The Most Beautiful Name

MEDITATIONS ON THE VEIL

MEDITATIONS ON THE VEIL
Five Images of Contemporary Islamic Calligraphy
That Transcend the Boundaries of the Eye
by Aaron Vlek

(click all images to enlarge)

Few native English speakers can comprehend the possibilities, the depth of meaning and subtle implications inherent in the concept of the living sacred text, language, and alphabet such as that of Qur’anic Arabic. We write and read, even our most elegant treatises and love letters, often with a sterile and utilitarian efficiency that prefigures and starkly illustrates the highly prized transitory and disposable quality of our culture, our ideas, and perhaps even our very aspirations.
Drawing from the works of five contemporary examples of Islamic calligraphy, I will provide a brief examination of the traditional Qur’anic, personal and sigilistic, and even one piece which appears seemingly wholly abstract. Yet, as radically distinct from one another as these individual works appear at first to be, as divergent from the ritual formality of what is typically considered Islamic calligraphy, all share three important features. The images are constructed, crafted, drawn, and evoked from the body of the written Arabic script. Each work possesses a bold and imposing visual composition that challenges viewers to abandon their habitual default modes of looking and seeing as they are compelled to confront and contemplate that which is being presented in each image.
And most importantly, each image seductively illuminates the mystery of the Arabic script as it both veils and reveals the secrets it wishes to share with us. In each of these works here under discussion, the artist has employed the Arabic script as a master composer might create a complex and intricate symphony. Where the English and Western languages seem to lay flat upon the page, divesting themselves quickly of their contents and then waiting silently, as if to say, that is all and nothing more, the Arabic calligraphy is never static, never quiet, always tempting us with this, and again perhaps, with so much more.

Image #1

Al-Waqfa (2006)
Al-Arif – The man of Knowledge
Nazar Yahya (b. Iraq, 1963-)
Handmade book, 10 digital prints with collage


Yahya has crafted a handmade book featuring ten digital prints and a bound cover. As contemporary as this piece may be, with its slick, high-tech execution , it recalls the elegance of a near monastic care and meticulousness in what is clearly a cursive style of personal Arabic penmanship and not a formal and traditionally Qur’anic calligraphic style at all. The color palate is quite reminiscent of both Zen and Shinto painting styles with the bold and dramatic hand against the royal glow of a warm and sunny background. As with Shinto and Zen works, the prominent solar sphere commands the viewer’s gaze and forces the eye to penetrate through the distracting veil of the thickly and carefully rendered sacred and mystic text.
In Yahya’s piece, al-Arif, the Man of Knowledge, the text derives from al-Niffari, a 9th century mystic from the artist’s native Iraq known for his passionate evocations of God. The viewer is invited to transcend the material reality in which he is seemingly forever entrenched, through the protecting veil of the written and visible exoteric text, itself perhaps looming like the Sphinx before the gates of the gnosis, ready to turn away the unworthy, or the unprepared. Niffari states in the text upon the page,, “Whenever the vision is broadened, the words become narrowed." Are Yahya and al-Niffari suggesting, or hinting, that regardless of how beautiful the calligraphic script may be, it is but the outer husk of the meanings and Reality hidden behind the veil of the text? And perhaps even this, the hidden meaning itself which the trained eye, the scholastic theologian, or the mystic may comprehend, is merely another veil of many yet to part as we transcend the limitations of the senses, the reasoning mind, and all knowledge which we may smugly call our “own” and come finally to encounter that which destroys forever the clamor of the mind.

Image #2

RITUAL SIGNS II (1999)
Iman Abdullah Mahmud
(b. Iraq, 1956-)


Ritual Signs II is a clear and typical example of the ancient form of table or tablet of corresponding mystic symbols, elements, and images. Almost a cookbook or roadmap for attempting to decipher the inner nature of deepest reality, and navigating the intricate connective relationships between all things in creation, this type of formula was developed and used extensively in the ancient world among the Hebrews, Egyptians, Chaldeans and many others and has survived into modern usage in forms little changed in either style or content.
Some examples of this form which thrive today are the anagrams and other common amusement puzzles found everywhere in popular culture from Barnes & Noble to the back pages of The New York Times. As with the tarot cards and their mundane cousins the playing card deck which lacks the major arcane or trumps, these modern puzzles and anagrams offer seemingly only amusement and distraction.
The intriguing feature of Mahmud’s table of sigils, is that it truly appears to be a “working magician’s” drawing board. It’s old and worn, tattered and frayed at the edges and clearly shows evidence of fevered erasings and mad scribbling, one can almost imagine by candlelight at the midnight hour. The bold and almost violent strokes across the surface of the work seem disturbingly new, perhaps the ink still damp, giving evidence of a final and triumphant AHA! Moment as these dramatic dark symbols almost leap from the page to preeminently wipe out all that has gone before, or has lead up to, this final secret and private revelation.
Even a light comparison between this work and other similar examples from cultures as disparate as the Hebrew, the Caribbean, and of the 16th, 19th, and 20th century European, as well as those of neo-occultists of the John Dee, Austin Osman Spare, and Aleister Crowley schools of thought, will reveal an uncanny similarity. One cannot easily dismiss the haunting universality of man’s attempt to categorize, symbolize, and then manipulate his observations and theories of the non-spatial and spiritual realms with the same hunger and precision, and with a similar methodology, as do the empirical scientists who scoff at them.

Image #3

SALOME (1993)
Rachid Koraïchi
(b. Algeria, 1947-)
Gold and indigo hand-woven silk

Koraïchi’s Salome evokes similar ritual styles from diverse cultural sources as does Mahmud in the previous image. Disdaining the canvas, the high-tech digital program, and the calligrapher’s nib and parchment, Koraïchi traces his arcane and indecipherable formulae on azure silk with gold lettering and symbols. These three mediums tell us a great deal. Silk is very costly and exquisite, azure is the color of heaven and indeed even “the gods,” and gold is the most precious of material elements. Although Koraïchi is an artist from the “Islamic” world, his stretched and twisted calligraphic renderings resemble the Japanese kanji figures far more than the Arabic script from which they are derived. The figures at the top of the work bear a remarkable resemblance to the classical hieroglyphic depictions of the gods seated within the Barq of Re as it makes its journey across the heavens twice daily, at dawn and at sunset. Dawn and sunset are two of the Muslim times of prayer as well. Also similarly to the Mahmud piece, Koraïchi utilizes the table schema in the central portion of the work with the left portion of the panel resembling the rayed chart of the Zodiac, and the entire central portion similar in style to typical ancient Egyptian stelea or formulaic devotional tablets. Together these provocatively suggestive images create a delightful mélange of surprisingly cohesive cross cultural references.
At the very outset, we know that Koraïchi’s configurations are of the utmost import. However, the artist forever locks us out of these formulae by creating a completely private and interior secret script, which he then flaunts defiantly and gloriously before our eyes. We may glean certain hintings from the composition and the execution materials, but we will never know with certainty what Koraïchi has discovered by merely sitting passively in our chairs and gazing upon his travel notes. The artist seems to be suggesting that we must go forth and embark upon our own explorations, carve unique inroads towards the unknown, and devise our own private and interior languages with which to communicate our discoveries to ourselves and to the world. And perhaps Koraïchi is again like the Sphinx, retaining his silence as a final sacred oath.
Comparing other examples of similar models such as Tibetan prayer flags, ancient and contemporary, as well as Buddhist Thanka sacred paintings on cloth, we find silk and gold used frequently to convey the sacredness of the inner teachings and to beautifully decorate outward texts for the less initiated eye. Modern day “occultists” from the 19th and 20th centuries and well into the present have often endeavored to create secret working languages decipherable only to their creators to express and symbolize the expanse of the inner drawing board.

Image #4

The Attributes of Divine Perfection (1987)
Ahmed Moustafa
(b. Egypt, 1943)
Oil and watercolor on paper


This work is perhaps the most intriguing of this grouping under discussion. Moustafa’s central image depicts a cube highly reminiscent of the Ka’aba at Mecca to which Muslims turn in prayer five times a day. Yet the clever and almost playfully reverent use of the Islamic imagery extends provocatively to every element of the work’s composition. The dark blue background of the piece is subtly worked with the Throne Verse (Ayat al-Kursi 2:255) of the Qur’an. This backdrop is textured ambiguously to suggest the lovely appearance of a vast hanging curtain or veil, its folds almost visible and rippling, again reminiscent of the fabulously text-embroidered curtain that shrouds the exterior of the Ka’aba.
Furthering this idea of the deepening layers, inside the blue veil is the Ka’aba itself, but the walls of this Ka’aba are protected with yet another layer, this time with the second half of the shahada, or declaration of faith, that Muhammad is the Prophet of Allah. Once inside these protecting veils, the interior of the cube is opened, or revealed, to display the 99 Beautiful Names, or Attributes of Allah modeled intricately and suggestively into a pattern evoking the molecular structure of everything in the material creation from gross matter and crystalline structures to that of the highest of animal life, Mankind himself. These Attributes of Allah, the artist seems to declare, aggregate in countless wondrous combinations to form the basis of all existence, and display the mystery of seemingly diverse multiplicity of creation through differing mixtures of these subtle essences of Allah’s nature.
The remaining element of the work, the foreground which leads from the image of the cube outwards right off the canvas towards the viewer like a royal road, is worked with yet another Qur’anic passage admonishing, inviting, calling upon man to call in return upon God by any of these beautiful names. The result, we are promised, is that this road will open before us and guide us through the veils to the final personal revelation of the Mystery. This lovely image bridges the seeming gap between the heights of modern empirical knowledge and the often quoted ancient and sacred tenet of faith: Wheresoever ye shall look, there is the Face of God.

Image #5

A FINE FRENZY (2004)
Shirazeh Houshiary
(b. Iran, 1955-)
Black and white aquacyl, white pencil
and ink on canvas
This final piece almost needs no words. Similar images emerge frequently in many times and cultures. Always, it seems a meditation upon the descent of the soul as it turns away from the external realities and closes in upon its own concealed center. As Houshiary explains this work, this piece is created from a single word that is written over and over and over again upon the surface of the canvas, and then erased, written again and erased, smudged, and then written over and erased again producing an almost impossible to believe texture and symmetry. It recalls Moustafa’s Divine Attributes as this single word becomes the distilled substance of the entire work, but which loses any continuity with an actual written word of human origin and script. Again, this harkens back to Nazar Yahya’s work Al-Arif, which points beyond the veils to where the word ceases to have meaning as the rational mind is taken from itself.
Houshiary removes veils by removing the rational meaning of the word without diminishing the purity of its essence. She declares, and rightly so, that this method transcends culture and speaks deeply to us all at a level that ravages the conditioned meanings we all live by. If one gazes into the center of this piece, there is very much something there to be seen. Is it the intent of the artist? A hallucination on the part of the viewer? Or is there something there that each of us might discover by focusing intently on the center of A Fine Frenzy as it works like an Escher maze upon the brain and plays its tricks upon the supremely malleable human consciousness? Houshiary states openly that it is her hope, through this work, to allow the viewer to set aside the rational consciousness, to rend this veil that separates the viewer, all of us, from the Real that we all share at the core of our own inner fine frenzy.

What these five works all share in common, what they all tantalizingly suggest and challenge us to explore and discover for ourselves, is that there is indeed a great and beautiful mystery, a commanding and defining Truth to all of this great Thisness that surrounds and fills us. But that it is, as we are so often maddeningly reminded, hidden in plain sight, and that we must be transformed into creatures that can apprehend, see, taste, encounter, and Be with that Mystery. But that to undertake this great adventure, we must courageously chart virgin territory, the inner core of our own unique beings, and set aside those veils so that we may abandon ourselves to something so much more. Each of these five works both veils, and reveals that Mystery.

CONFESSIONS IN SOLITUDE: A Necessary Sin Against Humanity

“I came to love withdrawing into seclusion (khalwa) at home, as well as going forth into the [deserted] countryside. And I would wander about in the ruins and amongst the tombs situated near the city. This was my constant practice. And I sought sincere companions who might be of assistance to me in this matter, but I didn’t succeed and I withdrew from those places of retirement.”

Like the pregnant cat who would guard her precious secret from the danger of prying eyes, al-Hakim Tirmidhi, one of the great saints of 9th century Islam, discovered in solitude, that which his many years of scholarly training in his faith had not produced. As a youth he had undergone education appropriate to the son of a scholar and entered formal education at the age of eight years. But it was not until after his twenty-fifth year and a journey to Mecca, that the inner worlds of mystical conversion began to ripen and wipe away the elaborate scaffolding of the scholarly and rational dogmatism of the exoteric practice of his faith. And like the pregnant cat, he sought passionately for the jealously guarded places of privacy and “alone with the Aloneness” through which he might explore and give himself completely to experiences which catastrophically destroyed his former being and identity within traditional Islamic scholarship.
What is truly remarkable in this narrative is the suggestive similarity it bears to the autobiographical accounts of al-Ghazali in the 12th century, Jalaladin Rumi in the 13th century, and numerous other notable saints in Islam. But the phenomena of the observable an definable mystical unfolding is not confined to Islam. St Bernard of Clairvaux, St. John of the Cross, Theresa of Avila and Thomas Merton spanned the centuries of the Christian era. Evelyn Underhill’s classic and massive tome Mysticism beautifully reveals in delicious prose the common hallmarks of this spiritual unfolding and the many points all mystics seems to share in common. Most have undergone a formal education in the faith of their culture. All seem at one point to withdraw from the society of their fellows, often literally to a cave, the desert, a forest, or an isolated cell, where they undergo a cataclysmic change of perception and being from which they never “recover” and which ushers in points of heightened clarity, moral elevation, and a range of deep conversion experiences held similarly in common across disparate religious and cultural paradigms. These elements of heightened intellectual and aesthetic clarity, positive changes in personality, and perhaps most notably the moral elevation and a marked sobriety juxtaposed with periods of ecstatic states, separates the mystic from the psychotic or other mental disorder, many of which are accompanied by religious delusions and visions.
The need for solitude is felt to be a necessity in which the individual may explore, experience, and enjoy the new state and its many wonders. In the Deliverance from Error, al-Ghazali describes, upon returning reluctantly from his own Wandering the need to cut himself off, to live alone and only frequent society when necessary to teach. Does he not sound like the new bride just back from her honeymoon, only venturing out as needed and racing back to the joys of solitude that is not so very lonely at all?
The problem, a very big problem, is that the happy picture does not remain so idyllic for long. The villagers, it seems, are always jealous. Whether the mystic’s Beloved is Allah, Jesus of Nazareth, a strange wanderer named Shems, or a mysterious daemon pregnant and growing within the hidden confines of his psychic Being, these angry villagers, regardless of the century or culture from which they spring will endeavor to destroy those who become consumed with a drawing away from their midst in search of an aloneness that threatens the love of the reality of the visible and more trivial layers of the world. Such mystics seem also to fall into two varieties. Those who cannot keep their mouths shut, and spill their secrets to the world and pay with their lives. The most notable of course being Mansur al-Hallaj in the 10th century and his dance to the gallows.
The second type are those who know and keep their silence to themselves, sharing their secrets only with those who may be touched in similar ways by tasting the fruit of their gnostic experiences. These come back from their wanderings, but resume their place within society if but to a controlled and limited degree. Al-Ghazali was a man of profound traditional scholastic and legal achievements from an important and powerful family. He could not return to society and maintain a wholly obscure existence. Bernard of Clairvaux, a contemporary of al-Ghazali and the founder of the Cistercian monastic order within Roman Catholicism had a career very similar to al-Ghazali, underwent a similar conversion, and returned to public life of the church to pursue a career very similar to al-Ghazali’s with many of the same messages and techniques, teaching through letter writing and a call to attain both to the letter of religious law and to the inner gnosis. Both men maintained that either hand alone could not grasp the truth.
Al-Ghazali and Bernard both served the calling of the public “church” and the private gnosis, and their conversions lead them back into important and powerful roles within the society of the religious. Both men enjoy a tremendous fame and respect today in many communities. And both men came back to the world and embraced her, and shared with her the secrets that she was able to embrace and understand. Both al-Ghazali and Bernard worked for and supported the religious system and its role in an ordered and rational society, while quietly disseminating the more viral wines and fruits of their explorations to their private students through poetic writings, letters, and discourses.
Mansur al-Hallaj was an agent of chaotic upset. He tipped over the gracefully ordered dinner table and told people to eat off the floor, to grab food bare handed from the trees and to take savory morsels from the lips of strangers. It is easy to imagine the fear and horror this birthed in the hearts and minds of both the clergy and lay believers as well. Not only does this speak to destroy the girders or order in a value based society, but is hints at the monstrous ocean of the unknowable, That Which is Discovered in Solitude which would turn the safe and reliable order of the world on its head and drive a man presumably mad. Blasphemy, heresy, insanity are the only possible explanations and provide powerful protecting talismans against facing or even considering that Unknown by the masses.
But one must then consider the innocent girl child and her virginal isolation from the world of Men until she is ready to receive them in an appropriate and mutually enjoyable way. Just so with the horror, the fear, the revulsion felt towards even the subconscious suggestion of the Violation of the individual consciousness by that which it utterly alien and outside of Itself . Appropriate indeed that the masses remain separate, protected in their virginal innocence against that which would destroy the world if more than just a strange and isolated few pass quietly and unnoticed in the crowd, sharing a word, a story, a pamphlet, a few books, with one another.
But even in the secular world, solitude is warned against, is ridiculed, is pitied, all messages to those who might be warned against it, lest the balance of those who Know outweigh those who must not in order to keep the world machine functioning as it is. Similar injunctions are found against getting too excited about tantalizing and provocative sentiments found within the words of al-Ghazali, Hafez, Rumi, Abil-Khayr, Jami, Hallaj and the list goes on forever. Al-Ghazali warns in Deliverance from Error that the masses are not suited to a close study of certain kinds of knowledge as it will drive them mad.
“Beware! Beware! Do not think [for a moment] that this rational knowledge is a trifle matter. One must suffer greatly before one knows what [precisely] “proof” is. There are very few people in the world who know what [exactly] proof is. Indeed there are even very few who even if they want to learn what [exactly] “proof” is can do so. The majority of the [so-called] “’ulama” of your time have just heard of the name “proof.” They are far from [knowing] what it truly [means]. To make a long story short, if there be a student as intelligent as you are, then in no less than two years, certainly noting short of a year, one can teach what [precisely] the rational method and “proof” are. And that is in case I be the teacher. Otherwise, if someone else were to teach you “proof” and what it truly means, he would pluck you out of your faith [just] like a strand of your hair from your temples. [No sir!] This is not a sort of sea from which you and your contemporaries can emerge safely. Nothing but resonances of the Divine Grace can save [a person] there. You must stay where you are and do not even mention the name of “proof”! Else you would lose yourself, because on this path the blood of many people like you has been spilled.”

This suggestive admonition from 12th century notable “individual” ‘Ayn al-Qudat Hamadhani speaks clearly to the climber not suited to an all-out assault on the Everest of the internal Being and whose safety, well-being, and true aspirations and nature would be better suited to a Sunday stroll and picnic in the company of friends among the foothills on a sunny day. But those heartier and more relentless beings, those driven by passions they can neither control or deny were they even to wish to, will glean the secret and seductive message embedded therein. Like the half obscured and glittering gate not to be ignored that calls irresistibly to the likes of every lonely Steppenwolf, it whispers in the dark of solitude, Magic Theater, not for everybody!
Solitude is the darkness outside the reassuring glow of “civilization,” the silence beyond the collective monkey chatter of humanity that rejects that single most precious commodity held necessary and inviolate by the majority: the perpetual noise of social connectivity. Human beings will congregate with other people who they despise, just to avoid being “alone.” They will turn on television sets, radios, and video games, with the sole purpose of drowning the challenging echoes of the silence within their own beings, a silence that calls them to a loss of virginity they are not yet prepared to endure. But they will always hate and fear those who remind them that perhaps the girders of a seeming reality that keeps them from the unraveling insanity of the Rabbit Hole are just as tenuous as our collective tribal campfire and that it too will die and grow cold if they do not remain perpetually awake to feed it.
Solitude is a dark mother, a Kali of the soul that teaches her young brutal truths in the blood-milk she feeds their hunger. Do not, she seems to warn the unworthy, slip out of bed in the middle of a dark night to answer the call of strange men in the cold and silent alleys outside your window, unless sadness, horror, despair, disillusionment, and the loss of your humanity are small coins in the exchange. The virgin will always be afraid, but when her desire overrides her fear, then only is she ready and able to be taken by the Knowledge she seeks.

Transitions of the Liminal Wilderness

The New Islam of Dr. Ali Shari'ati

TRANSITIONS OF THE LIMINAL WILDERNESS
The New Islam of Dr. Ali Shari’ati
by Aaron Vlek


What is religion? This is one of the most frequently asked yet little understood questions in the human dialogue. It’s undeniably the most argued about, the most debated, and one of the most controversially loaded terms in any language. Many would argue that the purpose of religion is to provide mankind with the sacramental methods by which he may encounter, know, and embrace the divine. Others contend that religion’s most critical role is to prescribe laws and norms of human social conduct and to provide a system for defining and enforcing man’s place within the world in relation to the divine through the direction of a wise or clerical class. There are however those who have undertaken to examine this seemingly universal human experience and attempted to isolate its distinctive features.
In this paper I will examine some of the fundamental ideas of Dr. Ali Shari’ati as he addresses this question within his model for a new Islam in 20th century Iran. To illustrate this examination I will use the theoretical model of German cultural anthropologist Arnold van Gennep (1873-1957) and his observations of the liminal experience and its function in religious structure. Van Gennep has created a template for this examination which has been applied frequently and with general success in examining cultures ancient and modern, east and west, tribal and cosmopolitan, settled and nomadic. This model also works with striking elegance in the individual transformative experience outside of an overarching cultural model, and suggests a fundamental and highly organic role of such states of being in the human experience. While acknowledging the obvious limitations and criticisms of van Gennep’s admittedly Western starting point, I hope to show that his model, and Shari’ati’s understanding of the human condition and psyche both transcends and manipulates culture, race, time, and gender.
In his important work Rites of Passage (1909) van Gennep separates his model into the religious, the shaman/holy man, and the witchcraft/spiritual outsider elements within societies and defines their distinctive functions. Briefly, witchcraft generally serves an “outlaw” role and often provides outlet or focus for negative and socially destructive energies. The shaman/holy man strives to guide individuals outside the confines of societal structures and into discrete encounters with the divine. Religion, in van Gennep’s model, serves to define and unify the social fabric and mythic identity of a people. This model then establishes an accessible place within the liminal outer boundaries of the social experience which allows the individual and the society to participate sacramentally in the mythical elements of their defining world vision.
The presence of the liminal function provides controlled opportunities for a repetitious cascade of culturally energizing and reinforcing experiences which provide enduring shape, cohesion, uniformity of existence, and security to the society through these ritualized breakdowns of the social norms. Through this structure, cycles both inside and outside the temporal collective experience of the group are maintained and manipulated in predictable ways even within situations of the controlled and focused chaos of the liminal state, thereby enlightening consciousness of the individual participants and establishing the reality of the shared mythos.
These experiences transition the individual through different levels of social status and individual states of being and exhibit several features in common throughout differing cultural milieu. Rites of passage therefore are designed to create moments outside of collective time and space through which individuals and perhaps whole societies may enter the wilderness of the liminal and undergo transformation that would otherwise remain impossible.
The model I have created for this examination of the ideas and phenomenon of Dr. Ali Shari’ati in the religious politics of 20th century Iran is based upon the van Gennep model of religion as a social structure. Shari’ati’s model is a response in part to the static formula to which all institutionalized religions must eventually succumb as their initial explosive momentum, revelatory or otherwise, begins to degrade and dissipate. In response to this dissipation, the appearance of Shari’ati and his ideas served as an initial ritualistic explosion of generative energy which had the effect of ushering great numbers of people across widely disparate social, economic, and ideological strata into a common, and I plan to demonstrate, liminal state that exhibited all the defining characteristics of the typical rite of passage in the van Gennep model.
As in the van Gennep structure, Ali Shari’ati makes brutally clear the role of religion in the life of humanity, man’s responsibilities to religion and to his fellows, and his rights and duties within both religion and the world that God has mandated upon him. He then provides access to a regenerated and purely Iranian liminal state to transition the people from the phase of loss and abnegation to the mythic and potently charged liminal state which becomes the nexus for extreme change in the personal or collective state.
First, it is important to establish a general description of the concept of liminality. The liminal state is that which exists both abstractly and with visceral reality outside of the normal experience as defined by time, custom, place, identity, and relationship; to self, to other, and to one’s society. The liminal is the twilight time of death before one is reborn into a new state of being or social status. What is known and comfortable, the nature of the real and the definition of the self, either as an individual, or collectively as a group or a society, has come to an end, has broken down, and the stability of the new state, its responsibilities and privileges, its possibilities and uncharted limitations are yet to be established.
This uncertainty destabilizes the mind and creates a sense of the hyper-aware in which all things appear to become possible. It is a marginal time of strange and mysteriously directed chaos and intellectual weightlessness. It is a time characterized by a unique reconciliation of seeming opposites: crippling fear and ecstatic excitement, the complete darkness of the unknown/unknowable and supra-rational hope and confidence, and a timelessness in which mythologized experience becomes both sacramental and profoundly accessible to be communally shared. Shari’ati’s ideas, when examined collectively and viewed within the context of the economic and social crises they sought to address, form a seamless entrance into the possibility of just such a liminal experience.
However as with all processes, the rite of passage model and its reliance upon the liminal state must reach completion for the full transformative growth state to be attained and stabilized. Without such completion, the individual, group, or society, may remain dangerously caught in a perpetual state of liminality from which an equally profound agent of change must appear to break the tornado-like pattern of circular, self perpetuating energy.
Looking at the Shari’ati phenomenal model it is critical to identify the necessity which required a transitional passage, the complex social issues and the resulting window of opportunity which made possible an escape from these crises. In rites of passage models involving the individual coming to the age of maturity, the rituals and rhetoric, the symbology of passage to a new state of being in adulthood will have no meaning or effect if one is not caught in the inner maelstrom of psychological and physiological changes associated with onset of maturity and anticipation of participation in a new adult status in society.
Shari’ati understood with a crystalline clarity the critical need to address the specific states of most acute crisis in the people he sought to transform. In Part-1 of Where Shall We Begin Shari’ati identifies two actors on the stage. The enlightened soul who occupies a liminal plateau within society is an indefinable creature who is neither part of the ruling or intellectual elites, nor a part of the common masses. For Shari’ati, the enlightened soul exists to view society from a distance and assess its full parameters and thereby recognize the weaknesses, failings, the corruptions and disease which plague it, and the nature and location of its culturally shared guilt and shame. Such an individual must then identify the root causes of this disease and corruption, and then devise clear and communicable solutions for the eradication of these social ills as well as methods for their execution. But first he must ensure that these methods may be enthusiastically embraced by all elements within society and that his remedies are appropriately suited to the time and place, and to the history and cultural identity of the people whom he strives to reach. The first step in this process, for Shari’ati as for the enlightened soul, is to build a bridge that will reach from himself to all in society and unite that society to himself.
As with the prophetic calling, the enlightened soul is burdened with a profound mission: it is the task and duty of this person to awaken the masses to an awareness of the depth of their suffering, to unify them through a common and universal language and experience, and to usher them through a series of shared events which will lead them out of the wilderness of the diseased state of social being and into a new and creatively dynamic model capable of self-generating change and growth. The enlightened soul must also ensure that the people be armed with the means of defending themselves and the vulnerability of their new state against threats both from external sources, and from within their own society.
The second player on this mythic stage is the varied and diverse peoples of 20th century Iran whom the enlightened soul, Shari’ati himself, had to unify as beads upon a single thread. For Ali Shari’ati, that obvious thread was Islam. But Islam at the time Shari’ati was writing was not a unifying factor and had, in the case of a corrupt clerical class, served to further diversify social groups and actually made possible many of the worst crises which challenged Iranian society at the time. Islam was also not a unifying force amongst certain factions of the intellectual elite who had embraced the ideas of Marx, Mao, and others and who disavowed any role for religion in the societies of modern humanity.

The Pre-Liminal Stage: The Banishing of the Known

In the van Gennep model, the full potency of the liminal state would not be achievable if the individual or group is not first removed from all normative and rational points of orientation and reference. In this pre-liminal stage all systems of security, power, and identity are stripped away. This includes ideas and assumptions of what constitutes the real, of what composes memory, history, physicality, and may even include, in the case of individual liminal experience, instances of extreme physical distancing from normal elements of security, safety, and personal dignity. Only by undergoing this stripping away of all elements by which the human creature defines his experience may the liminal state be entered and the zone of the endlessly possible be attained.
In this stage, Shari’ati removes each component element of Iranian society from the matrix of its established identity and forms. He accomplishes this in his writings Man and Islam and Where Shall We Begin. In Man and Islam the nature of humanity is defined as dual, for he is composed of both mud and of the spirit of God. This duality of man is highly suited to his role as the vice-regent of God on Earth. The spirit of God which He has infused into man with His breath awards man his dignity and power and establishes the appropriateness of his will, a will subject only to the will of God, a will not to be broken or usurped arbitrarily at the whim and greed of other men.
This dual nature is a model evidenced and reinforced by God Himself in the Qur’an, a God both of severity and of mercy, a deity who establishes temporal authority and justice and offers otherworldly forgiveness. The God of the Qur’an is the natural embodiment of God as He is revealed in both the Old and New Testaments and He establishes His dual nature in the world and in man. This dual nature is again demonstrated in the person and the activities of the Prophet of Islam and his companions, men of both justice and piety, but men of war and political struggle when and where it was deemed necessary to establish and maintain that justice and piety.
Ali Shari’ati pronounces a deep and profound sentence upon the Islam of the traditional clerics and of the masses of Muslims themselves. They have one and all failed in fulfilling this dual nature, a nature whose balance alone will yield the fulfillment which is man’s birthright as God’s agent upon the earth. This failure has, Shari’ati contends, been the downfall and failure of all the religions and philosophies. In the past, cultures, religions, ideologies clung exclusively to either a materialist orientation at the expense of the spirit, or they looked only to the afterlife and the things of the monastic experience at the expense of the world and man’s place of dignity and success within it.
For Shari’ati, this focus solely upon the afterlife and matters of the spirit, as taught and enforced by the Muslim clerical classes was no less of a betrayal of the true Islam and of humanity than is the abandonment of Islam in favor of a purely materialistic and sensual existence. This resigned forfeiture of the material rewards of a healthy life in the this world, a life of competition with other cultures and societies on equal material footing, had made possible the economic subjugation by imperialist nations and corrupt internal governments of countless peoples and cultures in the Islamic world and most notably for Shari’ati, those of Iran.
Shari’ati cites the failure of European Renaissance and Enlightenment era humanism to address the failings of medieval Christianity. Given man’s dual nature, a pendulum that drags humanity from one unhealthy polar extreme to the other, from Roman Catholicism of the Middle Ages to rampant and soulless materialism and opportunism where the individual cannibalizes his brothers to advance his own worldly interests is just as monstrous a failure as that of humanity downtrodden and in a perpetual state of self loathing and awaiting a final judgment. In this condemnation, Shari’ati creates a holism of collective guilt and failure from which none can easily escape. His argument also challenges the collective world outside of Islam and Iran and points to the complete ineffectiveness of any other world model to provide a suitable and two dimensional means for man’s satisfactory integration into the world of one’s fellows, one’s self, one’s God and within which the world may become the arena of humanity’s natural and rightful supremacy.
The stark materialist, even amidst an personal success, must recognize the failure of the purely material model to address the totality of humanity’s needs. In Shari’ati’s assessment, all classes of Iranian society arrived at the middle of the 20th century suffering from multiple layers of betrayal. The clerical class had historically disarmed all but the aristocratic and socialist classes of the means to fight both imperialism and the wholesale sell-out of the nation’s resources and means of production to foreign interests and franchises that failed to contribute to the indigenous Iranian economy. They had also robbed the Muslim people of the rightful rewards of what Shari’ati defined as the true Islam in favor of a corrupt form.
The ruling elites had betrayed the people by robbing them of the means of productivity, by privately selling the country’s natural resources needed to produce a healthy economy and by sending their own profiteered monies abroad instead of investing back into infrastructures of the Iranian economy. Both classes illustrated clearly Shari’ati’s allegations that both the singularly material or the purely spiritual models could be nothing but cultural suicide for a people. These wealthy and ruling classes were betrayed ultimately by their own greed and by a myopic hubris which barred them from seeing their own hand in the actions which caused their catastrophic downfall.
The intellectual elites were betrayed by everyone: by lower and peasant classes who had no understanding of their aims and in many cases no interest in their efforts and political struggles, by economic elites who saw socialist and Marxist agendas as a clear threat to their power bases, by their foreign Communist and socialist allies who used them as long as it secured their own global goals but disposed of them as soon as they became inconvenient and outlived their usefulness, and they were betrayed by the ‘Ulama who fought their secular atheism. These intellectual classes, many among them socialists and Marxists themselves, suffered perhaps their greatest betrayal from within as factionalism and the inability to compromise toward collective socialist goals destroyed their numerous unaligned parties, perpetuated infighting and even assassination from within their own ranks. Again, for Shari’ati this purely secular opportunism betrayed the fatal flaw in a model that did not derive from a worldly perspective founded within a spiritual mandate upon the dignity of man as a dual being of both spirit and matter.
At the end of this Pre-liminal phase, Shari’ati had succeeded in articulating the crises of social chaos, economic ruin, imperialist encroachment on several fronts, and the recognition of a corrupt clerical class that had failed both the people and Islam and thereby God. He also showed the failures of a broken intellectual class cast adrift in a complex cultural tableau that could not be unified to endorse in any cohesive way their socialist goals and which in many cases had no context or meaning for the majority of the common people. When carefully and closely considered, this articulation left no possible room for comfort or security for anyone. All models had failed; a unifying social agenda had not materialized because no voice was capable of being heard by all classes.
Any hope which might have been placed in external social models, i.e. western secularism and materialism, or Humanism, which Shari’ati viewed as a failed response to medieval scholasticism and therefore a product of an imbalanced Christianity, was brushed aside and viewed as impotent in their one dimensionality. In Mission of a Free Thinker Shari’ati outlines the call for the Iranian people to extricate themselves from the thrall of foreign European intellectual models in favor of uniquely Iranian historical world views. Such foreign ideas he contends are doomed to wither and die and to serve no productive purpose when they are grafted onto a people for whom they have no historical or cultural precedent. He then called for a search for solutions to the problems Iran faced from within its own rich and complex three thousand year philosophical history; solutions which might address the unique and disparate identities of his people and the possibility of a united psyche of the societies of Iran. The success of these solutions, Shari’ati insisted, mandated the Iranian people being the innovators and masters of their own future and their own resources and not merely remain consumers of foreign ideas and goods.
This isolation, this plateau of neither nor, neither past nor future, neither secular or monastic, created just the sort of vacuum where something new and wholly outside of these failed models could explode within the beleaguered Iranian political narrative and possibly capture the imagination and hope of the Iranian people. Shari’ati as the enlightened soul identified and named each distinct and possible social ill and he identified its source. He pointed to the weaknesses, failings, betrayals, states of hopelessness, and the impotent trajectory towards the future that his nation had embarked upon through an economically suicidal involvement and dependence upon external political and economic forces, and by failing to adhere to an Islam that addressed man’s dual nature.
For Shari’ati the historic manifestation of institutionalized Islam of the previous thirteen centuries and of his own time was antithetical to his reading of Qur’anic instructions and promises to humankind. Once again in Where Shall We Begin and in Man and Islam Shari’ati points to passages in the Qur’an which speak of man’s superiority and rights of self determination, qualities he showed to be lacking in the contemporary Islam of the mid 20th century with its emphasis on fatalism and resignation to oppressive external conditions as a manifestation of God’s will, and by focus upon a delayed future reward in the afterlife. Shari’ati suggests, arguably and with solid reason, that this robbery of man’s power in the world is in part a byproduct of late Roman political expediency in subduing large numbers of disenfranchised peoples and certainly not founded in the Qur’an. Historically power elites within all times and places of human culture have made use of this very tool to restrain the striving of the masses. However for Shari’ati, this trend had its deadliest precedent in the deviations of the earliest generations of Islam after the time of the Prophet and his companions and in the establishment of the Umayyad dynasty
In Arise and Bear Witness Shari’ati traces two fatal flaws that began to appear with the first deviations after the death of the Prophet and which first appeared in the Umayyad period during the late 7th century CE: The establishment of religious authorities who misappropriate interpretation of the Qur’an as a means of establishing the suppression of ideas, and the fatalism which ensures the acceptance of these deviations and oppression as the will of God. This calls sharply and alarmingly into question the whole premise of the manifestation of historical Islam and the authority of the ‘Ulamma who represents and perpetuates it in Shari’ati’s own time.
This cutting away of the web of a flawed traditional Islamic religious culture by Sharia’ti’s deft hand was the last theoretical piece to fall away and the final shove of the Iranian people towards the inescapable abyss into which they had descended, been pushed, or in some cases never been allowed to emerge from. But for Shari’ati, this final push, this dismantling of the historical manifestation of a corrupt and humanly manipulated Islam, was a meticulously considered articulation of the controlled chaos of the liminal state and a powerful fulcrum of vast potential change.
Looking once more at the van Gennep model, Shari’ati’s argument was that all classes of Iranian people had lost themselves, that they had been betrayed at every turn and most tragically by those in whom they should have had the greatest cause for hope. Even the religion to which many of them clung for salvation, Shari’ati showed to be a betrayal which diverted the people’s concerns from looking after their own protection and wellbeing. Much like the profound inner transformations and secrets of the youth on the verge of adulthood, and the ancient rituals which speak to those inner and universal changes both frightening and exhilarating, Sharia’ti’s words found no denial in the souls of many in all classes of Iranian readers. It then became his task to build for the Iranian people a bridge they might all recognize and cleave to.

The Liminal Dimension: Cult of Martyrdom

Having removed or destroyed the girders of deviant religious faith and brought to light the full extent to which all classes of people in Iranian society had been betrayed repeatedly and used for the purposes of others than themselves, betrayed by foreign powers and domestic alike, Shari’ati knew his people were truly vulnerable and desperate. But they were ready; they were deep within the liminal zone, trapped at the center between deepest loss and greatest potentiality. It was at this most pregnant moment that Dr. Ali Shari’ati chose to strike, and to extend the bridge to his people that would provide the carefully constructed means to their salvation against the oncoming of any possible enemy from external directions or from within.
Central to the liminal experience there must be a tri-part axis which unifies the rational, the irrational, and the supra-rational. Leave any of these elements out of the equation and there can be no psychic chemical reaction of experiential combustion. Ali Shari’ati knew that what his people needed was not another dry and abstract philosophy founded on western models and precariously burdened with yet more books that no one cared to read because they offered no immediate and tangible answers. They didn’t need an imitative trope repackaged in Iranian garb and bolstered with irrational hopes for social unification where no precedent for such unification had ever emerged.
Shari’ati had placed his most impassioned readers outside of time, place, and identity, and his next move was to extend to them a bridge by which they could move to a new state of prosperity and dignity, and that bridge was Islam. But this was not to be the old, flagging, and by Sharia’ti’s charge a corrupt and false Islam, but rather an Islam rescued, as he proposed to rescue the Iranian people themselves, out of time and from the hands of enemies both internal to Iran and external abroad, enemies both historic and contemporary. Shari’ati presents the stark picture of Islam, betrayed in its earliest days after the death of the Prophet, betrayed by foreign enemies, and from within by various descendents of the Prophet’s companions and his enemies. Shari’ati paints an startling and avaricious portrait of a companion of the Prophet selling or creating his words in the form of Hadith factories to serve a corrupt Umayyad dynasty which had commandeered Islam from its rightful defenders and begun to rewrite the words of the Prophet and to reinterpret the Qur’an in ways suited to their own political and social ends. Chief among these scandalous rewrites were those which robbed the faithful of their rightful power and dignity in the world. This reinterpretation of Qur’anic passages assigned to them a fatalism which taught Muslims to accept all forms of oppression and corruption as the will of Allah, and consigned them to the role of spiritual peasants dutifully awaiting the glories of the afterlife when by the promises of their Prophet and the word of God they should be thriving and happy upon the Earth as His vice-regents.
This is a clear challenge that Islam had endured for over twelve centuries, and for Shari’ati continued to suffer in the hands of corrupt usurpers of the Prophet’s message and God’s word. This Shari’ati underscored by the further charge that this usurpation is directly responsible for the misery and economic subjugation that was plaguing the Iranian people in the 20th century. This was a clear and vocal call to rescue this hostage Islam and restore it to its true position of power and justice. But if Islam had been in a corrupt form for twelve centuries, and Shari’ati’s argument has many strong points, then how are these modern rescuers to know what is the true Islam? Perhaps Ali Shari’ati could humbly come forward and offer his services in this regard. But Shari’ati was too clever, too shrewd, and far too much in command of his understanding of the juggernaut of processes he had unleashed to instill into this model the corruption of his own personality, at least too visibly. Repeatedly Shari’ati voices his own intellectual limitations, his spiritual weakness, his inability to understand and adequately communicate these sublime and critically delicate matters to the people.
In Arise and Bear Witness Shari’ati outlines the next critical element in the psychic potion he is concocting to treat the many ills of his people. He explains that the Prophet is himself the remedy against the foreign enemy and he posits the model of Islam, a restored and purified Islam, as the bulwark against imperialism and the encroaching vampirism of western consumerism. Yet what of the internal threat, the threat of corruption and betrayal from within the ranks of Islam and specifically from within the Iranian people? Shari’ati presents here a model in the Imams of these earliest days. Ali, Hasan, and Hussein, martyrs who had died willingly in the face of this very corruption and betrayal from within the ranks of their companions and friends, within the “faithful.” Again in Arise and Bear Witness Shari’ati illustrates within the lives of these martyrs the same betrayals that his contemporaries faced and suffered. For Shari’ati, each of these early Imams provides a model of perfect conduct in the face of such conditions as war, physical abuse, loss of dignity, oppression, and a betrayal of the Prophet’s legacy.
Shari’ati’s methods in his creation of the liminal experience are both brilliant and poetic. He understood that without the excitation and exultations of the passions, all of his ideas, his plans for positive change and a reenergizing of his society would remain only theoretical and abstract. He then needed to apply the lighted match that would ignite and conjoin the fuel of previously incompatible groups caught in the kindling of common enemies and crises and carry them forward as a united body prepared to confront horrific obstacles and persevere to the only possible conclusion: success.
The lighted match that Shari’ati chose to ignite the excitations and exultations within the passions of the Iranian people was the seminal role of martyrdom in Shi’ite Islam, a uniquely Iranian feature and one exquisitely suited to the personal and collective entrance to the liminal state. Shari’ati held in complete contempt those Muslims who retreated to the privacy of personal prayer and inner devotions. For him, these people were weak, they were among the worst betrayers, and they willingly succumbed to and perpetrated the corruptions of the past while allowing Islam’s heroic martyrs to die while they played it safe. Such people willingly disavow and abandon the path of courageous and virtuous action in the world of faith and justice; a model lived to the fullest by the Prophet. Martyrdom for Shari’ati is not a tragedy, not a loss; it is a sacramental cleansing of both the individual and Shi’ite society that one must feel both privileged and honored to embrace.
What Shari’ati offers his fellows at this most auspicious time, should they choose to join him in the crossing of this bridge, is nothing less than fellowship with Ali, with Hasan and with Hussein in their sacred timelessness. For as Shari’ati contends, these great martyrs of Shi’ite Islam are not truly dead, they are forever present and with the faithful. They stand as eternal guides and models of right action, models which put to shame those who follow any other course in the world than the model of action and justice as a means of throwing off all oppression, both in the form of the external enemy, and the enemy within their own society. For Shari’ati the two polarities of a secular and materialistic ruling class, and a clergy devoid of the powerful models of the Prophet and his companions in the world were the supreme betrayal of the passionate commitment to the faithful as displayed in the lives of Ali, Hasan, and Hussein.
It is within the lines of the poetic and mystical prose of martyrdom that Shari’ati attains his magnificent height as he culminates in an orgiastic igniting of the final conflagration as his people are invited to identify, not only metaphorically, but in spirit and deed, with their greatest religious heroes, and to participate in their glorious destiny. Shari’ati offered the Iranian people an equation where they might joyously and with truth and justice join with him on his journey, or turn away in shame and earn the contempt and disgust of those whom they abandon and thereby join the ranks of the corrupt usurpers of Islam, both the timelessly past and the eternally present. Shari’ati guided those who walked with him on this journey through an almost seamlessly choreographed series of steps, the natural culmination of which is the shared ascent into the mythic state via the collective embrace and renewal, the reaffirmation of the sacrament of martyrdom.
This acceptance and internalization of the renewed embrace of martyrdom and its bridge to kinship with the great Imams of Shi’ite Islam, allows those who have followed Shari’ati to enter a deeply liminal state. This state is characterized by unlimited possibility, by the hyper-aware state from which one finds the power to act instantly and in ways dramatically beyond the norm, and through which they may participate in the ever-present nearness of eternity.
One could easily devise a vastly elegant chemical table, place all elements within the Iranian social and political climate upon the graph, map their failings, and see a direct and highly rational corollary and solution in Shari’ati’s model. Those who had sold Iran out to foreign interests and those who had cannibalized her from within were placed under a keen and merciless microscope and their guilt of greed, materialism, and secularism was easily revealed within the lines of Shari’ati’s accessible and impassioned prose. The guilty could recant these crimes under the duress of great shame before their people. If they chose not to recant, all the better. Within the tenets of the new Islam, it was morally and religiously incumbent upon Muslims to depose all corrupt rulers who shared in the guilt of historic betrayers of the sacred role of, to use the medieval Christian term, ministerial kingship. The ‘ulama could resign their corrupt transmission of Islam and reform the faith to be in tune with the “true” Islam, or they could go down to defeat along with the corrupt administration and share in the condemnation of early destroyers of Islam and be likened to the enemies of the faith who betrayed and killed Ali, Hasan, and Hussein. Shari’ati states frequently that the enemy within the ranks of one’s would-be brothers is far more foul and dangerous than any foreign enemy.
The intellectuals were highly skeptical and wary of anything in clerical robes. Yet they had been betrayed at every corner and had no allies. Shari’ati’s model revealed a God who had taught mankind “the names” which he took to mean, education, learning, and understanding. Sharia’ti’s model for a virtually classless Islamic society based upon a rational scheme and wielding the tools of socialism could be swallowed by these intellectual elites by minimizing the specifically religious rhetoric of Islam. Women also found something new and exciting in Shari’ati. The Qur’anic passage describing woman’s creation from Adam’s “rib” and therefore inferior to him, was a great error in mistranslation according to Shari’ati. The true meaning, he claimed, was that woman had been created of man’s “nature, of the same “nature’ as he and this was taken to mean that she was created from the spirit or soul of God as was man and therefore women were the inheritors of the same dignities, essence, and nature as males.
Shari’ati consistently played down his own role while pointing to the Prophet, and even more closely to the martyred Imams as the true guides and models of perfect faith and action. He created a sound and rational agenda of first critical steps on the journey to attaining political, economic, and cultural autonomy for his people. He rescued and revitalized their faith and their religion, and he reintroduced to them their martyrs, those who had died for the faith for which they were now the guardians. These martyrs, their stories, their lives, their blood and their wounds, Shari’ati placed into their hands with no less power and passionate agony than the visage of any thorn-crowned man on a cross. And then he placed upon their hearts the sacrament of participation in that mystery of sacred martyrdom.

The Post-Liminal State: The One Unstable Element
Visiting once more the van Gennep model, as the orgiastic thrust and explosion of the liminal state dissipates and closes, the known world, the rational and predictable, the verdant and productive stage must be reentered so that the fruits of the fecundity of the liminal phase may integrate properly into the new states of being. The seeds have indeed burst wide, but now they must grow patiently and with great care under the nurturing elements, or rot and die. Shari’ati’s use of martyrdom was a powerful and highly effective component of his program. It was sublime in every regard but one. The potency and efficacy of martyrdom as a fulcrum to the liminal state was undeniable. However as an element, martyrdom is altogether too unstable to use in any system which strives to achieve enduring predictable ends, productive methodologies, and which seeks to become a viable and self-perpetuating society.
As sublime and transcendental as the conception of martyrdom may be poetically and theoretically, historically and practically it cannot endure as a permanent feature of a productive society that Shari’ati sought to awaken in 20th century Iran. Schoolyards full of happy playing children cannot for long endure if their fathers are busy attaining personal martyrdom. Economies do not thrive when the best of their working generations are out seeking opportunities for physical martyrdom. Families, marriages, youth designed to become next generations cannot thrive when the desire for true and physical martyrdom is the secret gem buried within their hearts. Societies cannot evolve, create, innovate, and master new technologies, ideas, sciences, and arts, when they have become addicted to and trapped within the liminal state and its peculiar and hyper-real conditions. Societies cannot evolve when they become habituated to bizarre states of social consciousness which require, like any fantastical drug, a very short period of ecstasy, rapid destabilization of simplistic energy modalities, and then ever and increasingly rapid ascending plateaus.
In 1977, Ali Shari’ati died under unclear circumstances. Both “natural causes” and assassination at the hands of SAVAK were reported. In either circumstance he attained his own martyrdom. The Shari’ati model for a new Islamic society, one with the aspirations to thrive and succeed with its feet firmly resting in many worlds, religious, worldly, and above all free by its own definition and on its own intellectual terms, did not materialize. What is striking is how solid and rational the majority of Shari’ati’s ideas and equations were. What is even more striking is that he did not appear to set in place a safeguard for the uncontrollable tornado that a juggernaut such as the widespread romantic embrace of martyrdom would unleash. But this very concept; a safeguard, a control, a limitation, a boundary, renders impotent and metaphorical the nature of the liminal condition and that is antithetical to the potentiality of such states.
It is both tempting and far too simplistic to merely assume that martyrdom was a powerful but ultimately flawed element within an otherwise elegant and intriguing schema. It is equally seductive and problematic to consider that the perpetually turbulent and chaotic era of the closing days of the Qajar Dynasty and the tragedies of the Pahlavi Dynasty and ensuing world events created a permanent state of the collective liminal within which the Iranian people were already addictively entrenched long before the arrival of Ali Shari’ati on the scene.
The tri-part religious equation as posited by Arnold van Gennep was clearly initiated by Ali Shari’ati in the volumes of his numerous written works, but it never saw completion in the transitional stages within Iranian society. The rectifying steps which he sought to inspire in his people have yet to unfold, and it could be argued that since Shari’ati’s death, Iran has remained in a revolving door of a succession of increasingly destructive liminal states. It would require little argument to demonstrate that as in the days of Shari’ati, as in the days of the Qajars, and of the Pahlavi, the west and other artificial influences continue to keep the dirty finger in the Petri dish and never allow the coming together of natural elements to stabilize and become something solid and self-perpetuating. And it is perhaps sad and chilling to consider that as with conglomerates of unstable natural elements that come together briefly and dynamically yet possess no common nucleus, Iran may be destined to come together and fall violently apart again and again as it remains trapped within a revolving cycle of uncompleted liminality that never establishes the stability and continuity such states have been shown to bestow on other cultures typical of the van Gennep model.

A Bit of Black Cloth

Bi’ismillah ir-Rahman ir-Rahim ……….. Sura 24/Verse 31 – Qur’an[24:31] And tell the believing women to subdue their eyes, and maintain their chastity. They shall not reveal any parts of their bodies, except that which is necessary. They shall cover their chests, and shall not relax this code in the presence of other than their husbands, their fathers, the fathers of their husbands, their sons, the sons of their husbands, their brothers, the sons of their brothers, the sons of their sisters, other women, the male servants or employees whose sexual drive has been nullified, or the children who have not reached puberty. They shall not strike their feet when they walk in order to shake and reveal certain details of their bodies. All of you shall repent to GOD, O you believers, that you may succeed. This is a very revealing passage from this notable text. What are perhaps of even greater interest are several additional English translations of this passage, including those by Muhammad Asad, Yusufali, Cleary, Pickthal, Shakira, and Khalifa which read almost exactly as the above sura (chapter) with very little if any profound variation. One version admonishes women not to stamp their feet in order to make known their weight of jewelry and trinkets, while the above speaks of not revealing “certain details” of their bodies. What these several translations have in common however is the same wording and caution for women to cover “their bosoms” or “their chests.” This is the often quoted passage of the Qur’an used to mandate the full veiling of women in some Islamic countries and sects. Yet nowhere in any of these or similar translations of other pertinent Qur’anic passages, at least in the English translations, does the requirement extend to covering the face of the woman. Head coverings are frequently referred to in passages describing modesty in dress for all Muslims and which includes head covering for men as well. Hijab, or covering, has burst into the passionate and often confused discussion of current events as a highly charged and volatile word in the press, in political circles where it is being used as a battle standard on both sides of the veil, and in the lives of moderate Muslims in the West, both native born to the faith as well as those converted to Islam as adults. Hijab has become a source of rage and indignation for many non-Muslims who see the practice as a backward remnant of a dying cultural tableau, but one which is defiantly elbowing its way into the workplace, onto modern western streets, and with increasing demands to be respected along with the identifying dress codes of other world religions. Many Muslim women in the west cover their head, hair, neck and upper body with a scarf, often of stylish and attractive fabrics, while others adhere to the more conservative and increasingly provocative solid black. Infrequently does one see the full kit, the niqab which conceals the entire face, on the streets or in the workplace of a western city, although ghetto communities in large metropolitan areas are home to many immigrant women, some of whom do maintain this tradition. What interests me for the purposes of this discussion however, is the western female convert to Islam with no experience of veiling or required dress growing up in her native culture who embraces hijab and who gladly wears it openly in public. It is however a phenomenon with what appears to be a remarkably short and identifiable history. It was in 1975, in San Francisco, that I embraced Islam, and although I did not take a Muslim name my adherence to the Sunni Five Pillars of Islam (shahada, profession of faith, salat, five daily prayers, zaqat, charity along with many of the various do’s and don’ts, the Ramadan fast, and the Hajj, pilgrimage to Mecca) was sincere and complete, with the exception of, to date, the Hajj. I ran with two very different crowds in those days. I was the manager of a printing shop with an ocean view and a customer base that included a large number of Palestinians, many of whom ran grocery stores. The largest population of Palestinians outside of the Middle East in the world, at that time, was located in San Francisco and every corner deli sold falafel and interesting conversation. These people were politically active and wise and considerate friends, and they delighted in discovering a Muslim convert and undertook to broaden my education in Islam, and in the truth about what was going on “back home.” They were equally delighted that I was learning to speak Arabic “like a human being.” A large number of these people and the extended circle to which I was frequently included in social and cultural events, were women. Without exception these women were strong and intelligent and every one of them had seen and heard a hell of a lot more out in the world than I ever would. They were raw and vital, open, up front and in your face, and they were highly action oriented. They were also fiercely committed to their faith and to the salvation of their homeland, and none of them wore hijab of any kind. But this was the mid 1970s, Afghanistan and the Americans was decades away, Afghanistan and the Russians had not yet happened, and the political writings of ideologues like Dr. Ali Shari’ati and Jalal Al-i Ahmad and others that would change the face of Islam and arguably the world forever, were just going to press. The other side of my Islamic family, and completely separate from the Palestinians was the Sufi order to which I belonged and which had a Persian master and a large number of Iranian immigrants. This was a very, very different crew. Here was the Chanel suit crowd, the Mercedes dripping with a wealth of Persian carpets on the floorboards, the Rolex watches and the elegance, the graciousness, the poetry and the ney in place of the angry handbill, the bullhorn, and the never discrete collection envelope. And although we women did cover our heads during salat (prayer) in the service in the Khaniqah (meeting place) none of these Iranian women ever wore any sort of hijab on the streets. But this was the ‘70s and ‘80s in San Francisco after all. We were staggering out of the hippie era and bulldozing headlong into the glitter and the glam of the rock mega-media generation and just getting warmed up for the arrival of New Wave splendor and there were no rules of fashion except look cool, develop your own unique style, and have as much fun as possible doing it. This was also the era of a confused and experimental explosion of cults and religions and spiritual groups and every possible and shameless cultural rip-off and the accompanying countless opportunities to buy and wear lots of great stuff. The commonplace of turbans and harem pants, of saris and dhotis, of a wealth of African plunder and Chinese imperial garb trailing in splendid layers off blue-eyed white bodies on the streets and in the cafes of San Francisco only increased the stark contrast of the Palestinians in their blue jeans and inexpensive brown business suits, and the Persians in their Chanel and Armani. And everyone drooled over the pages of National Geographic and the award winning photographs of veiled women jingled down under a wealth of coined jewelry and we each thought something very different, my two Islamic families and I. Of course all us whiteys thought the veils were beautiful and exotic, we thought they were cool in our neo-Romantic ignorance and plagiarism of world culture. And all my Palestinian and Persian women friends hated the veil as an outdated symbol of former oppression, quaint, old fashioned and something their grandmothers did. And that’s where it stayed for a while, in the West, like a secret pregnancy, or a hidden virus, depending on how you chose to see it. A quaint old fashioned garment, hated by some, charming to others, tucked away with the whalebone corsets and starched white collars in the global archive of fading eras. Over the next few years more friends came and went. Kareema from Libya, Meryem from Lebanon, never a hijab in sight. But the world did not become as charming and as hopeful as the menagerie in San Francisco had naively envisioned. There were widespread and growing changes reshaping the world long before the events of September 11, 2001, changes which had their dark and tangled roots in Iran and the Middle East and in the economic policies of three Western nations, Great Britain, the US, and Russia/USSR, and in events of the earliest decades of the 20th century and beyond which shaped future global conflicts and which continue clearly yet unresolved and escalating today. Then there came the arrival of several waves of immigrants from places in the world referred to loosely as “the Middle East” but which included many countries not truly located in that geographic region at all: Afghans fleeing the Russians came first, and some of them wore hijab, and some did not, then came Iranians fleeing theAyatollah, some veiled and some not, and of course there were more and more Palestinians fleeing everybody, and later still the arrival of large numbers of people from many African nations fleeing famine, war, corrupt and oppressive governments, drought, and AIDS. And somehow this little piece of cloth, hijab, a woman’s head covering which can be as simple as a scarf, dormant in many arenas for so long, was brought out of the closet to become the branding logo for a whole new generation and a diverse range of conflicts, both cultural and economic, religious and secular, that are continuing to shape our world in sad and alarming ways. But why? Why on October 19, 2006 was a twenty-three year old Afghan immigrant shot and killed on the streets of Fremont, California while walking her young child to school? She carried no purse or money, but she was wearing hijab. This was termed a “hate killing” and unfortunately such crimes are not new. Fremont is just over the bridge from San Francisco. Back in the ‘70s and ‘80s the victims of hate crimes were frequently high visibility gays. Even the lightest examination will detect an ironic yet striking similarity between hijab and the black leathers and blue jeans cuffed-just-so-and-no-more of the visible San Francisco gay scene in the ‘70s and ‘80s. Back in the day, the emergence of a visible and vocal gay community posed as much of a perceived threat to the moral and cultural values of many in society and was accompanied by as much fear as any falling towers in Manhattan. Why, in October of this same year, did the British Leader of the House of Commons Jack Straw condemn the wearing of the full face veil in public in England as an affront to that country’s disdain for public anonymity? The enraged outcry from the Muslim community has overwhelmingly been that the remarks constitute an attack on Islamic religious custom, and that such prejudices against visible symbols of religion do not extend to other religious groups such as Jews, Sikhs, and others with equally visible religious dress affiliations, and therefore single out Muslims for racial prejudice. Yet at least in the United States, it is illegal in most places for anyone to appear in public or to operate a motor vehicle wearing a ski mask, Halloween mask other than on October 31st, or in any other way to obscure one’s personal identity for fear they are doing so to perpetrate a crime. When large numbers of individuals from one culture migrate into another culture with radically different social mores and customs, and do not embrace the new adopted cultural model but rather remain isolated and begin to form social groups and political networks of their own, and when those networks mature to the point where they seek to impact public policy for the state as a whole, this impact may significantly alter the social face of the adopted culture. And the adopted culture will always resist, and often by whatever means necessary. When this phenomenon is carried out in political arenas and world class newspapers, you get international incidents. When it moves to the grassroots, to less metropolitan areas, and among the lower socioeconomic groups for whom immigrants are traditionally economic competition, you see the rise of increasingly violent “hate crimes.” There is no moral or political value in this statement. It is an observed phenomena that has manifested in cultures as varied as the fifth century Roman Empire, imperial China, the Greek city states of antiquity, and the so-called West in the modern world. There is currently in Britain an organized call for public funding for a Muslim-only school. Does Britain fund religious schools run by the Church of England? By the Roman Catholic Church? By any other Protestant sects, or by Buddhists, Taoists, or any other group? Which Muslims would this publicly funded exclusive school serve? Sunnis, Shi’ites, Arabs, Pakistanis? Would the children of white converts be welcome? To what standards would this school be held? What outside scrutiny would it be willing to endure? In 1998, several American college girls in Sacramento, California were employed by the Sacramento Metropolitan Airport in a large national car rental chain. There were several Afghan male immigrants also employed by the company. When summer set in with the typical Sacramento heat in excess of 100 degrees often unrelenting for days, the company provided summer uniforms for its employees. The women’s uniform featured the company logo and colors on a sleeveless shirt: Modest in all regards by Sacramento and US standards. The Afghan males however fought angrily with the company to force the girls to wear long sleeved shirts. After some weeks of this, the company, American citizens, relented and apologetically asked the girls to wear the winter, long sleeved shirts. The girls took take this case to an attorney where it was quickly settled out of court and the social customs of that local area and the rights of its citizens were upheld. It would be untenable to envision Americans living in an Islamic nation such as Saudi Arabia for example, suing local governments and residents of that nation to conform to western modes of dress. All these issues and many more, all frightening to consider and impossible to solve without the elixir of time, a very long span of it, have now been distilled down to this little piece of black cloth. Like the burning flag and burning bra of the ‘60s, the hijab is on fire in the opening decade of the 21st century. But perhaps one of the strangest forums in which this controversy is raging is among Western converts to Islam, and between the women themselves. Progressive Muslims (a very liberal and academically focused group of Muslims, many of whom are converts) has a high profile presence on the internet where the war on hijab continues to inflame inter-Muslim dialogue. Their generally anti-hijab stance is the voice of fully westernized women, women of Middle Eastern and Southeast Asian descent born in this country and abroad, and western converts. Much of their agenda seems based in a desire to assure non-Muslims in the United States that they are educated and modern and above all safe and not like those people “over there.” The dialogue among Western convert women however at times takes an almost circus-like air. Several times I have encountered hijab-wearing white women on the streets of New York City, their angry faces starring defiantly out at me as I pass by, glaring at everyone, and oh so very, very aware that they have willingly adopted a mode of dress that singles them out as different and which affords them a strange and usually painless sort of martyrdom. The purpose of hijab, as stated in the Qur’an, is modesty, and its ultimate goal is to remind one of their submission to Allah. Yet the reasons many convert women have cited to me for wearing hijab seldom include remembrance of God. Many women have spoken of the great pride they feel when they wear hijab in public. Yet hijab, according the Qur’an is modesty, Qur’anic Islam is a religion of humility, and the purpose of life is to turn towards God and away from the hubris of material existence. With the growing number of mosques in the United States and the greater immigrant population, western converts to Islam increasingly find themselves unwelcome in mosques that frequently serve one ethnic or national group or another, and these converts will often adopt the national dress of the people whose mosque they attend in order to fit in. This too is a change from decades in the past. In the ‘70s and ‘80s the cultural and political climate was very different and converts were almost always welcomed in mosques, including women. Today often convert women are not welcome at all if they happen to show up alone on the doorsteps of the mosque, where they might be more welcome if they come as part of a family group. This is also the product of very different social classes emigrating to the US. In California thirty years ago most native Muslims one would encounter in a mosque were highly educated and often from the upper classes of their countries of origin and so had a more inclusive worldview through exposure to many places and people. Often today the populations of mosques and their mullahs and sheikhs are middle class or from smaller towns, and increasingly they are armed with a highly politicized and exclusionary agenda. Increasingly much of the Islamic scene is being taken virtual hostage by what are referred to as the Wahabis, followers of the 18th century Arab theologian Mohammed ibn Abd al-Wahhab, an extremely fundamentalist and puritanical strain of Islam that demands absolute adherence and uniformity of practice, belief, and appearance. Wahabi belief argues that one’s submission to God may be evidenced by adherence to strict codes of dress, codes of dress that the Wahabi themselves have defined and which they seek to enforce in an expanding reach within the Muslim community and which includes full veiling and a black almost monastic garb for women. The Wahabis have used violence and outright massacre to secure control of whole villages in the Arab world and they have used extreme degrees of intimidation to take over Islamic communities all over the world. They have secured control of many mosques in the US. Many find it hard or even impossible to resist the pressured suggestion that their faith is somehow tainted or invalid because they have been corrupted by western influences, such as by abandoning the full veiling of women, by watching television, reading Western literature and newspapers, and in some cases by having westerners for friends. Some convert women have told me that one cannot be a Muslim at all without adhering to not only hijab but an entire mode of Middle Eastern dress. Great, bring it on. But I tell these women, at least be honest and admit to yourselves, if to no one else the real reason you don that foreign garb. It’s cool, it’s beautiful, and you like it, and the human creature always delights to drink deeply at the well of novelty. And there will always be those who secretly thrill to the kiss of hubris by feeling that they have shouldered a heavy and visible burden for the sake of religion. But does it bring one closer to God or constitute all the work one needs upon the self to glean the real benefits out of a sincere adherence to Islam? No. I have refrained from saying to these women, “Oh, Muslim Amish?” Which century, which country, which social class, tribe, or religious sect within Islam is considered the correct mode of dress to adopt? I am not proposing that as was the policy during the reign of Reza Shah, founder of Iran’s Pahlavi dynasty in 1920s, the hijab be forcibly ripped from women’s heads on the street, that they be fined or that any other restrictions be placed upon them. Nor do I seek to discourage women, any women, from wearing hijab or any other garment. I defend a woman’s right to wear hijab if it is her sincere desire to do so, as I defend all sincere expressions of faith that cause no unnecessary or unprovoked harm. But neither do I wish to be told by a furious white woman who has not so long ago converted to Islam and has no conception of the cultural and political trajectory of hijab, that the contents of my heart are invalid as long as I am not wearing a piece of fabric on my head. I make a point of asking these women, these sister converts like myself, when they came to Islam, under what circumstances, and what spiritual benefits they find in hijab. Without exception, the women who have most aggressively thrust this issue unsolicited into my face, have come to Islam in recent years, years since the changes in Islam as a result of the writings of Shari’ati, the Wahabis and others, since hijab became the required and visible proof of submission to a religious form if not to God.But what I am always most intrigued to discover is the lack of historic understanding of that piece of cloth, the role that hijab is playing in some very troubling global movements within Islam, and the ease with which some western women have embraced and championed various elements within Islam that are clearly under historic and heated internal debate and which are being used to polarize various camps in a global conflict. And I wonder, as I have over the years in my own inner and outward explorations of the spirit of Islam and its most inspired writings, if people who convert to a new religion cling to the visible signs of a cultural faith in ways those naturally born into that faith often do not. Do such people become addicted to the strange and novel and its antinomian place within American culture, and become so enamored with these surface symbols that they never penetrate to the real treasures they might discover within their new faith by foraging off the well trodden and visible path? Do I wear hijab on the streets of New York City or in my home? No, it holds no meaning for me beyond a piece of cultural trapping. It is the meaning that it holds in the minds of others that I disdain. Can I and have I worn hijab in a mosque or other Islamic religious settings where it is appropriate and required and the custom? Yes, and with the same ease and willingness with which I can remove my shoes upon entering a Buddhist setting. It means nothing to me so I can put it on and forget about it in its place. But for me, that place is private and so for me, it has no place on the streets of a modern western city. Could I wear hijab without the slightest second thought or irritation on the streets of Jeddah in Saudi Arabia? Absolutely, and with the same ease with which I throw a scarf over my head when entering a cathedral in Florence or Venice. Could I wear hijab in any place where it was the custom, and appropriate, and respectful of the home culture of my fellow Muslims and fellow human beings to do so? Gladly and with great pleasure. Could I wear hijab in a place in which it draws ridicule, and casts Islam in a poor light with those who are misinformed, could I wear hijab in a place where it has come to mean a thousand and one things that have nothing whatsoever to do with Allah and everything to do with the all too mundane agendas of Man? Never.

HISTORY

The tired mantra “History repeats itself” is of course absurd. History is not a cognizant being that can “repeat itself” or even possess an “itself.” What this hackneyed trope reflects however is a limited observation of what could arguably be called a fact. Historical events are invariably necessitated by an aggregation of factors culminating in an unavoidable outcome. Clouds form with a peculiar density of elements and the appropriate temperature and rain, or snow, falls. Minerals within the earth undergo a necessary pressure of stress and weight and angle, and they melt, cool, and form other distinct yet predictable elements. Herbivore animals, in the presence of drought and famine either die or begin to mutate into predators and omnivores.
The empirical observations of the world are remarkably sublime, elegant, and predictable where even mutations and discrete teratomas within a body, a larger system or an entire society may only develop and evolve from available local elements. What humankind, with the exception of a few schools of scientific philosophy refuse to consider, is that we too behave in exquisitely narrow ranges of possibility given the aggregation of conditions, ideation, resources, and biological determinants of our species. Of course until the European “Enlightenment” the role of history was aesthetic. Since then history has still been an art and not a science but the discipline has tried to cut and paste certain pieces of rhetoric onto it to give it a cheap veneer of an empiric science. But it is a useful tool, if approached from enough angles to get as clear a bead on the matter as possible. Just as the nefarious “Marco Polo” was completely discredited when he failed to appear in the Chinese Imperial court journals, journals known for meticulous recording of minutia, particularly as relating to foreign visitors. There are mention of various missionaries by full name and even the names of their servants. No mention of any “Marco.”
History is a funny thing. At the same time the Pope was issuing a description of Attila as having horns and a tail, Priscus, the Byzantine court “historian,” scribe, and the only person to write a description of the man based on first hand meetings within him, and whose accounts are still extant today, describes a passionate chess player of modest skills, awkwardly attempting to fit into a court ill-suited to his rustic and politically inexperienced ways, but who won everyone over with his voracious appetite to learn of anything new and different to his experience. Which account will the individual reader find compelling and convincing? Attila with horns or the “axis of Evil,” history is not repeating itself but social, economic impetus to growth; similar factors create similar results regardless of time and place. Progress is a myth, part of the sparkle and glow of the campfire of our ancestors that we tend against the encroaching darkness, but the darkness never left town. We build bigger and better tools, but we can still slide with just as much abandon and predictability back into the chaos of intellectual barbarism and fetishistic localization. The “angry villagers with torches” syndrome. Now the angry unlettered villagers with torches are inhabiting major US cities. Did Marcus Tullius Cicero penning reams of elegant sarcastic prose and social commentary on what Roman society matrons were wearing at parties that season from exile on his country estate suspect that in a few of hundred years the powerful social class he occupied would be all but wiped out and exiled en masse to a few raged estates while new and voracious classes of “outsiders” elbowed their way onto the stage and took their turn at the mike?
History does not repeat itself, but historians generally cite the demise of the Roman Empire as predicated upon these key factors, themselves all inevitable outcomes of their own trajectories of momentum.
1) Too large an expanse of geography to be controlled by too few who operated as autonomous overlords with no responsibility to the localities ruled and their people’s. Rape and pillage and send the fruits back home.
2) The Roman military, once an aristocratic class, needed to enlarge beyond that class and increasingly employed mercenaries loyal only to a single general and not the state who were motivated by personal gain only. Prior to this period returning veterans were given land to start new farms and families. This practice was abandoned and soldiers were increasingly consigned to perpetual military careers, thus investing nothing in the state.
3) Massive losses in war debt caused a collapse in the military’s ability to pay soldiers in the field and provide food and supplies creating a desperate scavenger mentality among an increasingly chaotic and uncontrollable army.
4) Open infighting and competition among Roman military factions and generals.
5) Undertaking of increasing campaigns of conquest without the manpower or resources to complete them and for reasons solely to bolster a dying economy on the Italian peninsula. Seasoned war-hardened men with no prospects come home to destabilize the peace of a civic society back home. Dead soldiers don’t come home to feed their families and tend their farms to create food and other goods and millions flood into the cities consigned to crime of all kinds. Millions of farms abandoned and turn to waste. Bread and Circuses. Rise of prostitution, increase in illegitimate poor. Collapse of economy. Rise of violent combative games and blood sport for diverting rising dissatisfaction among increasingly uncontrollable growing classes of destitute and illiterate.
6) Wealthy classes begin abandoning cities and isolating themselves in elite enclaves outside the cities.


History does not repeat itself, but the same chemicals mixed in the same precise quantities, temperature, and order of mixing, will invariably create the same result. History does not repeat itself, but the Six Points listed above without exception describe the conditions of the US military today. Can Man or the individual man or woman consciously “write history” or create it? With rare exceptions, no. The British seem perhaps to have diverted the Socialist revolution that Marx predicted for England by ushering in modest reforms in its, by our standards, monstrous labor practices. Five year olds were no longer allowed to work sixteen hours a day in the mines to the point where their bodies were warped in strange configurations that shortened their lives and limited their work capacity. But in many among the extreme poor, this loss of a working member of the family created worse financial hardships, often driving women, vast numbers of women, into prostitution, thus increasing the proliferation of disease, and the unemployable sick.
Women were allowed to bring infants to work. But they were not allowed to cry and scream, so they were placed in baskets beneath the sewing machines, perhaps a hundred in a room, their small faces wrapped in rags soaked in laudanum to silence their cries. Who did these children grow up to be and what was their impact upon British society? In the US child labor laws are extensive. Yet many Americans grow and remain perpetual children all their lives, never learning how to create a means of sustenance for themselves beyond the subsistence.
Where is all of this rant and screed going? Simply this, in CORPSE: Nature, Forensics, and the Struggle to Pinpoint the Time of Death, Jessica, Snyder Sachs describes the vastly elegant and complex multilayered society found within the folds and gases of the rotting human corpse. This society is wholly interdependent, its strata and their functions are empirically observable, and minutely discernable along a trajectory of time into past, to the moment of death, and the point of ultimate decay. This whole process hinges upon one of several species of blowflies and the larvae it produces. There are many other occupants and citizens necessary to this banquet. They all show up at a very specific and necessary time within the process, their arrival is necessitated by other necessary events immediately preceding their arrival, and their presence and function makes possible and necessitates other arrivals and other successive events in this process. All of these conditions lead to predictable and observable, quantifiable conclusions in the decay process. No variations, no discrete artistic mutations, no anomalies occurring outside the aggregation of components and their interactions.
All of this is a sublimely functional mechanism of the world processing itself and all the elements within itself. It’s also really quite beautiful once you get past the initial conditioned response to such things. But what Sachs and other researchers have discovered that is perhaps most interesting in all of this, is that the components and elements of initial decay and the breakdown of healthy organisms are already always present within life. If a person is shot and killed, the gases and chemicals of decay and dissolution are already at work before he hits the ground, while they had not yet begun the moment before. There is much, much for us to learn from this. Not to change, but to be the witnesses of it. All things in the observable universe, including the individual human being, the race, the culture, the species, the old stars in the heavens that explode on camera to delight the eyes of scientists, all things manifest a cycle of coming into existence, maturation, period of progeneration, of sterility, of decadence and decay, (the real definition of the word decadence) and the white hot last flush of existence, and extinguishment. It’s remarkably simple.
Why does the old Sufi not come down off his mountain and pick up a shovel and a pack of seeds, or a Kalashnikov, or a stack of handbills and a bullhorn? Is it because he has grown too tired, or jaded? Is it because he feels powerless to effect the grim realities of a beleaguered world? Is it because he has run out of ideas? Is it because he IS old and the exciting new undreamed of world is even now gathering its forces on the horizon and it’s beyond his capacity to even “get it”? No. It is because the darkness of his Solitude has shown him Its Truth. That maybe God, whatever He really is, created all of this just to explore His own unlimited possibilities, and He is, as they say, just playing with Himself. Those that know this, seem always to find a very great and exquisite joy in this. Once they get over the sadness.