Old Serbia (Blogging Black Lamb and Grey Falcon)

Posted on February 10, 2022 by James Thomas Snyder

I saw before me what an empire which spreads beyond its legitimate boundaries must do to its subjects. It cannot spread its own life over the conquered areas, for life cannot travel too far from its sources, and it blights the life that is native to those parts.

OLD SERBIA IS what we now call Kosovo, a partially recognized sovereign state that emerged following the 1999 NATO war with the federal Yugoslavia over ethnic cleaning in the formerly autonomous province. Kosovo is a toponym derived from the 1389 Battle of Kosovo. The battle figures prominently in West’s narrative as well as the history of Serbia and Yugoslavia. In the Kosovo Polje, or Field of Blackbirds, the Ottoman army destroyed the Serbian defense, solidifying Turkish control over the Balkans for the next 500 years. The blackbirds described are the carrion birds that descended on the dead. Later, in a foreshadowing of Flanders Fields, legend tells that the field erupted in red peonies the following spring, the blood of the Serbian martyrs.

Gračanica (Kosovski božuri) (1913) by Nadežda Petrović; (Wikipedia)

In the early 16^th century Muslim Albanians began to migrate to Kosovo. Today, Albanians almost entirely populate this cradle of the Serbian nation. In 1989, on the six hundredth anniversary of the battle, communist apparatchik Slobodan Milošević gave his infamous speech inciting the Serbian audience. Standing at the rebuilt monument of Gazimestan, which West also visited, he used the heroic narrative to define his nationalist agenda that perpetuated war, massacre, and genocide across the former Yugoslavia for the next 20 years.

West tours the field, which like a medieval Gettysburg is scattered with various semi-monuments erected in memory of the dead. Close by is a genuine treasure: the frescoes of Gračanica, the first Serbian Orthodox monastery she visits in Kosovo. The Serbian monasteries West visits at Peć and Dečani are rightfully famous landmarks. Most of them today are restored and preserved under the UN’s designation as World Heritage Sites.

West is genuinely enraptured by the devotional art here and she takes time to examine, deconstruct, and contextualize the frescoes painted centuries earlier. She finds here a more experiential piety, immediate and deeply felt. She intuits an uncanny communication between centuries: the expressionism on display in Gračanica from 1325 is painted in the same authentic, almost naive style as William Blake hones in the 1800s. The similarities are indeed so striking it is easy to confuse the two. There is no indication that Blake visited, saw, or even studied these obscure frescoes. The fact that they both seem to express in the same way suggests they have tapped into a deep and universal experience.

For West, that universal trait is a mysticism that separates east and west. “This is a study of what our people alone know,” Constantine observes. “This is mysticism without suffering.” West finds this refreshing. Instead of the half-mad mystic hermit of the Western church, who starves and thirsts himself in the desert for a chance at a vision of the truth, these Orthodox mystics are ascetic because what they think requires much more room than civilization can provide. “Life is not long enough for these men to enjoy the richness of their own perceptions, to transmute them into wisdom,” she concludes.

God Blessing the 7th Day, William Blake, 1805

West revisits the Kosovo legend, about which the less said the better. She quotes extensively, and has been extensively quoted as quoting, the poem that forms the Serbian national ur-narrative. It describes the choice made by Prince Lazar as he assembled his forces against the invading Ottomans. The angel Elijah, in form of a grey falcon, visits Lazar on the eve of battle. The angel offers the prince a choice between the kingdom of heaven and a kingdom on earth. He chooses the former, after which his army is cut to pieces on Kosovo field. It is an ages-old example of the noble Lost Cause (in which case St. Jude should have appeared before Lazar), which is purer in defeat than in victory. Ignominy and slaughter are redeemed. From the defeat of the Confederacy to Germany’s stab in the back, from Custer’s Last Stand to the Mother of All Battles, stories of nobility and self-sacrifice redress ancient carnage and catastrophe. It is hard to imagine the grip of a 600 year-old legend on people in the 21^st century, but there is much to echo William Faulkner here (“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”).

For West, Kosovo is even more sickening than her experience at the Sheep’s Field. Here the grey falcon is the bridgehead to the black lamb. It connects animal ritual sacrifice to actual human sacrifice. It is the terminus for humanity’s unconscious death wish. With a sardonic cut she writes, “So that was what happened, Lazar was a member of the Peace Pledge Union.” This pro-appeasement organization, as with its fellow neutralist, nativist, and fascist parties and clubs across North America and Europe between the world wars, is conveniently forgotten today.

“[W]hat the pacifist really wants is to be defeated,” West writes. She continues:

If it be a law that those who are born into the world with a preference for the agreeable over the disagreeable are born also with an impulse towards defeat, then the whole world is a vast Kosovo, an abominable blood-logged plain, where people who love go out to fight people who hate, and betray their cause to their enemies, so that loving is persecuted for immense tracts of history, far longer than its little periods of victory.

Rebecca West’s travels in Old Serbia (Kosovo). (Google Maps)

The rest of the trip alternates between mystical revery and pure annoyance. She makes an eccentric visit to the Stan Trg (an English typographical corruption of Stari Trg, “Old Mine”) mines at Trepča. These pits have been continuously mined for more than 2,000 years and today remain the largest producer of lead-zinc and silver ore in Europe. There she finds a Scotsman whom she calls Gospodin Mac, the mine’s general manager. The author Ian Hamilton has identified the Mac as A.S. Howie, a career employee of the Selection Trust, who died not long after the meeting West records. Not much more information is available about him, but West enjoys the company of her fellow countryman and his wife immeasurably.

The pitiful Constantine retreats into himself, hovering on the verge of nervous collapse as he tries to reconcile his wife’s animus toward him and his English friends. He comes off as brusque and smug, but West sympathetically sees right through him. “I paused, at a loss for words,” she writes. “I did not know how to say that he was dying of being a Jew in a world where there were certain ideas to which some new star was lending a strange strength.” This is both a terrifying portent of the Holocaust and the most succinct summary of dual consciousness that I have ever read.

There are two other long shadows of the war to come. First West and her husband encounter a strange man in a provincial café. The man approaches them speaking German while claiming to be Danish. But hearing the man speak Henry Andrews immediately determines, “That man has spoken Berliner German from his infancy.” Constantine concedes the fake Dane is likely a German agent, but they remain confused why he would be here, so far from any large city or capital.

Later, in Dečani, they are accosted by an irritating blond monk who brags he soon “will have the great honour of entertaining at Dečani Herr Hitler and Herr Göring!” (Hitler later pressured the Regent Prince Paul of Yugoslavia to join the Tripartite Pact. When Serbian officers ousted Paul in a coup and installed Peter II in 1941, Hitler declared Yugoslavia an enemy state and invaded. Nevertheless, I can find no indication that Hitler visited Yugoslavia prior to the occupation. Göring visited Ragusa, Croatia, in 1935.)

West laboriously relates the descent and fall of the Serbian empire and Byzantium to the Ottomans. A civil war among the descendants of King Milutin in the 1320s stalled Serbian plans to take Byzantium at Constantinople. An internecine power struggle between Milutin’s grandson Stefan Dušan and his father resulted in the father’s imprisonment and Dušan being crowned emperor. He proved an able leader and commander, initially offering his armies to Cantacuzenus, ruler of Byzantium, to fight his civil war. That offer just as quickly reversed and Dušan went on a campaign of conquest throughout the Balkans.

As a result of this reversal, Byzantium was suddenly extremely vulnerable. To shore up its defenses, Cantacuzenus allied with the Turks and ceded territory in Europe to them to repay debts. This placed the Ottomans in an opportune position to capitalize on Byzantium’s weakness coming out of its civil war. When Dušan suddenly died, he left a leadership vacuum and vast imperial possessions without defenses. The Ottomans then embarked on their conquest of the Balkans that included the Battle of Kosovo and the Fall of Constantinople in 1453. Ottoman Turkey soon consolidated rule over an empire spanning from Baku to Algiers and from Budapest to Aden.

This is an extensive narrative backdrop to the situation West finds in Old Serbia in the late 1930s. Dušan’s turn on Byzantium, she argues, sealed the fate of the Eastern Church and opened the door to 500 years of Turkish domination in southeastern Europe. West sees the lasting result in Old Serbia, which serves her argument about the destructive nature of empires. She sees in real time the consequences of centuries of conquest and subjugation. Her argument isn’t that the Ottomans Turkified or Islamized Kosovo so much as do almost the opposite: there is almost nothing left. In the place of what should be the Serbian national heartland, she sees instead an absence, a cultural void that follows colonization.

Battle of Kosovo, Adam Stefanović, 1870. (Wikipedia)

“Yet people here had once known all that we know, and more,” she writes, “but the knowledge had died after the death of Stephen Dušan, it had been slain on the field of Kosovo.”

NOTE: This article has been corrected to indicate that Hermann Göring visited Yugoslavia in 1935.

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Garry Wills’ Qur’an (Part One)

Posted on March 18, 2020 by James Thomas Snyder

Is Islam as American as apple pie? Both are early imports from Asia Minor – Islam from the Arabian Peninsula by way of Africa and Iberia, apples from southern Kazakhstan by way of Europe – that have grown deep roots in the New World. Islam has directly affected the New World in ways that have been obscured for generations but deserve better understanding today.

The history of Islam in the Western Hemisphere has long been debated in the Near East. There are some interesting, if apocryphal, suggestions that early Muslim navies traveled to North America from the Mediterranean before Columbus, but evidence is scarce. Islam definitively arrived in the Americas with the Spanish conquista. With them the Spaniards brought tens of thousands of African slaves, a large plurality of whom were likely Muslims, as early as 1501.

The conquista was profoundly affected by the Spanish experience of both Moorish rule and the reconquista that expelled Muslims from the Iberian peninsula in the late 15^th century. The pursuit of gold in the New World was motivated in part by the financial burden of the war and the sheer fact of reconquest in Spain drove a self-fulfilling narrative for the brigands and ne’er-do-wells who led the pillage. In their minds the conquest of the New World was an extension of the liberation of the old.

What the quran meant

But the Spanish could not purge the cultural influence of Muslim rule as easily as it could the population that brought it to them. Just to start, the entire Spanish language was heavily influenced by Arabic including hundreds of adopted words. You may never view Arnold Schwarzenegger the same when you consider that his characteristic line, “Hasta la vista, baby,” is a direct Arabic import from hatta meaning “until”. Likewise, Spanish speakers from Argentina to Canada still use the expression ojala, invoking God, meaning the same thing as the Arabic inshallah: God willing.

Consequently, the Spanish left an Islamic-inspired legacy across the hemisphere. The geometric tile mosaics of Seville, Spain, were inspired by Islamic art whose legacy can still be found as far away as Mexico and California. The famously beautiful enclosed balconies of Lima, Peru, are a direct import from North African moucharaby latticed windows. Place names influenced by Arabic terms proliferate. Guadalajara, Mexico’s second largest city, means “Valley of the Stones” in Arabic. The Catholic patron saint of Mexico, the Virgin of Guadalupe, has Arabic roots: Guadalupe is an Arabic-Latin mash-up meaning “Valley of the Wolves”. The historical influence doesn’t stop there. Matamoros, a Mexican border town opposite Brownsville, Texas, means “Moor-Slayer,” the epithet applied to Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, known to Muslims as el Cid (el sayid), a Spanish holy warrior of the reconquista. Santiago de Chile and San Diego, California, are named for St. James, a mythical hero of that war.

This influence persists even in the United States. There is strong if not conclusive evidence that California’s etymology is rooted in the term “caliph,” which applies to a Muslim leader descended from the prophet Muhammad. Similarly, it is possible that Albuquerque stems from the Arabic term Abu al-Qurq, meaning “father of the oak”. Andalucia, Alabama, may have adopted a residual place name from the Spanish colonialists who explored the south during the 16^th century. Al Andalus was the name of Islamic Spain.

African slaves poured into the hemisphere shortly after the conquista. At least 10 percent of the 400,000 Africans kidnapped to the United States were Muslims. This is a fair if low estimate for the rest of the Americas. The most notable slave uprising in Brazil, to which the Portuguese brought three million Africans, was led by a Muslim community known as the Malê. While most Africans were converted to Christianity, it is well-documented that many of these men and women retained their names indicating Islamic roots: Muhammad, Fatima, Ayisha.

Two African American slaves, Ibrahim Abd Al-Rahman and Omar ibn Said, achieved modest fame in the 19^th century when they demonstrated literacy in Arabic. Through a dramatic political intervention, Al-Rahman was manumitted to Morocco with his wife. (Sadly, not their nine children.) Ibn Said remained property in the United States and died two years before the 13^th Amendment was passed that would have freed him.

moors account

The Moor’s Account, a recent novel by Laila Lalani, tells the true story of Estevanico, a Moroccan slave who accompanied the Panfilo de Narvaes expedition to Florida in 1527. Estevanico, whose real name was probably Mustufa Zemmouri, was one of four surviving members of the expedition whose numbers were decimated by shipwreck, disease, exhaustion, and native population raids on the invaders. Before he died, probably in 1539 in what is now New Mexico, he traveled from Florida along the Gulf Coast, across what is now Texas and northern Mexico, all the way to Mexico City. He was among the first non-natives to see what we now call the American southwest.

Muslims did not exist in individual vacuums in the United States: there were communities of Muslim believers, including one led by Bilali Muhammad in Georgia. Muhammad was literate in Arabic and wrote a short treatise on Islamic law before his death. He also commanded 80 men during the War of 1812. Indeed, Muslim soldiers served in the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War and the Union Army during the Civil War.

jeffersons quran

Separate from the faith of the African population, which did not interest their owners, Islam conceptually and politically affected the founders of the American republic. In Thomas Jefferson’s Qur’an, Denise Spellberg’s comprehensive survey of the influence of Islam on the Founders’ debate over religious freedom, tolerance, and political participation, she reveals a radical, if wholly theoretical, acceptance of plural belief in the early United States. In contrast to Great Britain, whose monarch is also head of the Church of England, and most European countries with their own state church, the Americans imagined their new state purged of church influence and religious society protected from government action. At that time, the country was utterly dominated by Protestant sects. Catholics were a distinct Christian minority, except in Maryland (which they founded) and Jews were considered so rare as to be exotic. The belief systems of the indigenous people of the Americas were barely acknowledged and the Islamic beliefs of the enslaved population virtually unknown.

The drafters, in sum, made an extraordinary concession to a future they only could imagine when writing the constitution to forbid religious discrimination explicitly. The founders, in an extraordinary leap of faith, embraced the distinct possibility that future U.S. officeholders, including the president, may not be Christian. At that time, in a country dominated by Protestants, Muslims were routinely lumped together with other religious and cultural minorities of the age, including Catholics, Jews, pagans, Hindus, Indians and “infidels”. The political principle of religious inclusion is a cornerstone of revolutionary American democracy. The vision of religious freedom appears, in retrospect, astonishingly clairvoyant – an almost science fiction vision of their country 200 years in the future that actually came to pass. Today, in that envisioned future, Christians still predominate in the United States but Protestants do not. Catholic justices now hold a majority in the Supreme Court. Jewish Members of Congress serve at three times their representation in the population. And Islam is the fastest-growing religion in the United States.

While clearly none of the American founders was an Islamic scholar, they appear to have been better acquainted with Islam and the great Islamic civilizations than the contemporary generation. The early Americans, in exalting “foundation,” placed the experimental United States alongside the world’s great civilizations, which included Rome and Athens but also the contemporaneous Ottoman Empire as well as ancient Egypt and Persia. The founders knew their history and drew from the historical experience in crafting the government.

This homage is found in the physical structures that symbolize the republic. A relief of Suleiman the Magnificent graces the chamber of the House of Representatives. Islam is depicted as an allegory for physics on the ceiling of the Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress. And the Prophet Muhammad himself is depicted in relief in the U.S. Supreme Court as a great lawgiver.

Unfortunately, an intellectual caesura has opened up between the revolutionary generation and today’s leaders and thinkers. Indeed, a concerted collective attempt by the Christian majority to understand Islam only occurred after September 11, 2001. The gap in knowledge unfortunately remains evident.

But it was not universal. Today about half of the U.S. Muslim population consists of American-born converts, and the largest representation of those are African Americans. This American Islamic tradition dates back more than a century to the founding of the Moorish Science Temple of America in 1913. A follower known as Wallace Fard Muhammad broke from the temple to establish the Nation of Islam in 1930. Both organizations were syncretic religious/political movements with roots firmly sunk in African American history and experience. Nevertheless, the Nation of Islam reformed itself into an orthodox Sunni Muslim organization, still dominated by African American converts, following the death of Elijah Muhammad. No American today can claim absolute ignorance of Islam if they know the names Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali, the Nation of Islam’s two most famous converts. But these movements have always been considered fringe, both politically and theologically.

How can we account for this collective loss of knowledge? One way may be examining the vaunted Western Canon, that corpus of literature spanning back to Greece two thousand years before Jesus Christ. The definition of the canon varies, which is what makes Harold Bloom’s definitive list so important. In The Western Canon, Bloom specifically extols the Qur’an as a source of law, ethics, and poetry as part of the Western tradition. (Strangely, this is his only other mention of Islam in the book. The Qur’an isn’t even noted in the index.) He includes the Arabian Nights, The Poem of the Cid, the apocryphal Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, William Shakespeare’s Othello, as well as Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote, whose framing story involves finding the manuscript written in Arabic by an “Arab Historian”. Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, while not hospitable to Islam, nonetheless represents its core tenets accurately. Goethe’s last work, West Eastern Divan, was inspired by the Muslim Persian poet Muhammad Hafez e Shirazi (and inspired Muhammad Iqbal to write an homage to Goethe in return). Herman Melville’s character Ishmael in Moby-Dick (his name is the Biblical progenitor of the Arabs) describes the fasting and prayer of his harpooner bunk mate Queequeg as a kind of “Ramadan”. Mark Twain’s Innocents Abroad, though not included in Bloom’s list, was widely read contemporaneously and involved descriptions of the Grand Tour that includes the Holy Land and Egypt. Clearly, literate Americans were familiar with the Islamic world as late as the 19^th century.

But all of that prologue is forgotten in the contemporary era. The answers to why Islam’s cultural and philosophical influence in the United States fell away since can be explained in part by examining Bloom’s modern canon. Not a single great 20th century American writer wrote on these themes. This suggests a deterioration of collective knowledge and experience in American letters. The Arabic writers Bloom cites, including the Nobel Prize winner Naguib Mahfouz, were largely secular in nature (a sin for which he was stabbed in the street by an Islamic extremist). Other Europeans address these themes to a lesser extent: Albert Camus (The Stranger), Ivo Andric (The Bridge on the Drina), Amos Oz (The Perfect Peace), and Lawrence Durrell (The Alexandria Quartet). Still other writers aren’t included in the list but probably should be: Rebecca West (Black Lamb and Grey Falcon), T.E. Lawrence (Seven Pillars of Wisdom), Gertude Bell (The Desert and the Sown).

In the 20^th century, American writers were grappling with modernity and affluence, war and peace, the immigrant experience and the African American struggle for justice. After the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1918 learned Americans had little reason to include the Islamic world in their thinking until that fateful second Tuesday in September 2001. That is where the reckoning with our intellectual history began.

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Belief from the inside out

Posted on May 8, 2016 by James Thomas Snyder

Carla Power’s Pulitizer Prize-shortlisted If the Oceans Were Ink, an outsider’s meditation on The Holy Qur’an with the help of a learned Islamic scholar, signals a subtle but seismic shift in our intellectual world. It joins other unmistakable indications that mostly secular Western thinkers now realize they have allowed the belief of a billion people to be defined by a clique and that the popular understanding of Islam has been warped and obverted to the point that the exception has replaced the rule.

I imagine especially for Muslims it is as if everyone thought they were doctors because a friend had a rash, or physicists because they’d seen a car accident. While they understand something from the inside out, everyone else seems to be just peering in from the outside.

I was reminded of this when listening to an interview on San Francisco public radio recently. The host of The Forum on KQED, Michael Krasny, was interviewing Qamar Adamjee, curator of a new exhibition of Islamic Art at the Asian Art Museum. (The relevant portion begins at about the 13:00 minute mark.) Krasny does not so much ask a question as state the cultural and human destruction wrought by the Taliban and the Islamic State. As she struggles to express herself, Adamjee’s response is telling. Those who attack art are doing so for political, not religious, reasons, she says. “It’s easy to pick on religion, it’s easy to pick on the other,” which of course cuts in two directions. She changes the subject: “[The exhibit] allows us to see Islamic culture as a much broader thing than the undifferentiated monolithic mass that comes across to us today.” What she is trying to say is: I want to talk about art and Islamic culture. This art has nothing to do with violence.

The larger point, perhaps missed in a discussion of art, is that the art and culture and belief of Muslims are what is really important. That is a difficult thing to say while a coalition of nations is trying to destroy the Islamic State. But as this recent NPR story by Tom Gjelten also argues, understanding that larger point is also essential to defeat our enemies and to make friends as well.

Carla Power’s honor may be a landmark of that dawning realization but it is not the only example. Another can be found in Garry Wills’ recent essay, “My Koran Problem” in The New York Review of Books in which he admits that only very recently had he read The Holy Qur’an. This is an extraordinary confession. How could a public intellectual and powerful liberal polemic of such range, virtuosity and experience go so long without understanding one of human civilization’s great texts? “It was ridiculous that I would remain completely ignorant of what a quarter of the world’s people not only believe in but live by (in different ways),” he writes. Beginning sometime after 2003, he continues to struggle with this text “unaided”. Surely Wills could find somebody willing to help him?

On a smaller scale but in more sympathetic vein, Washington Post columnist Courtland Milloy recently wrote about a visit to the Masjid Muhammad, “The Nation’s Mosque” located in northeast Washington, D.C. “If you see nothing suspicious, maybe that’s normal,” his article was headlined. At the mosque he met the imam, a retired U.S. Air Force Master Sergeant. A member of the mosque is a retired U.S. Army Command Sergeant Major. “We should be America’s allies in the fight against extremism,” another member of the mosque told Milloy. Muslims are by far the greatest victims of terrorism around the world. “Instead, we’re on the defensive, always being asked to respond to somebody’s claim that Islam promotes violence.” Again, in Milloy we hear somebody trying to change the subject, to focus on what’s important, which is what is normal.

How did so many overlook this pacific ordinariness, this everydayness, this normality that we all can recognize? Wills writes that he has spent most of his career studying Christian and Jewish theology. Herein is the heart of the problem. I discovered myself how self-limiting one’s own provincial interests can be. Even well-intentioned attempts to learn more lead to a contained circle of works, all cross-referencing each other, each self-delimiting any knowledge beyond the circle. It takes an extraordinary mind or experience to force oneself out and beyond. I am the grateful beneficiary of such an extraordinary experience and extraordinary minds when it comes to Islam.

Wills struggles from this insulating defect, unfortunately comparing the Qur’an to The Communist Manifesto and Mein Kampf, as if the holy text were an operational manual for our enemies. This is exactly wrong. Studying and understanding The Holy Qur’an and Islamic thought is how we understand and know our friends. Western secularists don’t understand what Muslims really believe and how their belief animates their lives. What is normal is important because it is what we have in common to defend against intolerance and barbarism.

But like Wills, we have to start at the beginning. At the beginning is the realization Wills alludes to: that understanding Islam on its own terms is more important than its present political context. When a billion people believe some thing, we have a duty to understand that from the inside out.

If Carla Power’s book suffers a flaw, like any other similar book written by a secular Westerner, it is that she addresses the belief from the outside. But she is studying the Qur’an, which as any Muslim understands is the place to start to understand Islam. There are several excellent guides (in English) to the Qur’an, including Introduction to the Qur’an by M.A. Draz and The Story of the Qur’an by Ingrid Mattson. These both benefit from the authors being Muslim. Additionally, several translations of The Holy Qur’an (also in English) can be found online. I am less familiar with the Sunnah and the Hadith, the actions and sayings of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) and a major source of Islamic theology and moral philosophy, but translations are also available online.

Like Wills, I admit that these ancient texts are indeed challenging to read unaided and barring a community college or divinity school course most of us must avail ourselves to what we can find in the public domain. To understand what Muslims really believe we have to break out of the confining circle of Western scholarship and read what Muslims write about themselves. Fortunately several books do this and don’t require the assistance of a scholar. The journey is rewarding from the first step.

the_road_to_mecca_book_cover The gift of a friend, Muhammad Asad’s The Road to Mecca (1947) is a good place to start. The book is at once a philosophic meditation, spiritual quest, and ripping adventure yarn in the old Islamic tradition. Asad was an Austrian convert from Judaism who began his career as a journalist in the Near East. His adventures, which included advising King Saud and the nascent government of Pakistan, rival or exceed those of T.H. Lawrence, Robert Burton and Gertrude Bell. Asad very nearly died of thirst while lost in the desert and was interned as an enemy alien by British authorities even though his entire family perished in the Holocaust. His greatest contribution was a defining contemporary translation, The Message of the Qur’an (1980), into English.

The story of Asad’s conversion is moving. He has returned to interwar Berlin from his latest journalistic exploits in the Near East and he is riding the Berlin U-Bahn with his wife. They note the devastated expressions of their fellow citizens, the deep unhappiness of their lives etched on their faces. There they decide to convert to a system of belief that appeared so much more humane and logical than what they had been raised in.

Who Speaks for Islam (2008) is a misleading title since this book, produced by Gallup and written by Dahlia Mogahed and John L. Esposito, is a very literal survey of what Muslims around the world think about belief, politics, and culture. It is a study of a complex and plural community, but many clear common threads show through: the central importance of family, the rejection of political violence, the concerns about the erosion of traditional cultural norms, the necessity of belief guiding political choices and personal behavior. These findings are not particularly dramatic and indeed could be mistaken for similar surveys in Europe and the United States. But they are critical to understanding the community on its own terms rather than those forced on it by barbarians and xenophobes.

Memories of Muhammad (2008) by Omid Safi, is a kaleidoscopic examination of the legacy of the founder of Islam. Safi argues it is impossible to understand the belief without understanding the man who promulgated it – much as Protestant Christians closely examine the life of Jesus Christ, he notes – in addition to how Muslims remember and honor the Prophet around the world. In the clearest way I have read, Safi illuminates the history of Islam, the Sunni-Shia schism, Sufi mysticism, and even contemporary politics. Born to Iranian parents in Florida, he displays in his home a devotional portrait of the prophet popular in Persian-speaking countries but considered taboo elsewhere – demonstrating the plural and dynamic nature of the community.

Safi by necessity acknowledges contemporary challenges – here he writes against the conventional orthodoxies of the “clash of civilizations” as well as Muslim Occidentalism – but significantly argues that the best way to combat religious strife is to argue for the alternative. Like Adamjee, he wants to change the subject to what’s really important: what real people believe and what belief means to them. And by doing so, he is convinced that it is necessary to talk about and gain a better understanding of Islam and what Muslims believe, which is what the rest of us are just now coming around to.

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Islam and the West, a Positive Approach

Posted on October 19, 2012 by James Thomas Snyder

Today I published an article on the protests seen in the Muslim world over the controversial anti-Islamic video that went live in August. My article follows a previous post but expands on my work in public diplomacy and public opinion to provide a much more complex, nuanced and optimistic (!) examination of the state of affairs that we in the West face with the Islamic world. I wrote it to challenge the self-limiting conventional wisdom that has hardened not just around this particular incident but regarding the West’s relationship to the vast, plural Islamic world as well.

My thanks go to the editors at Small Wars Journal for publishing my article.

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Islam and the Political Aesthetic

Posted on September 20, 2012 by James Thomas Snyder

An illuminated page from Sultan Baybars’ Qur’an, written entirely in gold. (British Library)

NOTE Sept. 22: With today’s events in Pakistan (and attending, preventable deaths and violence), my predictions about the numbers involved in the protests worldwide appears to have been off, certainly in scale. Nevertheless I still stand by my argument that those protesting are vastly outnumber by those standing to the side.

There was a brief moment, early in the crisis – immediately after the deaths of four American diplomats in Benghazi, Libya – when there was a strange and welcome alignment that we haven’t seen before. The murderers aside, those protesting the depiction of the Prophet Muhammad (Peace Be Upon Him) in an anti-Islamic video found themselves in accord with the U.S. government and several other reasonable observers – not to mention the actors fraudulently recruited to the production. All agreed, in effect, that the video was a tawdry scrap of agitprop. The producer, an Egyptian Christian, seemed so embarrassed by his feat that he wouldn’t appear in public. As the journalist Ashraf Khalil observed, the deaths in Benghazi and elsewhere excepted, these videos were best mocked and then ignored.

But the demonstrations, predictably, grew and spread, and the predictably righteous reaction grew and spread in the West, and the ghost of Samuel Huntington rattled his chains. I personally believe that the demonstrations across the Islamic world are less a spontaneous show of the easily aggressed feelings of Muslims than a deliberate mobilization by conservatives who seized on this video to maneuver against the democracy movements swelled during the Arab Spring and threatening their power. (But that is for another post.)

I was alarmed by how stupidly and easily Western observers fell into their cliched, pat observations about Islam, casting the thousands (perhaps only hundreds) of demonstrators for the plural billion Muslims around the world who no doubt wondered (as I did) what to make of this spectacle. While several anti-American demonstrations did take place, it is important to note that hundreds of millions of Muslims did not participate. They were probably angered and riled by this transparently deliberate attempt to insult them – you would be angry, too, if somebody told you to obscenity your mother – but they probably dismissed it out of hand. They have more important things to worry about.

This didn’t keep self-important and in many cases self-appointed Western observers from telling those quiescent masses of Muslims what to think and believe about the insults rained down on them from YouTube and Charlie Hebdo. They should get over it, become accustomed to their religious beliefs being mocked and denigrated. As if you went to see The Last Temptation of Christ to spite your grandmother, or told your LDS co-worker that you found The Book of Mormon a laugh riot, he should really go see it.

But at the heart of these condescending arguments are as much an assertion of the political aesthetic as those demonstrating in the streets: that art should have a political purpose. So as long as those hurling rocks and those hurling polished epithets agree on that, let’s understand what we’re talking about.

It’s difficult to capture succinctly a thousand years of artistic philosophy, but it is certainly true that the tradition of Islamic art shies from the physical representation of the human form. This is not exclusive, of course, but toward one end of this spectrum, particularly in the Sunni tradition, depictions of the Prophet are virtually unknown. (This should not shock anyone familiar with the iconoclasts or, for that matter, the severe Western anti-clerical movement that simply defaced churches across the West — resulting in such austere secular monuments as the French Pantheon.) Nonetheless, Shiites are known to depict their saints in icons, particularly during the ashura, that would be familiar to Christians and Buddhists. But overall the Islamic tradition discourages human or natural forms, leaving the Creation to God. This seems a constraint, of course, but perhaps no more so than any canvas. Limitations define greatness.

This tradition encourages, at the other end of the spectrum, an extraordinary devotion to geometry in design and architecture. Seen in illuminated manuscripts of the Qur’an (see above) and the ornamentation from mosques to homes, complex patterns and designs adorn. In their beauty and order they mirror Creation, reminding me of the Qur’anic Surah Al Rahman (“the Gracious,” 55):

The sun and the moon follow courses computed;
And the herbs and the trees both bow in adoration.
And the sky has he raised high, and he has set up the balance,
In order that you may not transgress the balance.

Cairo lattice window,
from an 1882 lithograph

This is perhaps most often seen across the Islamic world in the well-known lattices that serve both as shades in a sun-soaked climate and barriers from the prying eyes of neighbors to protect the modesty of women within.

Alicatado tiles, Spain (Tennessee Tech)

The intricate patterns of the latticework have been replicated in ceramic tile work, particularly in mosques and madrassas. The Blue Mosque in Herat, Afghanistan, stuns the viewer with its lapis tile work, overpowering the mosque that shares its name in Istanbul. Tilework migrated from the Mahgreb north into Spain after the Moorish conquest, and now is popularly known in the West as Spanish mosaic tiles.

La Mezquita de Cordoba (M.C. Escher)

While living in Europe I was delighted to learn about the influence of Islamic design on Western art. One of my favorite artists, the Dutch graphic designer M.C. Escher, was most influenced after a visit to la Mezquita at Cordoba in Spain (now a cathedral and World Heritage site). The fantastic perspective of the mosque’s interior and the intricate, tessellated tile mosaics forever influenced his most famous and familiar works.

Consider these two comparisons as just an example (the links above will provide many more). The one the left is from la Mezquita. The right, Escher’s inspiration. (With all due credit to Philosufi and Fatih Gelgi for elaborating on what I learned while visiting the Escher Museum in The Hague!)

Wikipedia article on Alhambra

Tecpatl ceramics, Mexico (Tennessee Tech)

I visited Gibraltar, Seville, Sintra (Portugal), and Toledo where the Islamic influence remains despite the worst efforts of the Inquisition. Ceramic tiles with their repeating patterns are still made in Seville. From there, the Spanish colonial influence, affected profoundly by the Islamic conquest, lives on 1,000 years later from my native California to South America.

Sagrada Familia (The Joy of Shards)

And back again. You can see this most explicitly in the meticulous exploded-mosaic style of Antoni Gaudi in Barcelona, which hosts most of his design and architecture. His masterpiece is the Sagrada Familia, still under construction a century after it began, whose details are covered with fragments of brightly colored Spanish tiles intricately reassembled. Gaudi was fanatically dedicated to his work but also profoundly religious and dedicated all his talents and devotions to this modernist cathedral.

So let’s make this abundantly clear: the Moorish conquest of the Iberian peninsula in the 8^th Century directly influenced the quintessential modernist expression of 21^st Century Catholic Europe. We can’t rewrite history, but it’s hard to imagine this happening in quite the same, sublime way if the Islamic artistic tradition followed Western conventions of human and natural representation. The Western artistic tradition we know today wouldn’t exist without the deep religious restraints of the Islamic tradition. And since we are People of the Book, this is something to celebrate. But Samuel Huntington would have us throwing rocks with those demonstrating in the streets, insisting that the gulf between our cultures is too wide and ne’er the twain shall meet.

What relevance does this have beyond the debased little video and the assaults that killed four Americans and others? Only that those events sparked an argument about art and politics — although those engaged in the argument are too dimly self-important to realize it — and in that argument nobody so far has talked much about the Islamic artistic tradition, which is profoundly devotional and influential. Those who critique the “Muslim” reaction are very willing to accept the insult without sharing any reverence. We live in a believing world. To ignore that demonstrates a profound disrespect and ignorance that is, at the very least, the tinder which the radicals are working desperately hard to spark.

I believe that we could all look at the examples of the art posted above — or by perusing the links — and agree, too, that these objects are very beautiful and that beauty forms the basis of human expression. (Perhaps we might even confuse some of their provenance?) That, for others, God is written on the walls, provides a deeper understanding. But there is nothing political about either of those expressions or experiences.

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