Sorry if this is mean but I find it annoying that so much is made of the death of David Frost. It’s not that I have anything against the man but for people who spent their lives on the screen why give them more screen time when they die? The broadcasting world is incestuous, one person’s death offering reasons to hear from others in the same business about their business and how good it is thanks to them via the dead ones good graces. It is canonisation by drip feed. God it gets on my nerves. Enough.
our friends the iconoclasts
Fascinating programme on Beyond Belief about new developments in Mecca and Medina.
I was talking the other day with my friends Afif and Nawal and we were looking at pictures of Mecca. They were showing me pictures of the crowds of pilgrims around the Kabba and in the background you could see incredibly tall skyscrapers that dwarfed the central point. They were both shocked at these buildings that dominated the skyline of the city. The radio programme discussed precisely this.
Over the past 20 or 30 years the Wahabi Saudi Arabian controllers of Mecca have destroyed large areas of both the city of Mecca and of Medina and built large areas of new flats and hotels in high-rise blocks and skyscrapers that also house many shops. This has resulted in very large areas of ancient housing being destroyed and also the destruction of a number of sites connected with the life of the Prophet. This includes some very important sites that were part of the practices of the pilgrims coming to Medina. They were destroyed by bulldozers and tombs simply dynamited.
This behaviour is looked on badly by many Muslims. The Wahabi are a puritanical 19th century group who have looked to return to the first years of the life of the Prophet. They are thus set against what they consider to be effectively polytheistic behaviours that they see expressed in people’s veneration of material aspects of the Prophet’s life, such as the house where he died in Medina and sites where he lived and members of his family died.
In the destruction of the sites we see, according to one of the participants on the radio programme, the destruction of the spiritual geography of Mecca and Medina. He went on to say that the great crisis of Christianity during the 19th century emerged from two areas. One was the work of Darwin which led to a questioning of revealed text and the other was the work of the 19th century German biblical lexicographers although that is not the correct term I use. They analysed biblical texts and alongside the material evidence gathered by archaeology were able to prove that the biblical texts and the historical and textual evidence did not correspond. He suggested that the destruction of the spiritual geography of Medina and Mecca would mean that in the future Muslims too would face the same issue. When they would visit the pilgrimage sites in the future the actual physical remains which, he claimed, were the real locations for the life of the Prophet, would no longer hold together the historico-spiritual life of the site. This would lead Muslims to the same point where doubt about the historical veracity of the life of the Prophet to would begin to emerge.
Alongside this I was considering that the Wahabi were iconoclastic in another way. The horror felt by the sensible Western mind at the destruction of the giant statues of the Bhudda by the Taleban are repeated in this puritanical form of Islam that leads to extremes of iconoclastic town planning in Mecca and Medina. However what is being destroyed from our perspective is the heritage rather than the sacred geography. We in the West tell ourselves the story that Islam has not gone through the series of pre- and Protestant Reformations that have marked the Christian world of the last six centuries and led to the breakdown of religious certainties and the emergence of forms of intellectual freedom which we cherish. So from that perspective, the work of the iconoclastic Wahabis is to our taste. In the long run it is they who will break the power of a notion of ‘true’ Islam. Certainly that the Wahabi’s were not orthodox Islam was the claim by one participatant in the radio programme for whom the Taleban were the skirmishing frontiersmen of the effectively uncultured Wahabis.
So the other way in which they are iconoclastic is in that they also attack our Western love of monuments to the past whether that be an intact 15th century street or the tomb of a member of the Prophet’s family. So we find ourselves in a strongly “catholic” world. Whilst we have had successive reformations we remain in the thrall of the shrine, the relic and we give it a new terminology: tradition, heritage. But we enshrine its defence in certain laws, legal restraints being nevertheless overridden by commercial practices with more immediate gains than the humanistic or spiritual rewards offered by the shrine, the monument to the past.
Greeks and Bhuddism
The children have been reading, no, devouring, the Percy Jackson books. The central theme of these is that there are in this world ‘real’ Greek Gods and more particularly their children, demi-Gods, who inhabit both the normal mundane world and the super-powered world of the Gods. Now being a lover of Greek myths I found it fascinating that my children (6/9/11) should be so taken with the stories.
The eldest had asked me what I knew about the myths and I was tongue tied as my knowledge is largely of a comparative/anthropological nature and it is to Robert Graves that I owe my personal attachment to the stories. I disappointed my daughter because I wasn’t able to retell the stories and my accounts of the relationship of Greek myths to other mythologies let alone accounts of the use and significance of the myths in the post-Greek world was not what she wanted. Continue reading “Greeks and Bhuddism”
Saddleworth, Brass, Morris and Rushes
Today, Saturday, we went to Greenfield, one of the Saddleworth villages. Our friends there are married and both come from the villages and we visited them on the occasion of the Saddleworth Rushcart. I won’t go into that suffice to say that a large group of Morris men process and dance around the various villages and on the Sunday lay rushes at one of the local Churches.
Afterwards we walked to Uppermill, Continue reading “Saddleworth, Brass, Morris and Rushes”
Darwin
Darwin’s theory of evolution developed the first unifying theory offering to explain all aspects of human life with no attention paid to cultural or other social differences. Darwin’s theory allowed us from the West who understood it (perhaps) to suggest that there was an evolutionary route that took us back to shared ancestry perhaps that’s the least. The conceit of the Western man, just man?, As we all share the same evolutionary rate we can also empathise with those others. This evolutionary conceit allows us to feel that we own the heritage of others.
Heritage
So heritage shows emerged as a property transaction. And it remains effectively a property transaction today. Heritage is mapped by ‘heritopography’, the sets of lines of communication or cultural understanding which allow the outsider to feel in place where ever they are provided they have a guidebook all mobile device. The British tourist standing on top of Machu Picchu and looking at a guidebook is sensing and experiencing a right to be present. That’s right to be present gives the tourist a sense of looking not at just somebody else’s heritage but at “their” heritage as well.
History
We have all obsession with history in the Western world from whence I emerge. A compulsive interest in the past and an ability to produce that past as historical record and to consume such records. There are psycho analytical events taking place. This fascination with the past and is perhaps linked into the continual need of Christianity to return to some earlier historical period. Here I am imagining a return to the Gospels and/or a return to the old Testament itself. So there has long been a profoundly historical aspect of Christian history. Maybe it is always been an historical religion.
Holy languages
Arabic is a wholly language. Language in which the angel Gabriel spoke to Mohammed. The holy language of the Koran is one whose themselves and consonants in and of themselves have some materiality and thus impact on the lives of those around. This idea of language carrying on certain magical properties reminded me of the work by Robert Graves in “the White Goddess”. Third to the early language used by the Bards.
St Paul as a prophet
Christianity has this unfortunate obsession with the figure of Jesus Christ. In turn has been a constant struggle within Christianity to return to the original figure of Christ as a way of combating a form of legalese religiosity which installs itself. Every movement like this faces the issue that the actual content of the Gospels, the words and acts of Christ himself, did not carry explicit rules and regulations for any form of social order beyond a very nominal ethics (and perhaps a transcendent imagination). Jesus Christ sits there is something to which Christianity returns Europe’s offers little order and indeed gives great space for interpretation via the same mechanism.
If only the church would except its indelible debt to St Paul, it may be easier to organise the faithful, as St Paul did offer more explicit explanations for how to live your life. In this sense St Paul stands out as a form of Prophet. And may lead you to be a more appropriate banner than Jesus around which a revitalised church might place itself. In this way St Paul is a prophet.
Walsingham – You Only Live Once…
It wasn’t difficult to find our way to Walsingham but when we arrived it wasn’t clear what we should do. I had persuaded my partner and our three children to come with me to visit Walsingham. My partner was interested in going but the three children had asked me “what is it?”. It’s the site of one of the most important mediaeval pilgrimages I explained. That didn’t seem to cut much ice with them so I decided to offer them a treat when they got there. I’d give them a little money to spend in the gift shop. Everybody was quite happy with this so we negotiated the small roads and found ourselves following narrow lanes towards Walsingham. There was nothing obvious about the signage, nothing to indicate that we were heading towards anything other than a small village in Norfolk. The road arrived suddenly somewhere that we assumed must be Walsingham.