Risen indeed

 

An Egyptian-American Muslim colleague of mine  received an e-mail from his Egyptian-American Coptic friend, addressed to a roster of friends and acquaintances both Christian and Muslim.   The message read, in its entirety:

Have a blessed Easter.

Risen indeed.

Now, my colleague occasionally has difficulties with nuances of English, even after a couple of decades of residence in the U.S.   But he did understand that this terse and telegraphic phrase asserted the Resurrection of Jesus.

Though Muslim to the core, he is quite accepting of the other Abrahamic faiths (indeed, has more than once attended services with Christian friends), and he was happy to receive this blessing from a friend.   He then asked me, in confidence (since he knows that I am candid about such things), whether all Christian denominations believed in the Resurrection.

            “Um … yes,” I replied.   (The “Um” part was to stall for time while the taken-aback-sensation passed.  In a similar fashion, some years ago, a young woman colleague, university-educated and soon to be well traveled, asked me out of the blue, “Do Jews believe that Jesus is the Messiah?”   -- “Um … no,” was my reply.)

His own reply was a surprise.  “Then we believe the same thing!” he exclaimed, beaming.   For the Koran (he went on) proclaimed that God “lifted” Jesus up to Paradise (rafa`a).   I expressed satisfaction at this congruence, and privately desired that the message might spread to outfits like ISIL and Boko Haram, who might, please, accordingly  knock it off.

He went on to inform me that (according to Muslims) Jesus of Nazareth (upon whom be peace) had not actually been crucified.   I had heard this motif before in connection with the Ahmadiyya (a pure simulacrum had been crucified in his place); but my colleague added a neat twist, reminiscent of the trope wherein the executioner hoists with his own petard:   God had caused the very soldier leading Jesus to Golgotha  to suddenly take on the mild carpenter’s appearance.  

“That’s not in the Koran,” I frowned.  -- “No,” he conceded.

“Hadith?”  (There are tens of thousands of these, some sounder than others, you never known what might be found in some of the doubtful ones.)  --  He considered.  “In the culture,” he finally said.

Which is to say:  Folklore, like “December 25”.   (None but the most ignorant Christian will take offense if you state that we really have no idea what day Jesus was born on.)

Well -- He is born, and He is risen.  Peace on Earth, good will to men.

A vision common to Christianity and Islam

(Nur mit ein bißchen anderen Worten)

~

[Philological footnote]  The Arabic, rafa`, is literally ‘raised’.   Thus, it is not quite equivalent to resurrexit, in what might elsewhere be a small  but is here a crucial difference:  rafa` is comptabile with Jesus having been raised to Paradise while still alive, like Elijah.  There is nothing in the Koran saying that he was risen from the dead.

~

With our linguistic caps on, let us look more closely at the wording of that greeting.   To a Muslim with an uncertain grasp of English, it might seem no more than you might find on a Hallmark card.   It is thus the perfect two-tier or encapsulated expression:   no more than a smooth rock, or black box, to the uninitiated;  but a treasure-chest  which springs open at the click, to initiates.

The standard American greetings that those of my generation grew up with  were “Happy Easter” and “Merry Christmas”.   But as those holdays became increasingly commercialized, some observent Christians have come increasingly to say “Blessed Easter” or “Easter Blessings”, to make it plain that they are actually referring to the holy-day and not simply a time to hunt eggs or find discounts at the Mall (or as a counterpunch to the latterday degradation of even “Merry Christmas” to “Season’s Greetings”).  You would not say it to someone you knew to be an atheist;  though you might say it to a kindly stranger.

 

“Risen indeed”, by contrast, is not used  even by the generality of Christians, let alone to those of other faiths or none.  It specifically echoes the antiphonal style of worship, priest and congregation:      

    

   “The Lord be with you” 

   Rx: “And also with you.”   

   “Christ is risen.” 

   Rx: “He is risen indeed.”    

 

And by leaving off the first two words of the latter formula, pronoun and auxiliary verb, the writer made it clear that he was echoing the ritual greeting, which you may hear in Orthodox, Catholic and Episcopal services, but not among churches whose liturgy or worship-style is not antiphonal.

Among the Eastern Orthodox, this formula is known as the Paschal troparion:   Χριστὸς ἀνέστη.

The English Wikipedia has a particlarly nice article on this topic, as does the Russian version:

       http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paschal_greeting

Christus resurrexit! Resurrexit vere!

[Update]  The whole offering-and-response style recalls, actually, Arabic.  There are dozens or scores, if not hundreds, of formulaic greetings and blessings, each with a prescribed response.   This scarcely exists in English, apart from “Thank you” -- “You’re welcome”.  (Arabic:  shukran. -- `afwan.)

Thus:  To al-salaam `aleykum, you reply Wa-`alaykum al-salaam.  (“Hello.” -- “Hello back.”)

To SabaaH al-xayr (“Good morning”), SabaaH al-nuur (literally “Morning of light”;  with many further variants.)

To na`iiman! (a salutation to someone who has evidently just bathed, or shaved, or had a haircut):  Allah yin`im `ayleek.

And so on.

There is thus, both a theological aspect to the responsory mode of worship, and a cultural/aesthetic one:  both typical of the Mideast.

[Further update]  Apart from the context of worship, such ritualized exchanges are typical of traditional societies, and indeed help constitute their social cement.   Contemporary American is sadly lacking in these:  a lonely survival is “Thank you” -- “You’re welcome” -- and even this may go the way of the dodo  as the custom of so much as thanking  fades, along with that relic of our mother’s day, the Thank-You Note.

(As, https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2025/08/26/carolyn-hax-cash-gifts-thank-you-notes/

Nieces prefer getting cash gifts and not sending thank-you notes.   Sending cash feels like paying bills  to this aunt, and nieces’ lack of response to gifts  makes it even worse.)

 

But the forefathers of our ancestors in the northern isles, were replete with these.   A fossil of one survives in the mysterious word wassail, now known to most speakers only in some old Christmas carols.  In origin, it is a salutation; grammatically, an imperative.  And it came with its own antiphon:

 

Host:  Wassail!  [cognate with Old Norse ves heill ‘be hale’, as in “hale and hearty” and “to your health”]

Guest:  Drink-hail!

 

Ah, the days, those were the days;  those were the days  indeed.

 

Paean to the Equinox

 تُولِجُ اللَّيْلَ فِي النَّهَارِ وَتُولِجُ النَّهَارَ فِي اللَّيْلِ ۖ

 [Sura 3, ayah 27]

Hail Equinox!  Emblem of an equal King,

whose balance-pan lies level ‘neath the oak

where his hands  with open palms dispense

plain justice, to earl and churl alike.

Now doth the husbandman  fête Harvest-Home,

from sheavèd grain   bakes celebrating loaves,

and with sweet rising smoke salutes

the prospect of the fall of autumn leaves.

E’en as our Maker  sundered dark from light,

in one proportion, when the World began,

so too the equinoctial Judge sits throned,

and equably  divides the day from night.

Praise Him! whose broad hand shaped us out of clay,

and like the Equinox, parts night from day.

The lingua franca of jihad (updated)

[Update May 2014]

In the widely-watched video, in which Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau exults in his new notoriety, and crows over the captive schoolgirls, he mixes various languages, in a rather desultory rant;  but at one point breaks into perfectly correct classical Arabic (inflectional voweling and all), when he says, pointing towards his sedentary hostages:  "By God! They will never leave our hands, until our brothers are released from your prisons."  His Arabic is better than his English (particularly in pronunciation).

Usama Ben Laden as well  used to give his public addesses in pure classical Arabic, rather than in the dialects that people use every day.

~

Mr Shekau’s behavior has, one may say, attracted its share of adverse comment.  But here is a detail whose import will escape non-specialists:

A nurse at a hospital here who saw Mr. Shekau a great deal before the summer 2009 uprising — she treated his followers, who were wounded in early skirmishes — found him menacing. “Even if you greet him he doesn’t greet you back,” the nurse said, asking not to be identified for security reasons.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/19/world/africa/a-jihadists-face-taunts-nigeria-from-the-shadows.html?hp&_r=0

Such surliness is more than impolite:  it is plainly contra-Koranic.   For in one of its well-known verses, believers are enjoined:  “When ye are greeted, reply in kind with the same greeting, or with a better one.”

~

For a wide-ranging survey of Arabic for linguistically adept non-Arabists,

written in a punchy style,  try

The Semantics of Form in Arabic,

in the Mirror of European Languages.

~

~     ~     ~

[Below, the original post from February]

A group of seven French nationals was recently kidnapped in Cameroun by Boko Haram, which has just released an interesting video of the hostages:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSx3EgStuMs

The hostages are all French, and Cameroun is officially francophone; and the local language is Hausa, with English as an official language.   Nevertheless, the captor’s speech is read in correct, classical, native-accented Arabic.  The rhetoric is stately, the syntax complex -- much like the addresses Usama Bin Laden used to give.  Moreover, the speaker refers to his group as the  Jamâ`atu ahli l-sunnati li-da`wati wa-l-jihad,  “which they nickname ‘Boko Haram’”.  There is indeed quite a contrast in feeling-tone between that mouth-filling Arabic phrase, with its careful and accurate morphological vowelings (and which means:  “Group of the Sunni people, for preaching and combat”),  and the local-language Boko Haram (basically, “bookums nogood” [*]), which by comparison sounds like pidgin.  In keeping with this, the speaker wastes no time at all denouncing the depravities of Western culture, but adorns his discourse with much stately religious phraseology.

Here classical Arabic is being used as an international koiné or lingua franca, much as French was the language of international culture and diplomacy in the eighteenth century, spoken as far east as the courts of Russia.   As such it is a step towards the kind of thinking that would be required for the re-establishment of the Caliphate, of over a thousand years ago, and which once stretched from southern Spain (al-Andalus) to the dimly-remembered lands  beyond the far rivers of the east.

[*]  It turns out that the conventional etymology of Hausa boko from English book  might be mistaken:
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303701304579549782784964904

Truth vs. Truthiness (updated)

[Update 24 Feb 2012]  The book discussed below  is to be reviewed, and the underlying issues wrestled with,  in this Sunday's NYTimes Book Review:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/26/books/review/the-lifespan-of-a-fact-by-john-dagata-and-jim-fingal.html?_r=1&nl=books&emc=booksupdateema1

~  ~  ~

[originally posted 16 Feb]]

The Koran is often printed with a standard commentary running around each page.  In the center, the dramatic, exhortatory, exclamatory text of the Koran itself, presented as the Word of God.  In the margins,  scholarly parsings of grammar, textual variants, etc.   The format does not really create dialectical tension, since the commentary, though straightforward and fact-based, does not intend to upset any apple-carts, nor to so much as bruise any individual apple.   And indeed, at UC Berkeley, where I sat in (for a while, before dropping out in disgust) on a Koran class for students in the Middle Eastern Studies department, “taught” or rather doled out  by a dour Scottish convert to Islam, the instruction -- unusual for a graduate-level class -- consisted almost entirely of first reading aloud a verse of the Koran, and then the commentary:  verse, commentary; verse, commentary.  No meta-commentary was either given or solicited by our dominie;  from the wall of his cramped and airless office, a giant poster of the Ayatollah Khomeini glared down  as if to reinforce the point.

A quite interesting publishing phenomenon has now revived the format:  text in the center, commentary around the margins.  But now the text is that of a magazine bloviator, a dude of truthitude; the commentary is that of a relentless fact-checker, a veritable Inspector Javert of the Correspondence Theory of Truth; and it is published in the margins  along with an acerbic anti-commentary or surrejoinder  by the original author.   The text itself -- typical journalistic syrup -- does not in itself merit such attention;  but the dialectical approach is quite interesting, and far above the norm of smug journalism.  You can read all about it here:

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2012/02/the_lifespan_of_a_fact_essayist_john_d_agata_defends_his_right_to_fudge_the_truth_.single.html

I posted a satirical version of this sort of thing awhile earlier:

Text;

Commentary plus anti-Commentary (not to mention some “readers’” “Comments”).

For our other posts on Truthiness, click here.

For serious philosophical examinations of Truth, here.

[Update:] A commentor at the Slate site points out that the Talmud as well is published in such a format;  and that this exemplar may even have inspired this latest publishing venture.

Another valuably observes:

Herzog famously rejects the "truth of accountants" in favor of something he calls "ecstatic truth", the proper target even of his documentary films.

While such an approach can certainly be abused, there is indeed a time for non-actuarial veracity, as you may learn from the Murphy Brothers  here:

http://murphybros.blogspot.com/2010/01/murphy-on-double-entry-bookkeeping.html

~

The older and more classic  a text becomes, the more likely it is to appear in scholarly editions with festoons of footnotes -- usually not wreathed around the margins, Koran-fashion, but relegated to the bottom of the page.   And yet one such edition, undertaken  in all probability  with no inkling that controversy would arise,  winds up taking issue with the object text in an unsettling way.  Henri Chamard, in his édition critique of the celebrated La deffence et illustration de la langue francoyse (sic; such is the diplomatic spelling) by Joachim du Bellay, is brought nolens volens to the conclusion that du Bellay pretty much plagiarized the bulk of it from an essay by an Italian, one Speroni.  The footnotes thus often consist of the source-quotations from that earlier work, the scholar functioning, not so much as a fact-checker, but as a veracity-checker, or honesty-checker.

[Update 16 III 12] More truthitude:
http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/16/this-american-life-retracts-episode-on-apples-suppliers-in-china/?ref=global-home

[Update 1 Nov 2012]

Mitt Romney: more like "subtruthiness" or "hypotruthitude":

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/post/mitt-romneys-kamikaze-strategy/2012/11/01/27ca3140-2435-11e2-ac85-e669876c6a24_blog.html?hpid=z3
"There's been quite a bit of consternation among reporters lately about Mitt Romney’s refusal to answer their questions. And rightly so. But let’s be clear on why Romney is refusing to engage reporters. If he did, he’d face questions about the mounting instances of dishonesty his campaign has resorted to in the final stretch ...
In the race’s final days, Romney has adopted what you might call a Kamikaze strategy. His campaign is cranking out a startling number of falsehoods and sleazy attacks..."

.

But the Baby Bear’s Porridge was Ju-u-ust Right…

Our Canadian Colleague comments, concerning a recent post (“Why is there Something rather than Nothing, Grandpa?”):

>> patterns not specifically tailored to the cerebral convolutions ... of ... the humble woodchuck.

>I think you are disagreeing here with most of the Christian theologians who have ever lived. Surely God created the universe just for us, so everything in it ought to make sense?

Now as it happens, I am at present reading a book that addresses this very issue -- but by a physicist, not a theologian (though he is a Christian):  Paul Davies, The Goldilocks Enigma:  Why Is the Universe  Just Right for Life? (2006).   The enigma in question refers to the program of the Anthropic Cosmological Principle.   This exists in various strengths, such as the Weak Anthropic Principle -- basically “We’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here -- and if we weren’t, we wouldn’t be here to know it” -- and the Strong Anthropic Principle -- in short, that the universe was fine-tuned so as to bring forth -- Hi Mom! --  intelligent life -- with no doubt many variants in-between, such as the “Feeling off my feed but should soon be right as rain” Anthropic Principle.   Since book-length discussions of these are easily available, I won’t comment further.

*

The alert reader will have noticed, however, that so far I have sidestepped the challenge issuing from the hyperborean forests.

Before replying publically, I passed this note to my Spiritual Advisor, Dr. Massey:

Now in fact, I am unable to conceive that the universe was created "just for us" -- certainly not just for H. sapiens;  *possibly* for all rational species, of which there may be a great many.    This view is not heresy, I hope?

To my immense relief, he thus replied:

No heresy there. Certainly, we must, by revelation, hold that only humans are created in the Imago Dei (I'm here, btw, using the nominative of the technical term, but after the preposition "in" in Latin, it would have been "in imagine Dei". I had originally typed just that, but thought better of it.)
In fact, a fairly straightforward reading of Genesis 1 would conclude that God did not create the universe for Man, but rather out of sheer goodness. Man was given an important caretaker role over that creation, but it wasn't made *for* him. Further, scripture attests a speaking animal in Numbers 22.

This keeps happening:  By a process of mediation and reasoning, I arrive at a conclusion that seems potentially alarming, only to discover that it is a doctrine tolerated or even advocated by the Holy Mother Church.

Even better, the learnèd doctor goes on:

In fact, a rereading of the delightful passage in Numbers 22 reveals that animals are experiencing the supernatural world on a level we humans are not. Balaam's ass, to be sure, cannot speak until the LORD "opened his mouth." But Balaam is not able to see the Angel of the LORD until God "opened his eyes."

Surely, after having his eyes opened, we do not conclude that Balaam is not really seeing the Angel. In the same way, we are not permitted to conclude that it is not really the donkey speaking. (In answer to some commentaries that say that God was merely speaking through the dumb animal.)

The Angel further points out that he would have spared the donkey and killed Balaam if they had come any closer.

So animals are, according to scripture, walking around and quite normally and naturally seeing what is invisible to us. And what do they see? They see a world filled with the servants and angels of God all around.

I have often noticed this phenomenon myself, particularly among the ducks.

*

A viewpoint somewhat more congenial to the thesis fathered above upon Christian theologians, may be found in Islam.  Although the Qur’an is overall strongly theocentric, in the matter of Adam  it is more anthropocentric than is the Torah.  For in Sura 2:31-33 we learn that God taught Adam the names of things, then stumped the angels and had Adam himself instruct the angels in the names;  and in verse 34, God orders the angels, “Bow down to Adam”:  which they did, but Iblis (Satan) refused, and thus became a kafir (unbeliever).

As for whether the cosmos itself was specifically made for mankind, 2:29 says only “It is He Who hath created for you all things that are on earth.”  This says nothing about other galaxies, let alone the cosmos as a whole, let alone Riemannian manifolds and E8.