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Are the Arabs already extinct? By Spengler
revelation that is final and certain, excluding the possibility of doubt:
The political-religious institution exercised its power as a faithful
guardian of the Koranic Revelation. It possessed the absolute certitude that
the Revelation spoke and wrote Man and the universe clearly, definitively and
without error or imperfection. This certitude, in turn, demanded that the
Muslim
individual be formed around a faith in an absolute text, one which allowed no
interrogation that might give rise on any doubt whatsoever. Under such
conditions, alienation is inevitable; the skeptical individual no longer has
the right to be a member of the society.
Because Islam - the last message sent by God to mankind - has placed the final
seal on the Divine Word, successive words are incapable of bringing humankind
anything new. A new message would imply that the Islamic message did not say
everything, that it is imperfect. Therefore the human word must, on an
emotional level, continually eulogize and celebrate that message; on an
intellectual level, a fortiori it can only serve as an explication.
Poetry, the most elevated form of expression, will henceforth be valued only
for its obviousness. [6]
With reference to literature rather
than theology, Adonis states what amounts to the same thing that Pope Benedict
XVI said last year about the finality of Islamic revelation. [7] Westerners
will assimilate this view only with great effort, for poetry of devotion is
among the most artful and most complex in the literature. One thinks of Dante
in Italian, John Donne and John Milton in English, St John of the Cross in
Spanish, Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock and Christian Fuerchtegott Gellert in
German, and Yehuda Halevi in Hebrew.
To Christians and Jews, God is not a monarch who presents a final and
indisputable truth, but a lover whose face is hidden - perhaps the most
fruitful subject for poetry in human history. In the tradition of the biblical
Song of Songs, St John conveys love for God in distinctly erotic terms. It is
inconceivable for a Muslim poet to address Allah with the intimacy of a lover
in the language of human passion. If poetry holds a mirror to our inner life,
then the inner life of Westerners is profoundly different from that of Muslims,
as different as the concepts of a God of Love who exalts the humble, and Allah
who loves the strong and rewards the victorious. I have addressed that subject
on a dozen other occasions.
One finds counterparts to the mystical-religious poetry of the Western
mainstream only in the Sufi fringe of Islam, but never in its central current.
Adonis praises in his study of Arab poetics [8] three medieval poets of the
Islamic era whose originality of expression inspires him: Abu Nuwas,
al-Niffari, and al-Ma'arri. Abu Nuwas "adopts the mask of the clown and turns
drunkenness, which frees bodies from the control of logic and traditions, into
a symbol of total liberation", Adonis observes. [9] Al-Niffari speaks the
language of transcendental bliss; it "eliminates the gap between the human and
the sacred, humanizing the sacred and sanctifying this thinking, poeticizing
reed: the human being".
But Adonis' greatest fascination is for the 11th-century Nihilist Abul Ala
al-Ma'arri.
If poetry was, according to the
"method of the Arabs", "the art of words", al-Ma'arri makes it into the art of
meaning ... Al-Ma'arri establishes nothing, at the level of either language or
meaning. On the contrary, all that he proposes only casts doubt on both of
these: for him they are simply two ways of expressing futility and nothingness.
He creates his world - if "create" is the right word - with death as his
starting point. Death is the one elixir, the redeemer. Life itself is only a
death running its course. A person's clothes are his shroud; his house is his
grave, his life his death, and his death his true life ... the truth is that
the most evil of trees if the one which has borne human beings. Life is a
sickness whose cure is death. [10]
We hear the term "culture
of death" often enough, but do not normally have a window into a culture truly
dominated by death. That is what Adonis, channeling Ma'arri, provides. The
English term "despondent" does not begin to characterize the poems of Adonis;
they do not express sadness about life so much as the belief that life itself
is an impossibility. I cannot fairly represent the author's translated poems in
this venue, but a few examples give some of the flavor of his oeuvre:
Each
day is a child/ who dies behind a wall/ turning its face to the wall's corners.
[11]
When I saw death on a road/ I saw my face in his. My thoughts resembled
locomotives/ straining out of fog/ and into fog. [12]
"We must make gods or die./ We must kill gods or die,"/ whisper the lost stones
in their lost kingdom. [13]
Strangled mute/ with syllables/ voiceless,/ with no language/ but the moaning
of the earth,/ my song discovers death/ in the sick joy/ of everything that is/
for anyone who listens./ Refusal is my melody./ Words are my life/ and life is
my disease.
Readers may peruse Adonis' work for themselves to
determine whether I am presenting only its dark side; in fact, it only has a
dark side. Misery, self-pity and longing for death are the most common themes
in Adonis' translated work, but rage figures as well, particularly when he
writes of the United States. One of his longest and most frequently cited poems
is titled "The Funeral [sometimes The Grave] of New York", and calls it (among
many other unpleasant things) "a city on four legs/ heading for murder/ while
the drowned already moan/ in the distance".
When Adonis wrote this poem in 1971, he wanted to see the city destroyed, and
appealed to the poor people of Harlem, "You shall erase New York,/ you shall
take it by storm/ and blow it like a leaf away."
In fairness to Adonis, he rather liked Walt Whitman, along with many other
Western modernists (especially Stephane Mallarme and Charles Baudelaire) who,
he concedes, helped him understand Arab medieval poetry to begin with. [14]
Rhetorically, Adonis sounds a bit like a terrorist, but he harbors no such
sentiments. Although he is a fierce anti-Zionist, he has met with Israeli poets
and favors some kind of dialogue with Israel.
But as the bard of the Arabs, or at least the closest thing the Arabs currently
have to a bard, he helps explain the remarkable willingness of Arabs to kill
themselves to inflict harm on their enemies. Caught between a stifling
traditional past and a threatening and unwished-for modernity, the Arabs in
Adonis' judgment cannot properly form a personality and are susceptible to
nihilism, just as the poems of al-Ma'arri evoked it during the 11th century,
and Adonis' poems evoke it today.
The "hell of daily life", the Arabs' incapacity to digest the devil's
sourdough, instills a wish for death that expresses itself in the horrible
events we see in the news daily. Adonis' warning has become an epitaph for a
tomb that is prepared, if not yet occupied: the Arabs are extinct.
Notes
1.
The Middle East Media Research Institute.
2. For example, The Pages of Day and Night (translated by Samuel Hazo),
The Marlboro Press 1994; and The Blood of Adonis, University of
Pittsburgh Press 1971. Additional translations are in progress.
3. The Pages of Day and Night, Introduction, p 15.
4. Op cit, pp 101-102.
5. Loc cit.
6. Ibid, pp 102-103.
7. See
When even the pope has to whisper, Asia Times Online,
January 10, 2006.
8. An Introduction to Arab Poetics (translated by Catherine Cobham),
Saqi Books: London 1990.
9. Poetics, p 60.
10. Op cit, p 65.
11. From "The Past", in The Pages of Day and Night.
12. Op cit, p 21.
13. Op cit, p 26.
14. Poetics, pp 80-81.
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