Some friends of mine in Jordan used to joke that the Jordanian government discovers a new maqam of the sahaba (companions of the Prophet Muhammad) every week. Anyway, this is a relatively famous companion whose maqam is on a beautiful Amman hillside; I have been unable to confirm if he is actually buried here or just stopped here.
From time to time we drop some Omani jewels on ya.....here ya go.
اذا كان المتكلم مجنون يكون المستمع عاقل
Meaning: "If the speakers is mad, the hearer should be wise." This proverb points to the necessity of caution on the part of a hearer in believing what he is informed and in acting upon it. Sound advice, especially in the age of the internet.
The good folks at Addis Tunes never disappoint...African gospel music for a Sunday afternoon...
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Over the weekend there were a couple protests in Amman. One of them was only about 400 yards from our apartment. After jumma, me and my roommate set out to go to a walima we had been invited to. As we reached the main road we heard deafening music from the parking lot of the Regency Hotel. I had assumed it was a wedding, but the massive police presence indicated otherwise. Everyone seemed to be in festive mood, and there was dancing, lots of Jordanian flags and a big picture of King Abdullah.
Protests in Jordan have generally not had the same tone and tenor they've carried in Syria and Egypt. The king seems relatively popular, and most of the protesters and activists have been calling for reforms and not overthrow. Back in March, when police broke up a sit-in in Gamal Abdel Nasser roundabout, killing 55-year-old Khairi Saad, King Abdullah assured his subjects that reform was on track. In cyberspace, Jordanians have also been calling for peaceful reforms. For example the founders of 7ibr have encouraged people to tweet about reform under the hashtag #ReformJO. Al Jazeera did a story on their efforts..
But do last weekend's protests in downtown Amman, which were broken up by police with batons, indicate a new direction? The Jordan Times reported that many people viewed the protests as not pointing towards an effective solution to the real problem of rising commodity prices. This blogger also wonders how the presence of Syrian refugees and the continuing unrest there will affect calls for political change in Jordan. Will the king still allow peaceful protests to proceed? And what steps will he take to ensure the continuing stability of Jordan while ushering in calls for popular reform?
My colleague and fellow blogger Alex Thurston has a blogosphere rundown of commentary and stories on the South Sudan, the world's newest nation. Expectations are understandably high (perhaps impossibly so) for the South to "deliver the goods" to its citizens, and to flex its autonomy, but the reality is that the South and the North will HAVE to work together for the benefit of their respective futures, at least until the South Sudanese government builds oil pipelines eastward across Ethiopia and Kenya. Over at African Arguments, Naomi Pendle reports on attitudes in Warrap State in South Sudan.
As far as attitudes in the North, I would recommend that everyone check out this documentary "Fight for the Soul of the North" on the future of the state and civil society in North Sudan. The picture is grim, and the North will require wise leadership if they want to prevent the complete collapse of the state.
Greetings Azanian Sea readers,
It has been a minute since I've been in the blogging game as I had responsibilities to take care of on the home front (like finishing graduate coursework at Northwestern). But I'm back, and I hope to get back to blogging and commenting on religion, politics, culture and history in East Africa this summer, while I wade deeply into another round of Intensive Arabic in Amman, Jordan. Things are relatively quiet here, but the Syrian border is closed, Egypt and Sudan are poised for major transitions in governance, there is still unrest in Libya and Yemen and it's bizarre to think about how close we are here to the tides of revolution sweeping the region.
In East Africa, a terrible drought is sweeping the Horn of Africa. In an already destabilized region, the prospect of no rain until September could have catastrophic results for the ability of many residents to eke out a living above the margin of survival. The big question is: how much does climate change play a role in this emerging crisis? Droughts are not new in East Africa, and the region was hit hard in 2006. But the cycle of drought seems to be quickening, as Daniel Howden writes, "At the beginning of this decade the rains failed every other season and what we now see is 'perennial drought'." Climatologists and others have been warning of this situation for quite some time, but it now seems to be approaching a crisis.
The drought is likely to intensify water conflicts in the region, as well as political conflict over other resources like grazing grounds, fuel, and arable land.
There is a reason Toshihiko Izutsu's book is available through Islamic booksellers online: its a great introduction to what is at stake for the believer in the language the Qur'an. If, as Izutsu explains, the ultimate guarantee of the Semitic religions is that God reveals himself to humans, then an understanding the language through which that revelation came is an indispensable part of understanding divine reality.
Izutsu take a long time building up to his argument about clusters of word and meaning in the Qur'an, and how they are often found in opposing pairs. The Qur'an, argues Izutsu, took the vocabulary of the pre-Islamic Arabs and expanded or narrowed the conceptual scope of certain words. In discussions of words like imam, kufr, wahy, kitaab, nabii, and tanziil, God and Man in the Koran offers an invaluable insight into the Gestalt, or Weltanschaung of the Qur'an.
Izutsu's work, despite being immersed in the technical vocabulary of semantic and linguistics, is readable enough for anyone to gain some insight, and for those (like me) who first read the Qur'an in English and found it (initially) ponderous and unpoetic, this book impresses an appreciation for the intricacy and vision of the original Arabic text. It may seem obvious to any scholar, but it bears repeating that any text in any language cannot be understood properly apart from the cultural context in which it is embedded. That is why the act of translation is so fraught with peril--something of the flavor, the style of the original text is always lost.
The status of the Qur'an as a holy revelation for Muslims complicates the commonsense application of this thesis (culturally embedded) Muslims have to wrestle with extracting universal meaning from the text (the debates over the uncreatedness of the Qur'an in early Muslim theology reflect this tension) and debates over the hidden meanings, abrogated meanings, literal meanings, and contingent meanings permeate this atmosphere of meaning-making.
In order to show what the Qur'an introduced to the Arabs, Izutsu sets out to explain the "darkly pessimistic" attitude of the Jahiliyya Arabs and their particular attitude and style of life. He shows how materialistic their worldview was, and how much they valued language and particular styles of recitation (i.e. saj') as having the potential to release the magical power contained in words. He explains how they initially saw Allah as just another djinn, since djinn were known to pounce upon human beings, throw them to the ground, kneel on their chest and force them to become the djinn's mouthpiece to the world.
Thus when the Prophet Muhammad (SAW) first began his prophetic mission, the Jahiliyya Arabs understood it in terms of spirit possession. However the Prophet (SAW), saw his mission in terms of a revelation from Allah, the Only True God, through His Angel Gabriel. The innovation this introduced in the worldview of the Jahiliyya Arabs is something Izutsu brings out well. The content of these revelations, which took place over twenty years, and which the Prophet (SAW) sometimes heard in terms of tinkling bells, after which he would understand what Allah meant to say, had to be communicated through the Prophet as a coherent message, what Izutsu calls a "Sprachwerk", an objective linguistic work. And it had to take form in a language-system peculiar to his community.
Sura 26, as-Shuara (The Poets)
وَلَوۡ نَزَّلۡنَـٰهُ عَلَىٰ بَعۡضِ ٱلۡأَعۡجَمِينَ
فَقَرَأَهُ ۥ عَلَيۡهِم مَّا ڪَانُواْ بِهِۦ مُؤۡمِنِينَ
Translation: "Had we sent this down upon some non-Arabian prophet, and had he recited it to them in Arabic, they would not have believed in it."
Based on this sura, Izutsu goes on to make a valuable conclusion, "The use of Arabic as the language of Revelation was not intended to be the open declaration of the superiority of Arabic." Arabic, argues Izutsu, was chosen for its usefulness, not for its inherent qualities.
Why is this argument important? Because it helps one avoid a kind of implicit ethnocentrism that runs through many hadith: that the language of paradise will be Arabic for example, and that Arabic is naturally the most exalted and best medium for expressing spiritual reality and complexity. Instead, the message had to be in Arabic because it had to be a prompting to action. Yet in order for the revelation (wahy) to remain a prompting to action, it cannot continue to be a "sprachwerk." That is, its interpretation cannot be fixed in the time it was revealed, even if the content remains the same.
In this reviewer's interpretation, this demonstrates that the inner meaning of the Qur'anic message is not necessarily literally attached to the interpretation of the signs themselves, which changes over time, but to the correct performative recitation of the revelation and the spiritual disposition it creates in the heart of the believer. Izutsu's work thus sheds light on why Muhammad Asad once remarked that no one should attempt to translate the Qur'an from Arabic unless he had personally lived among the Bedouins of the Arabian Peninsula.
For linguists, Izutsu's approach to the language of the Qur'an as a kind of worldview comes uncomfortably close to the Whorf-Sapir theory of language and meaning, in which language determines reality. I will let those with linguistic training critique this aspect of the book, if they have read it. For me, as a historian, Izutsu's work is "good to think with" and offers a sympathetic portrayal of an oft-misunderstood book.
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