Longing

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

Page 33 of 170 · 20 per page

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Like Shariati, Khomeini was trying to prove that Islam was not a medieval faith but had always championed values that the West thought it had invented. But Islam had been infected and weakened by the imperialists. People wanted to separate religion and politics on the Western model, and this had perverted the faith: “Islam lives among the people as if it were a stranger,” Khomeini lamented. “If somebody were to present Islam as it truly is, he would find it difficult to make people believe him.” 72 The Iranians were in the grip of spiritual malaise. “We have completely forgotten our identity, and have replaced it with a Western identity,” Khomeini used to say. Iranians had “sold themselves and do not know themselves, becoming enslaved to alien ideals.” 73 He believed that the way to heal this alienation was to create a society based entirely on the laws of Islam, which were not only more natural for Iranians than the imported law codes of the West, but were of sacred origin. If they lived in a divinely ordered milieu, impelled by the law of the land to live exactly as God intended, they themselves and the meaning of their lives would be transformed. The disciplines, practices, and rituals of Islam would create within them the Muhammadan spirit that was the ideal for humanity. For Khomeini, faith was not a notional acceptance of a creed, but an attitude and lifestyle that embodied a revolutionary struggle for the happiness and integrity that God intended for humanity. “Once faith comes, everything follows.” 74 Such faith was revolutionary because it constituted a revolt against the hegemony of the Western spirit. A Westerner was likely to find Khomeini’s theory of Velayat-e Faqih (“the Government of the Jurist”) sinister and coercive, but the “modern” government that Iranians had experienced had not brought them the freedoms that people took for granted in Europe and America. Khomeini was coming to embody in his own person an alternative Shii ideal to the Pahlavi monarchy. He was known to be a mystic and to embody divine knowledge in a way that was similar, if not identical, to that of the Imams. Like Husain, he had challenged the corrupt rule of a tyrant; like the Imams, he had been imprisoned and almost put to death by an unjust ruler; like some of the Imams, he had been forced into exile and deprived of what was rightfully his. Now in Najaf, living beside the shrine of Imam Ali, Khomeini seemed rather like the Hidden Imam: physically inaccessible to his people, he still guided them from afar and would one day return. There was a rumor that Khomeini had dreamed that, despite his present exile, he would die in Qum.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  76 It called attention to the government’s neglect of education and labor conditions; the fact that the Society alone was able to appeal to the fellahin was also disturbing. But, more important, all the Society’s institutions had a distinctly Muslim identity. Its factories all had mosques and gave the workers time to make the required prayers; in accordance with the social message of the Koran, working conditions and pay were good; workers had health insurance and decent holidays; disputes were arbitrated fairly. The extraordinary success of the Society was a dramatic demonstration of the fact that, whatever the intellectuals and pundits claimed, most of the Egyptian people wanted to be religious. It also showed that Islam could be progressive. There was no slavish return to the practices of the seventh century. The Brothers were extremely critical of the new Wahhabi Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and condemned its literalistic interpretations of Islamic law, such as cutting off the hands of thieves or stoning adulterers. 77 The Brothers had no definite notions about the kind of polity the future Islamic state should have, but they insisted that to be faithful to the spirit of the Koran and Sunnah, there must be a fairer distribution of wealth than there was in the Saudi Kingdom. Their general ideas were certainly in tune with the times: rulers should be elected (as in the early Muslim period), and, as the rashidun (“righteous”) caliphs had urged, a ruler must be accountable to the people and must not rule dictatorially. But Banna always felt that precise discussions about a possible Islamic state were premature, because there was still much basic preparation to be done. 78 Banna simply asked that Egypt be allowed to make its state Islamic; the Soviets had chosen communism, and the West democracy; countries where the population was predominantly Muslim should have the right to construct their polity on an Islamic basis, if and when they so wished. 79 The Society was not perfect. Because of its appeal to the masses, it tended to be anti-intellectual. Its pronouncements were often defensive and self- righteous. The Brothers’ image of the West, which stressed its greed, tyranny, and spiritual bankruptcy, had been distorted by the colonial experience. The object of Western imperialism had not simply been, as one of the Society’s spokesmen maintained, “to humiliate us, to occupy our lands and begin destroying Islam.” 80 The Society’s leaders were intolerant of dissension in the ranks. Banna insisted on absolute obedience and did not delegate responsibility sufficiently. As a result, after his death, nobody could take his place, and the Society was virtually destroyed from within by fruitless infighting. But by far its most serious and damaging failing was the emergence in 1943 of a terrorist unit known as “The Secret Apparatus” (al jihaz al- sirri).

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Most are not interested in politics, but given the predisposition to religion, they would be easy to mobilize by Islamic leaders in a social or economic crisis. Many of the young, however, still feel that modern Egyptian society does not have their interests at heart. Students in the science, engineering, and mathematics faculties are still drawn to the more extreme groups. They find that a stringent Muslim lifestyle gives them a viable alternative to the secularist option, helps them to make the difficult transition from a rural to a modern urban culture, and gives them a sense of authenticity and belonging. 64 It also provides them with a community, something which is more difficult to achieve in modern society but which is a crucial human need. They are not seeking to turn the clock back but are looking for new ways to apply the Islamic paradigm, which served Muslims well for centuries, to current conditions. The deep discontent which erupted so horribly in the assassination of Sadat still simmers beneath the surface, after two decades of Mubarak’s limited liberalization and partial implementation of democracy. The difference now is that the Islamists are much more organized. Patrick Gaffney, the American Arabist, revisited Minya in 1991 and noted that the crowds performing the noon prayers every Friday in the main street outside the tiny fundamentalist mosque were much more disciplined than they had been in the 1970s. Gone was the old ragged and disorderly defiance. Many of the participants were in their thirties and forties; they wore a uniform white jala-biyyah and the correct Islamic head covering. They gave the impression of forming a distinct and focused subculture, with its own direction and identity. Gaffney also noted a huge new government building housing the offices of the Ministry of the Interior, which was meant to symbolize the massive power of the state. An emblem of control in a former trouble spot, it seemed to have nothing to do with the dedicated Islamists, who were oriented to Mecca rather than Cairo. 65 Two realms existed side by side in Egypt in a schizophrenic rift that shows no sign of healing. Not surprisingly, therefore, there is war between the “two nations.” Periodically, there are reports of arrests and shoot-outs between the police and the most extreme Muslim groups. Where the majority of Islamists are content with a fundamentalist separation from secular society, a small minority resort to terror. Since 1986, there have been politically motivated attacks on Americans, Israelis, and prominent Egyptians. In 1987, Islamists shot Hasan Abu Bawha, a former minister of the interior, and Nabawi Ahmed, the editor of the weekly journal al-Mussawar.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Mendelssohn also argued for the separation of church and state, and for the privatization of religion—a solution that was very attractive to Jews who longed to shake off the restrictions of the ghetto and become involved in mainstream European culture. By making their faith a purely personal affair, they could both remain Jewish and become good Europeans. Mendelssohn insisted that Judaism was a rational faith that was eminently suited to the temper of the times; its doctrines were based on reason. When God had revealed himself to Moses on Mount Sinai, he had brought the Jewish people a law and not a set of doctrines. Judaism was, therefore, only concerned with morality and human behavior; it left the minds of Jews entirely free. Mendelssohn seemed to have little understanding of the mystical and mythical element in Judaism; his was the first of a number of attempts to make Judaism acceptable to the modern world by forcing it into a rationalistic mold that was alien to it—as it was alien to most religions. Mendelssohn’s ideas were, of course, anathema to the Hasidim and Misnagdim of Eastern Europe, as well as to the more Orthodox Jews of the Western world. He was reviled as a new Spinoza, a heretic who had abandoned the faith and gone over to the gentiles. Yet this would have grieved Mendelssohn; while he clearly found much of traditional Judaism incredible and alien, he did not want to abandon the Jewish God or his Jewish identity. He had a significant number of disciples, however. Ever since the Shabbetai Zevi affair, many Jews had shown that they longed to transcend the strictures of traditional Judaism, which they found confining. They were happy to follow Mendelssohn’s example: to mix in gentile society, study the new sciences, and keep their faith a private matter. Mendelssohn was one of the first to devise a way out of the ghetto into modern Europe that did not oblige Jews to reject their people and their own cultural heritage. Besides engaging in the intellectual life of the Enlightenment, some of these Jewish maskilim (“enlightened ones”) began to study their own heritage from a more secular standpoint. Some of them, as we shall see, would undertake a modern, scientific exploration of Jewish history; others began to study and to write in Hebrew, the sacred tongue which among Orthodox Jews was reserved for prayer and works of devotion. Now Maskilim began to create a new Hebrew literature, secularizing this holy language.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  This apparently craven dependence upon the supernatural was the obverse of everything that they were trying to achieve. The Zionists wanted to create a fresh Jewish identity, a New Jew, liberated from the unhealthy, confining life of the ghetto. The New Jew would be autonomous, the controller of his own destiny in his own land. But this quest for roots and self-respect amounted to a declaration of independence from Jewish religion. The Zionists were, above all else, pragmatists, and this made them men of the modern era. Yet they were all profoundly aware of the explosive “charge” of the symbol of the Land. In the mythical world of Judaism, the Land was inseparable from the two most sacred realities, God and the Torah. In the mystical journey of the Kabbalah, the Land was linked symbolically to the last stage of the interior descent into the self, and was identical with the divine Presence the Kabbalist discovered in the ground of his being. The Land was thus fundamental to Jewish identity. However practical their approach, Zionists recognized that no other land could really “save” the Jews and bring them psychic healing. Peretz Smolenskin (1842–95), who was bitterly opposed to the rabbinic establishment, was convinced that Palestine was the only possible location for a Jewish state. Leo Pinsker (1821–91) was only converted to this idea slowly, and against his better judgment, but he finally had to admit that the Jewish state had to be in Palestine. Theodor Herzl had nearly lost the leadership of the Zionist movement at the Second Zionist Conference in Basel (1898) when he had suggested a state in Uganda. He was forced to stand before the delegates, raise his hand, and quote the words of the Psalmist: “Jerusalem, if I forget you, may my right hand wither!” Zionists were ready to exploit the power of this mythos to make their wholly secular and even Godless campaign a viable reality in the real world. That they succeeded was their triumph. But their endorsement of this mythical, sacred geography would be as problematic as ever when they tried to translate it into hard fact. The first Zionists had very little understanding of the terrestrial history of Palestine during the previous two thousand years; their slogan: “A land without a people for a people without a land!” showed a complete disregard for the fact that the land was inhabited by Palestinian Arabs who had their own aspirations for the country. If Zionism succeeded in its limited, pragmatic, and modern objective of establishing a secular Jewish state, it also embroiled the people of Israel in a conflict which, at this writing, shows little sign of abating. T HE M USLIMS of Egypt and Iran, as we have seen, had first experienced modernity as aggressive, invasive, and exploitative.

• From The Lover (1984)

  The memory of the little white girl must have been there, lying there, the body, across the bed. For a long time she must have remained the queen of his desire, his personal link with emotion, with the immensity of tenderness, the dark and terrible depths of the flesh. Then the day must have come when it was possible. The day when desire for the little white girl was so strong, so unbearable that he could find her whole image again as in a great and raging fever, and penetrate the other woman with his desire for her, the white child. Through a lie he must have found himself inside the other woman, through a lie providing what their families, Heaven, and the northern ancestors expected of him, to wit, an heir to their name. Perhaps she knew about the white girl. She had native servants in Sadec who knew about the affair and must have talked. She couldn’t not have known of his sorrow. They must both have been the same age, sixteen. That night, had she seen her husband weep? And, seeing it, had she offered consolation? A girl of sixteen, a Chinese fiancée of the thirties, could she without impropriety offer consolation for such an adulterous sorrow at her expense? Who knows? Perhaps she was mistaken, perhaps the other girl wept with him, not speaking for the rest of the night. And then love might have come after, after the tears. But she, the white girl, never knew anything of all this. Years after the war, after marriages, children, divorces, books, he came to Paris with his wife. He phoned her. It’s me. She recognized him at once from the voice. He said, I just wanted to hear your voice. She said, It’s me, hello. He was nervous, afraid, as before. His voice suddenly trembled. And with the trembling, suddenly, she heard again the voice of China. He knew she’d begun writing books, he’d heard about it through her mother whom he’d met again in Saigon. And about her younger brother, and he’d been grieved for her. Then he didn’t know what to say. And then he told her. Told her that it was as before, that he still loved her, he could never stop loving her, that he’d love her until death. Neauphle-le-Château–Paris February–May 1984

• From The Lover (1984)

  It must have been a long time before he was able to be with her, to give her the heir to their fortunes. The memory of the little white girl must have been there, lying there, the body, across the bed. For a long time she must have remained the queen of his desire, his personal link with emotion, with the immensity of tenderness, the dark and terrible depths of the flesh. Then the day must have come when it was possible. The day when desire for the little white girl was so strong, so unbearable that he could find her whole image again as in a great and raging fever, and penetrate the other woman with his desire for her, the white child. Through a lie he must have found himself inside the other woman, through a lie providing what their families, Heaven, and the northern ancestors expected of him, to wit, an heir to their name. Perhaps she knew about the white girl. She had native servants in Sadec who knew about the affair and must have talked. She couldn’t not have known of his sorrow. They must both have been the same age, sixteen. That night, had she seen her husband weep? And, seeing it, had she offered consolation? A girl of sixteen, a Chinese fiancée of the thirties, could she without impropriety offer consolation for such an adulterous sorrow at her expense? Who knows? Perhaps she was mistaken, perhaps the other girl wept with him, not speaking for the rest of the night. And then love might have come after, after the tears. But she, the white girl, never knew anything of all this. Years after the war, after marriages, children, divorces, books, he came to Paris with his wife. He phoned her. It’s me. She recognized him at once from the voice. He said, I just wanted to hear your voice. She said, It’s me, hello. He was nervous, afraid, as before. His voice suddenly trembled. And with the trembling, suddenly, she heard again the voice of China. He knew she’d begun writing books, he’d heard about it through her mother whom he’d met again in Saigon. And about her younger brother, and he’d been grieved for her. Then he didn’t know what to say. And then he told her. Told her that it was as before, that he still loved her, he could never stop loving her, that he’d love her until death. Neauphle-le-Château–Paris February–May 1984 [image "Penguin Random House Next Reads logo" file=image_rsrcDK.jpg] What’s next on your reading list?Discover your next great read! Get personalized book picks and up-to-date news about this author. Sign up now.

• From The Lover (1984)

  I said “I love you” in Chinese back to her. “I love you” is all the Chinese she knows, and all the language we have in common. Commemorating the fortieth anniversary of the Vietnam Writers Association, she talked-story about a woman who had nine children killed in war. Kissing me, she kissed an American with roots in two countries that warred against Vietnam. The couple with no names in The Lover also reach each other through history that moved populations singly and en masse to and fro across the earth and into its every corner. Neither the girl in the fedora and gold lamé heels nor the Chinese man from Cholon belong in Vietnam; she is a generation removed from France, and he, generations away from China. The girl and her mother and brothers are barbarians, sans culture . How to enroot oneself but to make primitive, sexual connection with another? It may be that erotic love is more intense, dramatic, and romantic under imperialist colonialist circumstances than during normalization. Another pair of lovers, the ones in Hiroshima, Mon Amour , try to part; they may meet again, next war. “Please, leave me now.” “We’ll probably die without meeting again.” “Probably, unless one day there is a war.” I read The Lover to be Marguerite Duras writing about herself. She was born in Indochina, and like the narrating lover “returns” to France at the age of seventeen. I’ll take the nameless “I” to be Marguerite. My favorite books are about the writer writing about writing. I, Marguerite, create myself as an artist and as a woman as I write—levels and levels of consciousness—consciousness of consciousness. And I also make up the world, and a place to be. Rootless, I existentially write myself the stable world. “I’m going to write. That’s what I see beyond the present moment, in the great desert in whose form my life stretches out before me.” “I want to write. I’ve already told my mother: That’s what I want to do—write. No answer the first time. Then she asks, Write what? I say, Books, novels. She says grimly, When you’ve got your math degree you can write if you like, it won’t be anything to do with me then. She’s against it, it’s not worthy, it’s not real work, it’s nonsense. Later she said, A childish idea.” “I answered that what I wanted more than anything else in the world was to write, nothing else but that, nothing.” “I’m still part of the family, it’s there I live to the exclusion of everywhere else. It’s in its aridity, its terrible harshness, its malignance, that I’m most deeply sure of myself, at the heart of my essential certainty, the certainty that later on I’ll be a writer.” The Lover is a story about girl and woman becoming artist. I feel all right about taking this fiction as Marguerite Duras’s autobiography. In Duras’s movie, Hiroshima, Mon Amour , the heroine is making a movie about peace.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  These Portuguese Marranos had almost fifty years to organize an underground in which a dedicated minority continued to practice Judaism in secret and tried to win others back to the old faith. 28 But these Judaizing Marranos were cut off from the rest of the Jewish world. They had received a Catholic education, and their imaginations were filled with Christian symbols and doctrines. They often thought and spoke about Judaism in Christian terms: they believed, for example, that they had been “saved” by the Law of Moses rather than by Jesus, a concept that has little meaning in Judaism. They had forgotten a great deal of Jewish law, and as the years slipped by, their understanding of Judaism became still more attenuated. Sometimes their only sources of information about the faith were the polemical writings of anti-Semitic Christians. What they ended up practicing was a hybrid faith that was neither truly Jewish nor truly Christian. 29 Their dilemma was not unlike that of many people in the developing world today, who have only a superficial understanding of Western culture but whose traditional way of life has been so undermined by the impact of modernity that they cannot identify with the old ways either. The Marrano Jews of Portugal experienced a similar alienation. They had been forced to assimilate to a modernized culture that did not resonate with their inner selves. Toward the end of the sixteenth century, some Jews were permitted to leave the Iberian Peninsula. A Marrano diaspora had already formed in some of the Spanish colonies, as well as in southern France, but here Jews were still not allowed to practice their faith. However, during the seventeenth century, Judaizing Marranos migrated to such cities as Venice, Hamburg, and—later—London, where they could openly return to Judaism. Above all, the Iberian refugees from the Inquisition poured into Amsterdam, which became their new Jerusalem. The Netherlands was the most tolerant country in Europe. It was a republic, with a thriving commercial empire which, during its struggle for independence from Spain, had created a liberal identity as a contrast to Iberian values. Jews became full citizens of the republic in 1657; they were not confined to enclosed ghettoes, as they were in most European cities. The Dutch appreciated the Jews’ commercial expertise, and Jews became prominent businessmen, mingling freely with gentiles. They had a vigorous social life, an excellent educational system, and a flourishing publishing industry. Many Jews undoubtedly came to Amsterdam for its social and economic opportunities, but a significant number were eager to return to the full practice of Judaism.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  For many Iranians, America, the Great Shaitan, was “the Great Trivializer.” The bars, casinos, and secularist ethos of West-toxicated North Tehran typified the American ethos, which seemed deliberately to ignore the hidden (batin) realities that alone gave life meaning. Furthermore, America, the Shaitan, had tempted the shah away from the true values of Islam to a life of superficial secularism. 59 Iranian Shiism had always been motivated by two passions: for social justice and the Unseen (al-ghayb). Where Western people had, over the centuries, carefully cultivated a rational ethos which concentrated entirely on the physical world perceived by the senses, Iranian Shiis, like other premodern peoples, had nurtured a sense of the hidden (batin) world evoked by cult and myth. During the White Revolution, Iranians had acquired electricity, television, and modern transport, but the religious revival in the country showed that for many people these external (zaheri) achievements were simply not enough. Modernization had been too rapid and was inevitably skin-deep. Many Iranians still hungered for the batin and felt that without it their lives had neither value nor significance. As the American anthropologist William Beeman explained, an Iranian who believed himself to be trapped on the material surface of life felt that he had lost his soul. The drive for a pure inner life was still a supreme value in Iranian society, so much so that one of the greatest compliments one person could pay another was to say that “his/her inside (batin) and outside (zahir) are the same.” 60 Without a strong sense of the spiritual, many Iranians felt utterly lost. During the White Revolution, some had become convinced that their West-toxicated society had been poisoned by the materialism, consumer goods, alien modes of entertainment, and the imposition of foreign values. Further, the shah, with the enthusiastic support of the United States, seemed determined to destroy Islam, the source of the nation’s spirituality. He had exiled Khomeini, closed the Fayziyyah Madrasah, insulted the clergy, cut their revenues, and killed theology students. The Iranian Revolution was not merely political. Certainly, the cruel and autocratic regime of the shah and the economic crisis were crucial: there would have been no uprising without them. Many secularist Iranians who did not experience this spiritual malaise would eventually join the ulema simply to get rid of the shah, and without their support, the Revolution would not have succeeded. But it was also a rebellion against the secularist ethos which excluded religion and which many ordinary Iranians felt was being imposed upon them against their will. This was most graphically expressed in the depiction of the United States as the Great Satan. Rightly or wrongly, many believed that if he had not been so warmly supported by the United States, the shah would not have behaved as he did.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  That revolt was eventually put down by the government, but 1850 saw new uprisings in Yazd, Nairiz, Tehran, and Zanjan. The Babis created an atmosphere of utter terror. Political dissidents joined the revolt, as did local students. Even women, clad in men’s clothes, fought valiantly. The movement united all those who were dissatisfied with the regime. Mullahs who felt oppressed by the lofty mujtahids, merchants who resented the sale of Iranian resources to foreigners, bazaaris, landowners, and impoverished peasants all joined forces with the Babi religious enthusiasts. Shiism had long helped Iranians to cultivate a yearning for social justice, and when the right leader and the right philosophy came along, all kinds of malcontents found it natural to fight under a religious banner.67 This time the government was able to quell the insurgents. The Bab was executed on July 9, 1850, the leaders were also put to death, and other suspects rounded up and massacred. Some Babis fled to Ottoman Iraq, and there the movement split in 1863. Some, following Mirza Yahya Nuri Subh-i Azal (1830–1912), the appointed successor of the Bab, remained faithful to the political aims of the rebellion. Later many of these “Azalis” abandoned the old Babi mysticism and became secularists and nationalists. As in the Shabbatean movement, the casting off of taboos, the discarding of old laws, and the taste of rebellion enabled them to break free of religion altogether. Yet again, a messianic movement provided a bridge to a secularist ideology. Most of the surviving Babis, however, followed Subh-i Azal’s brother, Mirza Husain Ali Nuri Bahaullah (1817–92), who abjured politics and created the new Bahai religion, which embraced the modern Western ideals of the separation of religion and politics, equal rights, pluralism, and toleration.68 The Babi rebellion can be seen as one of the great revolutions of modernity. It set a pattern in Iran. There would be other occasions in the twentieth century when clerics and laymen, secularists and mystics, believers and atheists, would challenge an oppressive Iranian regime together. The battle for justice, which had become a sacred value for Shiis, would encourage later generations of Iranians to brave the armies of the shah to inaugurate a better order. On at least two occasions, a Shii ideology would enable Iranians to establish modern political institutions in their country. Yet again, the Babi revolution had shown that religion could help people to appropriate the ideals and enthusiasms of modernity, by translating them from an alien secular idiom into a language, mythology, and spirituality that they could understand and make their own. If modernity had proved difficult for the Christians of the West, it was even more problematic for Jews and Muslims. It required a struggle—in Islamic terms, a jihad, which might sometimes become a holy war. PART TWO [image file=images/image_image-3.jpg] Fundamentalism 5. Battle Lines (1870–1900)

• From The Lover (1984)

  Moreover, all the men wore the same sort of turban, all the women had their hair scraped back into the same kind of bun, and both men and women wore tunics with stand-up collars. And they all wore an expression I’d still recognize anywhere. My mother’s expression in the photograph with the red dress was the same. Noble, some would say. Others would call it withdrawn. They never speak of it any more. It’s an understood thing that he won’t approach his father any more to let him marry her. That the father will have no pity on his son. He has no pity on anyone. Of all the Chinese immigrants who hold the trade of the place in their hands, the man with the blue terraces is the most terrible, the richest, the one whose property extends the farthest beyond Sadec, to Cholon, the Chinese capital of French Indochina. The man from Cholon knows his father’s decision and the girl’s are the same, and both are irrevocable. To a lesser degree he begins to understand that the journey which will separate him from her is a piece of good luck for their affair. That she’s not the marrying kind, she’ll run away from any marriage, he must give her up, forget her, give her back to the whites, to her brothers. Ever since he’d been infatuated with her body the girl had stopped being incommoded by it, by its thinness. And similarly, strangely, her mother no longer worried about it as she had before, just as if she too had discovered it was plausible after all, as acceptable as any other body. The lover from Cholon thinks the growth of the little white girl has been stunted by the excessive heat. He too was born and grew up in this heat. He discovers this kinship between them. He says all the years she’s spent here, in this intolerable latitude, have turned her into a girl of Indochina. That she has the same slender wrists as they, the same thick hair that looks as if it’s absorbed all its owner’s strength, and it’s long like theirs too, and above all there’s her skin, all over her body, that comes from the rainwater stored here for women and children to bathe in. He says compared with the women here the women in France have hard skins on their bodies, almost rough. He says the low diet of the tropics, mostly fish and fruit, has something to do with it too. Also the cottons and silks the clothes here are made of, and the loose clothes themselves, leaving a space between themselves and the body, leaving it naked, free. The lover from Cholon is so accustomed to the adolescence of the white girl, he’s lost.

• From The Lover (1984)

  I’ve never written, though I thought I wrote, never loved, though I thought I loved, never done anything but wait outside the closed door. • • • When I’m on the Mekong ferry, the day of the black limousine, my mother hasn’t yet given up the land by the dike. Every so often, still, we make the journey, at night, as before, still all three of us, to spend a few days there. We stay on the veranda of the bungalow, facing the mountains of Siam. Then we go home again. There’s nothing she can do there, but she goes. My younger brother and I are beside her on the veranda overlooking the forest. We’re too old now, we don’t go bathing in the river any more, we don’t go hunting black panther in the marshes in the estuary any more, or go into the forest, or into the villages in the pepper plantations. Everything has grown up all around us. There are no more children, either on the buffalos or anywhere else. We too have become strange, and the same sluggishness that has overtaken my mother has overtaken us too. We’ve learned nothing, watching the forest, waiting, weeping. The lower part of the land is lost for good and all, the servants work the patches higher up, we let them keep the paddy for themselves, they stay on without wages, making use of the stout straw huts my mother had built. They love us as if we were members of their own family, they act as if they were looking after the bungalow for us, and they do look after it. All the cheap crockery is still there. The roof, rotted by the endless rain, goes on disintegrating. But the furniture is kept polished. And the shape of the bungalow stands out clear as a diagram, visible from the road. The doors are opened every day to let the wind through and dry out the wood. And shut every night against stray dogs and smugglers from the mountains. So you see it wasn’t in the bar at Réam, as I wrote, that I met the rich man with the black limousine, it was after we left the land by the dike, two or three years after, on the ferry, the day I’m telling you about, in that light of haze and heat. It’s a year and a half after that meeting that my mother takes us back to France. She’ll sell all her furniture. Then go one last time to the dike. She’ll sit on the veranda facing the setting sun, look toward Siam one last time as she never will again, not even when she leaves France again, changes her mind again and comes back once more to Indochina and retires to Saigon.

• From The Lover (1984)

  It’s more penetrating, less muffled. The livid red streetlights are lit. We’ve left the flat. I’ve put on the man’s hat with the black ribbon again, the gold shoes, the dark lipstick, the silk dress. I’ve grown older. I suddenly know it. He sees it, he says, You’re tired. On the sidewalk the crowd, going in all directions, slow or fast, forcing its way, mangy as stray dogs, blind as beggars, a Chinese crowd, I can still see it now in pictures of present prosperity, in the way they go along together without any sign of impatience, in the way they are alone in a crowd, without happiness, it seems, without sadness, without curiosity, going along without seeming to, without meaning to, just going this way rather than that, alone and in the crowd, never alone even by themselves, always alone even in the crowd. We go to one of those Chinese restaurants on several floors, they occupy whole buildings, they’re as big as department stores, or barracks, they look out over the city from balconies and terraces. The noise that comes from these buildings is inconceivable in Europe, the noise of orders yelled out by the waiters, then taken up and yelled out by the kitchens. No one ever merely speaks. On the terraces there are Chinese orchestras. We go up to the quietest floor, the Europeans’ floor, the menus are the same but there’s less yelling. There are fans, and heavy draperies to deaden the noise. I ask him to tell me about his father’s money, how he got rich. He says it bores him to talk about money, but if I insist he’ll tell me what he knows about his father’s wealth. It all began in Cholon, with the housing estates for natives. He built three hundred of these “compartments,” cheap semidetached dwellings let out for rent. Owns several streets. Speaks French with an affected Paris accent, talks money with perfect ease. He used to own some apartment blocks, but sold them to buy building land south of Cholon. Some rice fields in Sadec were sold too, the son thinks. I ask about epidemics. Say I’ve seen whole streets of native compartments closed off overnight, the doors and windows nailed up, because of an epidemic of plague. He says there’s not so much of it here, the rats are exterminated much more often than upcountry. All of a sudden he starts telling me some rigmarole about the compartments. They cost much less than either apartment blocks or detached houses, and meet the needs of working-class areas much better than separate dwellings. The people here like living close together, especially the poor, who come from the country and like living out of doors too, on the street.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Both sides realized that they had more to fear from other quarters than from each other, and should, therefore, join forces to oppose these new threats. The most worrying development was the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment, which had just begun to penetrate Eastern European Jewry and which seemed heretical to Hasidim and Misnagdim alike. The Haskalah was the creation of Moses Mendelssohn (1729–86), the brilliant son of a poor Torah scholar in Dessau, Germany, who, at the age of fourteen, had followed his favorite teacher to Berlin. There he fell in love with modern secular learning and, at prodigious speed, mastered German, French, English, Latin, mathematics, and philosophy. He longed to take part in the German Enlightenment, became a personal friend of Kant’s, and spent all his free time in study. His first book, Phaedon (1767), was an attempt to prove the immortality of the soul on rational grounds, and had nothing particularly Jewish about it. Against his will, however, Mendelssohn found himself obliged to defend Judaism when he encountered Enlightenment hostility to the Jewish faith. In 1769, Johan Casper Lavater, a Swiss pastor, challenged Mendelssohn to defend Judaism in public; if he could not refute the rational proofs of Christianity, Lavater declared, he should submit to baptism. Mendelssohn was also disturbed by the anti-Semitic prejudice in a pamphlet written by a Prussian state official, Christian Wilhelm Van Dohm, On the Civic Improvement of the Condition of the Jews (1781). In order to function effectively and competitively in the modern world, Van Dohm argued, a nation must mobilize the talents of as many people as possible, so it made sense to emancipate the Jews and integrate them more fully into society, even though they should not be granted citizenship or permitted to hold public office. The underlying assumption was that Jews were objectionable and their religion was barbaric. Reluctantly, Mendelssohn felt bound to respond, and in 1783 he published Jerusalem, Concerning Religious Authority and Judaism. The German Enlightenment was quite positive toward religion, and Mendelssohn himself seemed to share the same serene deist faith as Locke, though it is difficult to recognize it as Judaism. Mendelssohn seemed to find the existence of a benevolent God a matter of common sense, but insisted that reason must precede faith. We could only accept the authority of the Bible after we had demonstrated its truth rationally. This, of course, totally reversed the priorities of traditional, conservative faith, which took it for granted that reason could not demonstrate the truth of the kind of myths found in the scriptures.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  are gone, they revert to their own ideas. We spend our lives butting up 224 • The Art of Seduction from an invisible vessel and against people, as if they were stone walls. But instead of complaining then drying them with an about how misunderstood or ignored you are, why not try something dif-invisible towel. When he ferent: instead of seeing other people as spiteful or indifferent, instead of finished, the host called out to his attendants: "Bring trying to figure out why they act the way they do, look at them through in the table!" • Numerous the eyes of the seducer. The way to lure people out of their natural in-servants hurried in and out tractability and self-obsession is to enter their spirit. of the hall, as though they were preparing for a meal. All of us are narcissists. When we were children our narcissism was My brother could still see physical: we were interested in our own image, our own body, as if it were nothing. Yet his host a separate being. As we grow older, our narcissism grows more psychologi-invited him to sit at the cal: we become absorbed in our own tastes, opinions, experiences. A hard imaginary table, saying, "Honor me by eating of shell forms around us. Paradoxically, the way to entice people out of this this meat." • The old man shell is to become more like them, in fact a kind of mirror image of them. moved his hands about as You do not have to spend days studying their minds; simply conform to though he were touching invisible dishes, and also their moods, adapt to their tastes, play along with whatever they send your moved his jaws and lips as way. In doing so you will lower their natural defensiveness. Their sense of though he were chewing. self-esteem does not feel threatened by your strangeness or different habits. Then said he to Shakashik: " E a t your fill, People truly love themselves, but what they love most of all is to see their my friend, for you must be ideas and tastes reflected in another person. This validates them. Their ha-famished." • My brother bitual insecurity vanishes. Hypnotized by their mirror image, they relax. began to move his jaws, to Now that their inner wall has crumbled, you can slowly draw them out, chew and swallow, as though he were eating, and eventually turn the dynamic around. Once they are open to you, it be-while the old man still comes easy to infect them with your own moods and heat. Entering the coaxed him, saying: "Eat, other person's spirit is a kind of hypnosis; it is the most insidious and effec-my friend, and note the excellence of this bread and tive form of persuasion known to man. its whiteness. " • "This In the eighteenth-century Chinese novel The Dream of the Red Cham-man," thought Shakashik,

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Iranian Shiism had always been motivated by two passions: for social justice and the Unseen (al-ghayb). Where Western people had, over the centuries, carefully cultivated a rational ethos which concentrated entirely on the physical world perceived by the senses, Iranian Shiis, like other premodern peoples, had nurtured a sense of the hidden (batin) world evoked by cult and myth. During the White Revolution, Iranians had acquired electricity, television, and modern transport, but the religious revival in the country showed that for many people these external (zaheri) achievements were simply not enough. Modernization had been too rapid and was inevitably skin-deep. Many Iranians still hungered for the batin and felt that without it their lives had neither value nor significance. As the American anthropologist William Beeman explained, an Iranian who believed himself to be trapped on the material surface of life felt that he had lost his soul. The drive for a pure inner life was still a supreme value in Iranian society, so much so that one of the greatest compliments one person could pay another was to say that “his/her inside (batin) and outside (zahir) are the same.”60 Without a strong sense of the spiritual, many Iranians felt utterly lost. During the White Revolution, some had become convinced that their West-toxicated society had been poisoned by the materialism, consumer goods, alien modes of entertainment, and the imposition of foreign values. Further, the shah, with the enthusiastic support of the United States, seemed determined to destroy Islam, the source of the nation’s spirituality. He had exiled Khomeini, closed the Fayziyyah Madrasah, insulted the clergy, cut their revenues, and killed theology students.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  He had not died, but had been miraculously concealed by God; he would return one day shortly before the Last Judgment to inaugurate a reign of justice. He was still the infallible guide of the Shiah and the only legitimate ruler of the ummah , but he would no longer be able to commune with the faithful through agents, or have any direct contact with them. Shiis should not expect his speedy return. They would only see him again “after a long time has passed and the earth has become filled with tyranny.” 31 The myth of the “occultation” of the Hidden Imam cannot be explained rationally. It makes sense only in a context of mysticism and ritual practice. If we understand the story as a logos , one that should be interpreted literally as a plain statement of fact, all kinds of questions arise. Where in the world had the Imam gone? Was he on earth or in some kind of intermediate realm? What kind of life could he possibly have? Was he getting older and older? How could he guide the faithful, if they could neither see nor hear him? These questions would seem obtuse to a Shii who was involved in a disciplined cultivation of the batin , or secret sense of scripture, which bypassed reason and drew on the more intuitive powers of the mind. Shiis did not interpret their scriptures and doctrines literally. Their entire spirituality was now a symbolic quest for the Unseen (al-ghayb) that lies beneath the flux of outward (zahir) events. Shiis worshipped an invisible, inscrutable God, searched for a concealed meaning in the Koran, took part in a ceaseless but invisible battle for justice, yearned for a Hidden Imam, and cultivated an esoteric version of Islam that had to be secreted from the world. 32 This intense contemplative life was the setting that alone made sense of the Occultation. The Hidden Imam had become a myth; by his removal from normal history, he had been liberated from the confines of space and time and, paradoxically, he became a more vivid presence in the lives of Shiis than when he and the other Imams had lived a normal life in Medina or Samarra. The Occultation is a myth that expresses our sense of the sacred as elusive and tantalizingly absent. It is present in the world but not of it; divine wisdom is inseparable from humanity (for we can only perceive anything, God included, from a human perspective) but takes us beyond the insights of ordinary men and women. Like any myth, the Occultation could not be understood by discursive reason, as though it were a fact that was either self-evident or capable of logical demonstration. But it did express a truth in the religious experience of humanity. Like any esoteric spirituality, Shiism at this date was only for an elite. It tended to attract the more intellectually adventurous Muslims, who had a talent and a need for mystical contemplation.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Like any esoteric spirituality, Shiism at this date was only for an elite. It tended to attract the more intellectually adventurous Muslims, who had a talent and a need for mystical contemplation. But Shiis also had a different political outlook from other Muslims. Where the rituals and disciplines of Sunni spirituality helped Sunni Muslims to accept life as it was and to conform to archetypal norms, Shii mysticism expressed a divine discontent. The early traditions that developed shortly after the announcement of the doctrine of the Occultation reveal the frustration and impotence felt by many Shiis during the tenth century.33 This has been called “the Shii century” because many of the local commanders in the Islamic empire who wielded effective power in a given region had Shii sympathies, but this turned out to make no appreciable difference. For the majority, life was still unjust and inequitable, despite the clear teaching of the Koran. Indeed, the Imams had all been victims of rulers whom Shiis regarded as corrupt and illegitimate: tradition had it that every single one of the Imams after Husain had been poisoned by the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphs. In their longing for a more just and benevolent social order, Shiis developed an eschatology centering on the final appearance (zuhur) of the Hidden Imam during the Last Days, when he would return, battle with the forces of evil, and establish a Golden Age of justice and peace before the Final Judgment. But this yearning for the End did not mean that the Shiis had abandoned the conservative ethos and become future-oriented. They were so strongly aware of the archetypal ideal, the way things ought to be, that they found ordinary political life intolerable. The Hidden Imam would not bring something new into the world; he would simply correct human history to make human affairs finally conform to the fundamental principles of existence. Similarly, the Imam’s “appearance” would in a profound sense simply make manifest something that had been there all along, for the Hidden Imam is a constant presence in the life of Shiis; he represents the elusive light of God in a dark, tyrannical world and the only source of hope.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The Haskalah was the creation of Moses Mendelssohn (1729–86), the brilliant son of a poor Torah scholar in Dessau, Germany, who, at the age of fourteen, had followed his favorite teacher to Berlin. There he fell in love with modern secular learning and, at prodigious speed, mastered German, French, English, Latin, mathematics, and philosophy. He longed to take part in the German Enlightenment, became a personal friend of Kant’s, and spent all his free time in study. His first book, Phaedon (1767), was an attempt to prove the immortality of the soul on rational grounds, and had nothing particularly Jewish about it. Against his will, however, Mendelssohn found himself obliged to defend Judaism when he encountered Enlightenment hostility to the Jewish faith. In 1769, Johan Casper Lavater, a Swiss pastor, challenged Mendelssohn to defend Judaism in public; if he could not refute the rational proofs of Christianity, Lavater declared, he should submit to baptism. Mendelssohn was also disturbed by the anti-Semitic prejudice in a pamphlet written by a Prussian state official, Christian Wilhelm Van Dohm, On the Civic Improvement of the Condition of the Jews (1781). In order to function effectively and competitively in the modern world, Van Dohm argued, a nation must mobilize the talents of as many people as possible, so it made sense to emancipate the Jews and integrate them more fully into society, even though they should not be granted citizenship or permitted to hold public office. The underlying assumption was that Jews were objectionable and their religion was barbaric.