A whirlwind of middle eastern tidbits.

WHISPERING SATANIC FATWA VERSES
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Over the last couple of months I have been reading Salman Rushdie's "Satanic Verses" and last night I finally finished it (Really correction I finished it over a month ago). (Note to SG) I know I've already talked to you about this and countless others, I'm sure you are tired of me talking about it and maybe I would have been better off having done an entry about this earlier but I will talk about it again. "Satanic Verses" is the novel that Salman Rushdie received among other awards the most undesired fatwa by none other than the past Supreme Leader of Iran Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeinia. Supreme Leader, it has quite a ring to it I think instead of being software engineer I may try to better myself and work towards the job title Supreme Leader I wonder what sort of career track one would have to follow to get to that point. Not the point, so a fatwa right is basically when someone proclaims something about the Islamic faith usually in relation to clearing up some grey areas or issuing some laws or if you are feeling up to it declaring death sentences as was the case with Rushdie. "Fatawa" say it like Barbara Walters, actually it sounds like something that she would mispronounce.

Side Note: Before I get to far into this explosion of thought realize that I am by no means a scholar of any sorts just someone that reads books and looks up stuff on Wikipedia. I don't claim that what I say is correct this is just me blogging.

Have you ever wondered what it would take for someone to issue a death sentence for a specific person to an entire religious body? I mean that goes way beyond taking your best friends girlfriend or killing someone's beloved pet accidentally. I picked up the book in part because I really liked "The Moors Last Sigh" (another Rushdie book) and in part because I was curious about what could be so blasphemous about it. I could go into the book but then you could go read the book and then I wouldn't have to tell you about it. I will throw out that the book covers two Indian men who survived an airplane blowing up at 30,000 feet. After the crash both men attempt to deal with their life after death experiences. The book goes back and forth between the main characters trying to put their lives back together and dream sequences where Rushdie embellishes early historical Islamic events. It wasn't until I was about three fourths of the way through the book that I hit one of the dream sequences that made me realize where all the anger came from. The dream sequence focused on Mahound (Muhammad) and his return to Jahalia (Mecca) after having left Jahalia many years earlier after uttering the "Satanic Verses". That "Satanic Verses" was that Mahound had a sort of lapse where he agreed that three other goddesses could stand next to Allah. He declared this to all at a market in Jahalia and later regretted it and claimed that instead of being told by this after wrestling with the Angel Gabriel he was instead tricked by Satan. I dunno if that really is THE big deal but I figured I'd explain where the "Satanic Verses" came from.

A little later in Rushdie's fabricated history after Mahound leaves Jahalia Mahound becomes a great prophet and ends up spreading Islam all over the region. It was after all of this that he decided to come back to Jahalia and cleanse it's "Black House" of all of it's deities. However before Mahound made it to Jahalia one of his first former disciples made his way into Jahalia before Mahound came and ran into one of the towns people and started talking about his growing doubts that the prophet Mahound was actually a prophet. It was the point where Salman (one of the first disciples) started explaining how he noticed Mahound would always get instruction from the Angel Gabriel on one particular thing or another always at the right time. The instruction I most remember is when the people asked him why it was ok for Mahound to have 12 wives when they could only have one. A day later Mahound came back and said that the Angel Gabriel told him that he could have 12 wives as he was a special case. Salman goes on to say that when he took down the instructions said by Mahound he first started modifying them only slightly to see if Mahound would notice. As time went on he would modify them more and more hoping that he would notice. When he realized that Mahound wasn't infallible he became terrified and left hoping that he could get away before anyone noticed.

When I read all that I think I put the book down and said "Damn", I mean damn. That's pretty gutsy just up and saying that even if what you are writing is a work of fiction. SG and I have both had this conversation about how reading "Satanic Verses" has made us really want to learn more about Islam and it's history not because we think that what Rushdie wrote is true but because the cultural history is so alien to ours. Reading it also gave me a glimpse of where fantasy writers may get their ideas and names from. Example: Of the fantasy books I read the "Wheel of Time" series which regardless of what it has become lately still impresses me with it's overall concepts, story telling and character development. I don't know how many times I've wondered where Robert Jordan got the names for his characters or where he got the basis for different concepts. In reading "Satanic Verses" I found out that in Islam the devil is called Shaitan (Shaytan) while in the Wheel of Time series the name for the devil like force is called Shai'tan. None of this really matters I just found it interesting to actually find a concrete example of where an author pulled an idea from another foreign culture to use in their book to create something that feels alien or exotic.


IRAQ, AND IT'S SHIITES.
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A couple of days ago I was cardio'ng to my little hearts content reading a two year old article in National Geographic about the Shiites in Iraq. Two year old article? Yes. I don't have a subscription to National Geographic I just borrow the old ones my grandmother has and read them and why not I don't think I've found a National Geographic article yet that was so dated that it was pointless to read. The really strange thing that always happens is that that I read a national geographic article on something and then the next day or so I read about it again in another magazine/webzine/T.V. The last time this happened I had just seen a show about ancient Egypt where archaeologists excavated a dozen or so funeral barges all lined up around a dock waiting for the Pharaoh's to use in their after lives. This time it was the article about the Shiites in Iraq that just so happened to go into some history about Islam and why the split between Shiites and Sunnis occurred. Get this in 632 when the Prophet Muhammad died there were those who believed that his son-in-law should be the first caliph (spiritual leader). I'm not sure if they felt that the caliph should always come from one descended from Muhammad or if it was that they wanted the first Caliph to be descended from him. It didn't turn out to matter as it was the other group who felt that the caliph should be chosen by tribal consensus that won the argument. A couple of decades later the son-in-law of Muhammad became the fourth caliph however he was only caliph for five years before a group of tribal Arabs killed him. It was apparently this killing of the son-in-law which lead the schism between Shiites and Sunnis. Shiites were the ones who wanted a descendent of Muhammad as a caliph and Sunnis wanted it decided by tribal consensus. Interestingly after Ali's (son-in-law, fourth caliph) death his followers/disciples granted his dying wish by tying him to a camel and burying him wherever the camel stopped and where the camel stopped happened to be Najaf, Najaf in the news lately religious site, Najaf.

The article went on to talk about other interesting things like the Iran-Iraq war which being so young I only have a vague memory. The interesting thing? Oh yes the interesting thing was that during the Iran-Iraq war Iraq was worried about it's Shiites helping Iran which led to Iraq rounding up Shiites by the thousands. Apparently the Baath party while secular were still made up of Sunni Arabs which distrusted Shiites portraying them as Arab-hating Persians. Persians = Iranians and mostly Shiites, oh and according to Wiki Iran is still called Persia. While doing this whole skipping across the pond of middle eastern history I got the question of "What is an Arab?" If Persians are generally Shiites where the Iran is the general geographic location for them then what is an Arab? I can't help but think about that Cure song "Killing an Arab" every time I say Arab. To be an Arab doesn't mean that you live in a certain geographical region, are of a certain ethnicity or even worship Islam. All that it means is that you speak Arabic... at least I hope I got that right. Granted the vast majority of Arabs worship Islam but there are Arab Jews and Arab Christians (found in Egypt mostly) called Coptic Christians or something.