Of stones and bones

The relentless analyses of academics, especially International Relations experts notwithstanding, the desire to destroy the Twin Towers and other U.S. buildings of iconic stature, on September 11, 2001, was motivated, not by the terrorists' envy of Western "freedom", but by religious mis-beliefs.

So claims Adam Gopnik in his meditations on the 9/11 Memorial and Museum.

Gopnik sees enough evidence in the fliers and tapes made by Al Qaeda on display in the museum to support his claim.

Repeatedly the perpetrators are drawn, like moths to the flame (and like night to the morrow), to the prospect of going directly to heaven and a bevvy of virgins, once they accomplish the task of killing the American Harams. 

I kind of veer in the direction of Gopnik because sometimes it's easier to put a closure on events when the buck stops at a party with clear-cut motives that are graspable. Very often International Relations experts and historians tend to see events in a holistic light, and perpetrators of these events as victims or passive tools of a larger machinery of "history", rather than as agents of something immediate, like a benighted belief system which they actively espouse. 

It's alright to trace the roots of 9/11 and other modern political events of immense magnitude, back to colonialism, but the historicization can be frustrating and endless.

Gopnik thinks the word "freedom" in "freedom tower" is a misnomer; if the original towers were not victims of envy but of religious bigotry carried out to an extremity, then what should be an appropriate name for the new towers? Perhaps "Stones and Bones" is a good choice?

Jewishness in India

I remember "Nahoum," a hoary pastry shop tucked away in the din and bustle of Kolkata's "New Market." Later, much later, I learnt that the proprietor of "Nahoum" (a Professor of mine at the University told me the name is a derivative of "Noam") was Jewish. 

I learnt a bit more about the Jewish thread, its inception and its continuity, albeit in a state of great attenuation in both Kolkata and in India at large, from an English tutor in Kolkata. 

The tutor was a Vishwa Hindu Parishad (the "World Wide Hindu Organization") official and secretly confided in his students the Hindu fondness for the Jewish population of India--the latter helped them in firming their position against the Muslims, thereby affirming my belief in the proverb that "an enemy's enemy is a friend."

I was delighted to see the video that documents a discovery of Jewish food in India. The fact of a strong tradition of Jewish cuisine, hybridized into something else as evidenced by the video, and the presence of the remains of a synagogue, both in the beautiful city of Cochin, doesn't surprise me.

If you want to get a deeper idea of the Jewish strain in the coastal city of Cochin, go straight to Amitav Ghosh's In an Antique Land.

World according to Mary

Colm Toibin's novel, The Testament of Mary, that re-imagines Mary in light of a humane mother and a "real" woman, instead of a mythical mom who was simply a function of God's grand scheme, has been "trending," along with the controversy surrounding Pope Benedict's resignation.

The novel has been adapted into a play that is currently playing on Broadway. It's a "bold, brazen piece" according to Maureen Dowd of the NYT. 

The Mary of Toibin's creation is illiterate yet intelligent (a pointer for T that literacy has little obvious connection with intelligence per se), has echoes of Antigone and Electra, and is no "idealized, asexual and docile Madonna, tenderly cradling her son's bleeding body, Pieta-style."

This Mary cannot bear to witness the horror of crucifixion, disapproves of the outcasts that surround Jesus and (most scandalously) misses sleeping with Joseph.

Mary disdains the men who flock around Jesus' drive for power, for she can tell that they are in it, not for love of god, but for the creation of powerful institution by mythologizing the story of Jesus' birth, death and resurrection. She hates the notion of hiding the truth to protect the institution they are building.

Toibin is an (lapsed) Irish Catholic and gay. 

Can representation be violent?

The recent killing of four Americans in Benghazi over an online video about the prophet Mohammad, has prompted a myriad of responses in the Western media.

Most register a deep anger over the violence and some like Defence Secretary Leon Panetta have labelled the Muslim violence as a terrorist attack. 

The general consensus in the U.S. media is that such acts are violent and violence is unecessary and uncalled for as a reaction against a mere visual representation of a Muslim religious figure. 

Little attention has been given to the possibility of representation, whether visual, written or aural, as being an act of violence itself. 

The assumption is that all acts of violence are physical.

Even academics in their otherwise insightful explanation of the incident, don't consider violence to inhere in certain acts of representation.  

I agree that the Muslim rage over every bit of trivialization of their religious symbols is an overreaction. The trivialization isn't something one condones, but the Muslim reaction should have been a little more controlled and proportionate to the offence committed.

Yet isn't the video portrayal of Prophet in a mocking tone a sacrilegeous act in complicated ways? Isn't representation an act of violation? Do all violence have to be committed on the body?

Edward Said's take on the violence of representation resonates here. He saw representation as an act of power--in a world of unequal distribution of power, the powerful often end up representating the powerless in ways that are violating. In such instances the powerless hit back at the powerful through bodily violence.

The video is a mere video. But the Muslims, in context of a world where Muslims see themselves as powerless victims in the face of Western machination to subordinate them, see the video as an act of violence.

Profaning Faith

Lamenting a loss of vision, poet William Wordsworth famously wrote in Intimations of Immortality:

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,

The earth, and every common sight,

To me did seem

Apparell'd in celestial light,

The glory and freshness of a dream.

It is not now as it hath been of yore;-

Turn wheresoe'er I may,

By night or day,

The things which I have seen, I can see no more.

The poet hasn't gone blind literally, but has lost the gift of the child's eye, the child's natural ability to see the quotidian "apparell'd in celestial light."

The adult, they say, has to live with the burden of a particular kind of blindness which comes from experiencing life. Unlike the child, the adult can't see heaven on earth.

A recent New York Times bestseller in the non-fiction category, Heaven is for Real, celebrates the child's ability, not only to see heaven, but also to report back, with clarity, to his parents, all that he has seen, once he's back on earth.

But the child, Colton Burpo, is no Wordsworthian child; he doesn't see earth bathed in celestial brightness. He sees the heavenly light in heaven.

The story of a toddler's brief sojourn in heaven is summarized very well by Maud Newton:

At 3 years 10 months, Colton Burpo was a sunny child, a preacher’s son certain of his faith and his eternal fate. Then his appendix burst, and as doctors failed to figure out what was wrong with him, he lay in a hospital bed until his father, Todd, saw “the shadow of death” cross his face. “I recognized it instantly,” Todd, a pastor, recalls. With Colton’s face “covered in death,” Todd and his wife, Sonja, took the boy to another hospital, where he was wheeled into surgery. “He’s not in good shape,” the surgeon said. As Colton screamed for his father, Todd fled, locked himself in a room and railed at God.
Less than two hours later, Colton was awake, still shouting for his father. “Daddy, you know I almost died,” he said. But only over the months following his recovery did his parents hear his whole story: that while in surgery, he went to heaven and met Jesus, who assigned him homework; he also encountered angels, a rainbow-hued horse, John the Baptist, God the father, the Holy Spirit, a sister his mother miscarried (unknown to Colton) before he was born and his great-grandfather, Pop, as a young man. Everyone in heaven had wings; Colton’s were smaller than most. He learned that the righteous, including his father, would fight in a coming last battle.

So convinced is Colton that he was really in heaven during the time the doctors performed a surgical procedure, that he saw the doctor as a mere tool of Jesus' will:

"Dad, Jesus used Dr. O'Holleran to help fix me [...] Colton told his father as he asked him to pay the hospital bill which had amounted to a whopping 23k. 

It's easy to understand why in this day and age readers would take to this story. The average reader, despairing about the astronomical cost of basic health care, would have her anxiety assuaged by the thought of a Jesus that would come to her (financial) aid if she had faith enough.

With hyper-inflationary trends and the cycle of recession, stories of faith-based solutions to real social problems are attractive sellers.

Didn't Karl Marx once famously predict a relationship of inverse proportionality between poverty and religion? Else, how to account for the enormous popularity with the rapture stories, collectively titled Left Behind?

But Marx also spoke about change and the irresistible encroachment of modernity into our lives--the wheel of history will roll, he said, rendering into vapor all that was once "solid", and into lumps of profanity all that was once "sacred".

Books like Heaven and propagation of the virtue of absolute faith by politicians like Rick Santorum, is a fulfillment, not negation, of Marx's prophecy.

The wheel of history is rolling. What was revered as sacred even thirty years ago is now a commodity that is to be sold for money, media-attention and in the case of faith-based politics, votes.

Heaven's success has emboldened the Burpo family to expand into a multi-medium, million dollar empire, replete with bestselling picture books and a movie version in the making on the foundations of something quintessentially sacrosanct like faith. 

It's strange that the profaning of the sacred in this sense is not remarked upon, but innumerable bones are picked about the other, more obvious kind of profanation, reflected in yet another bestseller of our times, Fifty shades of Grey.