| FrontPageMag.com | By Robert Spencer | By Hugh Fitzgerald | Books | Jihad Watch | Islam 101 | Qur'an Blog | Raymond Ibrahim | Robert Spencer |  |
|
|
|||||||||||
|
|
“In Cairo there is at least still a store where the Muhammedans can buy old books. In Baghdad one will not find that sort of thing. If one collects books here, and is neither prepared to copy them oneself nor to let others copy them, one must wait till somebody dies and his books and clothes are carried to the bazaar, where they are offered for sale by a crier. A European who wants to buy Arabian, Turkish or Persian manuscripts will find no better opportunity than in Constantinople for here at least there is a sort of bookstore where Christians – at least Oriental Christians – can buy books.'” – Carsten Niebuhr, quoted by Fjordman here
Well, in Baghdad much has been made, especially by breathless reporters, of bits and pieces of old Baghdad that are supposed to represent some time in the recent past of fabled high culture. It's nonsense.
There is that obligatory mention of Mutannabi Street, the bookseller's row, named after one of the most celebrated poets in classical Arabic, and a dab hand at panegyrics for the prince, turning to invective if Mutannabi was not given the reward he expected. On that bookseller’s row much of the merchandise consists of local publications, and also cheap Western books translated into Arabic. On offer at Mutannabi Street is to be found the effluvia and crap, including dogeared manuals and Life Magazines from 1957, and "literature" at the level of Ken Follett and Barbara Cartland (in Arabic), and of course endless books on the greatness of the Arabs and the Arab Dilemma and the Arab Renaissance and Whither The Arabs? and -- what else? -- Muhammad, and the Qur'an, and the Qur'an, and Muhammad, and did I forget to mention all the books on the Qur'an, and on Muhammad?
Yes, wonderful fabled Baghdad, all mahgoof-and-mutannabi-street-and-memories-of-loss, akin to those of Egyptian intellectuals of old Cairo and old Alexandria, when it had a "different" flavor -- meaning that the Jews, and the Greeks, and the Italians, and the Armenians, and even the handful of French and British, were still there. They were all there, reading La Gazette de Caire or somesuch, supporting the local orchestra or opera or lycee, having cultural soirees -- and look, just look at the syce-runners waiting outside Shepheard's, in the old days when life was so...so interesting. Similarly, those who have this imaginary Baghdad in their heads are really longing for a time, decades ago, when there were still many Jews in Baghdad (before 1948-1951, and before the Farhud of June 1-2, 1941, and before the British left, in 1932). There were also many Christians, unafraid to walk the streets or go to church. Baghdad, like Cairo and Alexandria when the tone was not set by the primitive Muslims, and life in Baghdad was so much more... so much more interesting.
There's a lot of blah about the "educated" Iraqis, and that "professional middle class" and its supposed high level of culture. It's very exaggerated, in size and in attainment. A handful of sad-eyed musicians trying to play classical music. A professor of poetry here and there. That's about it. In Islamic societies, there is so limited a place for art, or real literature, that for art Muslims endure Qur'anic calligraphy or yet another skyward-thrusting minaret-and-mosque complex, reminiscent of some kind of military installation -- which, in a sense, it is. Or in the case of many of these terrible places, despite the prohibition on depictions of the human form, there is a twist on Hokusai or is it Hiroshige, with One Hundred Views of Our Leader.
Like most of the Arab Muslim dreams, even the very best (i.e., secularized, semi-westernized) of those born into Islam have little conception of how deep is the Western cultural bench, our rich history and their culturally impoversihed one. When they do travel to, or have a chance to study or live in the West, and visit our museums and libraries and universities, some must obscurely realize, with a pang, but do not like to dwell upon the thought, of how Islam has so limited the artistic and scientific and cultural potential of those born into it, those who whether in village hovel or in an urban hospital's obstetrics ward, slide straight from the womb into the waiting straitjacket of Islam. Most who think of some "lost culture" that they had -- in Baghdad before Saddam, or in Cairo before Mubarak and Sadat, have no good conception of what bookstores in the advanced West look like, what the publishing houses can put out, what people can routinely buy and read. For every 27 million people (the population of Iraq) there aren't a hundred with the kind of literary taste, I'd wager, that can be found entering, say, a well-stocked university bookstore, even in a lousy university (is there another kind, these days?) -- not to mention those who are to be found in used bookstores, the native habitat, with its transferred but well-accepted epithet (it is not the bookstore but the books that are "used"), or their online versions, devoid of the pleasures of travels to Serendip.
What Carsten Niebuhr (1733-1815), celebrated traveller to those antique lands, noted the presence of in Cairo but the absence of in equally fabled Baghdad, no longer stands. Cairo, too, is a cultural wasteland, and has been since Nasser seized the property of, and booted out, those Jews, those Greeks, those Italians, and all those non-Muslims who, for a while between 1880 and 1955, made a bit of Cairo and a bit of Alexandria semi-interesting, semi-worldly. Ungaretti was born (in 1882) in Alexandria, Cavafy too. But they were the ones who brought in a taste of the non-Muslim world, and even the quasi-European world. This was the world of those who attended the premiere of "Aida" on the banks of the Nile (hint: Muslim Arabs were not the main audience). That world is gone, or will go as more of the terrified Copts leave.
And everywhere in the Muslim Arab lands, as they empty out of their last non-Muslims, they will be left with Islam, and nothing but Islam. One can already observe the acceleration of that creeping desertification, of the intellectual kind, everywhere in the Arab and Muslim lands. For no non-Muslims ever wish to return to a Muslim-ruled land. Why should they? Why would they?
And that "cultural center" in Baghdad, that Bookseller's Row on Mutannabi Street, aside from the odd find -- Table-Talk of a Mesopotamian Judge was brought back to me by a friend -- offers books little different in quality from those laid out at a two-block street fair in Queens or Brooklyn, with you eagerly conning the tables for good finds, only to come away in the end with nothing but dismal disappointment.
Posted by Hugh at April 3, 2007 8:25 AM
Print this entry
| Email this entry
| Digg this
| del.icio.us
Well said, I haven't posted in months, but it is writing like this that makes me like Dhimmi and jihad watch.The truth can be spoken The truth is Muslim culture is primitive, the truth is the where ever there is or has been culture and civilization in the Muslim world there is, where or are Jews and Christians. The sad and not politically correct truth is, that Judaism and Christianity are superior in what they give their followers and the legacy they have left behind even for those from Jewish and Christian backgrounds who no-longer believe, i.e. Oriana Fallaci's cultural Christianity.
As simply literature and in the world of ideas the Bible is a vastly superior piece of literature compared to the Quran. Those who pin away for the old middle east are blind in their distaste for Christians and Jews and their moral eqivelancy,and they cannot see the obvious truth of the moral and cultural superiority of those religions and outlooks they engender in the world. As the minorities leave Dar al Islam, Dar al Islam will get grimmer and darker. Afghanistan and the hell of Pakistans tribal areas are real Islam, they are the total imbodiment of the intellectual,cultural and moral world, created by that second rate collection of hate and plagerism known as Al Quran.
Islam simply does not have the moral and cultural imagination for real literature and culture, and the Quran is the culprit. The more of the Quran that is fed the people, the dumber they are and the smaller their world becomes.The Quran is a set of mental chains. In the West a vast body of writers, believer and unbeliever, reference the Bible and its themes, the richness and the depth of Judeo-Christian culture and even its secular anticedents, simply overwhelms. Islam underwhelms and shocks with its crude, violent, childlike world view. Places like the old Alexandria and Cairo and Istanbul (pre-genocide) are gone forever the light of their enlightened minorites and their superior cultures and relgions gone, to be replaced by the blood vengence, culture hating darkness of rural Pakistan,Post war Iraq,Yemen or a thousand other sewers of human misery and shame.
Posted by: abdulalshirk![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.jihadwatch.org/dhimmiwatch/nav-commenters.gif)
at April 3, 2007 9:35 AM
" When they do travel to, or have a chance to study or live in the West, and visit our museums and libraries and universities, some must obscurely realize, with a pang, but do not like to dwell upon the thought, of how Islam has so limited the artistic and scientific and cultural potential of those born into it."
Either they dwell on such thoughts of inferiority (which I highly doubt, because after all, they are allah's chosen), or they just alter history to make out as if such an artist or architect or physicist or whatever was actually a muslim, but the infidels corrupted the history books, the Bible or anything else that would that would steal the 'glory' due to islam and its 'ingenius' followers. I mean, just the other day, an islamic troll posted on this website, a statement claiming that it was muslims who had discovered America!?? Uh hum. Whatever gets him through the day I guess. Need I say more.
Posted by: GreekFrenchInfidel at April 3, 2007 10:34 AM
It is haram for a fundamentalist muslim to love art, music and non-quranic literature. Stone-agers of any stripe are seldom interested in culture. Did Goring plunder museums because he loved art, or because he loved to plunder?
Posted by: MP at April 3, 2007 1:15 PM
Browsing the book shelves in Islamic countries can be an interesting exercise.
When asking bookshop directions in Istanbul and Tunisian markets I was asked repeatedly and pointedly by the man in the street which titles, which authors. No surprise registered when I said Sayyid Qutb and I was invariably pointed in the right direction.
In particular there was general familiarity with and affection for his authoritative "In the Shade of the Qur'an", though mostly that and his other books were in Arabic or Turkish.
While Turkey and Tunisia are regarded as relatively secular and while any mention to Western 'moderate' Muslims that you are reading Qutb usually evokes "Don't judge us by him, he's a radical", it is surely significant (at the anecdotal level) that even in those countries he is well known and not disowned.
Posted by: MBR at April 3, 2007 6:01 PM
Buying books in Istanbul can be quite a shock. First, the foreigner strolls from Taksim Square, down Istiqlal Caddesi, where he looks at the windows of what appear to be offering books in Turkish, and in English, French, German, books of all kinds, books that make the bookstore look like the kind of bookstore he knows. Then, he may find enticing the used bookstores, the ones that are selling books from that period 1880-1930, about the Ottoman Empire or some aspect of it, some even with lurid covers about "the Turk." Then there are also, deeper in the shop, sometimes in places that you must ask the owner if you can be admitted to, or books shown to you, of the kind known as travel books, and here we get to the real rareties, the 17th and 18th century works of European travellers to the East, and some of these, you discover, were once the property of a German Jewish scholar who had fled Germany, ended up in Istanbul, and lived quietly and productively, in a different less Islamic Turkey, and then died as he had lived, quietly, a decade or two ago, and some of his books had made it to this bookshop on Istiqlal Caddesi -- which is what so many foreigners may think of when they think of Istanbul.
Then, one fine day, you are walking through a different part of Istanbul, one where you don't see any other foreigners, and which has a different feel to it altogether. And you come across one bookshop after another. But they don't look anything like those other bookships (nor like those bookstalls in the mall, which sell cheap paperbacks in Turkish, of mysteries and quasi-romance novels and the Turkish version of the universal mental junk to be found anywhere). These books are all made out of either leather or some pseudo-leatherette, made no doubt from plasticene, with gilt lettering of the title and the geometric curlicues on the spine and on the cover -- and the script is Arabic, not the roman letters that Ataturk enforced. You have walked into one of those bookstores, one of many, that have nothing but Islam. The Qur'an. Commentaries on the Qur'an. Hadith -- the six sahih collections, and then the others. The Sira, and more books on this or that aspect of Muhammad. Hundreds and thousands of such books. Islam and Science. Islam and Health. Islam and the Family. Islam and Food. Islam and this, Islam and that, Islam, Islam, Islam.
It starts to overwhelm and sicken you. And you leave. And you wonder which offers a better guide to the minds of the Turkish masses today: that brightly-lit bookstore or two on the Istiqlal Caddesi, where you can find, in Turkish, Bernard Lewis, and possibly I. B. Singer or John Updike or Ian McEwan, or those other bookstores, the ones tourists seldom run across, and never enter, and that you realize that just on the one street you happened upon, far outnumber the bookstores of Istiqlal Caddesi.
Posted by: Hugh at April 3, 2007 7:18 PM
Very simple- all cultures are not created equal. Too bad the multi-culturists will never realize this.
Great post Hugh- you made the bookstores come alive, especially in your comment below the main story.
Posted by: s at April 3, 2007 7:32 PM
Without necessarily agreeing that the Qur'an itself is the main problem, I'd like to offer my description of it. It is a mishmash of material from different sources, thrown together in a disjointed way. Continuity may last for five or ten or fifteen verses and then suddenly disappear without a conclusion given to the previous 15 verses that did have some sort of continuity up to that point. To illustrate: the Qur'an gives an account of the Queen of Sheba who visited King Solomon of Israel. This account is not taken from the Hebrew Bible but from another Jewish source, the midrash [fanciful, legendary elaboration on a Bible story] about Solomon and the Queen. This midrash is a good tale if you get a chance to read it [try Louis Ginzberg's Legends of the Jews]. It is interesting and has a punchline or conclusion. However, the Qur'an does not quote the whole midrashic tale, just a part of it. Hence, as it stands, the Quranic account of Solomon and the Queen is an INCOMPLETE story. It does not reach a conclusion and makes little sense. Likewise, a sura [chapter] of the Qur'an jumps from one subject to another, with little continuity and inexplicably. I understand that the Qur'an recited in Arabic has a certain power with a strong rhythm and rhyme. But there is not much rhyme or reason, I note from my own reading of it. Then there are the bizarre contradictions of one verse by another. For instance, the statement about saving one life is like saving a whole world [also from a Jewish source] is contradicted in meaning by immediately succeeding verses. Then there are various borrowings from Christian sources. The Quranic account of Jesus not dying on the cross is --according to Bernard Lewis, I believe-- from the Donatist Christian heresy. Just how the Quran as a whole makes a favorable impression on those who do not hear it recited in Arabic [meaning those who don't know Arabic] is a mystery to me. So the Qur'an is a disjointed mishmash with disparate material from many sources.
Posted by: Eliyahu at April 3, 2007 8:14 PM
To give the devil his due, the Arabs, in their much hyped Abbasid,Fatimid,and Spanish Umayyad golden age were known for the size of their libraries (knowing about paper - unlike the Europeans, who were too busy fighting off the Vikings, anyway - helped)
"In every city the productions of Arabic literature were copied and collected by the curiosity of the studious and the vanity of the rich. A private doctor refused the invitation of the sultan of Bochara, because the carriage of his books would have required four hundred camels. The royal library of the Fatimites consisted of one hundred thousand manuscripts, elegantly transcribed and splendidly bound, which were lent, without jealousy or avarice, to the students of Cairo. Yet this collection must appear moderate, if we can believe that the Ommiades of Spain had formed a library of six hundred thousand volumes, forty-four of which were employed in the mere catalogue. Their capital, Cordova, with the adjacent towns of Malaga, Almeria, and Murcia, had given birth to more than three hundred writers, and above seventy public libraries were opened in the cities of the Andalusian kingdom. The age of Arabian learning continued about five hundred years, till the great eruption of the Moguls, and was coeval with the darkest and most slothful period of European annals; but since the sun of science has arisen in the West, it should seem that the Oriental studies have languished and declined."
Gibbon's 'Decline and fall', ch 52
Although he does add that much of it was probably dross and notes the absence of any translations of Greek literature, history and most of their philosophers.
at April 3, 2007 10:02 PM
Hundreds and thousands of such books. Islam and Science. Islam and Health. Islam and the Family. Islam and Food. Islam and this, Islam and that, Islam, Islam, Islam.
This world takeover game ain't easy, it requires extraordinary concentration.
Focus, focus.
Posted by: Alarmed Pig Farmer at April 3, 2007 11:03 PM
Hugh, I think that much of what you say is supported and/or echoed by Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet novels. It's a shame that Durrell seems to have been so out of step with British policy in the Middle East.
Posted by: Eliyahu at April 4, 2007 6:32 AM
btw, I'd like to recommend not only the Alexandria Quartet novels, but the movie based on them, Justine.
Posted by: Eliyahu at April 4, 2007 6:33 AM
Ungaretti is one thing, Lawrence Durrell quite another. The crudely exotic, the easy exploitation of couleur locale for effect, with its appeal to fellow Westerners was not what I had in mind. Think, rather, of what not Western but= some Egyptian minds, might make of that recent movie "The Yacobian Building."
My point is that as the Arab Muslim states booted out, or drove out, seriatim, non-Muslims. First, Jews. There were mob attacks on Jews in the 1940s, in Iraq, in Yemen, in Libya, in Syria, and the history of Jews under Islam was in most places one of utter wretchedness, sometimes amounting to outright chattel slavery, as in the Yemen, but in the places that for a time enjoyed the rule of a European power (as Algeria, with the loi Cremieux of 1870) or Iraq under the British from 1920-1932, Jews in some cases could even become prosperous (as, most famously, in Baghdad).
The Christian population everywhere in the Muslim countries has been under attack, and even in Lebanon losing power to steady Muslim pressure. The out-migration started in Lebanon, which because of its toporaphy was a place where Christians had managed to survive the Muslim conquest and subsequent, slow but inexorable, demographic conquest, as little by little non-Muslims to avoid having to endure the humiliation, degradation, and physical insecurity of the dhimmi status would, over time, convert or in some cases, be forcibly converted at a ruler's whim (Shah Abbas had all the Armenians and Jews in Tabriz converted over night, on pain of death).
The Zoroastrians, in their own country, Iran, have dwindled to a handful, though earlier in the Muslim period, some managed to flee, and in India, to surive.
And now it is happening, in accelerated fashion, in Iraq, where the removal of Saddam Hussein let loose the full Muslim venom against the local Christians -- by Shi'a as well as Sunnis. Saddam Hussein had his own reasons for not persecuting the Christians too much, though the Iraqis, even the "secular" Iraqis, did regime made sure the Christians knew their place (in the mass hanging of so-called "Zionist agents" among the Jewish victims were also a few Christians). The Christians could be trusted because they were weak; Christians formed the household staff of Saddam Hussein -- the drivers, the food-tasters, the waiters. Where else, after all, could they go? They couldn't plot against him, for whatever replaced him would certainly be even more dangerous for them. Hafez al-Assad made the same use of Christians (including Armenians who were trusted by him) in the other Ba'athist regime; the Alawites know that the "real" Muslims are the threat to them, and the Christians no threat of all.
Some Egyptians may yearn for some vanished cultural splendor, exaggerated no doubt, or misunderstood, that they dimly realize depended for its existence on the presence of those Jews, Italians, Greeks, and so on whose property was seized, and who were booted out of Egypt by Nasser in what is always described, inaccurately, as an act of Arab "nationalism." It wasn't "nationalism" or rather, behind or within that "nationalism" was the Islam-based hostility and even, for some (such as the Ikhwan) inculcated hatred for non-Muslims. Pan-Arabism was not an alternative to, but the conceivable, or seemingly doable at the time, subset of, pan-Islamism. The kicking out of non-Muslims is not an exhibition of "Arab nationalism" but of the deeper attitudes, the attitudes engendered by Islam, that can be seen in so much of what, for a few recent decades, was always brightly and briskly avoided, or overlooked, in the dreamy belief that Islam somehow did not matter, when for Muslim peoples and societies and states, in the end it is all that matters -- whether to yield to it, as the primitive masses always will, or somehow to constrain and weaken the hold and power of Islam, as the most advanced leaders (Bourguiba, Ataturk) will want to, and try to, implement.
Posted by: Hugh at April 4, 2007 7:54 AM
One more thing about Ungaretti: he wrote the shortest poem in the Italian language:
M'illumino
D'immenso.
Opening the shutters, letting the sunlight flood in.
Posted by: Hugh at April 4, 2007 7:56 AM
Comments are turned off and archived for this entry.
(Note: The Comments section is provided in the interests of free speech only. It is mostly unmoderated, but comments that are off-topic, offensive, slanderous, or otherwise annoying stand a chance of being deleted. The fact that any comment remains on the site IN NO WAY constitutes an endorsement by Jihad Watch or Dhimmi Watch, or by Robert Spencer or any other Jihad Watch or Dhimmi Watch writer, of any view expressed, fact alleged, or link provided in that comment.)