It's contest time at Jihad Watch, with our TaqiyyaFest still open for entries, and now a new offer from the Vice President of our Board, Hugh Fitzgerald:
Readers of JihadWatch are aware that MESA Nostra is the professional organization in which, in order to become a uomo d’onore, or a donna d’onore for that matter, no kneecaps need be broken, no nightclubs broken up, no trucks hijacked, no girls put on the streets, no cocaine contraband prescribed by “los medicos” of Medellin be distributed. No, there are only two requirements to become a Made Man in MESA Nostra. The first is easy: you must view the entire Middle East through ideological blinkers, in which Islam scarcely matters, and in which, whatever happens, Jihad-conquest and dhimmitude will be ignored, so that contemporary expressions of millennium-old doctrines, attitudes, impulses will be interpreted without the slightest reference to those doctrines, attitudes, impulses.That is content.
There is also form.
What would Shakespeare have been like had he not forced himself to squeeze his dramatic verse into the Elizabethan doublet of iambic pentameter? Or Spenser, without the Spenserian stanza? It is not only writers in Elizabethan England who found such constraints productive. How impressive that 20th century French writer who managed to produce a novel without using the letter “e,” or that other one who composed a series of works based on a single device: the beginning and the final sentences of whatever he wrote were phonetically identical, though semantically wildly different, and he assigned himself the writerly task of beating a plausible path through the overgrown jungle of language, a path that led ineluctably from that first sentence to the same-sounding, but different-meaning, last sentence.
Many of those in MESA Nostra may not realize it, but they are akin to Shakespeare and Spenser, Georges Perec and Raymond Roussel. For them it is not a question of verse-forms, or lipograms, or homophonic puns. Their self-imposed constraint consists in limiting their scholarly lexicon to fewer than fifty nouns, and two-dozen verbs. They harness these exhausted nouns, these over-worked verbs, and put them to work, no matter the subject. No matter the subject.
Thus the prose produced by one member of MESA Nostra will sound remarkably like that of another. Here we mean the enthusiastic, full-throated members of MESA Nostra, those whose interests do not stray very far from “Iraq” and “Palestine” and “colonialism” and “empire,” and the obvious ring-changing variants: “occupied Iraq/Palestine,” “Iraqi/Palestinian people,” “Israeli colonialism,” “American empire.” Many members of MESA Nostra membership have a deep and abiding personal and professional interest in these matters, as they do in little else. They can do no other.
But a few members of MESA Nostra are members-in-name-only, who remain different in mental makeup, and distant from the bureaucratic intrigues, the political tendentiousness, the anti-American,anti-Israel, anti-Western themes and variations. These “non-member” members do not write about the “construction of Palestinian identity” nor the “(de)construction of Israeli identity.” Rather, they write about “The Methods of the Mudaddithin,” or “Ephraim of Edessa,” or “Xavier de Planhol and Agricultural Desolation in the Berber Heartland,” or “Yemeni Jews as Chattel Slaves” or “The Destruction of the Coptic Churches of Upper Egypt,” or “Schacht, Jeffery, Gottheil: Three Masters of Morningside Heights” or “Arabic but not Quran’ic: The Evidence of Numismatics” or “Twelver-Shi’ism in Mevlevistan” or “Ibn Battuta, the Rihla, and the Destruction of Hindustan” or “Why There Was No Arab Copernicus or Vesalius: An Inquiry” or “Aisha and Marriage in the Islamic Republic of Iran” or “Quran’ic Memorization and Comparative I.Q. Levels in Post-Independence India” or “Sir William Jones and the Re-Discovery of India” or “The Role of Hadrami Traders in the Muslim Conquest of the East Indies” or “The Story of Thomas Pellow” or “Indo-Persian Miniatures of Jihad-Conquest in the British Museum Collections: A Catalogue Raisonee” or “Table-Talk of a Mesopotamian Judge: A Critical Edition” or “Book-Binding at the Abbasid Court” or “The Role of Hungarian Converts in Ottoman History” or “The War Within Islam: Universalist Claims, Arab Supremacist Doctrine” or “The Treaty of Al-Hudaibiyya and Pacta Sunt Servanda: Muhammad and Grotius on the Law of War and Peace” or …well, you get the idea. But these are not the people whom we have in mind when we discuss MESA Nostra at JihadWatch. We are talking about the other kind.
And it was with that other kind in mind – the card-carrying careerists, the blurb-and-reference swappers, the runners-for-office, the risers-high, the much-interviewed, the solemn dispensers of wisdom to the unwary, the True Believers – that we created the MESA Nostra Contest.
The contest is simple. Below is a single paragraph, itself consisting of a single sentence, transparently written in Mesanostran. Contestants are asked to identify the author.
“In conclusion, I feel that this work of analysis, by focusing on the implications of the phallic hegemony of Wehrmacht-helmeted Israeli troops and their supporters throughout the American empire, both equally unappeasable in their demonstrable need for “the Other,” does what in a quasi-heuristic sense it was intended to do, as it manages to break away from all Eurocentric approaches to discourses of postcolonial subalternity, or even of meta-alterity, and comes so subversively close in its disjunctive interrogation of the counter- or, more exactly, anti-mimesis which is inherently essential to Mesopotamian or indeed to Cairene, Abbasid, Jordanian or Palestinian thought for, as a native of (Amman, Baghdad, Beirut, Cairo, Damascus, Islamabad, Ramallah, Teheran, etc. – choose one) and hence a non-European, I am of necessity self-assigned to that category of people best placed to perform such a mission of interrogating all postcolonialist as well as narrativised specificity, but of equal necessity, not as one obviously intent on de-undermining or rather meta-determining the poststructuralist or post-postmodern universalism, with its customary relativised discourse analysis which seldom lends itself to anticipatory prolepsis, but on the other hand my critique is quite meta-consciously deeply para-rooted within, as well as up-rooted out of, and obviously from, Western thought with its inalienably alien constructions of meta-identity and hypersexuality, which necessarily give rise to post-essentialism which, in a larger sense, serves merely to violate all the strategic critiques of hegemonic historiographical constructions of essences, whether of the Orient or of scholars who deny the self-referentiality of all postcolonialist essentializing.”
The prize for the first correct entry emailed to director@jihadwatch.org will be a nicely framed copy of Professor Hamid Dabashi’s celebrated Poem in Prose to Edward Said, which you may read now by googling “Hamid Dabashi” and “Edward Said.” For many, that will be prize enough.
"Phallic hegemony of Wehrmacht-helmeted Israeli troops"? Oooh, I'm getting all warm and tingly inside. Clearly, the above example of tortured prose could have only come from the pen of an academic: normal people don't (and, in fact, can't) write like that. I have a feeling this may be a trick question, and that it was written by that old Orientalist, Eddie Said, himself.
Cynthia Weber? Weber taught at Purdue University for nine years before becoming Professor of International Studies at the University of Leeds, England.
Nuh, uh. Hugh, you made that up!
That can't be real - and yet, deep in my heart of hearts, I suspect it is.
I can imagine being trapped at a coctail party with somebody talking like this...do you a)laugh hysterically, b) excuse yourself politely and remove yourself enough distance so as your hysterical laughter won't be as embarrassing or c)
make a discreet call to your nearest local psychiatrist and plead for intervention?
Help!
You guys are the best!
Rebecca
Mandrake to General Ripper: "I would come over there Jack, but there's this string in my leg, you see?"
** LAUGHING HYSTERICALLY **
Somewhere in a corn field in Nebraska the MESA Nostra is digging a hole to stick my brain in...
Islam in Bulgaria Alert:
http://www.tol.cz/look/TOL/article.tpl?IdLanguage=1&IdPublication=4&NrIssue=100&NrSection=3&NrArticle=13387
Excerpt:
Mysterious Mosques and Schools
page 1 of 7
by Yana Buhrer Tavanier
27 January 2005
The Saudi foundation Al Waqf-Al Islami has built several mosques in Bulgaria, but the Islamic community is tight-lipped about its links with the elusive organization, which has been linked to Al Qaeda.
Editor's note: Bulgaria’s Muslims--most of whom are members of the country’s Turkish minority--are traditionally a moderate lot. But in recent years, more radical forms of Islam have arrived in Bulgaria and elsewhere in the Balkans, often with Saudi financing.
So, how radicalized is Bulgaria’s Muslim community and what is this Saudi money being used for?
This investigation, conducted in August 2004 by Yana Buhrer Tavanier, who is an editor with the Bulgarian weekly Kapital and a TOL contributor, has not found any evidence of terrorist activity--but it has uncovered a shadowy network that finances mosques and schools that promote the radical teachings of Wahhabi Islam and similar tendencies, and a network that has links to the chief mufti’s office.
The first of our two articles looks at several mosques that were built with Saudi money, though Bulgaria’s Muslim leaders continue to deny this fact. A second article deals with the network of Islamic schools in the country.
The arrival of Wahhabism has split the Muslim community and fuelled the ongoing power struggle for the position of chief mufti. The incumbent, Fikri Sali, has been accused of taking money from dubious Middle Eastern sources--an accusation confirmed by our investigation.
One organization came up wherever we looked for radical Islam in Bulgaria: Al Waqf-Al Islami, a foundation that promotes Wahhabism in Europe.
The charity has built several mosques in Bulgaria--described in the first of two installments TOL is running--and organized and financed a trip by Chief Mufti Fikri Sali to Saudi Arabia in July last year. While no Al Waqf involvement in terrorist activities has ever been proven, its Dutch branch--which invited Sali to Saudi Arabia--has come under suspicion after it was revealed that six of the 9/11 hijackers had attended a seminar it organized. (Al Waqf is among several organizations that are being sued by families of 9/11 victims.)
The Dutch intelligence service has recently compiled a report detailing the activities of Al Waqf’s Dutch branch, based in the town of Eindhoven. The report described the Al Waqf mosques there as a recruiting ground for a “holy war,” or jihad. Could something similar be happening in Bulgaria?
In our trip around Razgrad, in north-eastern Bulgaria, we found four mosques that had been built or financed by Al Waqf-Al Islami in 1993 and 1994, when the foundation was legally registered in Bulgaria. (Fikri Sali was also the chief mufti at that time.) The registration was revoked in the summer of 1994, and in 1999 its representative Abdulrahim Taha was expelled from the country.
But our report also indicates that Al Waqf never pulled out of Bulgaria. In fact, its activities seem to be expanding.
In 2002, a new Al Waqf foundation registered in Sofia without any reference to its Islamic character or religious activities, which would make the registration invalid. The manager of the present Al Waqf is a 41-year-old Syrian, Muafak al Asaad, who co-owns a Bulgarian company with Abdulrahim Taha, the former representative of the previous Al Waqf that had been expelled from Bulgaria.
Muafak is also an assistant to the wealthy Saudi businessman who is behind the mosques and schools run with Al Waqf money in Bulgaria. Kapital got his name from Ljutfi Imam in Todorovo, who had a notebook with all the expenditures for the construction of the mosque which contained the name Abdul Aziz.
Sheikh Abdullah Abdul Aziz Soreya visits Bulgaria almost every summer, according to police information, and stays in the resort of Pavel Banya for several months.
The residents of Surnitza are categorical that the Islamic school there belongs to Muafak. The school’s director, Said Mutlu, says the Syrian only owns the building and lets it to the chief mufti’s office but has no say in the curriculum or the funding.
Most residents of Surnitza don’t think so. “You can find Muafak in his school” was the most frequent answer our reporters heard in Surnitza when asking for his whereabouts.
This sort of covert involvement is in evidence, on a grander scale, in the visit by the chief mufti and several people from the leadership of the MRF--Bulgaria’s main ethnic Turkish party--to Saudi Arabia in July 2004.
The trip became embroiled in scandal after media reports that the delegation had been invited by Al Waqf, an accusation that was vehemently denied by the participants. The regional mufti of Razgrad, Mehmed Alya, called it “fiction” and also denied any involvement of Al Waqf in the construction of the mosques we visited. He was undeterred by the fact that residents of the villages remember that he personally brought “the Arab” to the sites.
***Kapital*** contacted Al Waqf in Eindhoven to shed light on the issue. Al Waqf confirmed that the invitation was genuine and was indeed sent by them.
Muafak al Asaad was listed on the invitation as coordinator of the visit. And a representative of the foundation who introduced himself as Abu Tarik even said that while in Saudi Arabia, he had an opportunity to meet Muafak.
This investigation, which develops on work that first appeared in different form in ***Kapital***, has not uncovered any terrorist sleeper cells, murky financiers and arms dealers, or fifth columnists in the midst of Bulgaria’s Muslim community. Overall, the community may not even be more radical than it has traditionally been. But the obfuscation and evasiveness, ranging from the negligent to the deceptive, of the country’s chief mufti and various religious officials does raise serious concerns about the degree to which organized Islam in Bulgaria may be in thrall to radical tendencies and Saudi money.
Slip Mahoney?
The Kingfish?
Some bored guy at the OED headquarters?
Ok, I give
Ollie
My entry is this man(?) with the bizarre grin
http://www.danielpipes.org/article/2255
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/mealac/faculty/dabashi/
Wile E. Coyote?
It was that Bit after WW2!!
He was a royal not churchill??
http://emperors-clothes.com/news/binl.htm
Bin Laden in the Balkans
[Re-Posted with additional materials, 3 October 2001
From the 'The Washington Times' June 22, 2001
"The rebels would have their big brothers in America - the same heroes who led the NATO mission against their enemies, the Serbs - believe that the violence they are now perpetrating in Macedonia is merely about protecting minority rights. But the National Liberation Army (NLA), a splinter of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), also has another motive: It is fighting to keep control over the region's drug trafficking, which has grown into a large, lucrative enterprise since the Kosovo war. In addition to drug money, the NLA also has another prominent venture capitalist: Osama bin Laden. The Muslim terrorist leader, according to a document obtained by The Washington Times and written by the chief commander of the Macedonian Security Forces, puts out the front money for the rebel group through a representative in Macedonia: 'This person is representative of Osama Ben laden sic , who is the main financial supporter of the National Liberation Army, where up to date he has paid $6 million to $7 million for the needs of the National Liberation Army.'"
********************************************
From 'The Canberra Times' (Australia ) April 28, 2000 - Page 8
"BIN LADEN IN KOSOVO ACTS
"BELGRADE: Islamic Saudi millionaire Osama bin Laden, wanted for terrorism by the United States, is in Kosovo. The official Yugoslav news agency Tanjug said bin Laden, whom it described as a " terrorist and Islamic fanatic" , arrived from Albania after having formed a group of 500 Islamic fighters in the eastern region around Korce and Pogradec to carry out " terrorist acts" in Kosovo.
"He planned similar acts in the southern region of Serbia bordering on Kosovo, including Presevo, Medvedja and Bujanovac, the agency said."
*******************************
'The Charleston Gazette.' November 30, 1998 - Page 2A
"BIN LADEN RUNS TERRORIST NETWORK, REPORT SAYS
"LONDON - The man accused of orchestrating the U.S. Embassy bombings in Africa operates a terrorist network out of Albania, The Sunday Times reported.
"The newspaper quoted Fatos Klosi, the head of the Albanian intelligence service, as saying a network run by Saudi exile Osama Bin Laden sent units to fight in the Serbian province of Kosovo.
"Bin Laden is believed to have established an Albanian operation in 1994 after telling the government he headed a wealthy Saudi humanitarian agency wanting to help Albania, the newspaper reported.
"Klosi said he believed terrorists had already infiltrated other parts of Europe from bases in Albania. Apparent confirmation of Bin Laden's activities came earlier this month during the murder trial of Claude Kader, 27, a French national who said he was a member of Bin Laden's Albanian network, the newspaper said.
"Kader claimed during the trial he had visited Albania to recruit and arm fighters for Kosovo.
*****************************
FROM 'THE DAILY OKLAHOMAN,' May 28, 1999
"...As U.S. Sen. Jim Inhofe long has predicted, American troops go into Kosovo against the Serbs, they'll be fighting alongside a terrorist organization known to finance its operations with drug sales - including some to the United States.
"By joining hands with the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), which intelligence sources say bankrolls itself by selling heroin and cocaine, the United States also would become partners of a sort with Osama bin Laden, the international terrorist behind last year's bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the Washington Times reports. According to the newspaper's sources, the KLA is linked to an extensive organized crime network headquartered in Albania. In 1998 the State Department listed the KLA as an international terrorist organization that supported itself with drug profits and through loans from known terrorists like bin Laden.
"Such an ally is the result of Bill Clinton choosing sides in a centuries-old civil war. "They were terrorists in 1998 and now, because of politics, they're freedom fighters," a top drug official told the Times.
"In Bill Clinton's war, where bombing has been turned into a humanitarian application, such a paradox fits right in.
*****************************
In 1999, the newspaper, 'Dani,' announced that bin Laden had been issued a Special Passport from the Washington-Backed Bosnian Government in 1993. Two weeks ago, the Bosnian government issued a denial. Given that this denial took two years and came immediately after September 11th, we suggest it be taken with a grain of salt.
"BIN LADEN WAS GRANTED BOSNIAN PASSPORT
"Agence France Presse September 24, 1999
"SARAJEVO
"Osama bin Laden, the Saudi billionaire wanted by the United States for organising bloody terrorist attacks, was granted a Bosnian passport in 1993 by the country's [i.e., Bosnia]embassy in Vienna, an independent weekly reported Friday.
"'The Bosnian embassy in Vienna granted a passport to bin Laden in 1993,' Dani magazine said, quoting anonymous sources, emphasizing that files and traces linked to his case have recently been destroyed by the [Bosnian] government.
"However, Bin Laden 'did not personally collect his Bosnian passport,' Dani said, without elaborating or explicitly stating that his passport was ever collected.
"'High Muslim officials of the Bosnian foreign ministry agreed that it [the destruction of files linked to bin Laden] was the top priority. It was even more important than investigating a person responsible for granting a passport to the most wanted terrorist in the world,' Dani reported.
"According to the article, Muslim political circles claim that six years ago officials at the Bosnian embassy in Vienna could not have known who bin Laden was.
"During the 1992-1995 Bosnia's war, the Vienna embassy has been 'making contacts with many Arab-world people seeking aid' for the mainly Muslim Bosnian army, the article said.
"The foreign ministry issued no comments on the article. Bin Laden, believed to be in Afghanistan, is accused by the United States of masterminding bloody bomb attacks against its embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in August of last year. Over 200 people were killed in these attacks. Washington has offered a reward of five million dollars for information leading to his arrest.
"Earlier this week the Bosnian government confirmed it had granted citizenship and passport to a Tunisian-born senior aide of bin-Laden in 1997. The government said citizenship was given to Mahrez Amduni, known in Sarajevo as Mehrez Amdouni, on the basis of his Bosnian army membership, stressing that there was no Interpol arrest warrant against him at that time.
"Amduni was arrested by Turkish police at Istanbul airport on September 13, in an operation in which Interpol also took part.
"During the Bosnia 1992-95 war some Islamic fighters battled alongside Muslim soldiers in central Bosnia against Bosnian Serbs and Croats. Most of them left the country after a US-brokered peace deal was signed in 1995. Some of them gained Bosnian citizenship as members of the Bosnian army or by marrying Bosnian women.
"The government has never revealed how many foreign fighters were granted Bosnian citizenship."
Copyright 1999 Agence France Presse
*****************************
The following article, while not specifically about bin Laden, talks about how the Mujahideen functioned in Bosnia:
"Polish Press Reports On Training Of Mujahideen In Bosnia
"From Tanjug, 12/16/97
"Intelligence services of the Nordic-Polish SFOR Brigade suspect that a center for training terrorists from Islamic countries is located in the Bocina Donja village near Maglaj in Bosnia, Warsaw daily Rzecspospolita writes on Tuesday.
"The author of the article, Marek Popowsky, who used to be in both SFOR and its predecessor IFOR in Bosnia, writes that mujahideen had first come to Bosnia in 1992, and numbered over 3,000 in the summer of 1995.
"Besides mujahideen from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Pakistan, there were several hundred Muslim extremists who had come from Italy, France, Germany and Britain, he notes.
"Deserters from the Turkish, Malaysian and French UNPROFOR battalions also volunteered as mujahideen, Popowsky writes. In addition to dangerous military actions, the mujahideen also carried out a religious and ideological mission, enforcing abidance by the Koran and recruiting young soldiers to die for Allah, Popowsky writes.
"Noting that Bosniac (Muslim) troops respected their allies but feared them at the same time as Allahs' warriors used to carry out high-risk actions and were cruel fighters, Popowsky quotes Serb officers as saying that the mujahideen never took prisoners. Wounded enemy soldiers were usually decapitated or slaughtered by mujahideen, Popowsky writes.
"The Dayton Agreement committed (Bosnian Muslim leader) Alija Izetbegovic to remove all foreign fighters from Bosnia, but about one thousand mujahideen who obtained Bosnian citizenship in the meantime remain in Sarajevo, Tuzla, Zenica and about ten villages, the daily writes.
"The largest group of mujahideen is now in Bocina Donja, a formerly Serb village near Maglaj, the daily writes, adding that the Nordic-Polish intelligence service G-5 is following the activities of such unusual "settlers", as it suspects that a camp for training terrorists is located in the village following reports from Serb and Croat forces' commanders.
"Noting that Islamic states had allocated to the Muslim part of Bosnia military and humanitarian aid to the value of over one billion dollars and that decisions to this effect had been taken not only by governments but also by various extremist Muslim groups and informal institutions, the daily writes that the activities of mujahideen in Bocina Donja would continue to be monitored by international special services to prevent the village from being transformed into a base for launching terrorist operations." (Tanjug, Warsaw, December 16
Part of the American Tribe
Squirrel Hunter
Spider Killer
God Bless the USA and her Fighting Forces and ALL who Fight with her give them Strength, Wisdom, Sight, and Courage to stay the course to Victory to Destroy ALL Islamic Terrorist and ALL who Support them Amen
God Bless the USA and her Fighting Forces and ALL who Fight with her give them Strength, Wisdom, Sight,so they domt bomb any more chinese embassies while stopping one of the few people who really understood the threat of Islam
Posted by: shiva at January 27, 2005 03:35 PM
You know if the chinese where not trying to black mail Clinton that would not have happened??
You know they were going to come clean on the money they gave him??
Seams they again have pissed him off and not paid out what they said they would for his book???
BUT HE IS OUT OF POWER NOW!!
Part of the American Tribe
Squirrel Hunter
Spider Killer
God Bless the USA and her Fighting Forces and ALL who Fight with her give them Strength,Wisdom,Sight,and Courage to Stay the course to Destroy ALL Islamic Terrorist and ALL who Support them Open the Worlds Eyes to their Threat give the Worls Courage to Stand and Fight this Evil Amen
Merely for style I might say Salman Rushdie, a man with a penchant for page long sentences and convoluted structure. Although in his advertising days he was more succinct and pithy.
But he is hardly MESA material.
Oh! My! God! Please, somebody, WATER! I have to take my Imitrex! NOW!
"on the other hand my critique is quite meta-consciously deeply para-rooted within, as well as up-rooted out of, and obviously from, Western thought with its inalienably alien constructions of meta-identity and hypersexuality, which necessarily give rise to post-essentialism which, in a larger sense, serves merely to violate all the strategic critiques of hegemonic historiographical constructions of essences, whether of the Orient or of scholars who deny the self-referentiality of all postcolonialist essentializing..."
Yesiree, and that's just one sentence! What a smokescreen! This person, as my Father used to say, "Didn't know sh*t from shineola." It reminds me of the old "In Living Color" where that guy sat on a cot behind bars and said things like:
"The telegenic veracity of the comingling avatar defines the viabilty of acrimonius gravitas sin qou non. That being said, I extrapolate the moratorium of quivering, lambasted diversity from post historic resonance. Verily, I say to the so-called unwashed masses that the nuanced vagaries heaped upon hyperventilating insignificance spell out proliferating schematic racism among the indigenous. And there you have it! E Pluribus Carpal Diem for one and all ... "
Found something??
Hamid Dabashi is the Chair of the Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures (MEALAC) Department, Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies, and the Director of Graduate Studies at the Center for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University.
http://www.counterpunch.org/dabashi10022003.html
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October 2, 2003
The Moment of Myth
Edward Said (1935-2003)
By HAMID DABASHI
Close proximity to a majestic mountain is a mixed blessing -- one is at once graced by the magnanimity of its pastures and the bounty of its slopes, and yet one can never see where one is sitting, under the shadow of what greatness, the embracing comfort of what assurance. The splendor of mountains -- Himalayas, Rockies, Alborz -- can only be seen from afar, from the safe distance of only a visual, perceptive, appreciative, awe-inspiring grasp of their whereabouts.
A very happy few -- now desolate and broken -- have had the rare privilege of calling Edward Said a friend, fewer a colleague, even fewer a comrade, only a handful a neighbor -- the closer you came to Edward Said the more his intimate humanity, ordinary simplicity, the sweet, endearing, disarmingly embracing character -- his being a husband, a father, a father-in-law, an uncle, a cousin -- clouded and colored the majesty that he was. Our emails and voicemails are still full of his precious words, his timely consolations, anecdotal humor, trivial questions, priceless advice -- all too dear to delete, too intimate to share. We were all like birds flying around the generosity of his roof, tiny dandelions joyous in the shade of his backyard, minuscule creatures pasturing on the bounteous slopes of the mountain that he was.
The prince of our cause, the mighty warrior, the Salah al-Din of our reasoning with mad adversaries, source of our sanity in despair, solace in our sorrow, hope in our own humanity, is now no more.
In his absence now it is possible to remember the time when you were and he was not part of your critical consciousness, your creative disposition, your presence in the world -- when he did not look over your shoulder watching every single word you wrote.
If remembering the time that you were but he was not integral to you is not to be an exercise in archeological futility, then it has to account for the distance, the discrepancy, between the bashful scholasticism of the learning that my generation of immigrant intellectuals received and the confidence and courage with which we can stand up today in face of outrageous fortune -- hand in hand with our brothers and sisters across races and nations, creeds and chaos -- and say, "NO!"
Today, there is a solidarity of purpose among a band of rebels and mutineers -- gentiles are among us and Jews, Christians and pagans, Hindus and Muslims, atheists we are and agnostics, natives and immigrants -- who speak truth to power with the voice of Edward Said the echo of our chorus. How we came here -- where we are, hearing with his ears, seeing with his eyes, talking with his tongue -- is a question not for making an historical record but for taking moral courage.
Now in the moment of his myth, when Edward Said has left us to our own devices and joined the pantheon of mythic monuments, is precisely the time to have, as he once said, a Gramscian inventory of our whereabouts -- once with, and now without him. Today the world is at once poorer in his absence and yet richer through his memory -- and precisely in that paradox dwell the seeds of our dissent, the promise of our future, the solemnity of our oath at the sacred site of his casket.
I come from a generation of immigrant intellectuals who mark the origin and disposition of their critical intelligence from the publication of Edward Said's Orientalism (1978). The shape of our critical character, the voice of our dissent, the texture of our politics, and the very disposition of our courage, are all rooted in every nook and cranny of that revelatory text. It was in the year of the Iranian Revolution, 1979, less than a season after the publication of Orientalism, that Samuel Klausner, who taught us theory and method, first introduced me to Edward Said's spectacular achievement in an utterly prosaic manner. I was a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, finishing a dual degree in Sociology of Culture and Islamic Studies. By the time I read Orientalism (inhaled it rather, in one deep, satisfying swoop -- drank it like a glass of freshly squeezed lemonade on a hot summer day), I had already read Karl Marx, Max Scheller, Max Weber, and George Herbert Mead on the sociology of knowledge. What Said had argued in Orientalism was straight out of a sociology of knowledge angle -- and yet with a globality of vision, a daring, defiant imagination, and with such an assured audacity that I remember I could not believe my eyes -- that I was reading these words in that particular succession of reason and rhetoric.
By the mid-1970s, my generation of sociologists at Penn had already started reading Michel Foucault in a systematic and rather unusual curriculum given that the discipline of sociology was then being rapidly sold out to federally funded policy research and demography -- a downward spiral from which a once groundbreaking discipline never recovered. But at that time at Penn, Phillip Rieff, Digby Baltzell, Samuel Klausner, Harold Bershady, Victor Lidz, and Fred Block were serious theorists with a relatively universal approach to their sociological concerns. I wrote my doctoral dissertation with Phillip Rieff advising me on the sociological aspect of my work and with the late George Makdisi on the Islamic aspect. But the seed that Orientalism had planted in my critical consciousness never left my thoughts after that fateful Fall semester of 1979 when we read it with Samuel Klausner in that dimly lit, tiny room on the fifth floor of McNeal Building off Locust walk on the Penn campus -- smack in the middle of the hostage crisis in Iran, when I could hear a chorus of Penn undergraduates shouting in unison, "Nuke Iran, Maim Iranians!"
Take Orientalism out of that curriculum, Edward Said out of our consciousness, and my generation of immigrant intellectuals would all be a bunch of dispirited souls susceptible to chronic melancholy, or else, horribile dictu, who would pathetically mutate into native informers of one sort or another -- selling their souls to soulless sultans in DC or else to senile patriarchs in Princeton.
I had no clue as to Edward Said's work in literary criticism prior to Orientalism, and for years after my graduation I remained entirely oblivious to it. It was Orientalism that would not let go of the way I thought and wrote about modern or medieval Islamic or Iranian intellectual history. From then on, I began a journey, at once professional and personal, moral and intellectual, that brought me literally to his doorstep on the campus of Columbia University -- where I now teach. To my dying day, I will cherish the precise spot next to Miller Theater on the corner of 116th and Broadway where I met Edward for the first time and went up to him and introduced myself -- the gratitude of a liberated voice in my greetings.
I discovered Edward Said first from Orientalism then his writings on Palestine, from there to his liberating reflections on the Iranian Revolution, and then from there I began an almost Jesuit training in every single book he ever wrote and the majority of his essays and articles, reading and re-reading them like a dutiful student preparing for a doctoral exam, long after I was giving doctoral examinations.
Today, of the myriad of things I have learned from Edward Said, nothing matters to me more than the rhapsodic eloquence of his voice -- the majesty, confidence, courage, audacity, and poise of his diction, without which my generation of immigrant intellectuals would have been at the mercy of mercenary academics and embedded journalists who have now flooded the gutters of the mass media -- uttering their pathologies with thick Arabic, Persian, or South Asian accents and yet speaking with a nauseating "We" that sides with the bankrupt architects of this predatory empire. In Edward Said's voice, in his princely posture and magisterial air of confidence, the fragile tone of our almost silent objections and the frailty of our say in the matter suddenly rose to the occasion.
Through Edward Said we suddenly found comrades we never knew we had, friends and families we never suspected in our own neighborhood -- Asia, Africa, and Latin America suddenly became the extension of our home away from home. Jose Marti I discovered through Edward Said, as I did Kojin Karatani, Chinua Achebe, Eqbal Ahmad, Tariq Ali, Ranajit Guha, Gayatri Spivak, Seamus Deane, Masao Miyoshi, Ngugi wa Thiongo. Everyone else we thought we knew he made new sense of for us -- Aime Cesaire, Frantz Fanon, Mahatma Gandhi, Mahmoud Darwish, Nazim Hikmat, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Faiz Ahmad Faiz.
As the color of our skin began to confuse the color line drawn tyrannically between blacks and whites in the United States -- segregated in the respective corners of their misplaced confidence about their races -- we Asians and Latinos, Arabs, Turks, Africans, Iranians, Armenians, Kurds, Afghans and South Asians were instantly brought together beyond the uncommon denominator of our origin and towards the solidarity of our emerging purpose, the nobility of our handshake with Edward Said.
For years after I had come to Columbia, I could not quite reconcile the public, mythic, iconic Edward Said, and the immediate Edward of my increasing acquaintance and friendship, camaraderie and solidarity. It was as if there was an Edward Said the Magnificent for the rest of the world and then another Edward for a happy few. The two were not exactly irreconcilable; they posited a question, a distance in need of traversing -- how could a mortal so fragile, frail, and accessible cut a global figure so monumental, metaphoric, parabolic?
When two years ago an infamous charlatan slandered me in a New York tabloid and created a scandalous website to malign my public stand against the criminal atrocities he supports, my voicemail was flooded with racist, obscene and threatening messages by the lunatic fringe he had let loose. Smack in the middle of these obscenities, as if miraculously, there was a message from Edward -- a breath of fresh air, refreshing, joyous, re-assuring, life-affirming: "Hamid, my dear, this is Edward . . ." Life was so amazingly beautiful. I kept listening to those obscenities just for the joy of coming to Edward's message. There was something providential in his voice -- it restored hope in humanity. Today at Edward's funeral, the heartbroken few who could look over the shoulder of the pallbearers of Edward's coffin were witness to yet another sublime restoration of hope when Daniel Barenboim played Bach's Prelude in E-Flat from Part I of the Well-Tempered Clavier as a musical tribute to his deceased friend. Those in the vicinity of this miracle saw and heard that the Maestro's loving farewell was no longer just a virtuoso pianist playing a beautiful piece of music-- but that they were privy to Daniel Barenboim speaking with Edward Said for the very last time, in the common language of their choice, privilege and transcendence.
Edward Said was the walking embodiment of hope -- one extraordinary incident that sought and detected an extraordinary sparkle in otherwise very ordinary people who happened on his watch. Years before, when I had open heart surgery and my dear, now departed, friend and colleague, Magda al-Nowaihi was just diagnosed with ovarian cancer, Edward was extraordinary in his support: calling on us regularly, sending us his new books and articles, reading our manuscripts, making fun of what he called our postmodernisms -- he was the sound of our laughter, the color of our joy, the shape of our hope. Magda fought her malignant cancer for years until her young children became teenagers; I defied my congenital fate and lived -- Edward, the model of our endurance, the measures of our truth, the meaning of our daring to walk into a classroom.
The closer I became to Edward the more impossible it seemed to tell what exactly it was that went into the making of his heroic character in such mythic measures -- by now I was too close to the mountain, embraced by its grace, oblivious to its majesty. But even in public, the account of his life that Edward Said published is no different. One reads his Out of Place (1999) in vain looking for a clue, a succession of historical or psychological causes and traits, as to what great or consequential events make for a monumentally moral life. Everything about Edward Said was rather ordinary, and yet an extraordinary adventure was made of the prosaic occurrences of this very life.
Born in Palestine in 1935, named Edward after the Prince of Wales, he lived a life of exile like millions of other Palestinians in the Arab world. Sent to Mount Hermon High School in New England, and subsequently to Princeton and Harvard for his higher education, Edward Said reports of no extraordinary event that one can identify, analyze, theorize as the defining moment of the mythic figure that he cut at the time of his untimely death. Edward was an ordinary man. Edward Said was a giant. The distance was covered by nothing other than the glory of his daring imagination.
Knowing Edward Said personally was a study in how heroes are made from the flesh and blood of the most ordinary and perishable realities. A Palestinian, an exile, an academic intellectual, a teacher, a scholar, a husband, a father, a friend: none of this common and abundant evidence of a disjointed world can account for the sum total of Edward Said as a towering figure measuring the very definition of a moral life.
"Did you know Professor Said," I asked Chaplin Davis here at Columbia when looking for a place for Miriam Said to receive the flood of visitors who wanted to pay their respects last Friday. "I never met him," she said, "but I know he was a warrior," and then she looked at me with a bright set of shining eyes and added ". . . for justice." "It was just like a light going off on campus," another colleague said of Edward's death.
If one is to begin anywhere to place the particulars of Edward Said's moral and intellectual life together it is not in the prosaics of his exilic life that he shares with millions of others, Palestinian or otherwise, but in the poetics of his creative defiance of his fate -- where he was able repeatedly to give birth to himself. At his death, Edward Said was the moral mandate, the volcanic outburst of a life otherwise wasted in and by accidents that accumulate to nothing. Exile was his fate and he triumphantly turned it into the fruit of his life -- the gift he gave to a world now permanently cast into an exilic departure from itself.
We can find few places in Out of Place that reveal the creative concatenation of such moments better than the concluding paragraph of the book. Like his life, Said's autobiography has to be read from its endings and not from its beginnings. "Sleeplessness for me," he says, "is a cherished state to be desired at almost any cost" (295). He stayed awake when the world went to sleep -- the insomniac conscience of the world, conversant with Minerva, observant with his eyes wide awake, like a wise owl, all-seeing, all-hearing, vigilant. "There is nothing for me as invigorating as immediately shedding the shadowy half-consciousness of a night's loss, than the early morning, reacquainting myself with or resuming what I might have lost completely a few hours earlier."
It is here, in the twilight borderline of repeated promises of a dawning light against the assured persistence of darkness, when it appears that the darker moments of our despair must yield to brighter hopes, that we always find Edward Said waiting for the rest of us to awake, to arrive. "With so many dissonances in my life I have learned actually to prefer being not quite right and out of place." Right here, I believe, Edward Said has rested his case and left his indelible mark on the rest of us, trying, as we are, to learn from him how to complement fatefully while remaining humanly incomplete. That, in my judgment, is the principal reason why such a multitude of people ordinarily at political and ideological odds with each other deeply loved Edward without contradicting themselves or him. His was a spontaneous soul -- he generated and sustained good will and moral purpose on the impulses of the premise he was given, not on the projected idealism of some metaphysical certainty.
What was paramount about Edward Said is that in his utter solitude he was never alone. He always spoke for an otherwise muted possibility of living a moral life against all odds, a graceful David swinging his sling and launching his stones against the Goliath of a world so mercilessly cast in the logic of its own madness -- to be the moral voice of a people, and to turn the tragic fate of that people into the tragedy of a global predicament in which we have all become homeless Palestinians. His virtue was to turn the vices of his time into momentous occasions for a more universal good that went beyond the specificity of one wrong or another. There was a catholicity to his liberating knowledge, a generosity to his moral rectitude, that easily transgressed boundaries and put to shame all territorial claims to authenticity. He was, as he rightly said, always slightly out of place, but that only brought out what was wrong with that place that could not completely accommodate him in the entirety of his character and culture.
In his legacy, Said has made a universal virtue out of the particular predicament that the world handed him at birth. Born in Palestine but denied his ancestral claims on that land, raised in Egypt but schooled with a British colonial education, dispatched to the United States by way of his father's claiming a more permanent part of his American dream but constantly driven to speak the truth of that lie to the powers that hold it, Said turned the inevitability of his fate into the defining moment of his stature as the iconic figure of an entire generation of hope -- against a whole culture of despair.
Edward Said's life has its most immediate bearing as an eloquent testimonial of a people much maligned and brutalized in history. His life and legacy cannot and must not be robbed of that immediacy. It is first and foremost as a Palestinian -- a disenfranchised, dispossessed, disinherited Palestinian -- that Edward Said spoke. The ordinariness of his story -- particularly in those moments when he spoke openly, frankly, innocently of his early youth, adolescence, sibling rivalries, sexual maturity, etc. -- is precisely what restores dignity to a people demonized by a succession of purposeful propaganda, dehumanized to be robbed of their homeland in the broad daylight of history. No assessment of his multifaceted achievements as a teacher, a critic, and a scholar, no laudatory endorsement of his universal humanism, no perfectly deserving appreciation of him as a musician, an essayist, a subaltern theorist, a political activist, etc. -- nothing should ever detract from his paramount significance as a Palestinian deeply wounded by the fate of what he repeatedly and wholeheartedly called "my people."
But Edward Said was not just a Palestinian, though a Palestinian he proudly was. Edward Said also became an icon, a moral paragon in a time when taking desperate measures have cast doubt on the very possibility of a moral voice, and here the ordinariness of his life makes the extraordinary voice that he was even more enduring. Said was not just a Palestinian. But he made every one else look like a Palestinian: made homeless by the mad logic of a brutal game of power that has robbed the whole world of any semblance of permanence.
How to remain an incessantly moral voice in a morally impermanent world, how to transfigure the disfigured mutations of the world into a well-mannered measure of truth, how to dismantle the power that false knowledge projects and yet insist that the just is right and the truth is beautiful -- that is the legacy of Edward Said, right from the mountain top of his majestic peak visible from afar, down to the slopes of his bountiful pastures which few fortunate souls were blessed to call home.
Hamid Dabashi is the Chair of the Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures (MEALAC) Department, Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies, and the Director of Graduate Studies at the Center for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University.
so he was named after the Prince of Wales but was homeless??
WAKE UP PEOPLE THIS IS IN YOUR SCHOOLS??
Part of the American Tribe
Squirrel Hunter
Spider Killer
God Bless the USA and her Fighting Forces and ALL who Fight with her give them Strength, Wisdom, Sight, and Courage to stay the course to Destroy ALL islamic Terrorist and ALL who Support them Amen
What about a contest for us big fans who are also laypeople... I would absolutely treasure an autographed book by Spencer, but surely I can't compete in these challenges. What about a 'lottery' for those loyal fans that can't, won't and don't dare compete against our most knowledgable fellow much-loved posters/contributors?
It's just a thought to level the odds, and I'm not one to beg, but dang, I just love this site and would really love an autograph. Even on a napkin.
Catherine
That near homo-erotic elegy to Eddie Said is just toooo precious. Habashi mentions Michel Foucault there, my hopes are up that I have picked the winner.
Yeah Foucault and his "deconstruction". Those post-modern philosophy classes were mind-numbing.
I gotta give the guy, credit. Its been years since I was in college, but I know good B---S--- when I read it.
I have no idea who wrote that long winded piece, but I do know who didn't....George W.
Didn't know if that will help out anyone.
By the way, what was the prize again? An all expense paid vacation for two in beautiful downtown Toganoxie, Kansas?
I believe the prize was a trip to the TAJ-MAHAL
Not everyone may have the stomach to read the entire paean to Said by Dabashi (which has been posted above on this same thread).
Therefore, when you do google "Hamid Dabashi" and "Edward Said" you should also google "Daniel Pipes," who when the Ode to Edward first appeared published an abridged version, which offers a goodly number of its most astonishing passages, or Hamid's Highlights.
Connoisseurs of the genre, readers of The Stuffed Owl and similar works, will want to take their Dabashi straight up and with not a word missing.
Chacun a son gout. De gustibus. Stuff like that.