Category: islamophobia

Recreational Arabic

 

Some decades ago I read  the confessions of a language fanatic — she was unapologetic about toting foreign language books to the beach. I have not been able to find that article on the internet, actually any article about readers who find escape that way, now my interest really piques.

Speaking of piquing, here is a peek at two vacationers who look upon language references as beach books, but they’ve chosen different dictionaries to read. That’s what I do — just ask Lisa. Last minute check before leaving the house: have I packed enough language tomes?

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Oxford to the left of us, Wehr to the right.

I’ve affixed Arabic-alphabet stickers to my keyboard to make life easier — electronic text editors know how to connect the letters correctly and smoothly. However it is important to write by hand while learning Arabic, it’s akin to hiding the calculator while memorizing multiplication tables.

Left-handers are accustomed to covering up what they write as they write, so it’s revealing to actually see my writing without contorting my writing hand. Calligraphic design is already demanding work. The Roman alphabet is as clumsy as Roman numerals, isn’t it? They did not even have minuscules available to lighten things up, perhaps they just liked to SHOVT a lot. Well, it is true, to paraphrase John Cleese, that they had an empire to run. There is that.

Methinks their alphabet was fashioned with stone-chiseling in mind.

alan-dunn-does-ex-take-the-ablative-or-the-dative-new-yorker-cartoon
Does  “ex” take the ablative or the dative?

As a left-handed calligraphic hobbyist I have to lift my hand frequently to know what is happening. Arabic calligraphy flows from designs inherent in the alphabet. Rather than arranging letters chosen from A to Z, you recognize the minute detail that permits extravagantly wild art with unambiguous pen strokes. This allows the pen wielder to proceed without limit, a dot or two or three makes everything explicable.

However you’ll experience heightened subtlety when you include the ten diacritical marks available in Arabic script. Reading a text that contains the full range of marks gives the writer and the reader a means of communication faithful and considerate of each.

The Art of Arabic Calligraphy (YouTube)

These ten marks are omitted in normal written communication. The small fonts selected for most published works also make text too busy. How do you critically distinguish letters and words if diacriticals are in the way. Once you have seen an Arabic word a hundred times it is hardly necessary to bludgeon a reader with something she already understands quite well.

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Of course this is why those marks only appear in scriptural texts or instructional language books. Clarity is critical, each and every millimeter of the way. The author cannot assume that a reader has seen each word hundreds of times already. I personally recommend acquiring the incomparable Sugar comes from Arabic.

Back to Wehr. Arabic is based upon a system of roots: constant consonantal characters in a specific sequence: A SaFaRi into the SaHaRa. The most useful Arabic-English dictionaries are organized by root. Looking up those roots is not easy for a beginner. Now there are ingenious online sources and mobile apps available to grease the learning process.

Learn from your mistakes. I often encouraged my German students that way —the learner who makes the most mistakes gets the most gold stars 🙂

Thanks for reading.

 

Racists Are The Undead: Live

My formative years molded me into a leftward-leaning spirit — I studied German and geography in West Germany in the days of Willy Brandt, cast a vote in 1972 for George McGovern at the American Embassy in Frankfurt, watched the tragically pivotal Summer Olympics in Munich.

The unemployment rate in West Germany was 0.8% at that time. Gastarbeiter (guest workers) were invited as guests. Willkommen Gäste!gastarbeiter

Returning to privileged shores in 1973 brought cultural shock in the form of enormous automobiles, gigantic shopping carts, conspicuous consumption to match conspicuous war — all the trappings of glitz and phony patriotism. Homesickness set in, not for the country of my birth but for my newly forged affinity to nascent European sensibilities, a widening disdain for all things Nixon in the final three years before a well deserved defeat in Southeast Asia.

Your country needed your bleeding heart for fodder, but you didn’t enlist. You’re as yellow as a Chinaman, Bill.  

Lottery luck: 255 of 366.

The Monroe Doctrine is a thin veneer for brutally enforcing manifest destiny upon innocents — another word for sanctioned rape of Latin America. Has the United States ever interfered in the free elections of another country?

Might always makes right. The meek are weak. 

Do your part by looking the other way, pledging allegiance to a cotton flag and never sitting during the national anthem.

You can get down on your knee in a prison cell, rabble-rouser. 

The Gerrymander assures white privilege, something that Clarence and Neil agree upon. Six Supreme Court justices are of the Catholic faith, three are of the Judaic faith. No Atheists, no Protestants, no Muslims. What’s up with that?

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Mitch (the unditched) changed the rules to seat a freaking originalist, Neil Gorsuch. Sing along with Mitch.

Clarence Thomas : Thurgood Marshall as Neil Gorsuch : Merrick Garland.

It’s what the founding fathers intended, my friend. It’s manifest. It’s destiny.

The constitution is a living document that matures slowly and deliberately. Society is kinetic. Amendments to the original document are a sign of vitality. Originalism molds its arguments from an intensely small set of volumes written in the 18th Century. Through the 18th Century human slavery was thought the most natural of laws, a societal bulwark. I’ve read that man was created in God’s image. Real men are white aren’t they? Why does Western Civilization color semitic speakers in shades and features comforting to western sensibilities?

originalism

Powerful white men were slaveholders. It’s a great way to keep the costs of production down. Down, down, down. Bail another crop of cotton, please. What did the white man do to the red-man? What would the white man do to those human resources obtained from Africa, the ones who arrived in cruise ships?

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Do slaveholders have vested interests? Do slaughterhouse proprietors pay slave wages to undocumented workers? Why don’t American birth-certificate holders get in line for jobs at the slaughterhouses?

Don’t judge the evils of an earlier era from the perspective of later generations. We all benefit by looking the other way, Bill. Please look that way too. You fit the bill, Bill. Respect yourself.

Columbus Day is still on the calendar. Andrew Jackson is still on the twenty-dollar bill. Native Americans, African Americans, Asian Americans, Arab Americans? Still the wrong color.

I’ve heard the following platitude: There is only one race,  — the human race.

Unfortunately, that platitude whitewashes centuries of evidence to the contrary. Forgive and forget? Convenient.

The human race consumes 70 billion fellow sentient beings per annum. Those fellow sentients possess inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness — unless homo sapiens cast a veto vote.

animals.killed.yearly

Did heroin present threats to polite society before it struck nice white folk? Is that fact relevant in a deeply racist society? But if you do not call yourself a racist does that earn you a wild card?

White flight in one generation becomes white gentrification in a succeeding generation. But the gentrifiers are making poor neighborhoods safe aren’t they? Don’t they create jobs and contribute to a well wealth-managed economy?

Nothing succeeds like success, Bill.

Racism is alive and deadly well in the country of my birth. Is that a success story?

Thanks for reading.

 

Palestinian Animal League

When you announce your vegan beliefs expect incredulity, perhaps not visceral, perhaps visceral. Make public your support of Palestinians to self-determination and expect raw nerves to flare — it comes with the territory. Or am I tilting at windmills? Why must Palestine be a verboten topic?

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Misunderstanding happens to “the least of these, my brethren” (Matthew 25:34). I mentioned recently that I am the green sheep in the family. Do I hold a lightning rod aloft, inviting impending doom? I guess.

I live in an area of the country noted for its borders — political, racial, climatic, geomorphic, social: there are others.  Our planet does not need more division and more rancor. Welcome the green, the black and the rainbow. Welcome the stranger.

 

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Sudfeh Vegan Cafe

Languages fascinate me intensely. Learning them lightens my spirit and dispels an illusory separation. We are all one. I lived and studied in Germany, a country that knows something of borders — their erection and their dissolution. Loving languages is a joy that requires patience, but it rewards that patience by several orders of magnitude. Or is it a waste of time, a conceit if you already speak THE international language — one dipped in the blood of imperious arrogance. Just saying. Colonialism is not dead. Were that it were.

 

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Berlin Wall

My intense interest in the Middle East began in 1967 when I began to seriously study its physical, cultural and religious geography. Study makes friends of pain and joy. I was living in West Germany in 1972, at the time of an ill-fated Olympics in Munich. Stasi was still going strong in East Germany. That same year I learned about Savak and the Shah of Iran from my fellow exchange students of the University of Tehran — a full seven years before the revolution in their ancient land, one with the longest continuous civilization in history, one that started with Cyrus the Great. Many cool people are Persian. Yes they are 🙂

Perhaps this is an overlong preface to my topic. I hope not, but please accept my apology if it is.

 

PALlogo
Source

Let me meld two curiously similar joys and pains — veganism and Palestine. Mix them together and you have The Palestinian Animal League. That kind group of animal activists knows that “acting like an animal” is an expression to deflect misbehavior of a specie with an overdeveloped ego that imposes their self-righteous “superiority” to the innocent fellow sentient beings possessing inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, though it be inexpedient to the self-described exceptional.

We’re not the top dog, we are the arrogant yapping selfish being that always takes advantage. Are we not a part of the cycle of life? Who made us the boss? What is the difference between cannibalism and meatism? I suggest that the difference between eating the flesh of your own and eating the flesh of an other is as trivial as the difference between apples and oranges — both are fruit. Human flesh and the flesh of any other sentient being — both are meat.

Let me now lighten the burden of writing. I yield the pen to The PAL. They know more about themselves than I. Expect joy.

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Arabic public art

Thanks for reading.

 

 

Losing Rumi in the Translation

A couple years ago I attended an interfaith discussion at Christ Church Cathedral in Cincinnati: “Welcoming the Stranger.” Their guest, Ismaeel Chartier of the Clifton Mosque, spoke to this theme. One attendee literally thumped a Qu’ran on a table and demanded an answer of Chartier:

“Do you know what is written in this book?”

He delivered this inquiry with a sharp accusatory tone. Then he gave the Qur’an interpretation another thump.

The Imam calmly replied:

“It depends on the translation.”

dua

Translation is a science, it’s an art, and there’s a lot at stake. Interpretations that serve a trenchant agenda may wish to cloud understanding, to close open minds. This is an odious breach of ethics and a declaration of cultural militance. An imperious position that lusts power. Most Muslims are not Arabs, but each adherent relies upon a faithful transmittal of the Word in Arabic language. It is in the marrow of Islam.

Simple answers to complex societal questions are wrong-headed and arrogant, but they are widely believed and have entered the body politic like a body-blow.

Yesterday I happened upon an article in the The New Yorker on the inescapably important Persian poet Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī . Coleman Barks is a decades-long lover of Rūmī, but it is unfortunate that his is an interpretation that informs his Christian upbringing. Barks is not disingenuous in working the poet through that innate filter, but the heart of Rūmī speaks to Islam — the faithful focus of his heart and being is integral.

rumi-calligraphic

From the article:

“Rūmī is often called a mystic, a saint, an enlightened man. He is less frequently described as a Muslim.”

Source: The Erasure of Islam from the Poetry of Rumi – The New Yorker

Memes that attribute heartfelt insight through search-engine algorithms often misattribute, mistranslate, misinform. Truth becomes an early victim. Allow me to repeat the oft repeated:

“Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.”

This quote is attributed to Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a voice much worth hearing. But this very popular attribution adopted by innumerable memes is not sourced to Moynihan.

lies

To quote the late and astonishing John Ciardi: writer and world-class translator of Dante.

“Good Words to You.”

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As an incurable pedant I assign vetting this quote as a reading assignment 🙂

Thanks for reading.