Saturday, 10 January 2015

Language and Politics.

The article below by the prominent British journalist, Robert Fisk, is a good example of attempting to deconstruct the structure of meaning behind mainstream political discourse. Whoever controls identity, has profound influence over the destiny and life of an individual, group or society.

For Michel Foucault ‘discourse’ is about practices that systematically form or create the objects that they speak. As a result the term ‘discursive formations’ refers to regular bodies of ideas and concepts, which claim to produce knowledge about the world (See The Archaeology of Knowledge).

Discourse theory examines the logic and structure of discursive articulations and the way in which they make possible the formation of identities in society. Political process has a pivotal place in the understanding of social relations and how they are transformed.

Egyptian violence was a massacre, not a ‘post-revolution transition’

What has happened to Egypt? The dead are being called “terrorists”, the word the Israelis use of their enemies. The word the Americans use. The Egyptian press talks of “clashes”, as if armed Muslim Brothers fought the police. Yesterday morning, I met an old Egyptian friend who said he looked at his country’s flag and began to cry.

I can understand why. Why did so many die? Who killed them? There are many Egyptians today, anti-Morsi people, to be sure, who told me yesterday that they could not believe this, that the Brotherhood folk were all holding guns, as one was indeed holding a Kalashnikov near the hospital – a man I saw – but the truth is that the police shot down the unarmed men and not a single policeman died. This was a massacre. This was a mass killing. There is no other word for it.

And we hear the words of our beloved ministers. Take William Hague, who asked the Egyptian authorities to refrain from violence because “now is the time for dialogue, not confrontation”.

Oh dearie, dearie. Not words he would use to the Syrian government, of course. It really is just a bit much when our Egyptian friends use so much fire power on their enemies.

Had Bashar al-Assad’s chums killed so many protesters in the streets of Damascus, the UN would be echoing to the sound of our horror, our fury knowing no bounds, our disgust. But of course, this is Cairo, not Damascus, and our words must be tempered to our friends, not least the general who runs this country. And watch out! The Egyptian Interior Minister has told his people that the Brotherhood sit-in at the Rabaa mosque “God permitting, must end. We hope that they come to their senses and join the political process.” But didn’t they do that when they won the election? General Mohamed Ibrahim, the Interior Minister, said only 21 Brotherhood members had been killed. So why did I count 37 bodies on the floor of the hospital yesterday morning?

But what is the “political process” in Egypt? If you can take part in an election and win – and then be deposed by a general (a guy called Abdel-Fatah al-Sisi) – what is the future of politics in Egypt? The West may want to love Egypt, but it is now being run by a very tough general who doesn’t seem to care very much what we think. He realises that Egypt’s relations with Israel are far more important than any coup d’etat in Cairo and that the preservation of Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel is worth far more than any pretence at democracy in Cairo.

And we – in the West – are going to go along with this. Mr Obama has told Egyptians that he the US “will always be a strong partner to the Egyptian people as they shape their path to the future”. And the Egyptian people – wait for this – had been “given a chance to put the country’s post-revolution transition back on track.” So there you have it! The military coup d’etat was a “post-revolution transition”. Forget the 37 dead I saw in the hospital on Saturday. Forget the speech that Obama made in the Cairo University building opposite another Brotherhood encampment four years ago. We are in a post-revolution transition. Call Lenin.

Robert Fisk, The Independent, Sunday 28 July 2013.

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About the Forum

The Forum initially started its work in December 1997 with the intention of promoting research culture and activities among doctoral candidates in one of the British universities in London. The Research Forum convened 8 sessions a year on humanities-related topics between 1997 and 2013.

The Forum now focuses on the production of self-taught courses, articles and commentary on some aspects of the news for students as well as the general public. The last meeting of the Forum took place in July 2015.

Mowlānā Jalāloddin Balkhi, known in Persia as Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Balkhī and in the West simply as Rumi, was born on September 30, 1207 C. E. in Balkh Province, Afghanistan, then on the eastern edge of the Persian Empire. Rumi descended from a long line of Islamic jurists, theologians, and mystics, including his father, who was known by followers of Rumi as “Sultan of the Scholars.” When Rumi was still a young man, his father led their family more than 2,000 miles west to avoid the invasion of Genghis Khan’s armies. They settled in present-day Turkey, where Rumi lived and wrote most of his life.

As a teenager, Rumi was recognized as a great spirit by the poet and teacher Fariduddin Attar, who gave him a copy of his own Ilahinama (The Book of God). When his father died in 1231, Rumi became head of the madrasah, or spiritual learning community. The school reportedly had over ten thousand students, including masons, grocers, weavers, hatmakers, carpenters, tailors, and bookbinders.

Rumi’s oldest son, Sultan Velad, managed to save 147 of Rumi’s intimate letters, which provide insights about the poet and how he lived. Rumi often involved himself in the lives of his community members, solving disputes and facilitating loans between nobles and students. The letters are described as having lines of poetry scattered throughout.

In 1244, Rumi met Shams Tabriz, a dervish “God-man” who had taken a vow of poverty. Their meeting is considered a central event in Rumi’s life. Though accounts of their meeting differ, one story claims that Rumi was teaching by a fountain, and Shams walked up through the crowd of students and pushed Rumi’s books into the water, including his father’s spiritual diary. “You must now live what you have been reading about," Shams told Rumi. Rumi believed both his real life and his real poetry began when he met Shams. “What I had thought of before as God," Rumi said, “I met today in a human being.”

Shams and Rumi were close friends for about four years. Over the course of that time, Shams was repeatedly driven away by Rumi’s jealous disciples, including one of Rumi’s sons, Ala al-Din. In December of 1248, Shams again disappeared; it is believed that he was either driven away or killed. Rumi left the madrasah in search of his friend, travelling to Damascus and elsewhere. Eventually, Rumi made peace with his loss, returning to his home believing Shams to be a part of him: “His essence speaks through me.”

Rumi’s mourning for the loss of his friend led to the outpouring of more than 40,000 lyric verses, including odes, eulogies, quatrains, and other styles of Eastern-Islamic poetry. The resulting collection, Divan-e Shams-e Tabrizi or The Works of Shams Tabriz, is considered one of Rumi’s masterpieces and one of the greatest works of Persian literature.

In his introduction to his translation of Rumi’s The Shams, Coleman Barks has written: “Rumi is one of the great souls, and one of the great spiritual teachers. He shows us our glory. He wants us to be more alive, to wake up... He wants us to see our beauty, in the mirror and in each other.”

For the last twelve years of his life, beginning in 1262, Rumi dictated a single, six-volume poem to his scribe, Husam Chelebi. The resulting masterwork, the Masnavi-ye Ma’navi(Spiritual Verses), consists of sixty-four thousand lines, and is considered Rumi’s most personal work of spiritual teaching. Rumi described the Masnavi as “the roots of the roots of the roots of the (Islamic) Religion," and the text has come to be regarded by some Sufis as the Persian-language Koran.

In his introduction to an English edition of Spiritual Verses, translator Alan Williams wrote: “Rumi is both a poet and a mystic, but he is a teacher first, trying to communicate what he knows to his audience. Like all good teachers, he trusts that ultimately, when the means to go any further fail him and his voice falls silent, his students will have learnt to understand on their own.”

Rumi fell ill and died on December 17, 1273 C. E., in Konya, Turkey. His remains were interred adjacent to his father’s, and the Yeşil Türbe (Green Tomb) was erected above their final resting place. Now the Mevlâna museum, the site includes a mosque, dance hall, and dervish living quarters. Thousands of visitors, of all faiths, visit his tomb each month, honoring the poet of legendary spiritual understanding.

Source: https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/jalal-al-din-rumi

Your Life Discourse!

It is soooo good when you realize that your life and every road you have taken made and makes sense... Even when you feel that the world will not applaud you for what you are doing, you find you have to do it yourself and clap your own hands. Later everything falls into place. In my doctoral thesis, I studied how the self-discourse is constructed along history. It is a fact that we describe our past like a coherent story. Even though we know that the discourse of our life is a construction, our life is actually built by roads and paths we accept, that come and go, and later make all sense because they are part of our own being. Once in a while we feel that our past is actually part of us.

Marcia Neme Buzalaf
marciabuzalaf@gmail.com.

Scholarship and Academia

Benedit Spinoza is one of the original thinkers among Western philosophers. When he was offered a Professorship of Philosophy at Heidelberg University at age of 31, he turned it down arguing that he wanted to be left alone to do his philosophising “in accordance with his own mind”. He proceeded to live a solitary life, earning his living by grinding and polishing lenses for spectacles, microscopes and telescopes – at the time a new profession.

Being a great philosopher and academic is a rare development: Descartes, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Marx, Mill or Nietzsche did not teach philosophy. The exceptions are Kant and Hegel.

Nothing much has changed since: academia is still not the right place for real scholars today. Mottos such as ‘publish or perish’ have mainly resulted in the production of shallow, regurgitated or ego-boosting publications. Universities are also no different from other corporate capitalist entities that seek to maximize their profit at the cost of quality service. They neither provide the scholar nor the student with a conducive environment for their development or self-fulfilment.

Thoughtful Sentences

Integrity: When the thoughts we think are the same as the words we speak, others will feel our integrity.

Enthusiasm: Those who are fired with an enthusiastic idea and who allow it to take hold and dominate their thoughts find that new worlds open for them. As long as enthusiasm holds out, so will new opportunities.

No Task Too Difficult: If you do everything with the feeling of happiness, there will be no task too difficult to perform.

A Long And Healthy Life: There are three ingredients for a long and healthy life: live with attention but without worry, use time in a worthwhile way, keep your thoughts pure, positive and filled with strength.

Saturday, 10 January 2015

Language and Politics.

Egyptian violence was a massacre, not a ‘post-revolution transition’

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