I and I

Noontime, and I’m still pushin’ myself along the road, the darkest part
Into the narrow lanes, I can’t stumble or stay put
Someone else is speakin’ with my mouth, but I’m listening only to my heart
I’ve made shoes for everyone, even you, while I still go barefoot

--Bob Dylan

Muraqaba

What is meditation? To wait and watch; observe; respect.

To perch on a winter branch and never, for a moment, doubt the immanent arrival of Spring.

Ibn al-Waqt

Something now is, O Son of the Moment. Be still!

Preserving the Heritage, Part 2

Some 3 million books perished when the National Library and Sarajevo's Institute for Oriental Studies were razed in a bombardment by Bosnian Serb forces.

But others were smuggled to safety...

Preserving the Heritage, Part 1

Turkish company restoring 600-year-old dervish lodge in Bosnia - Today's Zaman, your gateway to Turkish daily news

Persian Poets

"Seek knowledge, even if it means going all the way to Australia."

The Answer to Montesquieu's Question

My father always insisted that Persians basically did not have a home, except in their literature, especially their poetry. This country, our country, he would say, has been attacked and invaded numerous times, and each time, when Persians had lost their sense of their own history, culture and language, they found their poets as the true guardians of their true home. Citing the poet Ferdowsi and how, after the Arab invasion of Persia, he rescued and redefined his nation's identity and culture through writing the epic of Persian mythology and history in his Book of Kings, my father would say, We have no other home but this, pointing to the invisible book, this, he would repeat is our home, always, for you and your brother, and your children and your children's children.

Azar Nafisi

Shahnama: The Supreme Fiction, the Secret History of the World

Princeton Shahnama Project.

Samarkand

Piercing beauty.

Beautiful Vision Defiled

Like so many people, Saudis also suffer from an irony deficiency (irony poor blood).

The Beautiful Vision

The ultimate secrets of nature will not be revealed until man has stopped the self-destructive activity that prevents him from seeing what kind of world he is really in. The real world is beyond time, but can only be reached by a process that goes on in time. As Eliot says, only through time is time conquered.

Northrop Frye, The Great Code, 76.

And what, we may ask, is the "real world"? For Wallace Stevens, it was the phenomenal world as experienced and negotiated by the imagination. Stevens was following the aesthetics of Santayana (the Moor) who seems to have somehow intuited or imbibed (or arrived at coincidentally, perhaps through a creative misreading of Spinoza) a version of Ibn 'Arabi's metaphysical aesthetics--a version liberated from its metaphysical commitments.

Frye may have been more of an Akbarian than he knew. If so, he betrayed an anti-modernist streak. I follow Stevens (and Wittgenstein) into metaphysical minimalism--a familiar modernist move. That said, I affirm the beautiful vision that Stevens coined the "Supreme Fiction." Only a naive realism could doubt the power of the imagination to shape perceptions and, hence, influence one's conduct in the found world. In his "whole harmonium" Stevens articulated a sober Romanticism: one that eschews both the naive realism of the Positivists and the insupportable magical-idealism of many Romanticists (not to mention religious believers of all stripes). Stevens saw with both eyes (an Akbarian trope): the Knight of Doleful Countenance is never permitted to undertake his adventures without the assistance of his loyal, and earth-bound, Squire.

In the Immortal Words of Montesquieu...

How can one be Persian?

If Blake had seen Isfahan, he might have forgotten Jerusalem. For Isfahan, if anywhere, is Golgonooza.

Anne and Henri Stierlin

Photo archives of art and architecture from around the globe.

The Beautiful Ties That Bind

The Silk Road Project

Pre-Raphaelites Painters

The Holy Grail of Islamic Tradition

There is a tradition among Muslim scholars that the Divine has 3,000 names. 1,000 are known only to angels, 1,000 to prophets, 300 are to be found in the Torah, 300 in the Psalms, 300 in the New Testament, and the 99 most beautiful (asma 'l-husna) are found in the Qur'an. This totals 2,999. The 3,000th "name"--the supremely beautiful one--is God's own secret.

The scholars explain that God hides certain things from humankind as a mercy. God's closest friends among humankind (awliya) are hidden so that they will not be accorded special treatment: all men and women should, instead, treat one another as equals. God has hidden the precise date of the Night of Power in Ramadan (the first night upon which, according to tradition, the Qur'an began to be revealed) so that all the days and nights of Ramadan should be observed with equal devotion. God's consent to certain human behaviors is hidden so that men and women will not presume it, but will search the tradition for direction in their lives. It is also said that the supremely beautiful Divine "name" is hidden in the Qur'an so that human beings will study the book assiduously, learning it by heart.

The search for the most beautiful attributes of the Divine is the Holy Grail of the Islamic tradition.

The Wandering Scholar

Lectio Humana:

The University of Kentucky, 1978-1979.

The University of Pittsburgh, 1979-1982.

Duquesne University School of Law, 1987-1991.

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2001-2008.





Lectio Divina:

Learning to read in the deep heart's core, 1973-present.

The Religion of Beauty, i.e., حسن

I'm with Ruskin, Pater, Santayana, and Stevens: give me the religion of beauty and let the devil take the rest.