Richard Jeffrey Newman

One of eight major works that can reli­ably be ascribed to Attar, Ilahi-Nama (Book of God or, some­times, Divine Book) has, accord­ing to Ency­clo­pe­dia Iran­ica, been trans­lated once into Eng­lish, by John A. Boyle in 1976, and once into French, by F. Rouhani in 1961. Four of Attar’s eight works—Ilahi-Nama is part of this sub­set — are mys­ti­cal nar­ra­tives, each one deal­ing with a dif­fer­ent aspect of Sufi thought and expe­ri­ence. Ilahi-Nama’s sub­ject is zuhd, or asceti­cism, which Sufis under­stand to mean a dis­ci­plined stance of detach­ment and indif­fer­ence towards one’s desires so that one will not be ruled by them. This focus on the inte­rior world of human emo­tion dif­fer­en­ti­ates Ilahi-Nama from the other of Attar’s poems with which it is often com­pared, Man­teq al-tayr (Con­fer­ence of the Birds), his best known work in Eng­lish. The two poems are sim­i­lar in form (they are each frame sto­ries) and mes­sage (the key to enlight­en­ment exists within each human being, not in the exter­nal world), but the fram­ing nar­ra­tive of Man­teq al-tayr, an alle­gory about a group of birds in search of a king, is essen­tially a cri­tique of people’s need to find a mas­ter who will lead them on the path to true under­stand­ing. Ilahi-Nama, on the other hand, is about learn­ing to mas­ter oneself.

The fram­ing nar­ra­tive of Ilahi-Nama is about a caliph who asks his six sons what they desire most. The first son says he wants the daugh­ter of the king of the peris (faeries); the sec­ond wants to learn the art of magic; the third son desires Jamshid’s cup because it will reveal to him the secrets of the world; the fourth seeks the water of life; the fifth son cov­ets the ring Solomon used to con­trol demons; and the sixth son wants to mas­ter alchemy. As each son gives his answer, the father tells sto­ries to illus­trate, first, how shal­low and mate­ri­al­is­tic the son is for want­ing what he wants and, sec­ond, how the son should under­stand his desire so he can use it on the path to enlight­en­ment. None of the sons, how­ever, accept their father’s lessons at face value, argu­ing that he has mis­un­der­stood their desires and that the lessons he wants them to learn, there­fore, are mis­guided. When the father tells his first son what has come to be known as “The Tale of Mar­juma,” for exam­ple — about a beau­ti­ful and right­eous woman who, after her hus­band leaves on pil­grim­age to Mecca, must fend off a series of men who are so over­come with lust when they glimpse her beauty that they will stop at noth­ing to have her — the son accuses his father of want­ing to elim­i­nate sex. “God for­bid[!]” the father replies, explain­ing that “The Tale of Mar­juma” illus­trates how sex, prop­erly com­pre­hended and entered into, is a first step on the path to enlightenment:

But when your desire achieves apoth­e­o­sis,
sex gives birth to a love with­out lim­its;
and when this love is pushed by pas­sion to the edge
of its strength, spir­i­tual love emerges; and when
spir­i­tual love can grow no fur­ther, your soul
will van­ish into the Beloved’s end­less­ness. (My translation)

Given that the sur­face of the nar­ra­tive in “The Tale of Mar­juma” feels more like a Perils-of-Pauline-type story in which the depraved and debauched men get their come­up­pance than one about the spir­i­tual nature of sex­u­al­ity, the son’s mis­read­ing of the tale is an easy one to fall into. Such a read­ing, how­ever, fails to account for, among other things, the fact that not all the men who try to pos­sess the woman give in to their desires with­out a strug­gle. They are, in other words, nei­ther evil nor merely slaves to their desires; they are human and flawed and, more to the point, they are, in the end, able and will­ing to repent. Indeed, they must repent, for God has pun­ished them with a paral­y­sis from which — in an irony that is at the core of the story’s mean­ing — they can be healed only by con­fess­ing to the woman every­thing they did to her. » Read the rest of this entry «

Where I lived in the early 1970s, sixth grade was when boys got to see the movie – or maybe it was a nar­rated film strip with line draw­ings – about erec­tions, noc­tur­nal emis­sions, men­strual peri­ods and such (girls got to see it in fifth grade).[1. I have moved this post over from my other blog. (Click for Part One.) This way, when I finally get around to writ­ing Parts 3 and 4, they will all be in the same place. I see each post in this series as one sec­tion of a sin­gle piece of writ­ing, not as a dis­crete essay unto itself. As a result, while each sec­tion may con­tain its own argu­ment, it is not really pos­si­ble to know whether an issue that you feel is impor­tant will or will not be left out of the argu­ment made by the entire piece if you’ve only read a part of the series. I cer­tainly do not mean this caveat to be, in any way, an inoc­u­la­tion against cri­tique, but given the mod­u­lar nature of post­ing to blogs and of how blogs are read, it is a caveat I’d like you to keep in mind if you find your­self won­der­ing, and com­ment­ing on, why I have not addressed some­thing you feel needs to be addressed. Thanks. Also, to pro­tect the pri­vacy of the indi­vid­u­als involved, some names have been changed and some iden­ti­fy­ing details have been fic­tion­al­ized.] Sev­enth grade, if I remem­ber cor­rectly, was when they started teach­ing about sex itself, which I assume would have included a dis­cus­sion of birth con­trol, though I am not sure, since a paper­work mix-up placed me in the health class that did not include sex edu­ca­tion. So I know I did not learn about birth con­trol there; nor, I am equally sure, did I learn about it in the yeshiva I started attend­ing when I was in eighth grade, where the only classroom-based “sex edu­ca­tion” I remem­ber receiv­ing was in Rabbi W’s all-boy gemara class. He would preach at us week after week about the evils of co-ed danc­ing – it was the sea­son of sweet 16 par­ties for the girls – and explain how it inevitably lead to unwanted teenage preg­nancy. (The boys and girls watch each other danc­ing, you see, and then they want to slow dance, and so they are touch­ing each other, and then one thing leads to another and, sooner or later they find some­place dark, and before you know it, her belly is big and both their lives are ruined.) My class­mates and I talked about sex, of course, but since none of us were even think­ing about actu­ally hav­ing it, what we talked about tended to be the­o­ret­i­cal and had lit­tle do with prac­ti­cal­i­ties like pre­vent­ing an unwanted preg­nancy. Three inci­dents of such talk­ing stand out in my mem­ory, from 8^th, 9^th and 10^th grades respectively.

I first learned about the baseball-diamond-as-metaphor-for-sex in 8^th grade, because the big ques­tion was whether or not, at someone’s bar mitz­vah to which I had not been invited, Robert “got to sec­ond” with Sharon over or under the shirt. “Over or under,” of course, was a huge ques­tion, one that my class­mates pon­dered at great length, won­der­ing why she would let him get that far, how cool it was that he could get her to let him get that far; or maybe he didn’t have to do all that much per­suad­ing, maybe under­neath the “good girl” image that Sharon so care­fully cul­ti­vated was a whole other per­son that those of us who knew her only in school had never met; and did this make her a “slut,” and how, pre­cisely, did get­ting that far, did her let­ting him get that far, oblig­ate him to her in terms of com­mit­ment; and what the hell – some peo­ple were smart enough to ask – did com­mit­ment mean in ninth grade anyway?

I could not imag­ine why what Robert and Sharon did or did not do with each other was any­one else’s busi­ness, nor did I think that the ques­tion of when a girl stepped over the line and became a “slut” was any­thing other than stu­pid, but I was new to the school, though, which meant no one thought my opin­ion mat­tered very much, and so I was almost never included in these con­ver­sa­tions. Still, I do remem­ber one time that I spoke up, ask­ing – in response to I don’t remem­ber what – some far-less-articulate ver­sion of the fol­low­ing ques­tions: The whole point of touch­ing a girl’s breasts is to bring her plea­sure, right? What is wrong with Sharon want­ing that plea­sure or with Robert want­ing to give it to her? And why are we talk­ing about it like Robert was run­ning bases and Sharon was play­ing (inef­fec­tive) defense? You make it sound like sex is a com­pe­ti­tion that the girl has to pre­tend to lose, just a lit­tle bit at a time, in order for both peo­ple to get what they want.

I was not naïve. I knew that boys did in fact put “notches on their bed­posts” depend­ing on how far they got with any par­tic­u­lar girl, and I under­stood that girls who went too far put that hard-to-pin-down thing called their rep­u­ta­tion at great risk. I knew these things, how­ever, as facts, and while I accepted them as infor­ma­tion I needed to know about how the world worked, I did not really under­stand them, and, more to the point, I did not like them. Any­way, no one said any­thing when I was fin­ished talk­ing. All I have is a pic­ture of my class­mates’ faces turned towards me in a momen­tary, non-comprehending stare, and then they turned back towards each other and con­tin­ued talk­ing in the terms that were rel­e­vant to them. » Read the rest of this entry «

I orig­i­nally posted this in response to a con­ver­sa­tion about rape that was hap­pen­ing over at Alas, A Blog but that doesn’t seem to be online any­more, specif­i­cally about why some women have a hard time rec­og­niz­ing rape as rape. Some­thing about that con­ver­sa­tion – I don’t remem­ber what, and I don’t really feel the need to go back and read through the entire thread – made me think of the first time I had sex and how com­ing to terms with that expe­ri­ence raised for me some really inter­est­ing ques­tions that, while absolutely derail­ing in a thread about women and rape, were nonethe­less impor­tant to think about. This has been, con­sis­tently, the most pop­u­lar post on the older ver­sion of It’s All Con­nected, and so I am repost­ing it, with some small edits, here.

I lost my vir­gin­ity when I was six­teen with the eighteen-year-old girl who lived on the first floor of the build­ing next to my grandmother’s. As soon as our rela­tion­ship started to become phys­i­cal — and this was my first sex­ual rela­tion­ship ever — I asked her if she was a vir­gin. She told me yes. I told her I was as well and that I wanted to stay that way. My posi­tion had noth­ing to do with morals. I knew myself, and I knew that I was not ready for the level of inti­macy or the risk of unwanted preg­nancy that inter­course rep­re­sented. She told me that she felt the same way, and so our phys­i­cal rela­tion­ship con­sisted of all the things you can do with­out los­ing your vir­gin­ity. One time, how­ever, as she was mak­ing love to me, she climbed on top of me, and by the time I under­stood what was hap­pen­ing, I was inside her and both the power of the phys­i­cal sen­sa­tion, which was over­whelm­ing, and my own con­fu­sion, which was over­whelm­ing as well, made it impos­si­ble for me to find a place within myself from which to tell her to stop or to push her off me.

I did not like how empty I felt when we were fin­ished, and I told her so. I had thought – assum­ing we’d decided that we wanted to be each other’s first – that we would plan the loss of our vir­gini­ties, and so I fig­ured that the sex had hap­pened because we’d each, sep­a­rately, got­ten car­ried away in the moment. I knew that noth­ing in the way I’d behaved would have sig­ni­fied to her any­thing other than my enthu­si­as­tic par­tic­i­pa­tion, so I was not try­ing to accuse her of any­thing. Still, I was dis­ap­pointed that my first expe­ri­ence of inter­course was one I had not wanted to take place. I told her this as well, assum­ing that since she too was a vir­gin, she would at least under­stand how I felt, even if she did not feel quite the same way. What I wanted, in other words, was to talk about what had hap­pened, to make sense of it in a way that would bridge the gap that, to me at least, had opened between us. My friend, how­ever, responded in a way that shut that pos­si­bil­ity down pretty much com­pletely. If I hadn’t wanted to have sex, she told me, I should have told her to stop. Besides, who did I think I was kid­ding? I was no dif­fer­ent from any other guy. The only rea­son I’d said I didn’t want to have sex was that I was afraid I wouldn’t know how to do it right. » Read the rest of this entry «