately more with God, the Divine, the Greater Spirit.
I don’t think evil, or what we call evil, was placed in the world for the convenience of the good to do good.
Evil — such as that in Syria today — may be part of the natural condition from which the good have arisen, reformed, and with every generation turned about and made smaller and, where possible, less virulent.
We have said since Exodus, “With each generation a little more freedom is won.”
But it has to be won.
I think Adam would have been poorer — less developed, less human, less conscious, less a man, frankly — had he never tasted that apple and experienced delight and life.
The emphasis may be placed on the blossoming of humanity, not so much on obedience, which God controlled in any case.
And for us mere humans, perhaps it is the conversation, the good and searching, compassionate, and caring quality of it, that is our purpose.
If or as one becomes serious about global cultural polyphony, the physical structure that drives that is the earth and the influence exerted by its geophysical challenges and features.
This is a thing so large, so pervasive, we don’t think about it too much, and yet, from what may be used for clothing and how designed to what may be eaten and how prepared, our surrounds are in everything we do.
The intellectual thing we don’t think about and yet have the greatest difficulty in understanding is the invention of our greatest cultural technology: language. We create it, live suspended in it, are channeled by it in many ways, but it having stability for many good reasons (including the observation that it would not exist or function absent of some stability), we wrestle with it even as it evolves (or I would be typing this in Latin).
For both ethnic and personal self-concept, I would regard land and language _and their legacies_ as fundamental.
The conversation had to do with Indus Valley Civilization and outlooks and tensions involving ethnic, national, and regional self-concept.
Note: if any should like books cited in reference to link directly to Amazon in the United States, do tell. I thought it more universal to link to related reviews and Wikipedia entries.
Also, I’m preparing for this blog a page (in WordPress terms) for my library, which is still of personal size but growing.
Addendum
Tacked on to the same conversation:
A conversation that travels around the world may be about many discovered, renewed, and strengthened alignments and alliances. It is a conversation that dictators and those of similar mien and ambition must fear because it is out of their control and may go against them. One cannot keep apart people who have a deep affinity between them; however,a less considerate and strident charismatic and social cabal can and will produce ruin in a hurry, and in history, never more so than today. Those so much better grounded in their humanity needs must rise to their occasion.
The Awesome Conversation promotes a kind of response about which I am certain and that I copy-and-paste over here, where there is so much less chit-chat. Nonetheless, I regard each of these as a little gem having, potentially, uncertain but positive effects as regards stimulus for insight and for peace.
The scholarly will recognize something akin to the first three hours of grad school — not exactly a contribution to the field . . . perhaps more of a transposition from efforts in social science proper toward efficacy in more open political and social environments having by necessity interest in basic research and theory.
Attitudes (about or toward anything and anyone) may have structure reducible to noun : beliefs x affect (+/- emotion). So a “bixl”, which I believe related to catching colds, might be a bad thing (even though no such noun exists). 🙂 This way of looking over attitudes becomes more interesting, of course, when assorted kafir, infidels, Buddhists, Christians, Hindus, Jews, and Muslims become the focus of interest — i.e., how does one feel about _________ (fill in the blank).
While chewing on that, it may help to entertain another thought: across our gregarious species, the presence of language and some irreducible aspects and components associated with it (like the existence of the names of things) may be predictable, but from anthropological and related linguistic perspectives, the invention and evolution of languages — and all they endorse or inhibit — may be quite wild.
The whole world is not English.
Thank God.
But it — God, nature, and mankind — may have a needful and useful investment in differentiation and co-evolution. Our present inability to more effectively deal with cross-cultural issues in content of mind — and recognize them as such — may lead to a lot of confusion and tragedy.
On top of that: I don’t believe that differences in religious outlook are the sole cause or sufficient cause for conflicts in the name of religion. I think that for some the cloak of an idea may be made to serve as shield and sword enabling darker designs and impulses.
A part of the modern person’s responsibility may be to be careful of the earth and her children and to see to it that those “darker forces” become more contained across time as other avenues and challenges open up on the horizon.
Neither countries or cultures can guaranty the happiness of their people: human lives and particularly the lives of minds in their internal narratives are too complex for that; however, fairness, justice, and respect in how we deal with one another are matters that involve the expression of a place – locality, state, nation, and region — through the collection of laws and customs that create the social environment in which their constituents will experience their lives.
With that in mind, I felt in this passage — and do feel so — that if one word could change the world most beset by conflict, that word would be “integrity”.
Most, if not all, of the conflicts extant in Muslim-majority states revolve around disputes involving integrity. In turn, so I believe, that involves two sides of language-based and conveyed cognitive behavior that may be distilled down to choosing to use (for a while) a clinical, empirical truth — measurable, observed, verifiable — and avoiding the traps set by potential aggrandizement, flattery, and romance.
My first impression of Qadri is that he has on one hand attempted to dull the zealot’s edge as defined by the propensity for violence (2010) and this year has approached government demanding an end to, essentially, nepotism and patronage. At the same time, he has a role as a knight errant of Islam, and that in his interpretation may have yet in it vestiges of the medieval.
The want of integrity in governance — of honest appraisal and measurement in states of affairs; of open public investigations involving corruption and crime — seems to me a most fundamental and legitimate want, and Qadri and his followers are right to demand it — or by marching and making news, bringing this aspect of Pakistan’s predicament to perhaps a more global forum.
We sometimes joke in the west that “democracies elect the governments they deserve” — a wry observation and perhaps today a little painful for Pakistan, but these are new days too, and if you’re here in the “social network” — and it may be regarded as a miracle that I’m here, considering the confluence of personal, cultural, political, and technology variables involved — some may have a little more on which to chew with the idea of “integrity” as a key to getting and putting things right.
The Facebook poster wrote on one of the Meligy’s support sites: “AHMED got released . . . .”
By whom?
From where?
My source says Meligy has no Internet access but his phone has been on . . . .
I don’t like this story.
Of course, I’m happy to hear of a fellow writer’s renewed presence in the world, but this is also signal of the shortcomings of the remote blogger’s “second row seat to history” in journalism: it is a good position from which to provide commentary.
I’ve started work on new pages for the library within which I work — I’m going to share my catalog — and for the vocabulary, a fair part of it newly minted, with which I work.
Among the latter such and out of the cycle of assumed victimization –> aggression –> fear possessed by the target –> expressed criticism (and warnings about the true aggressor) –> aggressor self-defense of image (by the time one hits the scrawls having to do with “anti-‘Islamophobia'”, the conversation has gotten quite convoluted) comes an effect characterized by the questions it generates: what is it (e.g. blowing up innocents in suicide bombings)? How big is it? Where is it coming from? What is its distribution? How dangerous is it? How potent? How does it work? In response to all of the above, I’ve coined a use for an old term that has some overtones for curtains that shine and mirage that appear and disappear on the horizon: “shimmer”.
From The Awesome Conversation (i.e., my chatyping online):
The term I use is “shimmer”. Whatever it is looms large with a 9/11 or Mumbai . . . or an Hamas or Hezbollah . . . but there are other facets that become more quietly apparent or speak to the “better angels of our nature.” Anti-Semitism is real, and the denial of it, along with Holocaust Denial and such, underscores it. Ours is a dynamic and fast moving world in which older events occupy their space in history (in 12th Century Hungary, for example, laws promulgated to discriminate against Jews, including with the wearing of arm patches, were once signed equally applied to Muslims) and past is not prologue. Comparing casualty numbers, especially historical ones but also ones coming out of asymmetrical war does not compare morals or values involved.
Those who are not Muslim — and those who are — must nonetheless deal with violence linked to or cloaked by Islamic motivations or Islamist interpretations of Islam, and such acts — IEDs, car bombs, suicide bombs, kidnappings, etc. — seem to go hardest on Muslim communities from Afghanistan to Somalia. In his speech yesterday, Bashar Al-Assad embraced Iran and pointed his finger at Al Qaeda, KSA, and the United States as the source of his woes, and yet he had his army, under the command of his brother, Maher, unleash its fury indiscriminately against whole neighborhood and noncombatants, and while AQ is in Syria today, so are numerous other bands.
The shared faith in God and in one another moves some forces toward the margins, but those forces, whether they loom large or small, smile with friendliness at one moment and plot murder in private in the next, seem to have a presence in the world.
“Shimmer” responds also to the magical: now you see it . . . and now you don’t.
In addition to the above-named terrorist groups, each of which has an acknowledged track record, there are other entities that would seem to have broad interests in governance and human services while maintaining a permissive to encouraging view of the imposition and implementation of sharia law — i.e., by their interpretation — by all means available.
Organization by organization, name by name, readers in the United States have for interest a few organizations associated with and representing Islam that from the western perspective send up caution flags at least. This is not about choosing sides or preferring one set of critics to another but rather about gathering data enough — and data that can be tested for reliability — to form an accurate impression of states of affairs.
For independent look-up, one may suggest the following acronyms or nouns:
The Jamaat’s objectives is establishment of a Islamic state, governed by Sharia law. The JI opposes Western Ideologies such as capitalism, socialism and secularism, and practices such as bank interest and liberalist social mores but party advocates democracy as integral part of Islamic political ideals.
One may hope with both capitalism and socialism ruled out that the material needs of humans within a civil society may still be addressed. Somehow.
In whatever strident dogma or ideology it may be couched, the denial of the humanity of humanity — the loss of concern for the fate of others, the licensing of cruelty — never ends well however autocrats and their throngs may swell themselves for a while in false pride and grandiose ambitions.
Be that as it may, this “thing” that doesn’t exist but has a way of informing and motivating terrorism and war at every level, and today every day somewhere and in some way, “shimmers” at the edge of the consciousness of the good.
No Muslim who may be judged as not Muslim enough by any self-appointed “Takfiri” is safe from it, and the unbeliever, the infidel, the Christian and the Jew and everyone else provides an ample sea for those who have adopted or constructed for themselves this way of swimming in blood and trying to hide it.
Islamic Humanist, Islamic Liberalism, a less political Islam (see, for example, the American Islamic Forum on Democracy) may not be a given takfiri’s idea of Islam, but such drifts may prove more an Islam for the world and with the world.
“Sir” may be a bit much for an old literary bum, LX — “Jim” is fine (although the Facebook call-out helps as I have a lot of traffic in a day) — but I would suggest worrying not at all about the interests of the United States or anyone else but place first a Pakistani review of certain values, which I will list, in light of the Pakistani experience to date and the perception of its present state of affairs:
License and lying corrode a body politic; neglect comes always with a price; too much business behind curtains inspires suspicion and division.
Pakistan is its own New World.
However the language suggested may work within you and within the primary languages of the region . . . let it.
We’re a gregarious species across the planet and, for the better part of time in most places, peaceful. Where we’re not, it’s for greed, sometimes on the part of the powerful (e.g., Columbia), sometimes not (e.g., Mexico), or ambition that perhaps pursues too great an aggrandizement (e.g., Iraq’s Saddam).
If the overarching values informing the state’s moral compass hold, then a lot of problems may resolve within (title of a book) “the idea of Pakistan” as constitutionally chartered and as part of an evolving earthbound and globalizing human system.
This confrontation with thought and power reminds me of an old saying: “You can never win an argument with y our father.” One may, however, some day tell him to piss off. Such table talk is about power, and whatever proposition was offered to draw a fight, it was put there for kicking around and, perhaps, baiting the more gentle soul for a satisfying kicking around too, altogether a verbal manner and scheme expressive of an aggressive, cruel, damaged, and sadistic temperament.
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