A Sea Change in US-Israeli Relations?

Photo of the Mediterranean Sea taken from National Geographic Website

The sea never fails to leave its mark on anything it encounters. Its smell penetrates the most resilient plastic and eventually it must overcome all barriers to its movement. It transforms matter gradually but ineluctably and it works so silently that usually a complete transformation has been effected by the time one realizes that change is under way. These reflections are inspired by the article by Dave Lindorff linked below:

A Sea Change in US-Israeli Relations? Dave Lindorff

Islam: the Untold Story

This documentary recently appeared on British television:

Click HERE to view the documentary 

It argues that the origins of Islam are very different from those which are usually recounted and makes highly controversial claims about Islamic history. Yet unlike the Innocence of Muslims, it seems to me to represent a genuine attempt by a non-Muslim to discover the truth using historical methods. I think it would be a great pity if the backlash against films like the Innocence of Muslims were also to mean that films like this one could not be produced or discussed or were always and only seen as a provocation instead of a spur to dialogue between religious and non-religious people. What do you think? Comments are welcome :)

I should also point out that this film has been dismissed as wildly speculative, biased and badly researched. See for instance this blog here and also this scholarly refutation on youtube:

I am not qualified to decide whether the speculation contained in the documentary is well founded or not. However, I am intrigued by some of the implications that would follow from taking such a historical perspective to the orgins of Islam as is taken in this documentary and also in this other video-clip below:

For example, it is often assumed by non-Muslims that Mohammed intended to found a new and competing religion to Judaism and Christianity. But it seems many sixth century Christians saw Islam as a kind of Judaism. This perspective throws some light on the syncretism of Islam, which acknowledges both Jesus and Mary as important figures and sources of inspiration. Even the Quranic statement that "the natural religion of humanity is Islam" becomes a source of ecumenical unity rather than division once the term Islam is translated. If what Muslims were saying is that "submission to God is the natural religion of humanity", then how different is this from the attitude to God recommended by the central Christian prayer which starts out: "Our Father who art in heaven, Thy will be done"? If, then, Islam is seen as gradually developing its inner core by building and uniting previous religious traditions and developing its theology over time, then surely its validity as a religion would rest not on its originality but on the extent to which it manages to persuasively restate and make relevant central religious themes taken from Judaism and Christianity? And if this is indeed the case, then surely the the Byzantine Emperor quoted by Pope Benedict was making a theological mistake when he asked: "what did Islam bring which is new?" The point about Islam would lie precisely in the fact that its message is not new, which is why, I believe, the Quran emphasises remembering God. 

"Ara x'qala l-bahar! Look, our conquerors are back! And quite eroded too!" or "The sea as a metaphor for memory"

A couple of weeks ago I scribbled a quick entry on how the expression ‘Ara x’qala l-bahar’ has temporal as well as spatial connotations. In Malta, I spammed, this phrase is used to exclaim surprise (often a positive one) at an unexpected encounters with an element from the past (be it a face, and object, a person, a sound, a taste) one hasn’t come across in a long time. It is as if such an element had been lost at sea and (randomly or deliberately, we will soon shortly explore) has been washed again on its original shore.

This blog draws on my first return to Malta to do field-research after a year of lectures in England. It was during this time that it was announced that the old, great rock-opera ‘Gensna’ (our nation/people), an oral official narrative for left-wing national consciousness, was going to be held again... so that ‘older generations could re-live once again their finest moments’ and so that the ‘younger generations would know what their fathers went through’.

(one day I’ll spam something on how, in local politics, the term ‘zaghzugh’ [youth], refers to people who did not live through the great events of the 70s and 80s, they have been denied history, so to speak, and somehow are also innocent and free of the crimes of those years)    

"X’qala l-bahar" indeed! And for loads of people!

These tunes, which for 20 years had been largely forgotten (except for a disembodied tema’ 79, obviously) were to return back again to our stages, our TVs and radios to ensure we still remember... 

but remember what exactly? Through these 20 years, several parts of this musical kind of got, well, modified by the erosive processes of the sea of time, and were washed up back quite changed and sometimes rather unrecognisable. Or well, perhaps some people went down to the shore to look for pieces, and grabbed the wrong ones instead (no that’s not a green pebble, silly, it’s a piece of eroded glass, jeez).

I will explain…and focus on my favourite song of the rock-opera… Il-hakkiema (the conquerors), which shamelessly parades in front of us stereotypes of our best and most influential conquerors. I will quickly explore the main differences between the original depiction of the conquerors and our recent time-eroded ones. 

  

This pebble is not a pebble

For those to don’t know the song, it starts with the choir (representing the Maltese nation) lamenting and complaining that something went quite not as intended, that foreigners have arrived and god knows what awaits us. The conquerors then, one by one, make their pompous statements, outlining all they’d offer our nation. The Maltese are initially impressed, then they become dissatisfied and long for a new (and better) set of conquerors to govern them. 

The arab steps up first but... hey! Wait a second!

 I had seen on VHS (lovingly preserved by my grandparents) the original gensna, and the two depictions of the arab conquerors do not quite fit. 

The original 80s Arab!

 

The new Arabs.

 

In the original, the Arab wears a Saudi-Arabian, white outfit. His face is blackened and he is bearded. He waves his hands around like a souk vendor, salams and performs other religious gestures. In the re-imagined version, the Arab, well looks nothing like an Arab. He sports around a huge decorated hat, flowing red robes. He is unbearded and white skinned. If I didn’t know any better I’d even say he looked…well Ottoman.

"I will conquer that Island, somehow"

 My next shock (in terms of intensity) came with the portrayal of the British. In the original rock-opera, the Englishman walked around in his suit and top-hat. He curled his moustache, smiled beguilingly and looked as if he was channeling the bourgeois imperialist image through a caricature of Gerald Strickland. 

I even wear my military medals on a civilian businessman suit!

 The new Englishman? I don’t know. This conqueror looks like a 18^th century nobleman, and if English nobility ever sported such a look it was well defunct by the time they stumbled onto Maltese shores. 

I took Gibraltar first

The Knight of St.John also sports some differences. They both wear their long monk robes, but while the original knight (Josie Coppini, we love you), presented himself as pompous and arrogant, acting like a noble trying to convince the peasant he has a good deal, the new knight is stern and valiant, he punches the air, warlike and brave. This might say something about the huge knight-merchandise that has taken over our more touristy cities… perhaps.

Brilliant! Gets me every time!

The French…well they are largely the same, except for some cosmetic changes. They both strut around, proud and relaxed. They look down upon the ignorant masses. And both Frenchmen keep their hands tucked firmly into their coats. A bit disappointed here, but then again some pebbles washed up from the sea are not composed of soft franka, but of the harder Coralline limestone…and consequently they would have eroded at different rates.

The precious few reading this might think that I am making a bit too much fuss, and I would agree... but what these characters have in common is that they all, (regardless of them belonging to the original or to the modern version), are intended to be STEREOTYPES…and stereotypes refer to the first, most recognisable image that comes to mind when imagining a group of people. 

In other words, what has changed and eroded by the sea of time is the way we spontaneously imagine such groups to look like. 

So what has happened here? 

Well I will propose two ‘interpretations’, although in the spirit of this blog, this interpretative shore is open to new ideas and perspective 

1.       Hard and proper erosion  - abrasion, corruption, and all the other geographic processes I was thought back at secondary school. During the time when they were forgotten, our ideas of such peoples must have changed slowly and implicitly. It might probably also have to do with the fact that our relationship with such stereotypes has changed as well. The Englishman is no longer an active political conqueror and negotiator. The arab is no longer a central trading partner. Tunisia is not that big a deal of a tourist destination anymore. Let’s not even talk about Libya. The knight? Well we’ve got tourists to worry about.  Our stereotypes, in other words, are now being informed by a different set of processes.

2.       Or perhaps, something even more simple has happened, and in our attempt to re-assemble our cast of conquerors, the producers went down to the shore. They looked for pebbles, but then they found the green, shiny transparent thing. They know it is glass, they know it was the product of some wild barbecue and not a remnant of the sacred rocks that form our island... But hey, it does look pretty. And it does look sufficiently old and well…familiar? 

Yep. Looks like an Arab to me.

Religious People of the World: Unite!

Egyptian Muslims acting as human shields for Christians celebrating Midnight Mass in Alexandria last year.

The news that US Ambassador Chris Stevens has died from smoke inhalation following a rocket attack in Benghazi is worrying and portentous. The most destructive long term consequence of the attack, whoever was truly responsible for planning and carrying it out, is its likely impact on the way ordinary Muslims and Christians see each other. This is occurring in a context where Western Christians are already viewed as godless arrogant aggressors by many Muslims and where Muslims are increasingly labelled as potential terrorists by Christians. This once more opens up the terrifying vista of a world riven by deep cultural chasms, where religion is used as a pretext for murder and genocide...a world many had hoped would have been left behind after Obama's election.

To me as a Christian, one of the few hopeful signs in this tragic episode is the fact that the Coptic Christian church is condemning the disgusting film which is provoking Muslim outrage and also that some Copts are planning to demonstrate against it. In a way this helps to repay those Egyptian Muslims who last year, when Coptic churches were being bombed, decided to hold vigils outside churches where midnight mass was being celebrated; offering their lives as human shields for their Christian brothers and sisters. To my mind this was one of the most beautiful expressions of true religion, showing for a moment, its power in constructing a universal human solidarity which transcends the stupid artificial boundaries between believers.

I wish that we Maltese Christians, who are so close to the Christians of the Middle East and who also have significant traces of Islamic heritage in our culture, could take the lead in promoting such actions of solidarity with Muslims, paving the way for genuine peace and unity in God.

Looking through the Eyes of the Departed

My favourite ghost story writer is M.R. James (1862-1936) . His stories have the ability to inject sinister significance into ordinary objects and he draws upon real magical and folkloric traditions in a masterly way. One of his stories concerns a certain historian called Mr Fanshawe who, while staying as a guest at a country house, is lent a pair of binoculars which, unknown to him, have been filled with a fluid obtained by boiling the bones of hanged convicts. Whenever he uses these binoculars, he is able to view buildings and other scenes from the past, which he is unable to see with his ordinary eyes. This is a source of insight and fascination until a series of grisly encounters make him aware of quite what he is playing with...

This story is a good metaphor for anthropology, which always aims to see the world through the eyes of the other. Like Mr Fanshawe our curiosity may lead us to try to use powerful vantage points without asking too many questions about the ethics of doing so...unless we are  forced to confront them by our subjects.

However there is another way of looking through the eyes of those who have left, which has nothing to do with appropriating their world and is about re-experiencing, through love, the world one shared with the other who is no longer here. In one of his short stories, based on a dialogue with the ghost of his dead mother, Pirandello observes that such conversations are marked by the pain of knowing that while the loved dead person will always be remembered as alive by the living, the living will never again be thought about or reflected upon by the dead. Thus participating in such conversations means confronting the fact that part of you, the part which sprang into life under the loving gaze of the other, is gone forever.

The story was made into a moving episode of the film Kaos by the Taviani brothers a few years ago and the relevant part is reproduced below.

Hi mother's contribution is worth quoting in full: "Learn to see the world through the eyes of those who are no longer here. You will surely feel pain. But this pain will make the things you see more beautiful and sacred." These words appear to have inspired the marvelous closing scene of this episode where the young Pirandello and his sisters are depicted jumping off the pumice slopes of a small island when they are on their way to join their father in exile in Malta. This scene always leaves me with goosebumps; perhaps because the children in their innocent purity and Mozart's music combine to evoke in a powerful way the life of the soul:

Les Tres Riches Heures du Tony Blair

If you want to know what Tony Blair has been up to lately, click below:

Joking apart, this comedy clip really analyses the mechanisms of power through which symbolic domination is exercised in a masterly way; showing how post-modern financial capitalism divested charismatic political leaders of real power and also created new invisible, flexible but also impenetrable barriers of taste and disposition through which elites could control and dominate. These elites are post-national, liberal, moderate and determinedly gender and race-neutral. Yet at the same time their intolerance of any other claim to power or indeed dignity which is not built on brutal Darwinian and imperial capital accumulation shines through. A sad foretaste of the Obama years, which were also foreseen and denounced by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu:

David Harvey, the social geographer and the author of "The Condition of Postmodernity" has brilliantly analysed the structural basis of financial capitalism and claims that the crash of 2008 was quite predictable from this (Marxist) Perspective:

Finally here is my favourite comic take on what used to be called "the subprime crisis" before it mutated into the "Great Recession." Once again comedians seem to make the best social analysts:

Reclaiming Iago

In my previous post, I blogged about the mysterious lyrics of Modugno's song and how difficult they proved to interpret. Well sometime in 2007 the internet came to my rescue. One of my favourite past-times is to google odd combinations of words which mean something to me to see what resonance they have on the net. I call it: 'testing the limits of global imagination' and it is one of the best ways for discovering the relationship of one's ideas/thoughts/dreams to those of other people around the world. When I googled the lyrics of the song, I found that it came from an oddly titled film "Cosa Sono le Nuvole?" (What Are Clouds?), directed by the Italian writer and intellectual: Pier Paolo Pasolini (see photo on the right). In 1967 Pasolini came up with an Italian version of Othello, as a film about the play as enacted by a set of puppets. He cast some of the leading figures of mainstream Italian television of the time such as Franco Franchi and Ciccio Ingrassia as actors. 

Domenico Modugno figures as a garbage collector/undertaker, who constructs new puppets and disposes of old ones and there is an unforgettable performance of Iago by Toto`: the leading Italian comedian of the twentieth century. It was actually Toto`'s last film and he died before it was released. The song is sung by Modugno as he is disposing of the dead bodies of Othello and Iago. Its lyrics were composed by Pasolini in collaboration with Modugno and many of the words are taken from different speeches by Shakespeare's Othello. Caught up in a whirlwind of oscillating passions, Shakespeare's Othello exclaims: "But I do love thee. And when I love thee not, Chaos is come again." The same words are sung with ringing conviction in Pasolini's version. But without the implied reference to Desdemona, they become a statement about Love and its relationship to Life. "All my fond love thus do I blow to heaven", which is in Shakespeare the enraged prelude to Othello's killing of Desdemona become in Pasolini's version a philosophical adieu to erotic love from the standpoint of one who is dying, 

The  words are transformed; becoming more abstract and existential. Divorced from their immediate social context and the narrative temporality of the play the contradictions between Othello's various declamations emerge starkly and take the form of opposing principles, or mega-themes with the daemonic energy to propel humans in different directions (tal-genn Man!) At the same time new themes are added, clearly by Pasolini himself, who inserted lyrics speaking of the Beauty of Life (Ah but the poignant smell of the delicately textured grass! Ah if you had never been born!), of our Freedom to respond positively to the hatred of others (the one who is robbed and smiles steals something from the thief...so long as you can laugh you will never be lost) and about the relationship between Reason and Passion: But these are only words and I never heard that a heart, a heart which is deeply wounded, can be healed through listening. These last words contain, I feel, the key to the song and to the play as re-created by Pasolini. In his film, Pasolini makes significant departures from Shakespeare's plot, as the extract below makes clear:

Thus Desdemona becomes an artful, superficial little miss whose innocence is merely another term for the psychological and emotional immaturity she shares with Othello. Pasolini's Iago, by contrast is presented in a far more complex and sympathetic light than Shakespeare's. Shakespeare's Iago stands for irredeemable, inexplicable malice, which makes it possible for him to stand as the ultimate scapegoat and for the audience's sympathy to be drawn towards Desdemona and Othello. Pasolini's is green with envy but as a puppet manipulator himself he is also the only puppet who is somewhat aware of his condition as a puppet and thus able to offer advice when Othello asks him about the meaning of truth and of existence itself ('we are in a dream inside a dream', he tells Othello).. Acting as Othello's confidante, he sensitively observes and empathizes with Othello even while manipulating him, fitting into the ancient Greek model of pederasty, which the homosexual Pasolini celebrated. Thus Pasolini has the audience intervene to interrupt the killing of Desdemona and to kill Othello and Iago instead and as brothers in death he invites us to see the world through their eyes and not through those of the scapegoating mob with its rash moralising judgements.

At this terminal point, we become aware of a kinship between Iago and Othello which goes beyond male solidarity or even the solidarity of shared death. Othello, who always allows his Passion to prevail over his Reason, because he is convinced that Truth ultimately resides in his inner feelings and Iago, whose passionate commitment to Reason leads him to rationally manipulate the passions of others, are forced completely out of the puppet show. As total social rejects, they find themselves on the rubbish heap and there, freed from all subjection to Passion and Reason alike, they discover Beauty as their eyes are finally set free from their selves and they are able to gaze, with total freedom and without any desires, at the clouds."Ma quanto sono belle!" (How beautiful they are!) exclaims the former puppet that was Othello. "O straziante e meravigliosa bellezza del creato" replies his brother: "O marvellous and agonising beauty of creation." The words are those of Saint Augustine: "Oh Beauty ancient and ever-new the sight of you has set me on fire", or as Shakespeare more matter-of-factly put it: "We are such stuff as dreams (or clouds) are made of."

     

PS The entire film sub-titled in English can be viewed from this link

An enigmatic song

At some point in the late 1970's, during a family visit to Rome, I remember my parents pausing in the middle of a hot sunny street to buy an (audio) cassette from a street vendor. Like most Maltese families of the period, a trip abroad was seen as a kind of Odyssey from which the traveller was expected to return with stories to tell about the strange customs encountered and full of presents for every single member of the extended family. "Let's buy a cassette of Domenico Modugno for Zio Johnny", my Mum exclaimed, "you know how he likes this music".

Domenico Modugno

The cassette was duly purchased and given. Twenty years later, after my beloved uncle was dead and buried, I inherited it and started listening to it. The technology had already been rendered outdated by cd players, but I felt the muffled distorted sound connected me with my past and as a budding anthropologist I relished the sense that I was tapping into a rich vein of heady poetic, folklore-inspired music. The songs were full of sunlight, freedom, melancholy and delivered with gusto. The messages were usually obvious, but none the worse for that. Only one song proved difficult to figure out...the most beautiful of the lot. The subject was clearly romantic love, but the lyrics seemed enigmatic and contradictory; at one point passionate and intense (I would be eternally damned if I did not love you) and in the very next breath philosophically resigned (all my foolish love I blow away to the sky). For years I tried to ignore this, but still it niggled at my mind.     

To be continued...   

X’qala l-bahar: Spatial and Temporal (dis)continuities

Back during my grumpy university years, when my greatest concern in life was to read and digest the increasing and piling number of anthropology articles before they would swamp me, leaving me a tangle of broken nerves, I tried my hand at studying Arabic… and the greatest pleasure that came out of exploring such a language was the access to a world of art, music and ideas that such an enterprise opened up. 

It was with some pleasure, therefore, that I read and encountered David Zammit’s post on Fairouz – whose music during those university years was quite like Odysseus’ siren call. Quite like Odysseus’ sailors, my university articles sometimes held me in check and firmly tied to my boat, but more often they failed. 

When then I saw that such a post on Fairouz was published in a blog that celebrates Mediterranean flows (something I am completely engaged with in my current doctoral studies), I could not resist not writing down a couple of lines myself. 

Back during the day, I was indeed told (much to my shock) that the reason why I really liked Fairouz above all other Arab singers was that she indeed did not sound Arabic at all. I recall my Arabic teacher, an expert in all things Arabic, arguing how the instruments, the melody, the cadence pre-dated Arabic musical styles and paradigms. Fairouz, he told me, sounded quite…Mediterranean.  This is especially true of one of her most iconic songs: “Aatini an-nay wa ghanni” – give me the flute, and sing. 

I could drone on endlessly on these lyrics...but there's another point to be made:

Fairouz was also singing during a special time in the history of the Southern and Eastern coasts of the Mediterranean. Music, it has been noted, tends to echo developments occurring in other aspects of the social-political ecology in which they are embedded.  This songs marks and highlights the then contemporary trend in the greatly flowering and developing Arabic societies of the 60s and 70s to re-discover, re-interpret and re-sing old Islamic poetry and verse. This particular song, in effect, was written by Khalil Gibran, who in turn was very heavily influenced by Sufi traditions and philosophy. 

And there we go… "ara x’qala l-bahar" indeed, for Fairuz’s voice and verse highlights our very local expression that points to surprise at unexpected encounters! On the one hand, here we have a song which through various ways, ended up on our Maltese shores (we perhaps should not be surprised at this point that the internet is often surfed or navigated…the age of sea knowledge might be gone, but not lost!). On the other, we have a pleasant surprise at a face encountered in a long time. It warrants a tap on the back, a shaking of hands and a hearty: "Ara x’qala l-bahar!"

And there you have the Mediterranean in a nutshell – a zone of intense communication and mobility through space and time with the sea as its central actor and metaphor. 

Il-Malti fih x’tomghod. 

Brian Campbell