The American Dream of riches for all is turning into a nightmare of inequality. But a backlash is brewing, reports Paul Harris in New York
Paul Harris in New York
Sunday July 22, 2007
Observer
On the surface, Mark Cain works for a time-share company. Members pay a one-off sum to join and an annual fee. They then get to book holiday time in various destinations around the globe.
But Solstice clients are not ordinary people. They are America's super-rich and a brief glance at its operations reveal the vast and still widening gulf between them and the rest of America.
Solstice has only about 80 members. Platinum membership costs them $875,000 to join and then a $42,000 annual fee. In return they get access to 10 homes from London to California and a private yacht in the Caribbean, all fully staffed with cooks, cleaners and 'lifestyle managers' ready to satisfy any whim from helicopter-skiing to audiences with local celebrities. As the firm's marketing manager, Cain knows what Solstice's clientele want. 'We are trying to feed and manage this insatiable appetite for luxury,' Cain said with pride.
America's super-rich have returned to the days of the Roaring Twenties. As the rest of the country struggles to get by, a huge bubble of multi-millionaires lives almost in a parallel world. The rich now live in their own world of private education, private health care and gated mansions. They have their own schools and their own banks. They even travel apart - creating a booming industry of private jets and yachts. Their world now has a name, thanks to a new book by Wall Street Journal reporter Robert Frank which has dubbed it 'Richistan'. There every dream can come true. But for the American Dream itself - which promises everyone can join the elite - the emergence of Richistan is a mixed blessing. 'We in America are heading towards 'developing nation' levels of inequality. We would become like Brazil. What does that say about us? What does that say about America?' Frank said.
In 1985 there were just 13 US billionaires. Now there are more than 1,000. In 2005 the US saw 227,000 new millionaires being created. One survey showed that the wealth of all US millionaires was $30 trillion, more than the GDPs of China, Japan, Brazil, Russia and the EU combined.
The rich have now created their own economy for their needs, at a time when the average worker's wage rises will merely match inflation and where 36 million people live below the poverty line. In Richistan sums of money are rendered almost meaningless because of their size. It also has other names. There is the 'Platinum Triangle' used to describe the slice of Beverly Hills where many houses go for above $10m. Then there is the Jewel Coast, used to describe the strip of Madison Avenue in Manhattan where boutique jewellery stories have sprung up to cater for the new riches' needs. Or it exists in the MetCircle society, a Manhattan club open only to those whose net worth is at least $100m.
The reason behind the sudden wealth boom is, according to some experts, the convergence of a new technology - the internet and other computing advances - with fluid and speculative markets. It was the same in the late 19th century when the original Gilded Age of conspicuous wealth and deep poverty was spawned by railways and the industrial age. At the same time government has helped by doling out corporate tax breaks. In the Fifties the proportion of federal income from company taxes was 33 per cent, by 2003 it was just 7.4 percent. Some 82 of America's largest companies paid no tax at all in at least one of the first three years of the administration of President George W Bush.
But who are the new rich? Some of the names are familiar, Microsoft tycoon Bill Gates and savvy stock investor Warren Buffett. But most are unknown, often springing from the secretive world of financial hedge funds. Men like James Simons, who took home compensation of $1.7bn last year. Last year the 25 top earning hedge fund bankers in the US earned an average of $570m each. The average US household income is $50,000.
It is such men - and they are usually men - who feed the outlandish luxury goods economy of Richistan. It is they who are responsible for the rebirth of the butler industry, which was all but dead in the Seventies and is now facing a shortage of trained staff. So keen is the demand that many can expect to earn a six-figure salary when they graduate from booming butler schools.
Then there is the runaway feeder-industry of luxury consumer items. The new ultra rich turn up their noses at Rolexes; the sought-after brand is Franck Muller, which sells a high-end timepiece for $736,000. Or try a Mont Blanc pen, encrusted in jewels, for $700,000. Louis Vuitton's most exclusive handbag sells for $42,000. Only 24 were ever made and none ever touched a shelf as all were pre-sold to Richistani clients.
In places such as Manhattan and Los Angeles, restaurants and bars outdo themselves in excess. New York's Algonquin Hotel has a $10,000 'martini on a rock' (it comes with a diamond at the bottom of the glass). City eateries sell burgers for more than $50. One offers a $1,000 omelette. In Los Angeles there is a craze for Bling mineral water - at $90 a bottle.
Then there are the boats. The private yacht industry in America has been caught in an arms race of size and luxuriousness. So far, there has been a clear winner: Oracle-founder Larry Ellison's 450ft water palace, the Rising Sun. More than 80 rooms on five storeys and a landing craft that carries a Jeep, a basketball court doubling as a helipad and a fully-equipped cinema.
Now an Oregon-based company is taking things further: private submarines. An estimated 100 or so private subs are now drifting around the world's oceans. Then there are the rockets - several notable billionaires are now leading the way in private exploration of space. One of them is Robert Bigelow who has ploughed $500m into trying to build an inflatable space hotel. A miniature prototype model was successfully launched and tested last month. In a scene that perhaps James Bond would find familiar, armed guards now patrol the fences of Bigelow Aerospace's headquarters wearing badges decorated with an alien as their corporate logo.
But this is not just a world of riches gone mad that the rest of America can ignore. The growth of such a large super-rich class, coupled with a deepening poverty in many communities, is starting to tear at the fabric of society. Even some of the most wealthy - like Gates and Buffett - have spoken openly of the needs to address the massive 'inequality gap' that they have come to exemplify. In effect, some of the very richest Americans are calling for themselves to be taxed. In a speech last month Buffett - the third richest man in the world - pointed out that his tax rate was 17.7 per cent of his income while his secretary was taxed at 30 per cent. 'Many of the new super-rich are looking long term at the world and they see a collapsing US education system and health-care system and the disappearance of the middle class and they realise: this is bad for everybody,' said Frank.
Defenders of low tax for the very rich point to the theory of trickledown economics - the spending power of the rich benefiting the poor. But while the super-rich have boomed, the earning power of the average and poor citizen has not nearly matched the performance of the elite. In 2005 the top one per cent of earners in the US gained 14 per cent in income in real terms, while the rest of the country gained less than one per cent. The situation is especially bad for the severely poor - those living at half the poverty level - whose numbers are at a 32-year high. The rich are getting richer but are not bringing everyone else with them. 'If you look at the impact of the last 20 years it seems pretty clear that trickledown just does not work,' said Paul Buchheit, economics professor at Chicago's Harold Washington College.
There are some signs of a change in attitude. Recent huge Wall Street flotations such as the listing of private equity giants like Blackstone have created a push in Congress for taxes on the instant billionaires they have created. Scandals of excess such as Enron and WorldCom and the trial of Conrad Black have been high-profile. But few politicians, needing campaign cash from new millionaires, will get far preaching higher tax. Calls for more equality tend to have come from men like Buffett and Gates whose fortunes are so enormous that a little extra tax would make no difference. Bush has pushed to phase out taxes like the estate tax, which benefit only the rich. 'I don't see it changing. No matter what administration is in power,' said Buchheit.
But many think it must change. To a large degree, the debate over the booming lives of the super-rich is an argument about the American soul. It is a country that has always worshipped wealth, where the creation of a fortune was seen as virtuous and a source of pride.
But now that huge wealth has started to squeeze the 'middle class' out of existence, leaving the haves and have-nots in very separate worlds. It is possible that political will may develop to address the problem or that the problem will correct itself. The notorious end of the Gilded Age came in the panic of 1893 that sank America into depression.
Frank believes the signs of a coming storm are there. 'The trick is to spot when prosperity turns to excess,' he said. 'When a large amount of people make a lot money very quickly it's a sign you are near the top of the market.'
In a world of mega-yachts, private submarines and space hotels, that peak might be close at hand. And it's a long way down.
Billionaire's row
· There are 7.5 million households in America worth up to $10m. A further two million are worth $10m-$100m and thousands are worth more than $100m.
· There is now a two-year waiting list for 200ft yachts. If put end to end, the boats on that list, which cost $50m each, would be 15 miles long.
· Sebonack Golf Club in the Hamptons, Long Island, charges $650,000 for membership. That doesn't include the $12,000 annual dues, or tips for caddies.
· Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page have a private Boeing 767.
· John D. Rockefeller was America's first billionaire. Adjusted for inflation, he had $14bn - less than the net worth of each of Sam Walton's five children today. There were 13 US billionaires in 1985. Now there are more than 1,000. There are as many millionaires in North Carolina as in India.
· 'Affluent' is Richistani for 'not really rich'. According to Frank, you need about $10m to be considered entry-level rich.
Sunday, July 22, 2007
Welcome to Richistan, USA
The American Dream of riches for all is turning into a nightmare of inequality. But a backlash is brewing, reports Paul Harris in New York
Paul Harris in New York
Sunday July 22, 2007
Observer
On the surface, Mark Cain works for a time-share company. Members pay a one-off sum to join and an annual fee. They then get to book holiday time in various destinations around the globe.
But Solstice clients are not ordinary people. They are America's super-rich and a brief glance at its operations reveal the vast and still widening gulf between them and the rest of America.
Solstice has only about 80 members. Platinum membership costs them $875,000 to join and then a $42,000 annual fee. In return they get access to 10 homes from London to California and a private yacht in the Caribbean, all fully staffed with cooks, cleaners and 'lifestyle managers' ready to satisfy any whim from helicopter-skiing to audiences with local celebrities. As the firm's marketing manager, Cain knows what Solstice's clientele want. 'We are trying to feed and manage this insatiable appetite for luxury,' Cain said with pride.
America's super-rich have returned to the days of the Roaring Twenties. As the rest of the country struggles to get by, a huge bubble of multi-millionaires lives almost in a parallel world. The rich now live in their own world of private education, private health care and gated mansions. They have their own schools and their own banks. They even travel apart - creating a booming industry of private jets and yachts. Their world now has a name, thanks to a new book by Wall Street Journal reporter Robert Frank which has dubbed it 'Richistan'. There every dream can come true. But for the American Dream itself - which promises everyone can join the elite - the emergence of Richistan is a mixed blessing. 'We in America are heading towards 'developing nation' levels of inequality. We would become like Brazil. What does that say about us? What does that say about America?' Frank said.
In 1985 there were just 13 US billionaires. Now there are more than 1,000. In 2005 the US saw 227,000 new millionaires being created. One survey showed that the wealth of all US millionaires was $30 trillion, more than the GDPs of China, Japan, Brazil, Russia and the EU combined.
The rich have now created their own economy for their needs, at a time when the average worker's wage rises will merely match inflation and where 36 million people live below the poverty line. In Richistan sums of money are rendered almost meaningless because of their size. It also has other names. There is the 'Platinum Triangle' used to describe the slice of Beverly Hills where many houses go for above $10m. Then there is the Jewel Coast, used to describe the strip of Madison Avenue in Manhattan where boutique jewellery stories have sprung up to cater for the new riches' needs. Or it exists in the MetCircle society, a Manhattan club open only to those whose net worth is at least $100m.
The reason behind the sudden wealth boom is, according to some experts, the convergence of a new technology - the internet and other computing advances - with fluid and speculative markets. It was the same in the late 19th century when the original Gilded Age of conspicuous wealth and deep poverty was spawned by railways and the industrial age. At the same time government has helped by doling out corporate tax breaks. In the Fifties the proportion of federal income from company taxes was 33 per cent, by 2003 it was just 7.4 percent. Some 82 of America's largest companies paid no tax at all in at least one of the first three years of the administration of President George W Bush.
But who are the new rich? Some of the names are familiar, Microsoft tycoon Bill Gates and savvy stock investor Warren Buffett. But most are unknown, often springing from the secretive world of financial hedge funds. Men like James Simons, who took home compensation of $1.7bn last year. Last year the 25 top earning hedge fund bankers in the US earned an average of $570m each. The average US household income is $50,000.
It is such men - and they are usually men - who feed the outlandish luxury goods economy of Richistan. It is they who are responsible for the rebirth of the butler industry, which was all but dead in the Seventies and is now facing a shortage of trained staff. So keen is the demand that many can expect to earn a six-figure salary when they graduate from booming butler schools.
Then there is the runaway feeder-industry of luxury consumer items. The new ultra rich turn up their noses at Rolexes; the sought-after brand is Franck Muller, which sells a high-end timepiece for $736,000. Or try a Mont Blanc pen, encrusted in jewels, for $700,000. Louis Vuitton's most exclusive handbag sells for $42,000. Only 24 were ever made and none ever touched a shelf as all were pre-sold to Richistani clients.
In places such as Manhattan and Los Angeles, restaurants and bars outdo themselves in excess. New York's Algonquin Hotel has a $10,000 'martini on a rock' (it comes with a diamond at the bottom of the glass). City eateries sell burgers for more than $50. One offers a $1,000 omelette. In Los Angeles there is a craze for Bling mineral water - at $90 a bottle.
Then there are the boats. The private yacht industry in America has been caught in an arms race of size and luxuriousness. So far, there has been a clear winner: Oracle-founder Larry Ellison's 450ft water palace, the Rising Sun. More than 80 rooms on five storeys and a landing craft that carries a Jeep, a basketball court doubling as a helipad and a fully-equipped cinema.
Now an Oregon-based company is taking things further: private submarines. An estimated 100 or so private subs are now drifting around the world's oceans. Then there are the rockets - several notable billionaires are now leading the way in private exploration of space. One of them is Robert Bigelow who has ploughed $500m into trying to build an inflatable space hotel. A miniature prototype model was successfully launched and tested last month. In a scene that perhaps James Bond would find familiar, armed guards now patrol the fences of Bigelow Aerospace's headquarters wearing badges decorated with an alien as their corporate logo.
But this is not just a world of riches gone mad that the rest of America can ignore. The growth of such a large super-rich class, coupled with a deepening poverty in many communities, is starting to tear at the fabric of society. Even some of the most wealthy - like Gates and Buffett - have spoken openly of the needs to address the massive 'inequality gap' that they have come to exemplify. In effect, some of the very richest Americans are calling for themselves to be taxed. In a speech last month Buffett - the third richest man in the world - pointed out that his tax rate was 17.7 per cent of his income while his secretary was taxed at 30 per cent. 'Many of the new super-rich are looking long term at the world and they see a collapsing US education system and health-care system and the disappearance of the middle class and they realise: this is bad for everybody,' said Frank.
Defenders of low tax for the very rich point to the theory of trickledown economics - the spending power of the rich benefiting the poor. But while the super-rich have boomed, the earning power of the average and poor citizen has not nearly matched the performance of the elite. In 2005 the top one per cent of earners in the US gained 14 per cent in income in real terms, while the rest of the country gained less than one per cent. The situation is especially bad for the severely poor - those living at half the poverty level - whose numbers are at a 32-year high. The rich are getting richer but are not bringing everyone else with them. 'If you look at the impact of the last 20 years it seems pretty clear that trickledown just does not work,' said Paul Buchheit, economics professor at Chicago's Harold Washington College.
There are some signs of a change in attitude. Recent huge Wall Street flotations such as the listing of private equity giants like Blackstone have created a push in Congress for taxes on the instant billionaires they have created. Scandals of excess such as Enron and WorldCom and the trial of Conrad Black have been high-profile. But few politicians, needing campaign cash from new millionaires, will get far preaching higher tax. Calls for more equality tend to have come from men like Buffett and Gates whose fortunes are so enormous that a little extra tax would make no difference. Bush has pushed to phase out taxes like the estate tax, which benefit only the rich. 'I don't see it changing. No matter what administration is in power,' said Buchheit.
But many think it must change. To a large degree, the debate over the booming lives of the super-rich is an argument about the American soul. It is a country that has always worshipped wealth, where the creation of a fortune was seen as virtuous and a source of pride.
But now that huge wealth has started to squeeze the 'middle class' out of existence, leaving the haves and have-nots in very separate worlds. It is possible that political will may develop to address the problem or that the problem will correct itself. The notorious end of the Gilded Age came in the panic of 1893 that sank America into depression.
Frank believes the signs of a coming storm are there. 'The trick is to spot when prosperity turns to excess,' he said. 'When a large amount of people make a lot money very quickly it's a sign you are near the top of the market.'
In a world of mega-yachts, private submarines and space hotels, that peak might be close at hand. And it's a long way down.
Billionaire's row
· There are 7.5 million households in America worth up to $10m. A further two million are worth $10m-$100m and thousands are worth more than $100m.
· There is now a two-year waiting list for 200ft yachts. If put end to end, the boats on that list, which cost $50m each, would be 15 miles long.
· Sebonack Golf Club in the Hamptons, Long Island, charges $650,000 for membership. That doesn't include the $12,000 annual dues, or tips for caddies.
· Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page have a private Boeing 767.
· John D. Rockefeller was America's first billionaire. Adjusted for inflation, he had $14bn - less than the net worth of each of Sam Walton's five children today. There were 13 US billionaires in 1985. Now there are more than 1,000. There are as many millionaires in North Carolina as in India.
· 'Affluent' is Richistani for 'not really rich'. According to Frank, you need about $10m to be considered entry-level rich.
Saturday, July 21, 2007
The Wind-up Bird Chronicle
by Haruki Murakami
Amazon.co.uk Review
Bad things come in threes for Toru Okada. He loses his job, his cat disappears, and then his wife fails to return from work. His search for his wife (and his cat) introduces him to a bizarre collection of characters, including two psychic sisters, a possibly unbalanced teenager, an old soldier who witnessed the massacres on the Chinese mainland at the beginning of the Second World War, and a very shady politician.
Haruki Murakami is a master of subtly disturbing prose. Mundane events throb with menace, while the bizarre is accepted without comment. Meaning always seems to be just out of reach, for the reader as well as for the characters, yet one is drawn inexorably into a mystery that may have no solution. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is an extended meditation on themes that appear throughout Murakami's earlier work. The tropes of popular culture, movies, music, detective stories, combine to create a work that explores both the surface and the hidden depths of Japanese society at the end of the 20th century.
If it were possible to isolate one theme in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle that theme would be responsibility. The atrocities committed by the Japanese army in China keep rising to the surface like a repressed memory, and Toru Okada himself is compelled by events to take responsibility for his actions and struggle with his essentially passive nature. If Toru is supposed to be a Japanese Everyman, steeped as he is in Western popular culture and ignorant of the secret history of his own nation, this novel paints a bleak picture. Like the winding up of the titular bird, Murakami slowly twists the gossamer threads of his story into something of considerable weight. --Simon Leake, Amazon.com --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Book Description
'Mesmerising, surreal, this really is the work of a true original' The Times
Synopsis
Toru Okada's cat has disappeared and this has unsettled his wife, who is herself growing more distant every day. Then there are the increasingly explicit telephone calls he has started receiving. As this compelling story unfolds, the tidy suburban realities of Okada's vague and blameless life, spent cooking, reading, listening to jazz and opera and drinking beer at the kitchen table, are turned inside out, and he embarks on a bizarre journey, guided (however obscurely) by a succession of characters, each with a tale to tell.
From the Publisher
Mesmerising, surreal, this really is the work of a true original - The Times
About the Author
Haruki Murakami was born in Kyoto in 1949. His works include A Wild Sheep Chase; The Elephant Vanishes; Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World; Norwegian Wood; Dance Dance Dance; South of the Border, West of the Sun; The Wind-up Bird Chronicle; Sputnik Sweetheart; Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche; after the quake and Birthday Stories.
Warriors of God: Richard the Lionheart and Saladin in the Third Crusade
by James Reston
The story of the Third Crusade, and the two men who dictated its outcome: Saladin, hero of the Islamic world and Richard the Lionheart. Richard and the King of France led a European army of several hundred thousand warriors, but Saladin's manoeuvres resulted in the crusaders retreat and the demise of the Third Crusade.
Counting Sheep: The Science and Pleasures of Sleep and Dreams (Paperback)
by Paul Martin (Author)
Amazon.co.uk Review
A good kip, a nice nap, forty winks--we all know how agreeable it is to hit the hay. In Counting Sheep, Cambridge scientist Paul Martin, onetime Director of Communication at the Cabinet Office, analyses quite why sleep is so biologically and psychologically rewarding.
The book is divided into seven sections, with titles like "Preliminaries, Mechanisms and Origins". Using this scaffolding Martin confidently builds his thesis, that sleep is an adaptation for resting the weary body, which Homo sapiens has since cannily put to other uses (like dreaming).
But this is no dry Darwinian text. Martin is a plausible and highly engaging writer who has a gift for the telling anecdote: witness the Empress of Russia who employed an old woman specifically to tickle her feet so as she could drop off, or the famous-but-sleepy pianist who could only be roused by his wife playing an unresolved chord. Other enlightening diversions take Martin through the pros and cons of hypnotics, sleepwalking, snoring, late night milky drinks, nightmares, fatigued politicos and bedmates. Every section is enlivened by lots of pithy and well-chosen quotes, like James Joyce's blissfully simple: "warm beds, warm full-blooded life".
The author concludes with a chapter on sleeping problems. Many people have trouble getting the right amount of kip from time to time, and Martin gives sage advice on the best sleep regimens and remedies. But you don't have to be a narcoleptic or an insomniac to enjoy Counting Sheep: almost anyone should find this perfect bedtime reading. --Sean Thomas --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Sunday Times 21 July 2002
Just about everything you could possibly wish to know about sleep...Marvellous.
Sunday Telegraph 23 June 2002
A fascinating account of what happens during the dark third of our lives, the time with which we are so familiar but about which we know so little.
Evening Standard 17 June 2002
Energetic and immensely readable, this is as good a popular science book as I have read.
New Statesman 8 July 2002
A masterpiece of efficiently and entertainingly delivered information, bracingly clear and thoroughly researched.
Scotland on Sunday 23 June 2002
A thoroughly engaging and passionate book, littered with fascinating experiments, titillating examples and offbeat asides.
Book Description
A popular science book about the science and pleasures of sleep and dreams.
Synopsis
This an overview of that most vital, most underrated and most elusive of human activities, that draws on both cutting-edge neuroscience and classic literature. We spend one third of our lives asleep, but know hardly anything about it, and can remember so little of it as we come out of it. Why? This text seeks to answer questions such as: does sleeping keep us sane?; are dreams the place we go to resolve our problems, emasculate our fears and rehearse our hopes?; why are we paralysed when we dream?; why did sleep evolve?; and are we getting enough sleep?
From the Back Cover
To sleep, to dream: Paul Martin's Counting Sheep understands the centrality of these activities to all our lives, and can help you respect, and extract more pleasure from, that delicious time when you are lost to the world.
About the Author
Paul Martin studied biology at Cambridge, acquiring a First in Natural Sciences and a PhD in behavioural biology. He went to Stanford as a Harkness fellow and then to the School of Medicine as Postdoctoral Fellow, before lecturing and researching at Cambridge University. He is the co-author with Pat Bateson of Measuring Behaviour and Design for a Life. His first solo book was The Sickening Mind, which was shortlisted for the NCR Prize in 1997. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Wolves
One evening an old Cherokee told his grandson about a battle that goes on inside all people. He said, "My son, the battle is between two wolves inside us all.
One is Evil. It is anger, envy, jealousy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.
The other is Good. It is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and faith."
The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather: "Which wolf wins?"
The old Cherokee replied, "The one you feed."
قصيدة الحزن
علمني حبك ..أن أحزن
و أنا محتاج منذ عصور
لامرأة تجعلني أحزن
لامرأة.. تجمع أجزائي
كشظايا البلور المكسور
***
علمني حبك سيدتي أسوء عادات
علمني أخرج من بيتي
في الليللة ألاف المرات..
و أجرب طب العطارين..
و أطرق باب العرافات..
علمني ..أخرج منبيتي..
لأمشط أرصفة الطرقات
و أطارد وجهك..
في الأمطار..
و في أضواء السيارات..
و أطارد ثوبك..
في أثواب المجهولات
و أطارد طيفك..
حتى..حتى..
في أوراق الإعلانات..
علمني حبك كيف أهيم على وجهي..ساعات
بحثا عن شعر غجري
تحسده كل الغجريات
بحثا عن وجه ٍ..عن صوتٍ..
هو كل الأوجه و الأصواتْ
***
أدخلني حبكِ.. سيدتي
مدن الأحزانْ..
و أنا من قبلكِ لم أدخلْ
مدنَ الأحزان..
لم أعرف أبداً..
أن الدمع هو الإنسان
أن الإنسان بلا حزنٍ
ذكرى إنسانْ..
***
علمني حبكِ..
أن أتصرف كالصبيانْ
أن أرسم وجهك بالطبشور على الحيطانْ..
و على أشرعة الصيادينَ
على الأجراس, على الصلبانْ
علمني حبكِ..كيف الحبُّ
يغير خارطة الأزمانْ..
علمني أني حين أحبُّ..
تكف الأرض عن الدورانْ
علمني حبك أشياءً..
ما كانت أبداً في الحسبانْ
فقرأت أقاصيصَ الأطفالِ..
دخلت قصور ملوك الجانْ
و حلمت بأن تزوجني
بنتُ السلطان..
بلك العيناها ..
أصفى من ماء الخلجانْ
تلك الشفتاها..
أشهى من زهر الرمانْ
و حلمت بأني أخطفها مثل الفرسانْ..
و حلمت بأني أهديها أطواق اللؤلؤ و المرجانْ..
علمني حبك يا سيدتي, ما الهذيانْ
علمني كيف يمر العمر..
و لا تأتي بنت السلطانْ..
***
علمني حبكِ..
كيف أحبك في كل الأشياءْ
في الشجر العاري, في الأوراق اليابسة الصفراءْ
في الجو الماطر.. في الأنواءْ..
في أصغر مقهى.. نشرب فيهِ..
مساءً..قهوتنا السوداءْ..
علمني حبك أن آوي..
لفنادقَ ليس لها أسماءْ
و كنائس ليس لها أسماءْ
و مقاهٍ ليس لها أسماءْ
علمني حبكِ..كيف الليلُ
يضخم أحزان الغرباءْ..
علمني..كيف أرى بيروتْ
إمرأة..طاغية الإغراءْ..
إمراةً..تلبس كل كل مساءْ
أجمل ما تملك من أزياءْ
و ترش العطرعلى نهديها
للبحارةِ..و الأمراء..
علمني حبك أن أبكي من غير بكاءْ
علمني كيف ينام الحزن
كغلام مقطوع القدمينْ..
في طرق (الروشة) و (الحمراء)..
علمني حبك أن أحزنْ..
و أمنا محتاج منذ عصور
لامرأة تجعلني أحزنْ..
لامرأة تجمع أجزائي..
كشظايا البلور المكسور..
و أنا محتاج منذ عصور
لامرأة تجعلني أحزن
لامرأة أبكي فوق ذراعيها مثل العصفور
لامرأة.. تجمع أجزائي
كشظايا البلور المكسور
***
علمني حبك سيدتي أسوء عادات
علمني أخرج من بيتي
في الليللة ألاف المرات..
و أجرب طب العطارين..
و أطرق باب العرافات..
علمني ..أخرج منبيتي..
لأمشط أرصفة الطرقات
و أطارد وجهك..
في الأمطار..
و في أضواء السيارات..
و أطارد ثوبك..
في أثواب المجهولات
و أطارد طيفك..
حتى..حتى..
في أوراق الإعلانات..
علمني حبك كيف أهيم على وجهي..ساعات
بحثا عن شعر غجري
تحسده كل الغجريات
بحثا عن وجه ٍ..عن صوتٍ..
هو كل الأوجه و الأصواتْ
***
أدخلني حبكِ.. سيدتي
مدن الأحزانْ..
و أنا من قبلكِ لم أدخلْ
مدنَ الأحزان..
لم أعرف أبداً..
أن الدمع هو الإنسان
أن الإنسان بلا حزنٍ
ذكرى إنسانْ..
***
علمني حبكِ..
أن أتصرف كالصبيانْ
أن أرسم وجهك بالطبشور على الحيطانْ..
و على أشرعة الصيادينَ
على الأجراس, على الصلبانْ
علمني حبكِ..كيف الحبُّ
يغير خارطة الأزمانْ..
علمني أني حين أحبُّ..
تكف الأرض عن الدورانْ
علمني حبك أشياءً..
ما كانت أبداً في الحسبانْ
فقرأت أقاصيصَ الأطفالِ..
دخلت قصور ملوك الجانْ
و حلمت بأن تزوجني
بنتُ السلطان..
بلك العيناها ..
أصفى من ماء الخلجانْ
تلك الشفتاها..
أشهى من زهر الرمانْ
و حلمت بأني أخطفها مثل الفرسانْ..
و حلمت بأني أهديها أطواق اللؤلؤ و المرجانْ..
علمني حبك يا سيدتي, ما الهذيانْ
علمني كيف يمر العمر..
و لا تأتي بنت السلطانْ..
***
علمني حبكِ..
كيف أحبك في كل الأشياءْ
في الشجر العاري, في الأوراق اليابسة الصفراءْ
في الجو الماطر.. في الأنواءْ..
في أصغر مقهى.. نشرب فيهِ..
مساءً..قهوتنا السوداءْ..
علمني حبك أن آوي..
لفنادقَ ليس لها أسماءْ
و كنائس ليس لها أسماءْ
و مقاهٍ ليس لها أسماءْ
علمني حبكِ..كيف الليلُ
يضخم أحزان الغرباءْ..
علمني..كيف أرى بيروتْ
إمرأة..طاغية الإغراءْ..
إمراةً..تلبس كل كل مساءْ
أجمل ما تملك من أزياءْ
و ترش العطرعلى نهديها
للبحارةِ..و الأمراء..
علمني حبك أن أبكي من غير بكاءْ
علمني كيف ينام الحزن
كغلام مقطوع القدمينْ..
في طرق (الروشة) و (الحمراء)..
علمني حبك أن أحزنْ..
و أمنا محتاج منذ عصور
لامرأة تجعلني أحزنْ..
لامرأة تجمع أجزائي..
كشظايا البلور المكسور..
With a Grain of Salt
By Mohamed Salmawy
First Published 6/15/2007
Absolute Freedom for All
I do not agree at all with those who claim — and they are many — that there is no freedom in Egypt. The truth is that we have never, throughout our seven-thousand-year history known the kind of freedom we now enjoy.
The press, for example, has come to enjoy absolute freedom to slander the highest-ranking officials and insult them however it pleases. It is also free to invent scandals around these officials whenever necessary.
In one newspaper I recently saw a headline that read “Ministers’ sex scandals,” pointing to a story in one of its inside pages. I was disappointed in the newspaper after reading the inside page, not because the report did not match up to its headline, but because it didn’t include any pictures — not even graphics of any sort.
Nevertheless, publishing such a headline, even unaccompanied by any story at all — which is often the case with many newspapers — is enough to rub it in the faces of those who doubt the freedom that the press enjoys nowadays.
However, freedom in Egypt is not — as those who doubt it claim — limited only to the press. It extends to political life as well. Any political group (eg the Muslim Brotherhood) can now function as a public political organization, with its own recognized leaders, members, policies and slogans.
The government’s respect for such a group has grown so much that it now acknowledges it by dealing with it on a daily basis in or out of the People’s Assembly, even if it (or its newspapers) have never recognized its name and refer to it simply by its legal description as “the banned group.”
This free environment has of course reflected on other aspects. The whole country now enjoys a rare case of absolute freedom. I have traveled almost all around the world, but I have never ever seen anything quite like this. Citizens can now walk in the middle of the street oblivious of the existence of any sidewalks. Landlords can now leave their buildings unpainted, red bricks exposed, without any legal penalties.
In Maadi, where I live, we were all surprised at a neighbor who actually annexed the sidewalk extending his own property and turning it into his own little garden. When the neighbors complained to the district officials, the officials showed utmost respect to the freedom of the resident, who had obviously ironed out the matter with them beforehand – hence they did nothing about it.. A few days later, three other neighbors on the same street practiced their own ‘ironed-out’ rights as well, and followed in their neighbor’s footsteps.
Another resident in the same area went ahead and built a kitchen without a license just below his neighbor’s bedroom. When the wronged neighbor, who was fed up of smelling the fried garlic and listening to the splash of mulukhia every time he entered his bedroom, took the matter to court our deficient legal system did not recognize this newly-found freedom. It ordered the immediate demolition of the kitchen and slapped the perpetrator with a one-year prison sentence.
Strangely enough the verdict was never carried out because — believe it or not — demolition orders can now never be executed without the approval of the police.
The entire society, I say, now enjoys absolute freedom. That includes the government as well, which now feels free to turn a deaf ear to any criticism of its policies whether in the press or in parliament. Ministers don’t even bother to attend the parliament interpellations.
Furthermore, ministers — or at least some of them who belong to the NDP’s Policy Secretariat — can now reject any decision by the prime minister himself or refuse to carry out public government policy if they so choose.
Last year, in the prime minister’s office I was witness together with all 30 members of the Board of the Writers’ Union to a decree issued by the prime minister granting financial subsidy to the union towards setting up a much-needed pension fund for Egyptian writers. But the finance minister, who can’t stand the word “subsidy,” a dirty word in the IMF dictionary, refuses so far to carry out the prime minister’s decree, thus asserting his undeniable freedom.
For the same way the press, or members of political groups can do what they want, ministers too can now also do what they want — and so does the police.
Where else in the world can you find such absolute freedom?!
Mohamed Salmawyis President of the Writer’s Union of Egypt and editor-in-chief of Al-Ahram Hebdo. This article is syndicated in the Arabic press.
First Published 6/15/2007
Absolute Freedom for All
I do not agree at all with those who claim — and they are many — that there is no freedom in Egypt. The truth is that we have never, throughout our seven-thousand-year history known the kind of freedom we now enjoy.
The press, for example, has come to enjoy absolute freedom to slander the highest-ranking officials and insult them however it pleases. It is also free to invent scandals around these officials whenever necessary.
In one newspaper I recently saw a headline that read “Ministers’ sex scandals,” pointing to a story in one of its inside pages. I was disappointed in the newspaper after reading the inside page, not because the report did not match up to its headline, but because it didn’t include any pictures — not even graphics of any sort.
Nevertheless, publishing such a headline, even unaccompanied by any story at all — which is often the case with many newspapers — is enough to rub it in the faces of those who doubt the freedom that the press enjoys nowadays.
However, freedom in Egypt is not — as those who doubt it claim — limited only to the press. It extends to political life as well. Any political group (eg the Muslim Brotherhood) can now function as a public political organization, with its own recognized leaders, members, policies and slogans.
The government’s respect for such a group has grown so much that it now acknowledges it by dealing with it on a daily basis in or out of the People’s Assembly, even if it (or its newspapers) have never recognized its name and refer to it simply by its legal description as “the banned group.”
This free environment has of course reflected on other aspects. The whole country now enjoys a rare case of absolute freedom. I have traveled almost all around the world, but I have never ever seen anything quite like this. Citizens can now walk in the middle of the street oblivious of the existence of any sidewalks. Landlords can now leave their buildings unpainted, red bricks exposed, without any legal penalties.
In Maadi, where I live, we were all surprised at a neighbor who actually annexed the sidewalk extending his own property and turning it into his own little garden. When the neighbors complained to the district officials, the officials showed utmost respect to the freedom of the resident, who had obviously ironed out the matter with them beforehand – hence they did nothing about it.. A few days later, three other neighbors on the same street practiced their own ‘ironed-out’ rights as well, and followed in their neighbor’s footsteps.
Another resident in the same area went ahead and built a kitchen without a license just below his neighbor’s bedroom. When the wronged neighbor, who was fed up of smelling the fried garlic and listening to the splash of mulukhia every time he entered his bedroom, took the matter to court our deficient legal system did not recognize this newly-found freedom. It ordered the immediate demolition of the kitchen and slapped the perpetrator with a one-year prison sentence.
Strangely enough the verdict was never carried out because — believe it or not — demolition orders can now never be executed without the approval of the police.
The entire society, I say, now enjoys absolute freedom. That includes the government as well, which now feels free to turn a deaf ear to any criticism of its policies whether in the press or in parliament. Ministers don’t even bother to attend the parliament interpellations.
Furthermore, ministers — or at least some of them who belong to the NDP’s Policy Secretariat — can now reject any decision by the prime minister himself or refuse to carry out public government policy if they so choose.
Last year, in the prime minister’s office I was witness together with all 30 members of the Board of the Writers’ Union to a decree issued by the prime minister granting financial subsidy to the union towards setting up a much-needed pension fund for Egyptian writers. But the finance minister, who can’t stand the word “subsidy,” a dirty word in the IMF dictionary, refuses so far to carry out the prime minister’s decree, thus asserting his undeniable freedom.
For the same way the press, or members of political groups can do what they want, ministers too can now also do what they want — and so does the police.
Where else in the world can you find such absolute freedom?!
Mohamed Salmawyis President of the Writer’s Union of Egypt and editor-in-chief of Al-Ahram Hebdo. This article is syndicated in the Arabic press.
The Story of My Life
i was ready to tell
the story of my life
but the ripple of tears
and the agony of my heart
wouldn't let me
i began to stutter
saying a word here and there
and all along i felt
as tender as a crystal
ready to be shattered
in this stormy sea
we call life
all the big ships
come apart
board by board
how can i survive
riding a lonely
little boat
with no oars
and no arms
my boat did finally break
by the waves
and i broke free
as i tied myself
to a single board
though the panic is gone
i am now offended
why should i be so helpless
rising with one wave
and falling with the next
i don't know
if i am
nonexistence
while i exist
but i know for sure
when i am
i am not
but
when i am not
then i am
now how can i be
a skeptic
about the
resurrection and
coming to life again
since in this world
i have many times
like my own imagination
died and
been born again
that is why
after a long agonizing life
as a hunter
i finally let go and got
hunted down and became free
-Rumi
the story of my life
but the ripple of tears
and the agony of my heart
wouldn't let me
i began to stutter
saying a word here and there
and all along i felt
as tender as a crystal
ready to be shattered
in this stormy sea
we call life
all the big ships
come apart
board by board
how can i survive
riding a lonely
little boat
with no oars
and no arms
my boat did finally break
by the waves
and i broke free
as i tied myself
to a single board
though the panic is gone
i am now offended
why should i be so helpless
rising with one wave
and falling with the next
i don't know
if i am
nonexistence
while i exist
but i know for sure
when i am
i am not
but
when i am not
then i am
now how can i be
a skeptic
about the
resurrection and
coming to life again
since in this world
i have many times
like my own imagination
died and
been born again
that is why
after a long agonizing life
as a hunter
i finally let go and got
hunted down and became free
-Rumi
I Saw Goodness Getting Drunk
I am gone,
lost any sense of wanting the wine
of the nowhereness ask me,
I don't know where I am.
At times I plunge
to the bottom of the sea,
at times, rise up
like the Sun.
At times, the universe is pregnant by me,
at times I give birth to it.
The milestone in my life
is the nowhereness,
I don't fit anywhere else.
This is me:
a rogue and a drunkard,
easy to spot
in the tavern of Lovers.
I am the one shouting hey ha.
They ask me why I don't
behave myself.
I say, when you
reveal your true nature,
then I will act my age.
Last night, I saw Goodness getting drunk.
He growled and said,
I am a nuisance, a nuisance.
A hundred souls cried out, but
we are yours, we are yours, we are yours.
You are the light
that spoke to Moses and said
I am God, I am God, I am God.
I said Shams-e Tabrizi, who are you?
He said, I am you, I am you, I am you.
-Rumi
lost any sense of wanting the wine
of the nowhereness ask me,
I don't know where I am.
At times I plunge
to the bottom of the sea,
at times, rise up
like the Sun.
At times, the universe is pregnant by me,
at times I give birth to it.
The milestone in my life
is the nowhereness,
I don't fit anywhere else.
This is me:
a rogue and a drunkard,
easy to spot
in the tavern of Lovers.
I am the one shouting hey ha.
They ask me why I don't
behave myself.
I say, when you
reveal your true nature,
then I will act my age.
Last night, I saw Goodness getting drunk.
He growled and said,
I am a nuisance, a nuisance.
A hundred souls cried out, but
we are yours, we are yours, we are yours.
You are the light
that spoke to Moses and said
I am God, I am God, I am God.
I said Shams-e Tabrizi, who are you?
He said, I am you, I am you, I am you.
-Rumi
Inside the minds of killer doctors
Some of the accused behind the recent terror plots in Britain were professional healers. What on earth prompts someone to snap from caregiver to killer?
By Juan Cole
Jul. 09, 2007 | Counterterrorism officials have expressed astonishment that physicians and medical personnel appear to have been behind the recent terror plots involving car bombs in Britain. Physicians swear the Hippocratic oath to do no harm, and are in a caring profession aimed at healing, not killing. This puzzlement, however, betrays a lack of understanding of how members of small terrorist cells think and what motivates them. How, indeed, could a physician plan to inflict mayhem and lethal violence on club-goers or airline passengers?
Last Tuesday, a former Muslim militant, Shiraz Maher, dropped a bombshell in an interview on the BBC's "Newsnight," saying he had known one of the alleged perpetrators, Dr. Bilal Abdullah, a Sunni Iraqi, when Abdullah was at Cambridge. Dr. Abdullah, he said, "actively cheered the deaths of British and American troops in Iraq." From an elite Sunni medical family, born in the U.K. but raised in Baghdad, Abdullah attended the upscale al-Mansour high school and Baghdad College. Abdullah's family and friends have been targeted by Shiites in the past, according to recent news reports, although Abdullah reportedly had converted to the radical Salafi Jihadi form of Sunnism even before the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime. He is alleged to have hated Shiites, whom he considered apostates. He is also said to have come under the influence, while in Iraq, of the Sunni fundamentalist cleric Sheikh Ahmad al-Kubaisi, of the Association of Muslim Scholars.
Although not all the suspects so far detained in the attacks may be presumed guilty, Dr. Abdullah was arrested at the scene, on fire. He likely believed that Britain and the U.S. were responsible for the hundreds of thousands of deaths in Iraq -- though this is a gross simplification of a complex war -- and that the imperial powers had fatally marginalized Iraq's formerly dominant Sunni Arabs in favor of Iran-linked Shiites and separatist Kurds.
Abdullah's actions are consistent with the research findings of University of Chicago political scientist Robert Pape, who found that most suicide bombers are protesting what they see as the humiliating occupation of their country by a foreign military. He theorized that the bombings are intended to affect public opinion, and so to bring about changes in political attitudes in the occupying country toward the occupiers. Although the other alleged cell members are not Iraqis, they would have agreed that a key region of the Muslim world is occupied by Western troops, and felt similar outrage. At least one of the other plotters is thought to be from a Palestinian family displaced to Jordan by the rise of Israel, another source of anger in the Muslim world over occupation of Arab land.
Yet, the actions of the group in Britain were too erratic and error-prone to be the result of careful political planning. And the self-immolation by some of them raises questions as to their deeper mind-set. Terrorists imagine the world in black and white, as full of demons and angels, and place themselves on the side of the angels. Sociologist Mark Juergensmeyer has called this way of thinking "cosmic war." Small terrorist cells arise in part because their members develop a specific way of looking at the world, which they reinforce for one another in everyday interactions. As the group becomes more and more distinct in its views from the society around it -- and more isolated -- its members can cross boundaries of reason and human sentiment, becoming monstrous.
For caring professions to produce terrorists is hardly unprecedented. Israeli-American Dr. Baruch Goldstein carried out the 1994 massacre of Palestinians in the West Bank city of Hebron, killing 29 persons at the Ibrahimi Mosque and wounding another 150. The No. 2 man in al-Qaida, Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahiri from the elite Azzam family, trained as a physician in Cairo in the 1970s.
Paul J. Hill, who shot down abortion clinic physician Dr. John Britton in 1994 in Florida, was a formally trained clergyman who started out committed to helping people spiritually, not killing them. He became so overwrought about what he considered genocide inflicted on the unborn, however, that he felt compelled to save innocents by killing Dr. Britton. The reverend reflected, chillingly, afterward, "If I wounded him, just shot him in the leg or shoulder, I knew there was an excellent probability that he would return to killing innocent children. In my thinking it just became: I had to kill him."
Becoming a religious terrorist depends on several steps. The first is conversion to a way of thinking by which the perpetrators identify with a core group that they wish to protect, but which they believe is being subjected to great harm. Typically this group is imagined to be composed of innocents or lonely carriers of divine truth, whose existence is both essential and yet precarious.
The second is the naming of the malevolent force that is harming these pure ones. The so-called Christian Identity Movement in Oklahoma, to which terrorists Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols had links, posits that the U.S. government is persecuting the vanishing band of Anglo-Saxon Christians, the pure lost tribe of Israel, on behalf of polyglot minorities. This belief appears to have been among the motivations for the two to bomb the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995, killing 168 people.
The question for true believers thus becomes how to safeguard the righteous innocents from being wiped out by the forces of darkness. Some choose peaceful paths to that goal. If they simply organize protests or join political parties, they become social activists.
But a key motivation for the turn to terror is a sense of extreme urgency. If the true believers are convinced that an occupying force or government is committing daily mass murder, and simply cannot bear for it to continue, they may feel an impulse to do something immediate and dramatic. Hothouse conversations with a select group of like-minded believers can reinforce and multiply this feeling. Dr. Abdullah was seen by his co-workers at his hospital as a slacker who spent all his time surfing Muslim fundamentalist Web sites. If their description is accurate, it seems likely that he was increasingly obsessed with the alleged British and American threat to Sunni Islam.
Activists who become terrorists often view themselves as soldiers in God's army. Seeing all British citizens unsympathetic to the Salafi Jihadi cause as soldiers in an opposing army authorized the terrorists, in their own minds, to target civilians in the Tiger Tiger nightclub near Piccadilly Circus. Their intended victims were not simply late-night revelers in the mind of the would-be attackers, but rather enemy troops on rest and recreation.
Such perpetrators can also be impelled to act by a fear of imminent capture, since in their view this would spell the final victory of the forces of evil over the elect few. After the People's Temple group killed California Rep. Leo Ryan in Guyana in 1978 they were forced by their leader, Jim Jones, to commit mass suicide because Jones realized that this murder would lead to the destruction of their group, which he felt was alone in carrying the truth. Jones began as a pastor in a mainstream church and had at one point been a civil rights leader in Indiana -- a dramatic example of how caring individuals can go wrong.
It is likely, then, that Dr. Abdullah's group attacked Glasgow Airport in such an amateurish way out of panic, knowing that their botched operation in Haymarket, London, a few days before would likely lead to their arrest. Authorities have found a suicide note, and collective suicide appears to have been as important to them as damaging the airport or killing passengers.
The Glasgow Airport bombing underlines how the Iraq war is not, as President George W. Bush argues, quelling terror, but rather is generating it. How much Iraq-focused terrorism was there in the U.K. before 2003? The earlier Madrid and London Underground bombings were driven by the same motivation. That said, it must be underlined that in British society these individuals had access to peaceful means of expressing dissent and their views of policy. Moreover, most Britons already want their troops out of Iraq -- and so might even have given them a sympathetic hearing if they had not lashed out in irrational rage. And the tragic war in Iraq is not only being fought by British and American troops: Salafi Jihadi guerrilla cells, which may be inspired by preachers like Abdullah's mentor, Sheikh al-Kubaisi, routinely kill dozens of innocent Shiite Iraqis, and have also targeted Kurds and secular or tribal Sunni Arabs. Most Iraqis do not want the Salafi "Islamic state," of which Abdullah dreams.
Ironically, Abdullah and his group have possibly hindered any near-term withdrawal of British troops from Iraq -- if any such logical goal can be attributed as their aim -- since the new Labour government of Prime Minister Gordon Brown will not want to be seen as bowing to coercion by terrorists. Dr. Bilal Abdullah violated his oath as a physician because he cared too obsessively about the putative welfare of some, and cared not at all about that of others.
-- By Juan Cole
Banishing the Ghosts of Iran
By FATEMEH KESHAVARZ
The recent arrest in Iran of Haleh Esfandiari, director of the Middle East program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, has ignited a storm of protest around the Western world. To many Americans, it is but one more sign that Iran, in particular, and the Muslim Middle East, in general, are inhospitable to women and to freethinkers. For some years, America's popular reading list has bolstered that view, ignoring political complexities of the region in favor of a simple narrative.
Best sellers like Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books (Random House, 2003), Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner (Riverhead Books, 2003), and Åsne Seierstad's The Bookseller of Kabul (Little, Brown, 2003) have enforced and embellished the one-sided picture of Middle Eastern culture. Call it the "New Orientalism."
In the 1970s, Edward W. Said's influential Orientalism (Pantheon Books, 1978) offered a decisive critique of entrenched Western assumptions that construed Europe as the norm, from which the "exotic" and "inscrutable" Orient deviates. Not infallible — but certainly profound and engaging — Said's views fired the imagination of such influential scholars as Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, now central to postcolonial and subaltern studies.
But a new version of earlier assumptions pervades our culture today. The old European Orientalist writers of the 18th through the 20th centuries treated Middle Eastern culture and people as having been great in the remote past, but devoid of complexity and agency in the present. The New Orientalists don't improve on that. Whether it is Nafisi's women reading Western literature in postrevolutionary Iran, a brave bookseller smuggling works into Seierstad's Taliban-run Kabul, or Amir's guilt at tolerating the rape and repression of his kite-runner friend in Hosseini's book, they all reduce the cavernous and complicated story of the region into "us" and "them" scenarios.
Make no mistake. We should protest the incarceration of any academic anywhere in the world who gets caught in the crossfire of political games. We all wish Esfandiari to be freed, but the danger is that we will color all of Iran, the country in which I was born and whose contemporary literature and culture are a delight to teach, with such actions. If we do, we will give less, not more, aid to the many intellectuals, scholars, and writers who, little known in the United States, make up a vibrant, multifaceted Iranian culture. Bottom line: Iran — like many other countries in the Middle East — is more than a country of victims and villains. It has much to offer the world.
What makes the old Orientalism and its newer version effective is that their sinister plots build on each other — and gradually seep into our daily accumulated fears. In Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (University of Minnesota Press, 1997), the sociologist Avery F. Gordon explains that ghost stories are accounts of phantoms that disturb the reader with their overpowering presence. And yet their most distinct feature is that they are absent from view. Ghosts haunt us by not being there. And the New Orientalist literature has been producing ghosts in abundance. Muslim ghosts are large in number and perfectly wicked, suitable qualities for generating fear. They are old, so their past supplies material for nightmarish rereadings of history.
The memoirs, travel accounts, novels, and journalistic writings whose popular domain is haunted by Muslim ghosts vary in quality. Thematically, they stay focused on the public phobia: blind faith and cruelty, political underdevelopment, and women's social and sexual repression. They provide a mix of fear and intrigue — the basis for a blank check for the use of force in the region and Western self-affirmation. Perhaps not all the authors intend to sound the trumpet of war. But the divided, black-and-white world they hold before the reader leaves little room for anything other than surrender to the inevitability of conflict between the West and the Middle East.
An example is Nafisi, a visiting fellow at the Johns Hopkins University's Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, in Washington, whose memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran I use to analyze the New Orientalist approach in my book Jasmine and Stars: Reading More Than Lolita in Tehran (University of North Carolina Press, 2007). In the memoir, the professor of literature who is the book's narrator brings other women into her home to read Western classics. Outside the reading group, the author is angered by the preference that a male Muslim student exhibits for the protagonist in Maksim Gorky's Mother over Jane Austen's female characters. She says to Mr. Nahvi, the archvillain: "I am not comparing you to Elizabeth Bennet. There is nothing of her in you, to be sure — you are as different as man and mouse." The "good" professor, who appreciates Austen and Western characters, and the "bad" Iranian of today, who dislikes them, appear to be locked in eternal fight. What about the vast range of other Iranians who fall somewhere in between?
Reading Lolita in Tehran banishes what it cannot deal with. For example, it celebrates the power of literature for the women who gather to read the forbidden texts (although it would not have to have been as secretly as the book suggests) as evidence of women's resilience in the face of a revived patriarchy in post-1979 Iran. The least the book could do would be to mention a few contemporary Iranian women writers. It makes no such reference. The reader will not know that at the time this memoir was written, such prominent Iranian women writers as Shahrnush Parsipur, Simin Danishvar, Moniru Ravanipur, and Simin Behbahani, to mention only a few, captured the imagination of readers and made it to the best-seller list in Iran. In Reading Lolita in Tehran's narration of postrevolutionary Iran, such complex and towering Iranian women do not exist.
Further, despite favoring democratization of the Middle East, ghost stories refrain from addressing repression when conducted by the United States (for example, the toppling of Mohammad Mosaddeq, the democratically elected Iranian premier, with the help of the CIA in the early 1950s, or the behavior of governments deemed allies of the United States toward their own citizens). Indeed, the way this literature navigates its way through the Middle Eastern mess without running into the U. S. presence there is astounding. Reading Lolita in Tehran, for example, makes no reference to the coup ousting Mosaddeq, despite highlighting the anti-American orientation of the 1979 revolution that was widely understood to be fostered by the CIA's role in the coup. Neither is there any mention of chemical and other weapons used on Iranians and Kurds, with no objections at the time from Western democracies, during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s.
At the low end of the scale, the New Orientalist narrative not only draws on the ghosts of our fears but also harbors grotesque errors and generalizations bordering on the absurd. In Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women (Anchor Books, 1995), the prize-winning author and journalist Geraldine Brooks turns into a linguist. Commenting on the "tribal" connections among the roots of Arabic words, Brooks suggests that the word for "mother" has a common root with words that mean many things, including "stupid," "illiterate," "parasite," and "without opinion." A larger outcome of that supposed linguistic ambivalence is said to be ignorance of religion, because "the nature of the Arabic language meant that a precise translation of the Koran was unobtainable."
Irshad Manji, a Canadian television host and author, plays social scientist and historian in The Trouble With Islam: A Muslim's Call for Reform in Her Faith (St. Martin's Press, 2004), finding one of "the troubles with Islam today" to be the way it distorts history. "Growing up," Manji writes, she never "heard Abraham's name in a history lesson." Elsewhere she indicates that Muslims are not allowed to think for themselves, but only to imitate the behavior of the prophet.
The verdict — extended to more than a billion Muslims — is based partly on a report published by the religious academy in Manji's town that suggests that Muslims view the prophet as a perfect example. The author deals with specialized topics such as the chronology of the Koran in equally simplistic ways, assuming that since she cannot understand it, no other Muslim does. From that she argues that ignorance about the Koran leads to global tragedy. Had Mohamed Atta known that the hur promised to him by the Koran could refer to "white raisins" and not "dark-eyed virgins," the September 11 tragedy might have been avoided. From Manji's perspective, trying to understand political conflict, extremism, or injustice is unnecessary.
Don't hold your breath, either, for the "scholarly" versions of the New Orientalist discourse. They replicate the disturbing features of their popular counterparts. Bernard Lewis's recent work What Went Wrong?: Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response (Oxford University Press, 2002) lumps together the entire Muslim Middle East as "a culture" in turmoil in order to contrast it with Christian Europe as the epitome of progress. Generally speaking, Lewis, a well-known scholar of Near Eastern studies, is hostile to his subject: the modern Middle Eastern Muslim. Omid Safi, an associate professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, counts, in an essay in the fifth volume of Voices of Islam (Praeger Publishers, 2007), 14 demeaning qualifiers, such as "poor," "weak," "ignorant," "humiliating," "corrupt," "impoverished," "weary," and "shabby," on one page. The menacing tone of Lewis's discourse, perpetuated in his punitive narrating voice, scolds Muslim subjects at every turn for their "fall" from glory. At the same time, while their supposed rage, ignorance, and incompetence are made hypervisible, a kind of background noise setting the ghostly ambience, they rarely speak for themselves. The absence of Muslim voices and commentators comes across as a natural function of their lack of dynamism and agency.
With Muslim women, matters are even simpler. Silenced twice (by local culture and by Western narrative), Muslim women are elusive subjects in many Western histories of the Middle East. Historians make an effort to seek them in documents that capture smaller moments of personal exchange, like court records; deeds of charitable foundations, called waqf, that they owned; or biographical sources on transmitters of sayings of the prophet, called hadith. More often, in their flowing black chadors and locked inside a proverbial harem, women are favorite candidates to be made hypervisible and yet totally masked: perfect ghosts. Lewis, for example, cites their low status in the Muslim world as "probably the most profound single difference between the two civilizations." Legally, he places them categorically below the unbelievers and slaves. Members of the other two groups can improve their status, but women will always be women.
Lewis documents the plight of women through uninformed comments of a handful of men about a handful of other men. There is Evliya Çelebi, the 17th-century Ottoman traveler who expressed surprise that the Austrian emperor stopped his horse on the street to let a woman pass. The Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi, in his opera Aida, told the story of the Egyptian Radames, torn between his love for the Egyptian princess Amneris and the Ethiopian slave Aida. To Verdi, a European Christian, Radames had to face the tragedy of choosing between the two women. What he didn't understand, says Lewis, is that his Egyptian hero would not have been faced with a problem: He could have possessed both women. Lewis also gives us the Iranian revolutionary leader Ayatollah Khomeini, who blamed the deposed shah for women's immodest clothing and social activities. Such comments "document" the backward social status of the Ottoman, Egyptian, and Iranian women. The women themselves are not quoted and discussed.
Lewis closes with prescribing for the ghost a dose of the liberty enjoyed by those "schooled in the theory and practice of Western freedom." The list of recommended freedoms is long, but it does not include the one on the minds of Middle Easterners these days: freedom from military intrusion.
As in many other places in the Middle East, in Iran new and less-known players appear on the scene if today's culture is allowed to come into full view. Again, the case of women is instructive. Shahrnush Parsipur, born in 1946, is a powerful postrevolutionary author of many successful novels, including The Dog and the Long Winter (1976) and Tuba and the Meaning of the Night (1989). Parsipur is also the author of Women Without Men: A Novella, which she composed after the 1979 revolution and which Syracuse University Press translated in 1998. I purchased the latter two novels in Iran last summer, although they are supposedly "banned." In Women Without Men, she gives us Zarrinkolah, the charming prostitute. Shortly after the onset of the revolution, Parsipur's women are out to "see the world," and no one is going to stop them. When Zarrinkolah, a "little woman of 26 with a heart open like the sea," decides to leave the brothel, she needs no one's permission, no blessing from a holy man. She is her own source of holiness, the ray of light that brightens the brothel's miserable life. A holy prostitute in postrevolutionary Iran has to be a miracle, you say. But that is exactly the point. Postrevolutionary Iran has towering women writers who make miracles possible. Parsipur has since left for exile in the United States. But her books still have an enormous following that cannot simply be dropped from the picture of Iranian history and contemporary cultural life. Iranian women have figures like her to look to for a sense of empowerment.
Parsipur is one of many. A few decades before the revolution, and before Parsipur's generation made its presence felt, Simin Danishvar — born in 1921 and still living in Iran — had captured the imagination of thousands of Iranian readers. Her beautifully crafted novel Savushun takes place in the historic city of Shiraz in southwestern Iran. It follows the life of a Persian family confronting change during World War II, through the eyes of a young wife and mother. It is one of Iran's all-time best sellers.
An equally powerful poetic voice in 20th-century Iran is that of Simin Behbahani, born in 1927 and affectionately known to her followers as the lioness of Iran. A major literary figure before and after the revolution, she is also known for her activism and outspoken dedication to women's rights. She is currently president of the Iranian Writers' Association. During the Iran-Iraq war, Behbahani wrote passionately in favor of finding a peaceful solution to the conflict. In 1997 she was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Many of these writers view themselves as citizens of the world, and they have identities that are hybrid. Such identities are part of our evolving global society, which demands new ways of knowing and writing about one another: as a kaleidoscope of colors, accents, and vantage points. Unless we learn about less-explored cultures, those colors and vantage points will remain beyond our reach. Few Western readers and scholars would look up the exquisite poetry of the prominent 20th-century Iranian poet Forough Farrokhzad, who died in 1967, in a bookstore, or include her work in a world-literature or gender-studies course. It has to grow roots and bloom in the culture before the seeds are carried to new gardens.
Farrokhzad's beautifully crafted poem "Frontier Walls" is her poetic manifesto, her philosophy of life. In the light of the candle she carries, she and readers leave behind the walls that separate them and see the wholeness of human experience:
Return with me to that star,
Return with me
To that star far away
from the frozen seasons of the earth and its
ways to measure and understand
Where no one fears light.
Return with me
To the start of creation
To the fragrant core of a fertilized egg
To the moment I was born from you
Return with me, you have left me incomplete.
Fatemeh Keshavarz is a professor of Persian language and comparative literature and chair of the department of Asian and Near Eastern languages and literatures at Washington University in St. Louis. She is author of Jasmine and Stars: Reading More Than Lolita in Tehran (University of North Carolina Press, 2007).
The recent arrest in Iran of Haleh Esfandiari, director of the Middle East program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, has ignited a storm of protest around the Western world. To many Americans, it is but one more sign that Iran, in particular, and the Muslim Middle East, in general, are inhospitable to women and to freethinkers. For some years, America's popular reading list has bolstered that view, ignoring political complexities of the region in favor of a simple narrative.
Best sellers like Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books (Random House, 2003), Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner (Riverhead Books, 2003), and Åsne Seierstad's The Bookseller of Kabul (Little, Brown, 2003) have enforced and embellished the one-sided picture of Middle Eastern culture. Call it the "New Orientalism."
In the 1970s, Edward W. Said's influential Orientalism (Pantheon Books, 1978) offered a decisive critique of entrenched Western assumptions that construed Europe as the norm, from which the "exotic" and "inscrutable" Orient deviates. Not infallible — but certainly profound and engaging — Said's views fired the imagination of such influential scholars as Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, now central to postcolonial and subaltern studies.
But a new version of earlier assumptions pervades our culture today. The old European Orientalist writers of the 18th through the 20th centuries treated Middle Eastern culture and people as having been great in the remote past, but devoid of complexity and agency in the present. The New Orientalists don't improve on that. Whether it is Nafisi's women reading Western literature in postrevolutionary Iran, a brave bookseller smuggling works into Seierstad's Taliban-run Kabul, or Amir's guilt at tolerating the rape and repression of his kite-runner friend in Hosseini's book, they all reduce the cavernous and complicated story of the region into "us" and "them" scenarios.
Make no mistake. We should protest the incarceration of any academic anywhere in the world who gets caught in the crossfire of political games. We all wish Esfandiari to be freed, but the danger is that we will color all of Iran, the country in which I was born and whose contemporary literature and culture are a delight to teach, with such actions. If we do, we will give less, not more, aid to the many intellectuals, scholars, and writers who, little known in the United States, make up a vibrant, multifaceted Iranian culture. Bottom line: Iran — like many other countries in the Middle East — is more than a country of victims and villains. It has much to offer the world.
What makes the old Orientalism and its newer version effective is that their sinister plots build on each other — and gradually seep into our daily accumulated fears. In Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (University of Minnesota Press, 1997), the sociologist Avery F. Gordon explains that ghost stories are accounts of phantoms that disturb the reader with their overpowering presence. And yet their most distinct feature is that they are absent from view. Ghosts haunt us by not being there. And the New Orientalist literature has been producing ghosts in abundance. Muslim ghosts are large in number and perfectly wicked, suitable qualities for generating fear. They are old, so their past supplies material for nightmarish rereadings of history.
The memoirs, travel accounts, novels, and journalistic writings whose popular domain is haunted by Muslim ghosts vary in quality. Thematically, they stay focused on the public phobia: blind faith and cruelty, political underdevelopment, and women's social and sexual repression. They provide a mix of fear and intrigue — the basis for a blank check for the use of force in the region and Western self-affirmation. Perhaps not all the authors intend to sound the trumpet of war. But the divided, black-and-white world they hold before the reader leaves little room for anything other than surrender to the inevitability of conflict between the West and the Middle East.
An example is Nafisi, a visiting fellow at the Johns Hopkins University's Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, in Washington, whose memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran I use to analyze the New Orientalist approach in my book Jasmine and Stars: Reading More Than Lolita in Tehran (University of North Carolina Press, 2007). In the memoir, the professor of literature who is the book's narrator brings other women into her home to read Western classics. Outside the reading group, the author is angered by the preference that a male Muslim student exhibits for the protagonist in Maksim Gorky's Mother over Jane Austen's female characters. She says to Mr. Nahvi, the archvillain: "I am not comparing you to Elizabeth Bennet. There is nothing of her in you, to be sure — you are as different as man and mouse." The "good" professor, who appreciates Austen and Western characters, and the "bad" Iranian of today, who dislikes them, appear to be locked in eternal fight. What about the vast range of other Iranians who fall somewhere in between?
Reading Lolita in Tehran banishes what it cannot deal with. For example, it celebrates the power of literature for the women who gather to read the forbidden texts (although it would not have to have been as secretly as the book suggests) as evidence of women's resilience in the face of a revived patriarchy in post-1979 Iran. The least the book could do would be to mention a few contemporary Iranian women writers. It makes no such reference. The reader will not know that at the time this memoir was written, such prominent Iranian women writers as Shahrnush Parsipur, Simin Danishvar, Moniru Ravanipur, and Simin Behbahani, to mention only a few, captured the imagination of readers and made it to the best-seller list in Iran. In Reading Lolita in Tehran's narration of postrevolutionary Iran, such complex and towering Iranian women do not exist.
Further, despite favoring democratization of the Middle East, ghost stories refrain from addressing repression when conducted by the United States (for example, the toppling of Mohammad Mosaddeq, the democratically elected Iranian premier, with the help of the CIA in the early 1950s, or the behavior of governments deemed allies of the United States toward their own citizens). Indeed, the way this literature navigates its way through the Middle Eastern mess without running into the U. S. presence there is astounding. Reading Lolita in Tehran, for example, makes no reference to the coup ousting Mosaddeq, despite highlighting the anti-American orientation of the 1979 revolution that was widely understood to be fostered by the CIA's role in the coup. Neither is there any mention of chemical and other weapons used on Iranians and Kurds, with no objections at the time from Western democracies, during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s.
At the low end of the scale, the New Orientalist narrative not only draws on the ghosts of our fears but also harbors grotesque errors and generalizations bordering on the absurd. In Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women (Anchor Books, 1995), the prize-winning author and journalist Geraldine Brooks turns into a linguist. Commenting on the "tribal" connections among the roots of Arabic words, Brooks suggests that the word for "mother" has a common root with words that mean many things, including "stupid," "illiterate," "parasite," and "without opinion." A larger outcome of that supposed linguistic ambivalence is said to be ignorance of religion, because "the nature of the Arabic language meant that a precise translation of the Koran was unobtainable."
Irshad Manji, a Canadian television host and author, plays social scientist and historian in The Trouble With Islam: A Muslim's Call for Reform in Her Faith (St. Martin's Press, 2004), finding one of "the troubles with Islam today" to be the way it distorts history. "Growing up," Manji writes, she never "heard Abraham's name in a history lesson." Elsewhere she indicates that Muslims are not allowed to think for themselves, but only to imitate the behavior of the prophet.
The verdict — extended to more than a billion Muslims — is based partly on a report published by the religious academy in Manji's town that suggests that Muslims view the prophet as a perfect example. The author deals with specialized topics such as the chronology of the Koran in equally simplistic ways, assuming that since she cannot understand it, no other Muslim does. From that she argues that ignorance about the Koran leads to global tragedy. Had Mohamed Atta known that the hur promised to him by the Koran could refer to "white raisins" and not "dark-eyed virgins," the September 11 tragedy might have been avoided. From Manji's perspective, trying to understand political conflict, extremism, or injustice is unnecessary.
Don't hold your breath, either, for the "scholarly" versions of the New Orientalist discourse. They replicate the disturbing features of their popular counterparts. Bernard Lewis's recent work What Went Wrong?: Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response (Oxford University Press, 2002) lumps together the entire Muslim Middle East as "a culture" in turmoil in order to contrast it with Christian Europe as the epitome of progress. Generally speaking, Lewis, a well-known scholar of Near Eastern studies, is hostile to his subject: the modern Middle Eastern Muslim. Omid Safi, an associate professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, counts, in an essay in the fifth volume of Voices of Islam (Praeger Publishers, 2007), 14 demeaning qualifiers, such as "poor," "weak," "ignorant," "humiliating," "corrupt," "impoverished," "weary," and "shabby," on one page. The menacing tone of Lewis's discourse, perpetuated in his punitive narrating voice, scolds Muslim subjects at every turn for their "fall" from glory. At the same time, while their supposed rage, ignorance, and incompetence are made hypervisible, a kind of background noise setting the ghostly ambience, they rarely speak for themselves. The absence of Muslim voices and commentators comes across as a natural function of their lack of dynamism and agency.
With Muslim women, matters are even simpler. Silenced twice (by local culture and by Western narrative), Muslim women are elusive subjects in many Western histories of the Middle East. Historians make an effort to seek them in documents that capture smaller moments of personal exchange, like court records; deeds of charitable foundations, called waqf, that they owned; or biographical sources on transmitters of sayings of the prophet, called hadith. More often, in their flowing black chadors and locked inside a proverbial harem, women are favorite candidates to be made hypervisible and yet totally masked: perfect ghosts. Lewis, for example, cites their low status in the Muslim world as "probably the most profound single difference between the two civilizations." Legally, he places them categorically below the unbelievers and slaves. Members of the other two groups can improve their status, but women will always be women.
Lewis documents the plight of women through uninformed comments of a handful of men about a handful of other men. There is Evliya Çelebi, the 17th-century Ottoman traveler who expressed surprise that the Austrian emperor stopped his horse on the street to let a woman pass. The Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi, in his opera Aida, told the story of the Egyptian Radames, torn between his love for the Egyptian princess Amneris and the Ethiopian slave Aida. To Verdi, a European Christian, Radames had to face the tragedy of choosing between the two women. What he didn't understand, says Lewis, is that his Egyptian hero would not have been faced with a problem: He could have possessed both women. Lewis also gives us the Iranian revolutionary leader Ayatollah Khomeini, who blamed the deposed shah for women's immodest clothing and social activities. Such comments "document" the backward social status of the Ottoman, Egyptian, and Iranian women. The women themselves are not quoted and discussed.
Lewis closes with prescribing for the ghost a dose of the liberty enjoyed by those "schooled in the theory and practice of Western freedom." The list of recommended freedoms is long, but it does not include the one on the minds of Middle Easterners these days: freedom from military intrusion.
As in many other places in the Middle East, in Iran new and less-known players appear on the scene if today's culture is allowed to come into full view. Again, the case of women is instructive. Shahrnush Parsipur, born in 1946, is a powerful postrevolutionary author of many successful novels, including The Dog and the Long Winter (1976) and Tuba and the Meaning of the Night (1989). Parsipur is also the author of Women Without Men: A Novella, which she composed after the 1979 revolution and which Syracuse University Press translated in 1998. I purchased the latter two novels in Iran last summer, although they are supposedly "banned." In Women Without Men, she gives us Zarrinkolah, the charming prostitute. Shortly after the onset of the revolution, Parsipur's women are out to "see the world," and no one is going to stop them. When Zarrinkolah, a "little woman of 26 with a heart open like the sea," decides to leave the brothel, she needs no one's permission, no blessing from a holy man. She is her own source of holiness, the ray of light that brightens the brothel's miserable life. A holy prostitute in postrevolutionary Iran has to be a miracle, you say. But that is exactly the point. Postrevolutionary Iran has towering women writers who make miracles possible. Parsipur has since left for exile in the United States. But her books still have an enormous following that cannot simply be dropped from the picture of Iranian history and contemporary cultural life. Iranian women have figures like her to look to for a sense of empowerment.
Parsipur is one of many. A few decades before the revolution, and before Parsipur's generation made its presence felt, Simin Danishvar — born in 1921 and still living in Iran — had captured the imagination of thousands of Iranian readers. Her beautifully crafted novel Savushun takes place in the historic city of Shiraz in southwestern Iran. It follows the life of a Persian family confronting change during World War II, through the eyes of a young wife and mother. It is one of Iran's all-time best sellers.
An equally powerful poetic voice in 20th-century Iran is that of Simin Behbahani, born in 1927 and affectionately known to her followers as the lioness of Iran. A major literary figure before and after the revolution, she is also known for her activism and outspoken dedication to women's rights. She is currently president of the Iranian Writers' Association. During the Iran-Iraq war, Behbahani wrote passionately in favor of finding a peaceful solution to the conflict. In 1997 she was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Many of these writers view themselves as citizens of the world, and they have identities that are hybrid. Such identities are part of our evolving global society, which demands new ways of knowing and writing about one another: as a kaleidoscope of colors, accents, and vantage points. Unless we learn about less-explored cultures, those colors and vantage points will remain beyond our reach. Few Western readers and scholars would look up the exquisite poetry of the prominent 20th-century Iranian poet Forough Farrokhzad, who died in 1967, in a bookstore, or include her work in a world-literature or gender-studies course. It has to grow roots and bloom in the culture before the seeds are carried to new gardens.
Farrokhzad's beautifully crafted poem "Frontier Walls" is her poetic manifesto, her philosophy of life. In the light of the candle she carries, she and readers leave behind the walls that separate them and see the wholeness of human experience:
Return with me to that star,
Return with me
To that star far away
from the frozen seasons of the earth and its
ways to measure and understand
Where no one fears light.
Return with me
To the start of creation
To the fragrant core of a fertilized egg
To the moment I was born from you
Return with me, you have left me incomplete.
Fatemeh Keshavarz is a professor of Persian language and comparative literature and chair of the department of Asian and Near Eastern languages and literatures at Washington University in St. Louis. She is author of Jasmine and Stars: Reading More Than Lolita in Tehran (University of North Carolina Press, 2007).
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