Category Archives: Islam

Husband Murder on the Rise in Iran

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Saba Vasefi is an Iran­ian women’s and children’s rights activist who is now liv­ing in Aus­tralia. Her doc­u­men­tary, Do Not Bury My Heart–for which I have not been able to find much infor­ma­tion on the web – about the exe­cu­tion of minors in Iran was screened recently in the under­ground doc­u­men­tary sec­tion of the Copen­hagen Inter­na­tional Doc­u­men­tary Fes­ti­val. She’s writ­ten an arti­cle, which I found on the Tehran Bureau web­site and which was orig­i­nally pub­lished in Mianeh, about the increase in Iran of the num­ber of women accused of mur­der­ing their hus­bands. “This is,” she writes, “a sig­nif­i­cant shift in Iran­ian soci­ety, where mur­ders involv­ing spouses have in the past almost always involved men killing women, often in what is known as an ‘hon­our crime.’” More­over, these mur­ders are usu­ally, nom­i­nally, legal since “Arti­cle 630 of Iran’s Islam-based crim­i­nal code makes it legal for a man to kill both his wife and her part­ner if he finds them in the act, and it is con­sen­sual.” This bur­den of proof, she goes on to say, “is rarely met,” with most honor killings being more about “jeal­ousy, sus­pi­cion or merely a way of end­ing a marriage.”

One of the things I found most inter­est­ing about Vasefi’s arti­cle is the dif­fer­ence between what her research reveals about women who’ve been accused of mur­der­ing their hus­bands and what the avail­able research says.

In the case of wives who kill their hus­bands, the avail­able research indi­cates that two-thirds of cases are moti­vated by a desire for revenge for the hus­band being unfaithful.

The sur­vey that Moaz­zami and Ashouri con­ducted across 15 provinces of Iran showed that in 58 per­cent of cases, the women had been unable to get a divorce because their hus­bands or fam­i­lies would not agree to it, or had chil­dren and would have had no means of sup­port­ing them­selves if they had sep­a­rated from their spouses.

My own research indi­cates that many women who resort to vio­lence are them­selves vic­tims of abuse, and have been unable to find jus­tice through the legal system.

She points out that many of the women who mur­der their hus­bands fit the same pro­file: they are poor, rel­a­tively une­d­u­cated, often forced into mar­riage at an early age to men who are much older than they are, cir­cum­stances which com­bine to make much more dif­fi­cult for them to get help through the legal sys­tem or to find other ways out of their sit­u­a­tion. Mur­der is, for them, “a last act of desperation.”

Akram Mah­davi, one of the women Vasefi inter­viewed, is in Rajayi Shahr prison under a sus­pended death sen­tence for hir­ing a man to kill her hus­band, whom her father had forced her to marry – she was 20 and her hus­band was 75. Her motive? That she’d dis­cov­ered her hus­band was sex­u­ally abus­ing her daugh­ter and her attempts at secur­ing a divorce had failed. Yet it’s not that there aren’t peo­ple in Iran try­ing to call atten­tion to the plight of such women. Women’s rights activists have been call­ing on the gov­ern­ment to set up shel­ters for bat­tered women for years, but the gov­ern­ment has always refused, “cit­ing Islamic laws that state it is wrong for a woman to leave home with­out her husband’s per­mis­sion.” I con­fess that rea­son­ing leaves me almost speech­less, as it still does all these many years later when I remem­ber the cop who asked me, when I was six­teen and call­ing for help because my mother’s boyfriend had forced her into her bed­room and locked the door behind them because she’d finally asked him to leave and he didn’t want to,“Are you sure your mother’s in their against her will, son?”

I don’t want to erase the dif­fer­ences between what hap­pened to my mother and what hap­pened to Akram Mah­davi, nor do I want to triv­i­al­ize the sig­nif­i­cance of the fact that, in Iran, the rea­son­ing that makes it so dif­fi­cult for bat­tered women, or women like Mah­davi, who was try­ing to pro­tect her daugh­ter from abuse, to find jus­tice is couched in an abso­lutist reli­gious rhetoric – though it’s not as if reli­gion has not been used here in the States to jus­tify treat­ing women, not to men­tion peo­ple of color, as sec­ond class cit­i­zens – but I find right now the sim­i­lar­i­ties more com­pelling than the dif­fer­ences. In each case, the woman’s auton­omy is under­stood to be cir­cum­scribed by the author­ity of the man who pos­sesses her sex­u­ally. In Islam, the hus­band must give her per­mis­sion to leave the sphere of his author­ity (and, there­fore, of his pro­tec­tion) with­out him1; in the case of the cop on the phone, his assump­tion was that I might have mis­taken some kind of sex­ual play, in which my mother was enjoy­ing the force her boyfriend was using to keep her in the room, for a sit­u­a­tion in which the boyfriend was unwill­ing to let my mother go out­side the sphere of his author­ity and in which he might turn – was already turn­ing – vio­lent because she did not obey him. That the author­ity is legal in the case of Islam and, for want of a bet­ter word, cul­tural in the case of my mother and her boyfriend, does not change the fact that the nature of the author­ity, a man’s right to rule his women, is the same.

  1. One of the odd­est expe­ri­ences I’ve had being mar­ried to a Mus­lim woman who occa­sion­ally trav­els to Iran has been the require­ment, imposed by the Iran­ian gov­ern­ment, that I write her a let­ter giv­ing her my offi­cial per­mis­sion to travel with­out me. [↩]

Went to See Maz Jobrani Last Night

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I took my wife and my son for their birth­days, which are a day apart later this month, to see the Iranian-American comic Maz Jobrani last night at Town Hall. He is very tal­ented and very funny. One of the things he does to great effect is bring the audi­ence into dia­logue with him as part of his show, and so – since part of this agenda is quite explic­itly polit­i­cal, i.e., to use com­edy as a way of call­ing out and break­ing down stereo­types and other kinds of bar­ri­ers between dif­fer­ent kinds of peo­ple – he asks mem­bers of dif­fer­ent groups to iden­tify them­selves in the audi­ence: Ira­ni­ans (obvi­ously), white peo­ple, Arabs (mak­ing sure to spec­ify which coun­try they come from, to make the point, you know, that the Arab Mid­dle East is not all one coun­try), Jews, Lati­nos, etc. Per­haps my favorite joke of the evening resulted from this – not that it was the fun­ni­est, but it was my favorite.

He was talk­ing to some Pales­tin­ian women sit­ting in the front and then – I don’t remem­ber exactly who said what – iden­ti­fied some Jew­ish peo­ple sit­ting in the same row, more or less, but across the aisle. He asked them to wave at each other, which they did, and made the pre­dictable joke about the peace process start­ing right there as part of the Maz Jobrani show. There fol­lowed some other pat­ter and then he said, address­ing him­self to some­one else in the audi­ence, say­ing some­thing like, “See, now, we need to start with a wave. Can’t go too far too soon; there’s just too much dis­trust.” Then he turned to the Pales­tini­ans and said, “Please, now, don’t go throw­ing any­thing at them; I don’t know what you brought with you, but don’t throw it. Not tonight.” And then he turned to the Jews and said, “And don’t you go tak­ing her seat; it’s her seat. Okay?”

The audi­ence exploded with laugh­ter. It was not his fun­ni­est joke of the evening, but it was in some ways his most point­edly polit­i­cal, and he car­ried it off so lightly, so well, I was clap­ping as much in admi­ra­tion as I was in laugh­ter. It made me won­der what he would have done with us had we been sit­ting close enough: a Jew­ish Amer­i­can man, a Mus­lim Iran­ian woman and our son. It also reminded me, for some rea­son, of one of my favorite poems by the 12th cen­tury Iran­ian poet Saadi. Here it is in my tranlsation:

Every­one thinks his own think­ing is per­fect and that his child is the most beautiful.

I watched a Mus­lim and a Jew debate
and shook with laugh­ter at their child­ish­ness.
The Mus­lim swore, “If what I’ve done is wrong,
may God cause me to die a Jew.” The Jew
swore as well, “If what I’ve said is false,
I swear by the holy Torah that I will die
a Mus­lim, like you.” If tomor­row the earth
fell sud­denly void of all wis­dom
no one would admit that it was gone.

Church in Florida to Host “International Burn the Quran Day” to Commemorate the September 11 Attacks

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The poet Kazim Ali posted this to his Face­book page, say­ing that he thought it “had to be a myth,” and that is what it sounds like at first, but the Dove World Out­reach Cen­ter is indeed invit­ing peo­ple to burn a Quran on Sep­tem­ber 11, 2010. It’s easy to dis­miss this as quack­ery, as not worth giv­ing the atten­tion that it got through CNN’s cov­er­age, but the truth is that if we don’t pay atten­tion to it, if we don’t call it out for what it is – and it’s grat­i­fy­ing to see that the Face­book page protest­ing the event has close to twice as many fans as the Face­book page announc­ing the event – it will spread. More than that, though, it will become – it already has become, actu­ally, and this is kind of fright­en­ing – part of the way per­cep­tions of Islam are framed by our national rhetoric. Here’s the video:

Rick Sanchez, I think, proves him­self to be a par­tic­u­larly inept inter­viewer here – I don’t watch him, so I don’t know if he’s usu­ally bet­ter than this – but one of the things that dis­turbs me about the way he tries to respond to Terry Jones, Dove World Outreach’s pas­tor, is his but-there–are–moderate-muslims-out-there tone, as if those “mod­er­ate Muslims” – and more about that phrase in a moment – are some­how the excep­tion to the rule. Or as if they are, you know, out there, but really well hid­den, and so you have to know the secret code or some­thing to get them to reveal them­selves. Equally trou­bling to me, though, is the way the phrase “mod­er­ate Mus­lims” has taken on the same descrip­tive weight and author­ity as, say, Ortho­dox Jew or Evan­gel­i­cal Chris­t­ian, as if “mod­er­ate” were some­how actu­ally a sect of Islam. Well-meaning as it may be, the phrase actu­ally con­tributes to rather than decon­structs the way in which Islam is being defined as a pro­foundly hos­tile theologically-informed, we-want-to-rule-the-world polit­i­cal stance towards the West, broadly speak­ing, and the United States in par­tic­u­lar, rather than as a reli­gion. This is to me – and I’d be inter­ested to hear what other peo­ple think of this – very sim­i­lar to the way in which the anti­se­mitic rhetoric of Europe framed Judaism from the 18th cen­tury, and cer­tainly the 19th cen­tury on, and it is cer­tainly one of the under­ly­ing assump­tions – i.e., that the Jews want to rule the world – of the “World Zion­ist Con­spir­acy” theories.

It’s also worth not­ing that Jones and his group also declared August 2 “No Homo Mayor” day, a day to protest Gainesville’s openly gay mayor. Both groups – Mus­lims and homo­sex­u­als – are god­less accord­ing to Jones, a logic sim­i­lar to the one that cre­ated the asso­ci­a­tion between being Jew­ish and homo­sex­u­al­ity, to men­tion being com­mu­nist, Jew­ish and homo­sex­ual, that was an impor­tant point of anti­se­mitic rhetoric in this coun­try dur­ing 50s, 60s and even 70s.

It’s easy to dis­miss Terry Jones and his church as a bunch of nuts, espe­cially when his argu­ments for why Islam is a devil’s reli­gion, as quoted in the text accom­pa­ny­ing the Rick Sanchez video, include doozies like this:

“I mean ask your­self, have you ever really seen a really happy Mus­lim? As they’re on the way to Mecca? As they gather together in the mosque on the floor? Does it look like a real reli­gion of joy?” Jones asks in one of his YouTube posts.

“No, to me it looks like a reli­gion of the devil.”

The prob­lem is that Jones and com­pany are only giv­ing expres­sion to the log­i­cal con­clu­sion of what an awful lot of peo­ple in the United State., con­sciously or not, already believe. The term Islam­o­pho­bia may be rel­a­tively new, but the (often racial­ized and racial­iz­ing) hatred of Mus­lims has a long his­tory in this coun­try – and that is some­thing I will per­haps write about in another post – a his­tory that pre­dates the Sep­tem­ber 11th attacks not by decades, but by cen­turies, and its assump­tions, its images, its rhetoric is/has been as much a part of our cul­ture as the assump­tions, images, rhetoric of, say, racism.

I am not an alarmist, though I do think there is a com­par­i­son to be made between the way in which anti­se­mitic rhetoric was deployed so as to make the Nazi’s cam­paign against the Jews and the way Islam­o­pho­bic rhetoric has been more and more mak­ing its way into our pub­lic dis­course. Indeed, I think this com­par­i­son would prob­a­bly work with the rhetoric of any geno­ci­dal cam­paign, though I do not think and I am not imply­ing that this is the begin­ning of some kind of anti-Muslim gov­ern­ment action. Rather, I think, plain and sim­ple, that those com­par­isons should make clear to us how imper­a­tive it is not to let the actions and the rhetoric of peo­ple like Terry Jones go unan­swered.

Constructions of masculinities in Islamic traditions, societies and cultures, with a specific focus on India and Pakistan between the 18th and the 21st century

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This is the title of a PhD the­sis writ­ten by Dr. Aman­ul­lah De Sondy, who has just accepted a posi­tion at Ithaca Col­lege. Accord­ing to Joan McAlpine, who pro­filed Dr. De Sondy for The Sun­day Times, sev­eral lead­ing pub­lish­ers are com­pet­ing to buy the the­sis and pub­lish it as a book and, if they do, I think they should con­sider the title she sug­gested: Men, Sex and Islam. I, for one, am very inter­ested to read it. In McAlpine’s words:

It chal­lenges assump­tions about what it means to be a Mus­lim man. The Koran does not, says De Sondy, demand a bearded patri­arch with sev­eral wives and dozens of chil­dren. There are dys­func­tional fam­i­lies in Islamic tra­di­tion, he says, prophets with­out father fig­ures and revered holy men who led “effem­i­nate” lifestyles. Most con­tro­ver­sially, he chal­lenges homo­pho­bia in Islam. “Homo­sex­u­al­ity is not incom­pat­i­ble with Islam. The two can and have co-existed. The impor­tant thing is to link it with liv­ing a good life and cre­at­ing a good society.”

Later in the arti­cle, De Sondy is quoted as saying:

“In the 16th-century Pun­jab, there lived a Sufi  saint and poet called Shah Hus­sain who is greatly ven­er­ated. He fell in love with a Hindu boy. They lived together and are buried side by side in the same tomb. Pil­grims come to the tomb and shrine in Lahore dis­trict even today, but some peo­ple want to rewrite his­tory, say­ing the boy was in fact a girl.”

He also points to the pres­ence of “antin­o­mian Sufis in the Indian sub­con­ti­nent  — men who have pierced ears and dance in women’s clothing”.

In response to the story that De Sondy says most of the con­ser­v­a­tives who dis­agree with him use – that of God’s deci­sion to destroy the city of Sodom because of the sins of its inhab­i­tants – he says the story “is really about [God’s] dis­ap­proval of the rape of young boys that was hap­pen­ing in the place,” which is very dif­fer­ent from say­ing that God dis­ap­proves of homosexuality.

I am not a scholar of Islam, nor well-enough informed to know the com­plex­i­ties of what Islam has to say about homo­sex­u­al­ity, but I do know that schol­ar­ship like this, which at the very least high­lights the degree to which ideas about mas­culin­ity, man­hood and male sex­u­al­ity are con­tested ide­o­log­i­cal ter­ri­tory, show­ing that the tra­di­tional view is only one of the pos­si­bil­i­ties that exist, is very, very impor­tant.

The Anti-Defamation League Should Be Ashamed of Itself

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I first read about the ADL’s state­ment sup­port­ing those who would stop the build­ing of Cor­doba House, a Mus­lim com­mu­nity cen­ter mod­eled on the YM/YWHA’s and CA’s you can find all over New York City over at The Debate Link. In read­ing the state­ment, I was struck by these two paragraphs:

How­ever, there are under­stand­ably strong pas­sions and keen sen­si­tiv­i­ties sur­round­ing the World Trade Cen­ter site.  We are ever mind­ful of the tragedy which befell our nation there, the pain we all still feel – and espe­cially the anguish of the fam­i­lies and friends of those who were killed on Sep­tem­ber 11, 2001.

The con­tro­versy which has emerged regard­ing the build­ing of an Islamic Cen­ter at this loca­tion is coun­ter­pro­duc­tive to the heal­ing process.  There­fore, under these unique cir­cum­stances, we believe the City of New York would be bet­ter served if an alter­na­tive loca­tion could be found.

These words raise, of course, the obvi­ous ques­tion: Sup­pose the build­ing at stake were a Jew­ish com­mu­nity cen­ter and sup­pose the peo­ple opposed it were doing so out of “strong pas­sions and keen sen­si­tiv­i­ties” that were anal­o­gous to what the peo­ple who oppose the Cor­doba House feel, would the ADL argue that such a build­ing in a such a place was “coun­ter­pro­duc­tive to the heal­ing process” and urge that the cen­ter be built else­where? More than that, though, I found myself won­der­ing about whose feel­ings the ADL is being so con­sid­er­ate of here. As Michael Bar­baro wrote on July 30th in an arti­cle on The New York Times web­site–the arti­cle was on the front page of the July 31st edi­tion of the paper – attribut­ing the point to Oz Sul­tan, Cor­doba House’s pro­gram­ming direc­tor, “He said that Mus­lims had also died on Sept. 11, either because they worked in the twin tow­ers, or responded to the scene.”

Sul­tan was respond­ing to a state­ment made by Abra­ham Fox­man, ADL’s national direc­tor, to the effect that the peo­ple whose feel­ings his orga­ni­za­tion feels ought not to be hurt by the build­ing of cen­ter at its cur­rent loca­tion are the fam­i­lies of those who died in the Sep­tem­ber 11th attacks. Mr. Sultan’s response, of course, is pre­cisely to the point, and I don’t think there isn’t much else to add to that. I do find Foxman’s rea­son­ing, at least as it is quoted in Barbaro’s arti­cle, pro­foundly trou­bling, though:

Asked why the oppo­si­tion of the [Sep­tem­ber 11th vic­tims’] fam­i­lies was so piv­otal in the deci­sion, Mr. Fox­man, a Holo­caust sur­vivor, said they were enti­tled to their emotions.

“Sur­vivors of the Holo­caust are enti­tled to feel­ings that are irra­tional,” he said. Refer­ring to the loved ones of Sept. 11 vic­tims, he said, “Their anguish enti­tles them to posi­tions that oth­ers would cat­e­go­rize as irra­tional or bigoted.”

It’s hard for me to know where to begin tak­ing this apart. First, though, let me say that I do think Fox­man is right about this: peo­ple who have been through trauma are enti­tled to their feel­ings about things that may force them to return to or relive that trauma, and even when those feel­ings are irra­tional, the valid­ity of the feel­ings them­selves should not be ques­tioned, even when those feel­ings can rea­son­ably be cat­e­go­rized as “big­oted.” The rest of us, how­ever, should not be held hostage to the legit­i­macy of those feel­ings. More, pre­cisely because those feel­ings can be rea­son­ably cat­e­go­rized as big­oted, defer­ring to them in mat­ters of pub­lic pol­icy and dis­course can end up per­pet­u­at­ing that big­otry in con­crete ways. Wit­ness the ADL’s state­ment which, even grant­ing the most gen­er­ous pos­si­ble read­ing – and I am not sure what that would be – mar­gin­al­izes Mus­lims sim­ply for being Muslim.

Even more than that, though, I think it is cyn­i­cal beyond belief for Fox­man to enlist the moral author­ity that inevitably attaches to men­tion of Holo­caust sur­vivors, espe­cially because he is him­self a sur­vivor, to jus­tify the ADL’s posi­tion. It is insult­ing of my intel­li­gence; triv­i­al­iz­ing of the Holo­caust; it ren­ders Mus­lims invis­i­ble on all kinds of lev­els by equat­ing the Sep­tem­ber 11th vic­tims’ fam­i­lies with the Jews; and it is, fun­da­men­tally, more about guilt-tripping the peo­ple who want to build the Cor­doba House and their sup­port­ers than it is about a search for heal­ing and that can be noth­ing but, to use Foxman’s own word, counterproductive.

I have not been fol­low­ing the Cor­doba House issue very closely and so I have not read much about the ques­tions that have been raised about some of the sources for its fund­ing, but I would like to say this: even if it turned out that Cor­doba House were being funded with money that could be tied back to the same peo­ple who per­pe­trated the Sep­tem­ber 11th attacks, or some sim­i­larly objec­tion­able group, [ETA: the fact of that fund­ing would be the rea­son to pre­vent the build­ing of the Cor­doba House any­where in the United States; the fact of that fund­ing] would still not jus­tify the ADL’s posi­tion that would not jus­tify the ADL’s posi­tion. I hope that those ques­tions about fund­ing, if they have been legit­i­mately raised, are resolved pos­i­tively and that the Cor­doba House gets built. The con­tro­versy sur­round­ing it con­vinces me that we really, really need it.

If Iranian Lesbian Kiana Firouz is deported from the U.K., she faces certain death in Iran.

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From the Every­One website:

Kiana Firouz, 27 years old, actress and les­bian activist from Teheran, Iran, has long been engaged in the bat­tle against the dis­crim­i­na­tion and per­se­cu­tion of homo­sex­u­als by the Ahmadine­jad régime. After pho­tograms of her video doc­u­men­tary on the con­di­tion of les­bians and gays fell into the hands of the Iran­ian intel­li­gence, agents began to fol­low and intim­i­date her. Con­cerned about her safety, Kiana left Teheran and sought refuge in the U.K., where she could con­tinue her work and studies.

She filed for asy­lum but her appli­ca­tion was rejected by the Home Office even though the Min­istry rec­og­nized her being per­se­cuted for her sex­ual ori­en­ta­tion and despite the fact that the Min­istry is well aware that under Islamic law homo­sex­u­al­ity is con­sid­ered a heinous crime pun­ish­able by hang­ing and that gays and les­bians are ene­mies of Allah. In Iran, pun­ish­ment for an adult con­sent­ing les­bian of healthy mind and is 100 whip­pings. If the act is repeated three times and pun­ished each time, the death sen­tence is applied the fourth time (Art. 127, 129, 130).

Hat tip: thef­bomb

If you have a mind to, please sign the peti­tion.

“The Myths of Liberal Zionism,” by Yitzhak Laor — I want to read this book

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Writ­ing in the Jan­u­ary issue of Harper’s Mag­a­zine, Joshua Cohen wrote this at the end of his review of Laor’s book:

It often seems that the Israeli-Palestinian con­flict is just […] a tex­tual prob­lem. If so, then the mud­dle of mean­ing that must be ana­lyzed lies in pars­ing not Pales­tin­ian from Israeli, but “Israeli” from “Jew.” Only once those epi­thets have been dis­sev­ered can some sort of dia­logue begin, between two polit­i­cal enti­ties and not between two (or three) reli­gions or Peo­ples. Until then, “Israel” will con­tinue to be vil­i­fied as a word that means some­thing other than what it should, while all crit­ics of Israel will be accused of anti-Semitism.

It is not clear to me from the review how much of this is Cohen, how much of this is Laor and how much of it is Cohen putting into his own words what he agrees with in Laor’s book, but any book that leads to this kind of think­ing, to ask­ing these kinds of ques­tions, whether I ulti­mately agree with the book or not, is a book worth read­ing. Now, if there were only 36 hours or more in a day. Sigh.

Translating Classical Persian Poetry: Why Retranslate Attar’s “Ilahi-Nama?”

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Farid Al-Din Attar is one of the most impor­tant writ­ers in the Per­sian canon. Not only is he a major poet in his own right, but his work offers cru­cial insight into Sufi thought and expe­ri­ence, while pre­fig­ur­ing other impor­tant poets like Rumi, Saadi and Hafez. As well, once trans­la­tions of clas­si­cal Per­sian lit­er­a­ture began to appear in Eng­lish in the 18th and 19th cen­turies, Attar’s work — along with, among oth­ers, that of the three poets I just men­tioned — played an impor­tant role both in help­ing the English-speaking world of the time under­stand Per­sian and Islamic cul­ture and in bring­ing into Eng­lish lit­er­a­ture an influ­ence felt by the likes of Matthew Arnold and Lord Byron, and that con­tem­po­rary writ­ers like Robert Bly con­tinue to find impor­tant. It is both ironic and a shame, there­fore, that only one of Attar’s major works, Man­teq al-Tayr, exists in a con­tem­po­rary trans­la­tion for a gen­eral English-language read­er­ship, The Con­fer­ence of the Birds, pub­lished in 1984 by Afkham Dar­bandi and Dick Davis. Read­able, enjoy­able and poet­i­cally pow­er­ful, The Con­fer­ence of the Birds is the kind of trans­la­tion we deserve of a lit­er­a­ture that has influ­enced ours in such sig­nif­i­cant ways. Unfor­tu­nately, what­ever its mer­its on schol­arly grounds, the same can­not be said — at least not with the same enthu­si­asm — for John Andrew Boyle’s out-of-print trans­la­tion of Ilahi-Nama, The Ilahi-Nama or Book of God, pub­lished by the Uni­ver­sity of Man­ches­ter Press in 1976.

In an essay called “Rep­re­sen­ta­tions of Attar in the West and in the East,” Christo­pher Shackle crit­i­cizes Mar­garet Smith’s 1932 trans­la­tion of Man­teq al-Tayr for being writ­ten “in a prose whose archaisms, includ­ing bib­li­cal ‘thee’s and ‘thou’s, cover Attar’s stu­diously clear style with a patina of rev­er­ence….” (187). Boyle’s Ilahi-Nama suf­fers from the same weak­ness. Here, for exam­ple, is his ren­der­ing of the pas­sage in “The Tale of Mar­juma” where the woman berates her brother-in-law for try­ing to have his way with her:

She said to him: “Art thou not ashamed before God? Dost thou thus show respect to thy brother?
Is this thy reli­gion and thy pro­bity? Dost thou thus keep trust for thy brother?
Go, repent, return to God, and eschew this wicked thought.”

That man said to the woman: “It is no use; thou must sat­isfy me at once,
Oth­er­wise I will cease to con­cern myself about thee, I will expose thee to shame, I will slight thee.
Straight­away now I shall cast thee to destruc­tion, I shall cast thee into a fear­ful plight.” (32)

As well, Boyle too often relies on a lit­er­al­ness that ends up being unin­ten­tion­ally comic and/or almost impos­si­ble to com­pre­hend. The first line of the final sec­tion of the “Exordium,” in which Attar praises and med­i­tates upon the great­ness of God — “Come, musk of the soul, open thy musk-bladder, for thou art the deputy of the Vicar of God” (27) — is an exam­ple of the for­mer. In “The Tale of Mar­juma,” to give an exam­ple of the lat­ter, when the female pro­tag­o­nist is on a ship at sea, about to be raped by the entire crew, she prays to God to save her. This is Boyle’s ren­der­ing of that scene:

When the woman learned of these wicked men’s feel­ings, she saw the whole sea as a liver from her heart’s blood.
She opened her mouth [and said]: “O Knower of Secrets, pre­serve me from the evil of these wicked men.” (38)

The phrase “the whole sea as a liver from her heart’s blood” clearly relates to the idea in Per­sian cul­ture that the liver, not the heart, is the seat of emo­tion, but what the phrase means, except in the vaguest of senses, is far from clear. By way of com­par­i­son, here is my ver­sion of those lines:

When she learned
what the men intended, she turned
and saw in the sea sur­round­ing her,
filled with her heart’s blood, a liver
wide enough to hold all she felt.
Her mouth fell open. She knelt,
prayed: “Pro­tect me, Knower of Secrets!
Save me from this wickedness.”

I make no claim that this is great poetry, or that there is no bet­ter solu­tion to the “heart’s-blood-liver” metaphor; and I am very aware that whether or not my trans­la­tion will endure is a ques­tion that only time and read­ers will answer, but the value of bring­ing Ilahi-Nama into 21st cen­tury Amer­i­can Eng­lish poetry is not only, and not even pri­mar­ily, that it might be suc­cess­ful in these terms. Rather, the value lies in the sus­tained engage­ment trans­la­tion is — both in the writ­ing and the read­ing — with another culture.

On the one hand, the value of such engage­ment is, or ought to be, self-evident, requir­ing no fur­ther jus­ti­fi­ca­tion. On the other hand, how­ever, given the cur­rent national and inter­na­tional polit­i­cal moment, it is, or ought to be, impos­si­ble to talk about trans­lat­ing Per­sian lit­er­a­ture with­out also talk­ing about both the state of rela­tions between Iran and the United States and the polit­i­cal unrest that has focused world atten­tion on Iran since the con­tested pres­i­den­tial elec­tions there in June 2009. Each of those dynam­ics demands that the peo­ple of the United States learn as much about the Iran­ian peo­ple, their cul­ture and their his­tory, as we pos­si­bly can, espe­cially since our col­lec­tive igno­rance about Iran has been pro­found since diplo­matic rela­tions between our two coun­tries ended after the Islamic Rev­o­lu­tion in 1979 – 80. Boyle’s trans­la­tion of Ilahi-Nama is not a text to which peo­ple are likely to go for that kind of learn­ing, most imme­di­ately because it is out of print, but also because its archaic dic­tion and bib­li­cal style is more likely than not to alien­ate them.

I am nei­ther naïve nor arro­gant enough to assume that my trans­la­tion of Ilahi-Nama will by itself effect any change, large or small, in US-Iran rela­tions or that it will alter even one reader’s notions about Iran and/or Islam. I do know, how­ever, that each trans­lated book made avail­able to a read­ing pub­lic increases the like­li­hood of such change tak­ing place. At the very least because it offers a rad­i­cally dif­fer­ent view of Islam from the ver­sion prac­ticed and pro­mul­gated by the cur­rent Iran­ian gov­ern­ment and can there­fore help to com­bat the anti-Muslim stereo­types cur­rently in fash­ion, but even more sig­nif­i­cantly because it is a great work of lit­er­a­ture writ­ten by one of the world’s great­est poets, whom we in the United States deserve to know bet­ter than we do, a new lit­er­ary trans­la­tion of Ilahi-Nama should be among the books mak­ing such change possible.

Sources

ʻAṭṭār, Farīd al-Dīn. The Ilāhī-Nāma Or Book of God of Farīd Al-Dīn ʻAṭṭār. Trans. John Andrew Boyle. Per­sian Her­itage Series, Vol. 29 Man­ches­ter: Man­ches­ter Uni­ver­sity Press, 1976.

Shackle, Christo­pher. “Rep­re­sen­ta­tions of Attar in the West and in the East: Trans­la­tions of the Man­tiq Al-Tayr and the Tale of Shaykh Ṣanʻān.” Attar and the Per­sian Sufi Tra­di­tion: The Art of Spir­i­tual Flight. Eds. Leonard Lewisohn, and Christo­pher Shackle. Lon­don: I. B. Tau­ris, 2006. 165 – 93.