TELLING WRONG FROM RIGHT
MORAL IMAGES IN A MUSLIM PRAYER BOOK
by
Robert L. Canfield
Department of Anthropology
Washington University in St. Louis
For the Saturday Seminar Series on
“Telling Right from Wrong: Morality and Literature”
Sponsored by University College
Washington University in St. Louis
Shortly after agreeing to give this lecture I came
upon a book with almost the same title as our series: Telling Right from
_______ _____ ____
Wrong: What Is Moral, What is Immoral, and What Is Neither One
______ ____ __ ______ ____ __ ________ ___ ____ __ _______ ___
Nor the Other.
___ ___ _____
The book had a grand aim–to rectify moral confusion in the world–but
its author fell short of it himself; for when submitting it
for consideration to the publisher he attached a forged letter
of recommendation.
In the published edition he describes the extreme circumstances
that led him to commit such a fraud and
the embarrassment that its discovery caused him.
It seems that even philosophers with world-redeeming moral
insights can
have as much trouble living up to their ideals as the rest
of us.
That ought to be no surprise, of course;
the attempt to maintain personal
rectitude in a morally problematic world
is presumably common among people everywhere.
But that attempt is not always obvious in other cultures, for
the ways it is expressed
vary widely around the world.
The moral images of people in other cultures
need to be interpreted if
their motives
and feelings are to be known.
The private devotional notebook to be examined
here demonstrates the problem,
for its moral concerns
are expressed in a strange, forbidding, even shocking imagery;
but once interpreted
it exposes
a struggle for moral rectitude and a desire for personal significance
that resembles our own.
That such a quest motivates this symbolism might be expected of a
devotional notebook. What may come as a surprise is how
relevant the text is–even though over a century old–toÔ h) 0*0*0*° ° ÔŒvital problems in our contemporary world.
1. The Manuscript and Its Author
__ ___ __________ ___ ___ ______
The book was purchased in an antique
shop in Ghazni, Afghanistan, by Charles and Virginia Prewitt in
the early 1960s.
An antique dealer had drawn it from the rafters of
his shop and shown it to them furtively, to keep
friends and colleagues
nearby from seeing him offer it to
foreigners. The book was wrapped in a scarf, as
sacred books normally are by the Afghans, this one in green silk.
Its thick leather covers
were embossed front and back with calligraphy and floral
designs. Inside there were 271 pages (3 1/2″ x 6″) of text,
on each of which were seven carefully calligraphed lines within a
border consisting of black, blue, tan and green lines. The first page of each “chapter” in the book was decorated with floral designs in multiple colors and at odd points some
words and diacritical marks were
emphasized in red.
Except for a few notations by another hand on the inside back
cover, there were no other marks in the book: no notes and no
commentary–Afghans do not make notes in sacred books.
But the manuscript bore the marks of much usage: pages
were well fingered
(mainly in the upper right hand corner) and
worn at the edges.
Coming to us like a note in a bottle, with scarcely a trace
of its source, the manuscript nonetheless betrays something of
what the transcriber was
like. He was an able calligrapher; and his care in
calligraphy and floral decoration indicate
his veneration for this material.
To him, this was a sacred text. Also, someone–presumably the
copyist, but very likely also other people after him,
perhaps including the antique dealer himself–had
handled and no doubt read this
text numerous times.
Something about the text drew people to it:
it was not merely a
religious text kept with pious intentions or for public display, but
one well used and assiduously studied. In that sense
this carefully traced and well-fingered text
manifests a personal quest.
C. S. Lewis^h1^s
once distinguished between “using” and
“receiving” a book, as a way of identifying great literature.
Most people, he said, “use” a book;
they read it to find out what
it says, and having found out, put it down. But there are some
people who turn back to a book to re-read it.
Having read it already and being well aware of its contents,
they nevertheless
become engrossed in it all over again.
This, says Lewis, is a different
kind of reading from the “use” people
commonly make of books.
In this case something about a situation or character
has captured their
imagination, presumably because it represents
something
personally significant to them, something in their own
experience and circumstance.
They re-read in order to reflect on their own lives.
A book
in such a case is not so much a tool for their use as a message
for them to hear, a revelation
for them to receive. The manuscript we have
come upon has been for the calligrapher and others
a source of personal revelation,
personal nourishment and self-discovery. What
it has “said” to them, how it said it,
and why its message so
engrossed them, are things we must discover.
Beyond the physical form of the book there is little
internal evidence of what the transcriber was like. At
the very end of the text, on the last page, is a final
inscription: “Monday evening, 16 Dhul-Hujja, 1264. The copyist
is Yaqub-i Kamtari.” That date was the evening of November 13, 1848,
presumably the date on which the copying was completed.^h2^s
The copyist’s name, as given, means “Yaqub [Jacob] the
Less,” or “Yaqub the Small[er],” perhaps “Yaqub, Jr.”
The picture that is conjured of Yaqub on the basis of these
sketchy, faded details is of someone living somewhere in the
eastern realms of Islam, presumably in Ghazni itself,
who completed the copying
out of this text in November, 1848.
Such is what we know of the man, except for the world he
lived in. It was a world in transition. Beset on every side by
non-Muslim powers, the world of Islam to which he belonged–and
which, as we shall soon see, thoroughly informed his life–was
undergoing some radical transformations. The most obvious of
these were losses in territory. In 1798, a half-century before
Yaqub completed his manuscript, the French had landed at
Alexandria and dazzled the Egyptians by their administrative
organization and their science and learning.
The Muslim sultanates of Java and Sumatra fell
to the Dutch in 1803 and
in 1812, the Ottomans lost control of
important territories in Bulgaria and the northern coasts of the
Black Sea.
By 1818 the lands of the once grand Moghals in India had fallen to the
British.
Even as Yaqub labored over his text
the Muslims of Central Asia were falling under the
sway of Russia, and the Persians were
making concessions to both the Russians and the British.
Afghanistan itself–assuming he lived there–had just
been in a war with the British, and Kabul was in fact in ruins.
Almost everywhere Islam was in retreat.
The retreat was generating
disorder and division among the Muslims themselves.
In the early part of Yaqub’s century
local Muslim groups had broken away from their Ottoman rulers.
various tribes and brigand groups–Afghans, Turkomen and
Turko-Persians–had overrun Safawid Iran and
Mughal India.
Wahabbi fanatics had rent Arabia asunder: trying to enforce a
stricter practice of Islamic rules and opposing
the veneration of saints and worship at tombs,
they had
destroyed the sacred tombs of Arabia, including even
Muhammad’s, and massacred Muslims in
Medina and Mecca.
Suppressed
in Arabia by the Ottomans in 1818, Wahabbi influences
inspired a holy
war against the Sikhs and British in India in the 1830s.
The frustration of Muslims would continue throughout Yaqub’s century.
Scarcely a decade after Yaqub had completed his
manuscript Muslims joined Hindus in the bloody Indian Mutiny
against the British. And
a generation later Muslims of Sudan would rise up
against the British and, under the leadership of a man
who called himself “the Mahdi,” “the Rightly Guided One,”
would form an expressly theocratic Islamic state.
But the radical opposition of Muslims
against European
influences in Yaqub’s century were atypical:
most Muslims were trying to figure out how to absorb
Western culture.
Even as Yaqub was calligraphing his devotional
notebook,
Muslims in Egypt, Persia,
Ottoman Turkey, and Volga Tatary were grafting
Western secular learning into their educational systems. In
India, the Persian language, which had been the medium
of Islamic letters, diplomacy and
administration, was being discarded, and English
was being introduced in its place.
In India, in fact, Muslims at the
Muhammedan Anglo-Oriental College
at Aligarh,
under the motto “The more worldly progress we make the more glory
Islam gains,”
would set the pace in integrating
Western thought into an Islamic world view.
Thus,
despite the resistance of certain elements, Muslims were in general
willing to acquire not only
Western technology but also Western social and political attitudes.
This was, after all, the ninteenth century, and the heady hopes
for a modernizing world
inspired not only Europeans but also
the progressive cadres of many nations of the world, including those
of the Middle East and South Asia.^h3^s
But this busy world of competing Islamic
visions–from those who would bring back the “original” Islamic
way of life to those who would join the progressive surge
of the Western world–appears
never to have touched Yaqub the Less.
The world he lived in was far from
the swirl
of cultural mixing, melding and culling
that was taking place elsewhere in the Muslim
world. He belonged to a tradition of Islamic thought
that had for seven centuries informed the life and
affairs of the vast body of Muslim peoples across Asia.
Indeed, Ghazni itself, where Yaqub’s notebook was sold and
where Yaqub
may have lived, was once,
much earlier, a center of medieval Islamic learning,
where some of the great works were written that
influenced the world of ideas in which Yaqub lived.
That was in the eleventh century.
Enriched by the flow of
commerce between India and Central Asia,
Ghazni was a prosperous city, with
the usual labyrinthine streets and alleys, walled
gardens, markets, and mosques; but as wealth flowed in from raiding
and trading,
grand monuments to conquests
in India and Iran were added, as well as a citadel,
elephant stables,
and a palace; also, above all, a great Mosque, immodestly
dubbed “The Bride of Heaven,” built
by artisans imported from India, to which was adjoined a
madrasa,
_______
a Muslim school of higher education,
burgeoning with books
filched from the libraries of Ray and Isfahan. And to
illumine this bustling city of cosmopolitan merchants and zealous
Islamic knights the Ghaznawid ruler, Sultan Mahmud, courted–some
have said kidnapped–the most eminent men
of learning in the eastern Caliphate:
Al-Biruni, the mathematician- philosopher- astronomer-
sanscritist, came from Khwarizm (or perhaps Sindh?);
Unsuri, the poet and
revered master of reputedly 400 poets and learned men, came from
Balkh; and from Khurasan,
for a time at least, came Firdowsi, whose epic poem,
Shahnama, “The Book of Kings”, has for generations captured
________
the imagination of Persian speaking peoples.
(Avecinna, the
physician and theologian, whom Mahmud considered the best prize,
escaped his grip by fleeing to Khwarizm and, later, to Isfahan.)
And besides the prominent learned men brought into the city
there were others who were born
and raised there, notably,
Ali ibn Usman Hujwiri, the philosopher and author of the
first treatise on Sufism in the Persian language, and
Abdul Majid Majdud Sana’i,
the first great Persian Sufi poet,
whose images of hell
anticipated Dante.
Ghazni did not last long as a cultural center–it
was sacked and burned in 1150, a deed
for which its perpetrator proudly called himself, “The World
Burner”–and other great cities rose in its place.
But in the period roughly from the time of Ghazni’s rise
until as late as the nineteenth century
the eastern lands of Islam were largely informed, or at least
stimulated by, the great thinkers of Persian Islam,
not only those of Ghazni in its heyday
but also many others who lived and wrote
in the eastern Muslim world.
Their writings were the literary expression of a rich culture
that nourished the literate public
in a vast region from the Adriatic Sea to Indonesia.
A man from Bokhara in the nineteenth century, for instance,
reported that in his youth his favorite Persian poets
were Saadi and Hafiz
(from Shiraz), Sa’ib (from Isfahan), Nawai (from Herat),
Fuzuli (from Ottoman Turkey), and Bedil (from India).^h4^s
It was a culture that was essentially
Persian and Islamic: Persian was the language
of diplomacy as well as letters, Arabic the language of
law and jurisprudence, Turkish the language
of the military, and other languages were sometimes used by local
communities.
The preeminent medium of literary communication was poetry.
In this region Muslims made Persian poetry
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the central icon of their culture, the focus of emotion in which
every speaker of Persian felt he or she could see something essential
of himself or herself . … [Even the] illiterate
population … know by heart lines of Hafez and Saadi and
Mowlana Jalal ad-Din Rumi and … use them in their speech
the way speakers of other languages use proverbs. …
Turks of Anatolia and of Central Asia,
the Muslims of India and … Malaysia and Indonesia,
turned to Persian models when they created literature
in their own languages. This vast area, from Turkey to Indonesia …
received an Islamic cultural mode
with a distinctly Persian flavor …^h5^s
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Today, the largest Muslim nations of the world–Indonesia
(with 119 million Muslims), India (with 82 million),
Pakistan (with 81 Million), Bangladesh (with 77 million), the
Soviet Union (with 47 million), Turkey (with 45 million), and Iran
(with 40 million)–are
heirs of that medieval Perso-Islamic culture.
It was the culture to which Yaqub belonged–or so
we surmise from
his apparent location and his linguistic skill, for his Persian
was flawless and his Arabic
slightly defective (he sometimes misused the article).
Thus, his notebook, even though personal and as far as I know
unique, is
a particular expression of a
culture that once was the idiom of learning and international
affairs in a vast region in Asia
and even now is the idiom of social discourse among many of
the rural and isolated peoples of Iran, Afghanistan and Soviet
Central Asia.^h6^s
2. The Text
__ ___ ____
As already indicated, the book is written in both Arabic and
Persian. It begins with an invocation on Muhammad in Arabic,
followed by eleven pairs of texts,
the first of each pair in Persian and the second in Arabic. The
final page is written in Persian, where the copyist’s name and
completion date are given. The book appears to be–as already
implied in my reference to Yaqub as the “copyist”–a collection
of texts authored by someone else, presumably in a much earlier
time. How Yaqub came by them we can only surmise, but his
notation of the date at the end of the book suggests that for him
it was a single piece; the work of assembling and editing, was
probably done by someone else, perhaps at a much earlier time.
Although this particular assemblage
of texts is, as far as I know, quite unkown to scholars, it
is like many such collections sought out and preserved by pious Muslims
all over the Muslim world. The practice of collecting sacred
Islamic materials is as old as Islam.
It began soon
after Muhammad’s death, when the preservation of information about
him became a vital concern of the Muslim
community. Pious scholars collected from his
associates details about his life and habits
that could guide them in behavior and worship, and after their deaths
their descendants or disciples
were sought out for such information.
Eventually the personal collections
of sacred information of all kinds gleaned from Islamic scholars in
diverse places were much prized:
one renown
authority of information about Muhammad, when
arriving at Baghdad from Khurasan in the eleventh century,
was met and escorted into the city by a huge
crowd.^h7^s
It became usual
for pious students to travel far and wide to study under
eminent Islamic authorities and acquire
for themselves not only the last dregs of what was
known about Muhammad but also the best of other religious
works available,
juridical, theological,
philosophical and ritual.
By this means each
student acquired his own assemblage of
sacred texts, prayers, magical formulae, ideograms,
theological treatises, and the like. Thus, their
collections of prayers were, like Yaqub’s,
evidentiary specimens of a widely respected
desire to know sacred truth.
Yaqub’s text is a
particular, concrete expression of a moral quest, couched in the
idioms of pious Muslims. That quest
we have set out to uncover–only the idioms will appear at first
strange and enigmatic.
2.1 The Persian Story.
___ ___ _______ ______
In this book each
of the Persian texts is a story, sometimes only a brief one,
explaining the powers of the Arabic text following it, which
is always a prayer.
Of these Persian-Arabic pairs of text
I have chosen to examine one,
because of the
distinctive qualities of the Persian story;
the Arabic prayer is fairly typical.
The story represents a certain extreme imagery, and so exposes
in dramatic form a kind of behavior so shameful that it frightens and
repells. In an exaggerated,
immoderate imagery, it portrays the outer
limits of moral outrage as understood by these people,
and so projects a sense of their inner life.
As even a people’s
fears take pictorial shape in the likeness of their real
life, their monsters betray something of what they are.
The Persian text is, in translation, as follows:
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Whoever recites this [prayer] will have a good name, will be
forgiven his sins, will have no trouble at all [in this life?], and
will not need to worry about the last judgement.
If this book is put in
the house of a family, the whole family will be preserved
against the devil, jinns and other unclean spirits.
There was a woman in Baghdad whose husband was a merchant.
He died and left lots of money and goods. She had a lovely
boy, so handsome that she fell in love with her son. She
loved him so much that people thought she was crazy. The
son brought in doctors but she couldn’t get well. But one
day an old lady living nearby came and asked her what had
happened to her. She was pale and her heart was aching,
and she sighed.
The old woman said to her,
“I am sure you are in love with someone.
You must not hide this from me. Tell
me so I can straighten it up for you.” The mother answered, “I am in
love with my son. I am in trouble. I cannot eat well. I
always feel sick.” Then the old lady said, “I will help
you reach your goal.” The woman gave permission to
explain her plan. The old lady told her, “Put on nice clothes
at night and put mascara on your eyes and perfume on your
body and I will invite your son to my house.” The mother
agreed. In the evening the lady came and received the boy and
brought him delicious food. After he ate, she brought in a
bottle of wine for him and he drank it. An hour later he
was drunk and his mother, dressed like a drunken peacock,
came to her son. The boy didn’t know her because he was drunk
and he committed adultery with her.
Four months later the mother’s pregnancy began to show.
The mother said to herself, “I don’t have
a husband. If my pregnancy is known, people will say hard things
about me.” She planned to go on pilgrimage so that she
would have the baby on the trip, and no one would know about it.
One day she told her son, “Your father left a lot of money and goods,
and I want to go to Mecca.” So her son
prepared two camel loads of gold for her trip, and she
started toward Mecca. When she reached Egypt she stayed in the
house of a man named Khorasan. In the ninth month she gave
birth to a baby, a girl. She stayed with the baby for three months
and she told Khorasan, “I will leave my daughter and the two
camel loads of gold with you. Whenever this girl grows up, give
her in marriage to a rich, handsome man.” She said, “Don’t
forget my request.” And Khorasan accepted her request.
She returned back to her home country.
When she came near her city,
her son was told his mother was coming and he came to her, kissed
her feet with abundant welcoming. He took her home and gave lots
of money [as a gift offering] to the poor.
After a few years her son wanted to
become a merchant. He told his mother, “My father was a merchant,
and I want to do the same business.” She gave him permission. So the
son bought several caravans of camels which would carry goods and
clothes and he went on a trip to Egypt. When he reached
Egypt, by chance he also went to the house of Khorasan and stayed there.
One day he was sitting with Khorasan and that young
girl came out of the house and he liked her and asked
whose daughter she was. Khorasan said she was his. The boy said,
“Would you be willing to give her to me in marriage?” And Khorasan
looked at him and thought he was a handsome boy and had lots of
money, and the recommendation of the mother came to his mind, so
he gave the girl to the boy, and they were married. And the son
returned back to his home country.
When he came close to the
village on the way back from Egypt someone sent a message to his
mother, and she came out happily to meet her son. She saw that he had a
bride also with him. When the mother looked at the face of the bride
she became suspicious that this could be her daughter. They came to
the house and the mother asked the bride whose daughter she was and
the bride said, “Of Khorasan.” “And in which city?” He answered,
“The city of Egypt,” and she asked other questions until the mother knew
that this was her daughter. The Mother wept, and ran out. She kept
on hitting her head against a stone in the wall, and said, “What
an awful thing I have done! No one has done such a thing!” She was
crying and weeping.
Finally she went to the desert. In the desert there
was a Shaykh. She went to him and put her head on the ground and threw
dust on her head. The man said, “What happened to you?”, and she
told him the whole story. And the man of God said, “What an awful
thing you have done! It is unforgivable.
But I know one prayer^h8^s
that
I will teach you. If you recite it in belief, if
God wills, your sin will be forgiven.” This is the
durud akbar [the great blessing].
_____ _____
So he taught this prayer to her for
several days, so that God would accept her request, and her sin
would be forgiven. Later the lady went to the man of God
and said, “Thanks be to God! I heard a sound from the sky that
said, ‘Because of this prayer, I will forgive your sin.'” And she
said to the man, “After I die, tell my son about this and teach him
the prayer, that he may also be forgiven.”
After a short time she died, and the son gave the poor
good things [as an offering].
Then the man of God called for the son and told him the whole story.
The son
became angry, and took a pick and an axe and with several neighbors
went to remove the mother’s body [from the grave] and burn it.
He struck the
ground several blows and a voice came from the grave saying,
“Don’t bother people who rest in peace.” Then he struck
the ground again, and he heard the voice again.
And the son said, “O, mother, you have done an awful
thing! It is a terrible sin! How can you be in peace?” She said,
“Although it was a great sin, still I learned a prayer from the man
of God, I recited it with belief, and God forgave my sin.
You must also go to the man and learn the prayer and recite it with
belief so that you will also be forgiven.”
So the boy
straightened up the grave and went to the man of God,
learned that prayer and was reciting it always. And God
forgave him too.
Whoever recites this prayer with full belief, his
sin will be forgiven. And people should not be in doubt.
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There is much that could be said
about this story–about, for example,
the location of the event in Baghdad, a bilingual Persian
and Arabic city; about the name of the innkeeper, which is
also the name of a Persian speaking region in eastern Iran and
Central Asia; or about the relationship of the women–but
I want to focus here on the
the most arresting feature of the story, which is, of course, the incest.
The central concern is the
oedipal relationship of the mother and the son, only in
this case, it is
a kind of obverse oedipal relationship, the mother
being passionately in love with him rather than he with her.
The oedipal attraction of a son for his mother
does appear, but transposed into an
attraction to his mother’s
daugther.
At issue in this story is the integrity of
the family and society.
Incest strikes at the
heart of society. The proscription against incest is
the essential basis of human sociality, for it keeps
males
from cohabiting with the women in their family and so
preserves the family. When Oedipus discoverd that the suitor of the
woman he loved,
the man he had killed, was his own father and
she his mother, he revolted against his passion and suppressed it.
Oedipus is thus a kind of archetype of the complex relationship
that forms the basis of the family,
entailing love and revulsion, jealousy and affection,
passion and self-control.
Freud regarded the locus of internalized societal norms
in the individual (the super-ego)
as “the heir of the Oedipus complex and
respresents ethical standards of mankind”.^h9^s
For Levi-Straus, the rules of
kinship and marriage, including the prohibition
against incest, “are the social state itself, reshaping
biological relationships and natural sentiments…” (Levi-Strauss
1969 [1949]: 490). “The prohibition of incest,” he says in
another place, “merely affirms, in a field vital to the group’s
survival, the preeminence of the social over the natural, the
collective over the individual, organization over the arbitrary”.^h10^s
This is, then, a story about
the ultimate human social outrage. The acts it describes were
against society, against “organization,” against human survival.
In the words of Levy-Bruhl incest is
“a monstrum,
________
a transgression spreading horror and fear.”^h11^s
It is the ultimate
offense against all that is considered virtuous and sublime. And
here in this story we have it doubly–double monstrum, double
horror, double fear.
This is a myth in its most evocative strength, in which the
unthinkable is portrayed on a canvas of sheer appearance. It
is a kind of archetypical representation, not an actual event, but
the projection of a fear; not a description of an actual
family, but of relations in families as they could be at their
worst, when all sociability breaks down. It is an image of behavior at
its imagined end-point, the ultimate obscenity. Levi-Strauss,
commenting on Freud’s interpretation of
Oedipus Rex, captures the
_______ ___
mythical power of this kind of story.
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“The desire for the mother or the sister, the murder of the
father and the son’s repentance, undoubtedly do not
correspond to any group of facts occupying a given place
in history. But perhaps they symbolically express an
ancient and lasting dream. The magic of this dream, its
power to mould men’s thoughts unbeknown to them, arises
precisely from the fact that the acts it evokes have never
been committed, because culture has opposed them at all
times and in all places.”^h12^s
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This story is an Islamic image of this
“ancient and lasting dream”,
and in that sense it represents the idealized
antithesis of the true Muslim, the kafir.
_____
The kafir in Quranic imagery is
_____
a denyer of the truth (Qur’an 50: 2-5), a worshiper of
other gods (28: 64), an adulterer (24: 4), and
unclean (9: 28).
In Afghanistan, the folk peoples, some of
whom I studied for the better part of two years,
have had little direct
contact with non-Muslims, except for the British and Russians
whom they fought in several wars. Their concept of the
kafir, therefore, was until fairly recently
_____
relatively ideal, uncomplicated by direct experience with
“nice” unbelievers. To them the
kafir is still an epitome of immorality, uncleanness and
_____
repulsiveness.
Their abhorrence of the
kafir is manifest, for instance, in their
_____
revulsion against pork, the most repulsive of foods,
forbidden to Muslims but eaten by kafirs.
______
In street parlance a kafir is a murdarkhor,
_____ __________
“a filth eater.” More than
filthy, the pig is also said to be sexually promiscuous. Someone
asked me, “Isn’t the pig the only animal that will mate
with his mother or sister?”
Besides actually touching and eating pork the
kafir will also drink wine, another food that,
_____
unlike Muslims almost everywhere else, the Afghan folk peoples have had
little experience with. In popular
imagery wine makes people not only drunk but also lustful. “It’s
not only the drunkennes that wine produces,” I once overheard a
mullah telling someone in a teashop, “it’s the other things that
go with it…” The liscencious acts wine produces are the sorts
of things kafirs do.
______
Kafirs are suspected, of course, of
______
being promiscuous but also, worse, of being incestuous. One
time, as I was sitting around a stove with a group of men in a
teashop, a third-grade teacher asked me if
we marry in my country, or, he said, “do you do what the Russians
do?” I wasn’t sure I had understood him, so he had to say it
again: “In your country do you marry or do you do what the
Russians do?” One of the other men broke in to say, “Of course
they marry! They don’t do what the Russians do!” Naturally, I
wondered what the Russians do. Eventually it came out that they
believed the Russians, rather than marry, simply cohabit
with whatever woman is at hand. After that I
began to hear this idea in other contexts. A man from Pul-i Khumri,
for example, who had travelled extensively in Soviet Central
Asia, told me that the Soviets put their children in nurseries
so they never know their parents or their siblings.
When they grow up, he said, “Who knows who they will take [in
marriage]!^h13^s
They could be
marrying their own sisters!” Such is the image of the godless
Russian, a specific exemplication of the
kafir for these folk peoples.
_____
But beyond this, the image of incestuous
practice is not projected upon the Russians only, but upon
other “heretical” sect groups among themselves; and
as each Islamic sect group
considers the others heretical, they suspect each other of
clandestine incestuous rites.
Many Afghans
believe the Isma’ilis, a small and until recently isolated sect
who venerate the Aga Khan, practice secret rituals. One
government official soberly explained to me that the Isma’ilis turn
the lights off and have sex with whomever they find in the
dark. “Who knows?,” he said. “They could be taking their own
mother or sister.” “But,” he confided in me, “they will never
tell you.” He was a Sunni speaking about Isma’ilis,
but eventually I heard this charge against
each of the three sects in Afghanistan–against Sunnis and Shi’ites
(the Iranian kind), as well as Isma’ilis.
And each time I was told,
“they will never tell you.” Such, in the popular imagination,
is the behavior of people
beyond the pale of the proper religious order; they
are on the way, if not already being there, to being
sexually immoral, perhaps incestuous, perhaps even ritually
incestuous.
An aura of
obscenity is projected on those who
refuse to participate in legitimate Muslim society. Heretics are,
like kafirs, unclean, even repulsive and filthy; they
______
consume wine; they will have sex with anyone, even a mother or
sister; they “turn out the lights”.
This is the horror of the young man’s predicament in our
story. He has been duped into drinking wine like an ordinary
kafir and into committing incest like a kafir,
_____ _____
and worse, double incest. The Qur’an says the kafir will
_____
be “troubled” and indeed in ordinary folk Afghan parlance another
synonym for kafir, besides “filth-eater,” is Qur’anzada,
_____ __________
“Qur’an-cursed.” No wonder the young man was overwhelmed with
remorse–and also his mother, once she saw the outcome of her
own immorality.
They were under the curse of the kafir.
_____
The story portrays the horror of an honorable
person caught in the unforgivable sin.
This is not only a story about a breach of the most
sacred of social mores, but also about
eternal virtues. The offense, while an offense against the essential
fabric of decent society, is also an offense against God’s society,
against standards that
exist, eternal and sublime, in heaven. For Muslims,
the ultimate moral authority is not society but God; in Islam God
has opinions about every person’s behavior, has a record of it, and
will someday hold them accountable for it. His wrath lurks in this
story, stirring the mother and son to fear and grief and repentance, and
a search for redemption.
This why the hero of this story, if there is one, is the old
man. For he has a specific and precious kind of knowledge, how to
win God’s forgiveness. He is an
Islamic authority, a
custodian of the means of rectifying human failures, of
gaining forgiveness for sins, of asuaging feelings of guilt.
Through the resources he controls he can guide to
prosperity in this life and wellbeing in the
one to come. His special provenience, as presented here, is
the Arabic prayer. Once learned, although
because of its length the task may take several days, it can be
recited over and over again in order to gain deliverance,
as the Sufis recite the name of God and Hindus their
mantras.
The prayer has, as will
be seen, the overt appearance of worship and praise, but its
intent is petition, a request for redemption from an impossible
and seemingly unforgivable circumstance. The utilitarian intent
is made clear in the introduction, which promises “a
good name”, forgiveness of sins, “no trouble” in this life,
freedom from worry about the Last Judgement, preservation against
the devil and evil spirits.
This is a text about the quest for efficacy. Indeed,
all the Persian texts in this book claim that the Arabic recitations
they introduce provide useful services. One prayer, for instance,
is said to protect from knives and swords, from
guns and arrows, from “the magic of sorcerers” and
deceivers, from the evil eye and “every spirit,” from impotence,
damage by flood and fire, from blight and worms and
grasshoppers; it will also ease childbirth and, for the dying,
death; and it will help the dead during the
terrifying post-mortem doctrinal examinations of
the fierce angels, Munkir and Nakir. The claims
made for the various texts in this book cover
what appears to be the gamut of life’s problems
in these people’s world, physical, social, economic,
and spiritual. The prayers, therefore, despite their appearace as
moral texts, have useful
applications. In the words of a mullah I knew, “they are tools, like
guns”. They have power, and so provide a grip on
the problems and affairs of human existance. The
line between worship and the quest for efficacy is thus vague, for
this Arabic recitation
can be as practical as it is worshipful.
Which is to say,
it is magic as well as religion. This formula for
delivering the most culpable of sinners exemplifies a
method, a technique as well as a moral frame of mind.
2.2 The Arabic Text
___ ___ ______ ____
The Arabic text, then, in the economy of the medieval Islamic world
from which it sprang, is priceless. You may wonder, when you see
it in translation, what makes it so special. That’s the problem
with kabbalistic texts: they never sound right in translation
and anyway they
never work in translation. The power is not in the meaning of
the text but in the worshipper’s identification with it.
The sacred power of the text is like that of the
Qur’an: it is experienced by a special
kind of personal identification, through which the
reciter internalizes its sacredness; the meaning is secondary.
Writing about the service the Qur’an renders in
worship, Hodgeson says
.in 8
[The Qur’an] was never designed to be read for information
or even for inspiration, but to be recited as an act of
committment in worship … What one did with the Qur’an was
not peruse it but to worship by means of it; not to
passively receive it but, in reciting it, to reaffirm it for
oneself…^h14^s
.in 0
A translation of the text does not get at its
special power and charm; whatever power it claims
comes through technical means, the main one here
being simply recitation.
The necessity of repeating sacred texts is explicitly stated in some
of the other Persian stories: one says its Arabic prayer, to work,
should be recited three times;
another should be recited every Friday.
These Arabic prayers could be–and presumably would be to a
Persian speaker who understood little Arabic–merely incantations.
I once learned
an incantation called the chihil qaaf, “the forty Ks,”
______ ____
from a man who in his youth had recited it countless
times in an attempt to get control of the jinns. (It was to have
taken forty days, but after the first several days, when the boy had
become exhausted, his father intervened, and the regime was never
finished–and the jinns never conquered). This incantation he
knew only as a burst of syllables, an unsegmentable string of
sounds–not even a word–so
he was incapable of teaching it to me. I got it down only by
having him repeat it over and over again, listening for every
succeeding syllable until I had gotten all forty of them. There
was no meaning in the syllables themselves, only a power.
In such a case, the recitation of the text was a purely technical
exercise.
Besides recitation, there can be
other technical proceedures
for making a sacred text work.
One Arabic prayer,
according to its Persian introduction, has to be
written with musk and saffron, sealed with wax (in a scroll?),
washed in a pitcher and the washings drunk;
another has to be whispered (“blown”) over crystaline sugar or
clean water and imbibed early in the morning.
The power of these texts is their
connection with the
unseen mechanisms of the cosmos that govern all earthly affairs.
One of the Arabic texts in this book is said to be written on
the side of God’s throne and on the palms of the hands of the
creatures who bear his throne; indeed, it is “because of the
spiritual blessing of the prayer [that] the throne is stabilized
in its place.” Like the Qur’an, which is written in the language of
heaven, these recitations are intrinsic to God’s sacred
and virtual realms. To know them and how to use them is to have
access to those realms.
This is why Arabic texts have such prominence in the Islamic
world, as they are the entre into the sacred reality.
The great modern author Jalal Al-e Ahmad once conveyed a sense of
their power to a pilgrim at an Iranian shrine:
.in 8
Words from the Koran echoed and re-echoed beneath the lofty
domes. Those Arabic words poured out like rain and charged the
whole place with holiness.
On doors and walls, on the friezes, on the glasswork of the ceiling
which reflected in countless broken fragments the images of that
vast crowd, on the fronts and backs of Holy Books, on the prayer
books in men’s hands, on the threshold of the sepulcher and all
around it, on the great silver padlocks of the shrine–everywhere
those Arabic words were inscribed in thousands of designs and
figures and scrolls, on wood and tile, on brick, on silver,
on gold: everything was absorbed by their power.^h15^s
.in 0
It is this
mysterious grip on the mechanisms of the unseen world that the
old man’s Arabic prayer gave to the remorseful woman and her
son. It gave them, the story claims, forgiveness and access to
God, a mighty precious commodity in a world whose mechanisms are
poorly understood and in any case are normally out of reach.
The power is appropriated through
the text directly. It is
(alas) lost in translation. If
you want the power, you’ll have to learn the Arabic. All we can
do here is explain the meaning.
Actually, in fact, we can only summarize it.
The text, crammed into one paragraph, is as follows.
It begins, like almost everything Muslim, with the
phrase, “In the name of God, the Beneficent, the Merciful.”
The rest of it, except for the last few lines, consists of
“benedictions”, blessings on Muhammad and other
sacred persons and on certain behaviors and statuses.
The first three lines stress his relationship to the
Prophets: “Blessings on Muhammad, Lord of the Messengers” (the
term is rasul, i.e., the prophets); “Blessings on Muhammad, Lord
_____
of the Prophets” (nabi); “Blessings on Muhammad, Lord of the
____
representatives” (i.e., the prophets). Then the blessings are
pronounced on good people generally: on the faithful, on Muslims,
on “the straight,” the righteous, the generous (here the
term has a double meaning, the “generous” [karim] meaning also
_____
those endowed with sacred power), on those who pray, “the
conciliators, “the blessed” (again possibly referring to the
spiritually endowed), “the heartsick” (for God or goodness?),
“the noble” (possibly the spiritually endowed by virtue of
their descent), “the finest people”, those who supplicate”
(again possibly referring to those with special access to God, as they
are often sought for intercessory help), “the holy
warriors”, “the assiduous”, “the wakeful” (for prayer),
“the spiritual guides”, “the intercessors on Judgement Day”,
“prophecy and the message”, the repentant, the contrite,
the repeaters, those in authority, those who affirm the
creed, the successors (of Muhammad), “the desirous” (for
spiritual things), and the victorious. Blessings are then
pronounced upon the sacred persons and places associated with
Muhammad: “Blessed be Muhammad, Lord of the Quraish (his
tribe)”, “Lord of the pure” (or fragrant), of the holy place, the
sacred mountains (presumably those that surround the two holy cities),
of Medina, Mecca, the Hashemites
(Muhammad’s clan), Taha and Ya Sin (Suras 20 and 36 of the
Qur’an), those who are “covered” (because of a chill during a
trance, as Muhammad once was), the covering, the flat land
(i.e., where the Ka’ba lies), the Hejaz, the Arabs (a term
not likely to have been invented by a Persian speaker). This is
followed by a series of formulae for how
extensively Muhammad should be blessed. “Blessed be Lord
Muhammad when the sun rises,” “… when the sun sets,”
“when the sun is at its zenith,” “when it sets,”
“when mountains move,” “when the earth declines,”
“when wild animals asssemble (in preparation for the
Judgement Day),” “when graves open (on the Judgement Day),”
“when hearts are exposed (for the Judgement),”
“when the books are read.” This is followed by a
series of blessings pointing to Muhammad’s surperiority over the pious:
“Blessed be Muhammad, Lord of the satisfied,” “Lord of those
who stand up (to pray),” “the pure,” “those
born pure,” “those who pray at midday,” “the
truthful,” “the holy ones,” “the generous (or spiritually
endowed),” “those who fast,” “the patient,”
“the repeaters of the creed,” “the distinguished (for
virtue?),” “the intercessors,” “those born to mediate”
(i.e., between people and God),
“the godfearers,” “the regretful” (for
sin),” “the intimate” (with God), “the heirs (holy
descendants),” “the pioneers” (early Muslims), “later
believers,” “non-Arabs,” “the purest people,” “the
fastidious” (in ritual observance), “the honorable,”
“those who have the gospel” (= Christians?), “the strictly
careful” (in ritual observance), “the sent ones,” “the
guides,” “the good,” “writers” (of religious works),
“the blessed,” “the accepted” (by God),” “all created
things,” “the rich (eloquent?) preachers,” “seekers
after forgiveness.” There is another series on the supremacy of
Muahmmad over all sacred heroes, in which he is called “the Lord,
the finest prophet,” “Lord of the sons of Adam,” “Lord of the
beloved”, “of the noble,” “of the pure.” And a series on his
personal qualities: “the greatest creature,” “the chosen
prophet,” ” the sufficient prophet,” “the prophet and the
discriminating one,” “the truthful prophet,” “the illiterate
prophet,” “the one always for good,” “the one always with (even)
the bad,” “Lord of the dawn,” “Lord of the dusk.” There is a
series on how many blessings should be recited: “as many as the
number of the faithful,” “as the sands of the sea,” “as the drops
of rain,” “as the stars,” “as trees and leaves,” “as the number
of months and days,” “as the number of plants,” “as days and
nights,” “as months and years,” “as birds and wings,” “as jinns
and humans,” “as people who pray,” “as people who do not pray,”
“as everything created,” “as should please you (God),” “as
creatures that swim,” “as grains and fruits,” “as creatures in
the sea,” “as angels,” and “infinitely, until the Judgement
Day.”
The prayer concludes with the following benediction and petition:
“And blessings be on the prophets
and holy messengers, and the angels
nearest God and His noble servants and all who obey him. And be
merciful, You Who are merciful, the Most Merciful One. I beg of
You mercy, O You, Who are the most merciful of the merciful.”
More could be made of this text than space allows
here, but the kinds of persons and behaviors considered venerable
seems worth noting, since that represents the structure
of honor and authority in this society. The
following are singled out as deserving honor: prophets,
“representatives,” “sent ones”, intercessors, intercessors on the
Judgement Day, the Quraish tribe, the Hashemite clan, the
“heirs,” the “noble” lineages. Also certain kinds of esteemed
behavior are recognized: the faithful, the straight,
the conciliators, the holy warriors, the victorious, the
truthful, the heartsick (for good), the repentant, the contrite,
the spiritually minded, the patient, the God fearing, the
distinguished (for virtue), the assiduous (in ritual),
the fastidious, the
strictly careful, the prostrators, the wakeful, the creed sayers,
those who stand up to pray, those who fast, those who supplicate,
those who write (religious works).
The text is thus an index to the kinds of
persons admired in this Islamic culture,
who consist in general of three kinds: the pious and
devout in spirit, the fastidious and assiduous in ritual,
and the descendants (“heirs”) in a line of sacred
persons.
In whatever sense the qualities venerated here were understood
by those who recited this text they could have
informed their attitude and understanding.
The terms imply a range of images of what is good, in
stark contrast to the imagery of evil or moral misfortune
portrayed in the Persian text.
The antithesis of the evil portrayed in the Persian text is
developed as a set of positive qualities and sacred
persons in the Arabic text.
This list of qualities together describe what,
in this world view, is the ideal Muslim, the moral person
that the reciter, if he cannot in all respects achieve, must
at least in all possible ways, emulate.
3. The Broader Relevance of the Text
__ ___ _______ _________ __ ___ ____
We have treated this Persian story and the Arabic recitation it
recommends as literary texts, even though they are, as far as I
know, unique.^h16^s
What they actually reveal is a certain imaginative world that
informed the lives of people in the eastern lands of Islam
in the medieval period. People of varying sorts–the
“original” author, and a succession of individuals who copied
these texts, and other people
who used them (or some version of them)
over an indeterminate number of years–took
care to preserve them and to read and re-read them so as to
imbibe their essence, to internalize their values and
become imbued by and blessed by their
powers. There are issues and themes in these texts that engrossed them,
gripped their imagination and so shaped their vision of the
world.
They gave substance to images of ideal behavior–in the case of the
Persian text to images of
the abhorrent, in the case of the
Arabic text, to images of the exemplary–and so,
ideally at least, they served to
constrain their behavior, keeping it in bounds, within
the limits of discretion, and to induce it to
maintain good and honorable standards. The texts thus served
as devices for internalizing values. By means of them
people came
to understand themselves and to see their lives
in a moral and virtual context.
It was Ezra Pound, I think, who said that
“Literature is news that remains news.” To these people these texts
remained news, despite many re-readings, because they dealt with
issues of lasting significance
in terms that seemed
thoroughly authentic.
The preeminent appeal of the texts, and
indeed of the whole
manuscript, is the hope of efficacy and
redemption. This book promises relief from misfortunes of all
kinds and from the ultimate one, rejection and punishment in
the Last Judgement. Here in this text are the expressions,
couched in the specific imagery of Persio-Islamic culture,
of what is presumably a universal fear, the fear of death, which,
to use the Biblical phrasing, subjects everyone to “lifelong
bondage”.^h17^s If there are any themes that are
“always news”, certainly relief
from the fear of death is one of them. If
there are any themes that make literature engrossing, it is its
ability to dramatize the quest for permanence
and significance.
For behind this concern with the Last Judgement is a less
explicit one, a concern to know one’s self, one’s
significance, one’s place in a wider, more enduring context.
There is a desire to understand what one wants to be;
how one wants to behave; how, in working out one’s life, one should
act to be true to oneself.
The repeated reading of the Persian myth and the
reciting of the prayer gives
a sense of what is good and
what evil, what is desirable and what repulsive. It thus helps
induce people to cling to the good and desirable and to
recoil from the evil and abhorrant. This text, with its
imagery of incest and redemption, is a text for internalizing
right from wrong–or better, in the emphasis of the Persian
myth, wrong from right.
The concerns with death and redemption evident in this text
are, we presume, selective. Death, failure, sickness,
misfortune–these are no more
real than the other experiences of life: joy,
pleasure, pride, honor. They
are not anyone’s only concern. We must regard this story, the
imagery of sin, despair, horror and dread portrayed here, as one
set of concerns among many.
We have been looking at a mood, in itself common to all
of us, one mood among many. We have
have, as it were, observed a pious Muslim
at prayer, in pursuit of efficacy and redemption. It is indeed
one of the poses a Muslim would have struck; there would
have been other moods, other poses. It is because we suppose
that the moods and poses presented here resemble our own that we
can suppose we understand something about Yaqub who appreciated
this book. We have induced a picture
of a human being like ourselves, engaged in a
struggle like ours, the attempt to cope with failure, self-reproach, and
the fear of insignificance, and a struggle to have hope,
meaning, and a sense of purpose and significance
in a morally problematic world.
As always, such a universal quest is couched in the
specific imagery of a distinct cultural tradition,
in this case
an Islamic one.
In Islam it is called “the great
holy struggle.” For the pious Muslim, it is a holy
war, a struggle against the nafs, the natural senses, or
____
what the Apostle Paul (whose imagery has shaped western thought
about this quest) would have called “the flesh.” This
private, personal struggle is the honored tradition of holy war
among Muslims, the subject of a massive literature in Islam,
venerated and memorized
by even illiterate peoples; almost every great Islamic writer
since the beginnings of the movement in
the seventh century has had something memorable to say
about the war against the base impulses of the self. It is also the
concern of fables and aphorisms used by people,
illiterate and literate alike, all
over the Muslim world. The holy war against the weaknesses of
the flesh is a universally accepted and idealized theme of Muslim
literature, oral and written.
Now, consider how this
essentially private and moral concept
compares with the typical Western image of Muslim holy war.
For practically anyone able to read these words the term “holy war”
suggests the quest of a band of
incorrigable sectarian fanatics
who force their will on other people, even
attacking them in the name of God, to rob,
pillage and take hostage, wild men who
threaten the fabric of civilization.
It happens, in fact, that
the Ghaznawids,
builders of the great city in whose ruins Yaqub’s manuscript was
found, resembled that stereotype as nearly as any, for
in many successive invasions their warriors galloped
out of the Suleiman Khel mountains
onto the plains of India to conquor in
the name of God. So also did the early
Safawids who from Anatolia invaded Iran in the fifteenth century,
announcing that, having distinguished themselves in the
great holy war against their carnal natures, they
were now ready to wage the lesser holy war against
infidels and the spiritually indifferent.^h18^s
Indeed, the concept of holy war has informed the behavior of
Muslims who have gone to war virtually
everywhere; the appeal to holy war–whatever the merits of
the particular occasion–has been the one common moral idiom
that has brought Muslim people together, stiffened their resolve,
given them the sense of purpose and meaning that the extreme
exertions of killing and dying in battle require.
Today, it has informed the acts of extremists
coming out of the Middle East.
Virtually every
extremist group in the Muslim world has declared itself in a
holy war. Virtually every attack, whether against soldiers or
civilians, against Israelis or Arabs, against
Egyptians or Americans–every hijacking, every bombing–is an
act of holy war. The result has been a dangerous tendency
among Westerners for
Islamic devotion and terrorist activity to be merged.
It has become a trend in the West to regard all
Muslims as extremsists, terrorists, or the harborers of
terrorists.
The pervasive moral ambience of
the Muslim world is being reduced down to fanaticism and
barbarism.
What our manuscript reveals of course is that the real moral
ambience of Muslim life is considerably more subtile, more deeply
felt, more morally informed and
impelled than our Western stereotypes allow.
Our copyist, Yaqub, removed by a century in time and by half the
globe in space, is a specific exemplification of the underlying
quest of pious Muslims, or if you please, of all Muslims at their
pious best. The true Muslim, the archetypical Muslim, would
eschew evil and assiduously cultivate the favor to God.
The extremists, coming out of that tradition use it, as Irish
extremists use Christian moral imagery, to justify what they do.
Morals, as they are wont to be, often end up serving practical
ends rather than controlling them.
I have called our copyist and his text medieval because they have
seemed more like a tradition now long past, more like the Islamic
world of the previous thousand years than like our own world
and time. As it turns out, the term misleads. These
texts, and the world of moral images they
represent, are contemporary, as much a part of our modern world
as we are. Only most of us, including a fair number of
scholars, even as
recently as a decade ago,
would have treated this text as obscolescent, unworthy of the
extended attention paid it here. This was because to the
Western scholarly mind the world was
modernizing. Power was centralizing, government was becoming
more “rational” and organized, and society more
secular. And religious ideals were being, it was said,
“rationalized” like everything else. Politics was thus
presumed to be discrete from religion, and
a political culture could be developed
without the overt and intense concern for morals and
virtual ideals that religious institutions are concerned with.
This, many people supposed, was progress.
In such a world the moral imagery of an
isolated Muslim and his Persianate culture of
a century ago had only historical interest.
But events since 1978 have radically challenged the
modernist supposition. The most dramatic of them was of course
the Iranian Revolution. Iran, one the most progressive nations
of the third world, where in the 1970’s you could buy virutally every
consumer product of the modern world, from sun glasses to
Mercedes trucks, and which, with American help, had become the
fourth strongest nation of the world, exploded. Thousands of
people chanted Islamic slogans for hours on end. People
flagellated themselves in the streets.
A million people greeted Khomeini at
Tehran airport. That social convulsion shocked and confused many
social scientists.
It seemed too
medieval, too religious for the modern world.
It has, as we all know, remained virulent for years.
But the Iranian Revolution was not the only event to
challenge the modernization paradigm of Western social
scientists. Another was the
response of the Afghanistan peoples to the
Soviet invasion. In a host of uncoordinated uprisings they
have created havoc for the Soviets
in every province of the country and limited
Soviet control to the main cities and to a few highways
during daylight–and
although their motives are diverse and by no means
wholly religious,
they have almost universally seen their cause as an Islamic
holy war.
The Afghanistan resistance groups have become generally
known as mujahedin, “holy war fighters.”
_________
And along side the convulsive holy wars in Iran and
Afghanistan there have been others, notably the Iranian
war against Iraq, and the sectarian fighting in Lebanon, in
which every side regards its cause as a
holy war.
In these movements the moral imagery of the common
people has entered the public arena, even as the common people
themselves have become more directly involved. This is perhaps what
might have been expected from the more culturally isolated
peoples of the
Islamic world, but interest in
holy war has been especially noticeable among the technologically
educated young Muslim leaders, who guide and instigate the current
attempts among Muslims all over the world
to establish institutions that are more explicitly Islamic.
Wrongly called Muslim “fundamentalists,”
they are, on the one hand, urbane and educated and, on the other,
zealous for Islamic cultural forms–a combination that confounds
the modernization paradigm. Worse, they–at
least some of them–consider Western values alien
to Islam and a threat to its essential integrity.^h19^s
But the trend toward values and moral images once deemed moribund
is not limited to the Muslim world. Everywhere there
has been a disenchantment with the secular ideals
associated with science and modernization,
and hope for religious and moral solutions has grown.
In the third world
there has been, for instance, a growing disappointment with
Western-sponsored development activities. Heralded promises of
modernization have generally not materialized and the new
generations are frustrated. Even in the West, as we
all now well know, there
are doubts about where science and modernization are going–caused
notably by twentieth century wars and, in the last few years,
by dramatic technological failures, and the growing prospect
of a nuclear holocaust.
The result has been a return to religious ideals all over the
world. In the Islamic
world, where progressive agendas have dominated
public arenas for generations,
new voices have called Muslims back to a more zealous
Islam, defined somewhat variously, of course–some to a
more strictly pious Islam, some to a more nationalistic Islam.
And elsewhere in the world Buddhist, Hindu, Sikh and
Christian groups are showing fresh ability to stir
popular feeling. Like Yaqub the Less
we ourselves are living in a changing world, where several kinds of
moral appeal compete for public acceptance,
where new agendas offer fresh hope for solutions to
contemporary problems.
Like him we don’t
clearly see a trajectory through the cacophony of voices;
the competing voices merely
confuse and distract. It may be that, like him, we are on the verge of
seeing a new social paradigm
arise to capture the world’s imagination.
And, as he
may have felt about the distant thunder of Western ideas in his own
day, we may find some of the moral impulses
of our own day
alarming and forbiding. It may be, in fact, that the
trajectory of change in our time will turn out to be the reverse of that
in his. While his world was
tending to more secular idioms, ours may be tending
toward more religious ones.
Whatever the long-term
trajectory of change,
the moral images of a deeply religious sort
appear likely to remain virile
for a good while.
This is self evident,
at least, to most Muslims currently at war, for
whom all the ideals of the
private quest for morality and
significance are brought to bear upon desperate public issues,
to whom all wars,
inward against the flesh and outward against kafirs, are
______
always holy. They are pure struggles, of the clean against
the filthy, the good against the abhorrant, the moral
against the debauched.
For the enemies are kafirs, of course.
______
The Shah was an impostor and infidel to Khomeini, and
Carter “the great Satan.” More recently Reagan has
been to Khaddafi a “crusader” like the
kafirs who long ago invaded the Islamic Middle East.
______
And to the Afghan mujahedin
_________
the Soviets are the archetypical kafirs.
______
This was captured in a recent mujahedin
_________
cartoon of the real meaning of the hammer and
sickle: inside the Soviet logo
various horrors of the Afghanistan war are
portrayed, among them, in a central place, a wine glass and a
terrified woman cowering in the background. The image of the
repulsive, lustful profligate unbeliever,
newly contextualized in a symbol of
the frantic struggle for
family and home and country,
now epidomizes the enemy of the Afghanistan people.
The moral imagery of this century-old Islamic
manuscript still lives, still guides
the behavior of people in
the Muslim world, still
provides a moral focus for social concerns. However
obsolescent in style and individual in its moral appeal,
Yaqub’s prayer book expresses one of the powerful
moral appeals in our contemporary world.
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Acknowledgements
I am indebted to several people for assistance that made
this article possible. Two people helped in the translation
of the texts who, because of their personal circumstances,
cannot be named.
Charles and Virginia Prewitt gave permission to photocopy
the manuscript and refer to it in publication.
John Bowen made helpful comments on the original lecture,
as did several other people in the audience.
Frances Robinson drew my attention to Aini’s memoirs,
cited in footnote 4. Jennifer Day helped produce the
manuscript.
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Notes
1. C. S. Lewis. An Experiment in Criticism (Cambridge:
Cambridge University) 1961.
2. November 13 was a Sunday on our calendar, but as “evening” of
an Islamic day begins at dusk, his “Monday evening” and
our “Sunday evening” were the same. The date happens (?) to have
been an even two weeks before the beginning of the Islamic New
Year.
3. There are many good sources on the modern history of Islam.
Besides other sources cited here,
I have consulted George E. Kirk, A Short History of the Middle
East: From the Rise of Islam to Modern Times (New York: Praeger)
1964; Francis Robinson, Atlas of the Islamic World Since
1500 (New York: Facts on File) 1982.
4. Sadriddin Aini, Pages from My Own Story: Memoirs
(Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House), 1958, p. 5.
5. Roy Mottahedeh, The Mantle of the Prophet: Religion and
Politics in Iran (New York: Simon and Schuster) 1985, pp. 161-2.
6. The authoritative works on the Ghaznawids are by C. E.
Bosworth: The Ghazvawids, Their Empire in Afghanistan and
Eastern Iran 994-1040 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University), 1963;
The Later Ghaznawids in Afghanistan and Northern India,
1040-1186 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University), 1977; The Medieval
History of Iran, Afghanistan and Central Asia (London: Vaviorum),
1977; “Gihad in Afghanistan and Muslim India”, in Israel Oriental
Studies IX (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University), 1983.
On the culture of the eastern lands of Islam see
Francis Robinson, op. cit.
7. Roy Muttahedeh, Loyalty and Leadership in an Early Islamic
Society (Princeton: Princeton University) 1980, p. 142.
8. The term here is da’wa, a recitation or petition.
_____
9. The source is The Ego and the Id; quoted in Marvin K. Opler,
Culture and Social Psychiatry (New York: Atherton) 1967, p. 188.
10. Claude Levi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship
(Boston: Beacon) 1963 [1949], pp. 490, 45.
11. Lucien Levy-Bruhl, Le Supernaturel et la Nature dans la
Mentalit~e Primitive (Paris) 1931, p. 247.
12. Op. cit, p. 491.
13. The Persian term was zan giriftan, which is ambiguous;
___ ________
it often means (but not necessarily) “to marry”.
14. Marshall Hodgeson, The Venture of Islam (Chicago: University
of Chicago) 1974, vol. I, p. 367.
15. Roy Mottahedeh, The Mantle of the Prophet: Religion and
Politics in Iran (New York: Simon and Schuster) 1985, p. 292-3.
16. Professor Gerhild Williams has pointed out that the Persian
incest story resembles a thirteenth century European legend.
17. Letter to the Hebrews 2: 14, 15.
18. Michel Mazzaoui, The Origins of the Safawids: Si’ism,
Sufism and the Gulat (Weisbaden: Verlag) 1972, p. 75.
19. Much has been written on modern Islamic fundamentalism,
not all of it accurate.
The most helpful sources to me have been: Olivier Roy,
L’Afghanistan: Islam et Modernit~e Politique (Paris:
Editions du Seuil) 1985
(on the Afghan type, which he calls “Islamism”);
Roy Mottahedeh, The Mantle of the Prophet, op. cit,
(on the Iranian type, presented discursively but perceptively);
Ira Lapidus, “Presidential Address, 1984 Meeting of the Middle
East Studies Association” in Middle East Studies Association
Bulletin Vol. 19, No. 1 (July, 1985), pp. 1-8
(on the situation in the Muslim world generally, presented
succinctly and with authority).