See whole article. And follow Steven Salaita’s blog at No Flags, No Slogans and his Twitter account at @stevesalaita. Always lots of great stuff.
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Stereotypical Covid sceptics are a kind of fringe lunatic but elite sportspeople are reared to keep total control of their bodies
Stefanos Tsitsipas and Novak Djokovic are two of tennis’s high profile anti-vaxxers. Photograph: Gonzalo Fuentes/Reuters
comment: nikobakos@gmail.com
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The Taliban have forbidden Ashura because they consider it an idolatrous Shia practice. Processions and gatherings have been broken up with beatings and violence. All I can say, I feel, is to repost an old post on the holiday, with a poem from Agha Shahid Ali. Look up Ali, who came from the small Shia minority of Kashmir, and who wrote in English, even, rather diconcertingly, but strange — uncanny — in a way that made his work even more beautiful. Most wonderfully odd were his poems that followed the metric and structural rules of the traditional Arab ghazal, but in English. Check him out if you want. It’s worth it.
Here’s that old post:
Karbala: A History of the “House of Sorrow”
In a distant age and climate, the tragic scene of the death of Husayn will awaken the sympathy of the coldest reader.
—Edward Gibbon
Jesus and his disciples, passing through the plain of Karbala, saw “a herd of gazelles, crowding together and weeping.” Astonished, the disciples looked at their Lord. He spoke: “At this site the grandson of Prophet Muhammad (Peace be upon him) will one day be killed.” And Jesus wept. Oh, that my head were waters, and mine eyes a fountain of tears, that I might weep day and night for the slain … And Jesus wept. And as if the news has just reached them—fourteen hundred years after the Battle of Karbala (near ancient Babylon, not far from the Euphrates) in the year A.H. 61/A.D. 680—mourners weep for “the prince among martyrs,” Hussain, grandson of the Prophet and son of Ali (“Father of Clay”) and Fatima (the Prophet’s only surviving child). Memorializing Hussain on the tenth of Muharram (Ashura) is the rite of Shi’a Islam—so central that at funerals those events are woven into elegies, every death framed by that “Calvary.” For just “as Jesus went to Jerusalem to die on the cross,” Hussain “went to Karbala to accept the passion that had been meant for him from the beginning of time.”
Zainab’s Lament in Damascus
Over Hussain’s mansion what night has fallen?
Look at me, O people of Shaam, the Prophet’s only daughter’s daughter, his only child’s child.
Over my brother’s bleeding mansion dawn rose—at such forever cost?
So weep now, you who of passion never made a holocaust, for I saw his children slain in the desert, crying for water.
Hear me. Remember Hussain, what he gave in Karbala, he the severed heart, the very heart of Muhammad, left there bleeding, unburied.
Deaf Damascus, here in your Caliph’s dungeons where they mock the blood of your Prophet, I’m an orphan, Hussain’s sister, a tyrant’s prisoner.
Father of Clay, he cried, forgive me. Syria triumphs, orphans all your children. Farewell.
And then he wore his shroud of words and left us alone forever.
Paradise, hear me— On my brother’s body what night has fallen?
Let the rooms of Heaven be deafened, Angels, with my unheard cry in the Caliph’s palace:
Syria hear me
Over Hussain’s mansion what night has fallen
I alone am left to tell my brother’s story
On my brother’s body what dawn has risen
Weep for my brother World, weep for Hussain
Reprinted from The Veiled Suite: The Collected Poems by Agha Shahid Ali. English translation copyright © 2009 by Daniel Hall. With the permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
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Tags: Agha Shahid Ali, Ali, Ashura, Damascus, Huseein, Shi’ism, Syria, Zeynep
Now that the fall holidays are upon us, can the city let these out as sukkos?
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…In the Byzantine Empire, ideas of race and gender were deeply intertwined.
“When did racism begin? Because of how ideas about race shape our contemporary world, some have argued that racism did not exist in the ancient and medieval worlds, that it was a modern invention. Proposing that there was a past before racism helped prop up the notion that Americans were living in a post-racial present, in the decades after the Civil Rights movement.”
Odd that the Post would publish such a article. See Betancourt’s whole piece here: “Anti-Blackness and transphobia are older than we thought“
Like, who ever thought that the Greeks and Egyptians and Romans and Byzantines and Arabs and Black Africans and Iranians and South Asians and the Chinese didn’t keep slaves for millenia? Way before white North Americans did?
Betancourt is setting up a straw man for himself to shoot down.
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