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.

 

The Ontology of History (updated)

The pageant of all that has happened is, to begin with, a blooming buzzing confusion.   Historically, one aim of the chronicler has been to slice up some of it, and dress it up into a narrative that will be entertaining or edifying for the audience.  More analytically-minded historians (such as Ibn Khaldun and his successors) have set themselves an additional task:  To make sense of it.

ابن خلدون

A wide-ranging comparative historian acknowledges the wealth of data which confront the historiographer, but

The “intelligible fields of study”, the comparable units of history, remain inconveniently few for the application of the scientific technique.

-- Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History (12 volumes; 1934-61; introduction, last paragraph)

One classic move is to organize the ever-mingling, ever-onrushing flow of events  into coherent thematic chunks;  as:  the Dark Ages; the Renaissance; the Reformation;  the Enlightenment.   Others refer to calendric stretches but, if so, normally must modify the defining termini a quo and ante quem  to reflect actual historical development:  thus, “the long nineteenth century” (which lasted into the Edwardian autumn, and winked out forever at Sarajevo), and “the Sixties”,  which  in the good sense  began with JFK’s election, and  in the bad sense  with his assassination;  and then petered out ignobly in the early seventies.

Anyhow, huge subject, won’t treat it here, but merely serve up a couple of quotes specifically related to Islamic historiography -- thus posting at least a place-holder for the topic, in our wildly successful “Ontology of …” series (soon to be featured on bubble-gum cards, suitable for trading).

“Classic” or “classical period” is likewise a construct, all the more obviously so  since it is being borrowed from one phenomenon, Greek and Roman antiquity, and used to somehow periodize another quite different one, Islam.

-- F. E. Peters, preface to A Reader on Classical Islam (1994)

History is a seamless garment;  periodization is a convenience of the historian, not a fact of the historical process.  By choosing carefully, one can slant history without any resort to actual falsehood.  For example, a writer on relations between the United States and Japan can start with Hiroshima, or he can start with Pearl Harbor.

-- Bernard Lewis, “In Defense of History” (1997/1999), reprinted in From Babel to Dragomans (2004), p. 389

He goes on to make an exact parallel with the historiography of the Crusades, of intense current relevance, but too hot to handle in this space;  consult the (excellent) original article.

The essential human unit  in which man’s nature is fully realised  is not the individual, [n]or a voluntary association which can be dissolved or altered or abandoned at will, but  the nation.

--Isaiah Berlin, “Nationalism”, repr. in Against the Current (1979), p. 342

(Cf. individual vs. group selection  in Darwinism.)

[Afternote] We sometimes also find explanatory periodization, not by historians, but by the people themselves:

The Aztecs … sought relief … from the oppressive idea of eternity, by breaking it up into distinct cycles … each of several thousand years’ duration.  There were four of these cycles;  and at the end of each, by the agency of the elements, the human family was swept from the earth, and the sun blotted out from the heavens, to be again rekindled.

-- William Prescott, History of the Conquest of Mexico (1843), p. 53

~

Glanced at above is the internal ontology of historiography -- its structure and staffage.  There is also the matter of its external ontology -- how it fits in with other disciplines.

“History is an art, like the other sciences,” a felicitious paradoxical epigram crafted by Veronica Wedgwood.

--John Lukacs, The Future of History (2011), p. 81

.

The Trinity (triune unity -- re-renewed)

[In observance of Maundy Thursday,  a re-post  from yesteryear.]

I spend a fair amount of time in the company of Muslims these days;  indeed, at present, by an accident of the seating-chart, I probably spend more time in close propinquity with Muslims, than with Christians, Hindus, Jainists, Jews, and Zoroastrians combined.   (Lotta LDS, though.  Plus all that could change with the next re-org, as my next podmates might be Zoroastrians.)   [Update March 2017:  And now, in fact, our branch chief is a Zoroastrian.] There is an effort of good-will on both sides;  my Sunni neighbor points eagerly to passages in the Koran, where good things are promised to ‘believers’ (mu’miniin) rather than specifically ‘Muslims’ (muslimiin).  A kind-hearted man, he hopes to be with me in Paradise, and not to gaze down on me roasting in Hell.  (`Uqbaalak, ya shaykh.)

Now, we Christians know implicitly, that the doctrine of the Trinity is no polytheism:

that Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, are not at all like Apollo, Zeus, and Hera, say, but more like le père Dupont, at once father, and Frenchman, and fireman.   But to explain this to our Muslim friends, is difficult.   I often have to fall back on saying:  the Trinity is a Christian mystery; it may be true or false (in some transcendental sense of those categories), but it is no descendent, direct or indirect, of the sort of pagan polytheism which stuffed the Kaaba with idols, and peopled the trees with dryads, and Olympus with squabbling gods.  For us as for you, God Himself -- Allah -- Yahweh -- e’en He -- is indeed One.

Yet this unity by no means necessitates or logically entails, that there could be no parts at variance within the Godhead, even to dissension.  (Of course, their absence might be a truth of the Church, and thus beyond dispute;  I am speaking here only of logic, the only subject in which I have been ordained.)  How indeed could we ever know otherwise (save by some enigmatic Revelation)?  After all:  We are made in His image, and we ourselves are a bundle of contradictions;  and He contains us, as a proper part.  (Additionally, that Eloi, eloi passage would seem to point in that direction.)

~

C. S. Lewis saw rightly when he compared the notion of the Trinity (purely as regards its intellectual coherence, rather than anything theological) with the ‘separate’ faces of a cube -- which latter is, however, nothing more nor less than the sum of all of them.  (Indeed, if you were to go with a sort of ‘projective cube’, with antipodal faces identified, our new Cube (topologically a three-torus) would even consist of exactly three parts.)

The historian of physics D’Abro offers a similar parable, along the lines of Abbot’s Flatland (A. D’Abro, The Rise of the New Physics (1939), vol. II, p. 653), his quarry being however, not the Trinity, but the (in some ways similar) “wave-particle duality”:  or, as we might term it, the wave-particle identity.  He imagines our various perceptions of something we believe to be one entity, but which sometimes seems a triangle, and at others, a circle:  eventually we realize that it is a cone, seen now this way, now that.  And, regarding the separateness/unity of electricity and magnetism:

The theory of relativity brought about the fusion of the two aspects, no longer by utilizing the background of 3-dimensional space, but by introducing the more refined background of 4-dimensional space-time.   The underlying entity, the partial aspects of which are electric and magnetic, were found to be the 4-dimensional electromagnetic tensor  situated in space-time.

-- A. D’Abro, The Rise of the New Physics (1939), vol. II, p. 653

The Trinity, we may confide, whatever in its unknowable essence it may be, is at the very least as complex as a  tensor.

~

Pascal (Pensées, 1670 [posthum]), has a very odd passage, asserting the alienating nature of God’s complexity -- or perhaps not -plexity, but monolithicness :

S’il y a un Dieu, il est infiniment incompréhensible, puisque, n’ayant ni partie ni bornes, il n’a nul rapport à nous.  Nous sommes donc incapables de connaître  ni ce qu’il est, ni s’il est.

Ni s'il est ! -- A useful first step towards an antidote  might be to drop that assertion about God's lacking any parts.

.

Chimed Poetry

The Koran was born as an oral document, in a largely preliterate society -- many Muslims maintained that the Prophet himself was without letters.   This “scripture” (as we call it, with print-culture bias) is in its natural element when recited aloud in public, by an expert in cantillation (tajwîd).  

The language of the text itself  lends itself naturally to such vocal performance, since, although it is not poetry (the verses are of greatly disparate length, and there is no meter), and though the verses to not exactly rhyme in a way characteristic of English or German,  they do (one might say) chime, showing assonance and consonance.

Readers of translations (or, strictly, “versions” or “interpretations”, as Muslim scholars insist) of the Koran, get no sense of this.    Nor should such a “chiming” version be undertaken in any rhyme-rich language, for the work as a whole.  Still, to give a flavor of it, here is an imitation or rhyming impression of the opening prayer of the Koran, the fâtiha:

To thee -- to thee -- our voice we raise --

Lord of the Worlds -- in hymns of praise.

Fount of all mercy  till End of Days,

Thee we entreat, our staff and stays.

Show us the straight path, midst welter of ways:

not that of the curse’d, nor of him who strays.

*

The canonical Latin prayers of the Historical Church  do not rhyme, nor show meter.   From the Creed:

Credo in unum Deum,
Patrem omnipotentem,
factorem cæli et terræ,
visibilium omnium et invisibilium.

But the later, popular prayers of the Middle Ages  often do.   Here is the Stabat mater, which is trochaic tetramater  and in strophic form:

Stabat Mater dolorosa

Iuxta crucem lacrimosa,

Dum pendebat filius.

Cuius animam gementem

Contristatam et dolentem

Pertransivit gladius.

O quam tristis et afflicta

Fuit illa benedicta

Mater unigeniti

Quae maerebat et dolebat.

Et tremebat, cum videbat

Nati poenas incliti.

*

For verse translations (in English, French, and German) of St. Francis’ hymn to Brother Sun, try this:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2013/04/welcome-francis-updated-anew.html

An inner layer of the onion

The lead article in this morning’s New York Times  features a lengthy look-back on a scandalous story from March of 2015:  the mob-murder of a woman in Afghanistan, upon charges that she had just burned a Koran.    To publish such a follow-up is quite commendable, as so many complex events are misconceived during the initial period of their media notoriety.  At the time, the story was reported along the lines of:   Yes, she apparently burned one, who knows why, but she was already known as a lunatic, and should not have been held responsible for the act, let alone murdered. 

An investigation followed, and the paper today states:  “Farkhunda had not burned a Koran.”   An obviously crucial point (logically, legally), entirely independently of whatever further feelings or philosophy you might personally entertain (and, as usual, we are dealing here only with the logic of the case, not trying to push one opinion or another).  -- But why, then, (you will immediately wonder) had the mob set upon her?  -- Ah, wheels within wheels.

What is alleged to have happened is this: 

Farkhunda first visited the Shad-Do Shamshira shrine … It was a Wednesday, women’s day at the shrine, when men are not allowed.  The women commiserate about their lives.  They visit the fortuneteller to buy amulets to help them get pregnant, find a husband, or have male children.  Known as tawiz, the amulets usually consist of writings on a small piece of paper  that a woman can pin to her body or keep in a pocket.  Farkhunda was appalled at the way the women’s superstitions were being exploited … She confronted … the fortuneteller.

The article then veers off in a more salacious direction, not strictly relevant to the crux of the story, about how the fortuneteller was selling Viagra and condoms on the sly.    To prevent Farkhunda from trashing her trade, the fortune-teller evidently decided that the best defense is a good offense, and accused her of burning the sacred volume;  that was passed to the mob, and grisly events followed.

There is a religious background here, however, which is crucial to the case;  and ultimately puts all this in quite a different light (theistically/legally;  no defense intended  of the quick-trigger savagery of the mob).

Now, neither birth-control nor aphrodisiacs are per se normally forbidden in Islam (though abortion is); for the latter, consult this jolly summary:

https://ar.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D9%85%D9%86%D8%B4%D8%B7%D8%A7%D8%AA_%D8%AC%D9%86%D8%B3%D9%8A%D8%A9_%D8%B7%D8%A8%D9%8A%D8%B9%D9%8A%D8%A9

But the amulets (and the fortuneteller) are quite significant here to the essence of the story, and the article does not spell this out.

The reader might get the impression that Farkhunda was simply objecting to the use of the shrine as a place of commerce, and upbraided them the way Jesus chased the money-changers from the Temple.  But the commerce in fortunetelling and amulets is islamically much worse -- as though the Temple-defilers had been selling pagan idols rather than merely changing your drachmae into denarii.   Mainstream (Sunni) Islam is quite emphatic in condemning pagan survivals and polytheistic deviations;  here Wiki quotes a hadîth (saying of the Prophet) against amulets:

وفي الحديث: مَن عَلَّق تَمِيمةً فلا أَتَمَّ الله له. وتعليق التمائم من فعل الجاهلية، كانوا يعتقدون أنه يدفع عنهم الآفات

The word used here for ‘amulet’ is tamîmah; the verb here, atamma, is from the same root, and the saying has the air of a bit of wordplay.  The word used in the article, tawiz, is from classical Arabic  ta`wîð  (accented on the second syllable; rhymes with seethe), from a root meaning ‘to seek refuge (from evil, with God)’, familiar in the common apotropaic phrase  a`ûðu bi-llâh.

As for fortune-telling, that too is deprecated as a survival of the jâhiliyyah (the Days of Ignorance before Islam) -- though in practice, a kind of Koran-based analogue of the bibliomantic sortes Virgilianae does survive, in the tolerated form of the istikhârah. 

Thus, at this point (as the article does not notice), Farkhunda appears, on the face of it, as a defensor fidei, in the face of her backsliding compatriots;  and thus, prima facie, a charge that she burned a Koran  would seem absurd.

But now comes a crucial further development, which the article quite glides over:  It seems that, in her iconoclastic zeal, Farkhuna went on to burn some of those amulets by setting a fire in a trash can.   Left to their own devices, readers may recall Christ’s equally vigorous action in the Temple, overturning the tables of the money-changers.  And had these amulets been, say, jade idols, there would have been no Islamic problem with destroying them -- indeed, ISIL and and Taliban deem it a duty, blowing up pagan statues far and wide.   Only … that is not what the ‘amulets’ are.  Reread the description: “the amulets usually consist of writings on a small piece of paper”.   Umm… What kind of writings?  “Today you will meet a tall dark stranger”?  “Help I’m a prisoner in a Chinese fortune-cookie factory”?  No:  typically, verses from the Koran.

Thus, it would appear that, indeed, Farkhunda did burn the sacred verses after all;  only, in the form of loose pages, rather than a bound book.  And that distinction is religiously immaterial.   It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that she was, then, within the culture, actually guilty  more or less as charged.

~

Secular readers will be unmoved by all that, and feel justified in not even attempting to understand what is really going on theologically (and thus, within Sharia, legally).  But abhorrence of burning God’s word, or even (in whatever secular context) the mere name of God,  is familiar, not only in Islam, but in Abrahamic religion generally. We deal with the matter here:

The ancient Jews, whether learnèd or otherwise, were loath to burn any scrap of writing, lest it contain, somewhere within it, the name of God (or rather, in keeping with the Hebraic decencies, the name of G*d).   Accordingly  those  who lived in Cairo, buried all excess scrip and scripture, in storerooms and cemetaries.

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2013/09/the-cairo-geniza-re-seen.html

~

Such folk-superstitions as talismans and fortune-telling  may have a particular flavor in Muslim lands, but much of it is an area rather than intra-confessional phenomenon.  Thus, consider the folk-belief in the Evil Eye, characteristically circum-Mediterranean.

Two examples from my personal experience -- everyone involved being highly educated and long living in America.

(1)  A Christian woman originally from Lebanon was introducing her class to Lebanese culture, and mention the tradition of the dreaded al-`ayn.   Of course, she said (standing there in fully modern Western dress), that’s all just superstition, people don’t really believe in it anymore, only … A change came over her, and her eyes turned inward, as she reminisced.

“Just last month something happened… I had a very fine tall potted plant in the entry-way, and a friend came to visit, and remarked on how nice the plant was.  And … the next week … it had withered and died!”

That would be a prototypical case of hexing via the Evil Eye, whose essence is envy.

Thus:  Hint to non-initiates.  When dealing with people from a Mediterranean culture, be especially cautious of praising their children, and being careful to dot your discourse on such subjects with mashaallaah!, which reputedly draws the sting of the Eye.

(2)  I once took dialect tutoring from a woman originally from Baghdad.  Though Muslim, she did not seem to have narrow religious views -- her parents had sent her to a Jewish school for one year, simply because it was conveniently in the neighborhood;  and she sometimes prays to the Virgin Mary (“since only she would understand a woman’s troubles”).  The class went well.

Later, two (Christian) young women, colleagues of mine (one blonde, one brunette, as we shall note so as to tell them apart) shared tutoring-sessions with the same teacher.  But the brunette noted that the teacher would never look directly at her, though she was at ease with the blonde.   When the brunette would ask a question in Arabic, the teacher (looking away) would respond in English -- vitiating the point of the class.

“As the weeks went by, I got more and more frustrated,” she reports.  “And then I noticed that, each week, the teacher had put on yet another piece of turquoise jewelry.”   Suddenly she realized what had been going on:  this young woman had blue eyes (not very, though), and that feature is said to be characteristic of al-`ayn.  The turquoise stones function as (blue) amulets against this.

A Theologian, a Poet, and a Mathematician contemplate the mystery of the Creation

The whole meaning of the Universe   is contained in the Koran.

The whole meaning of the Koran, is contained in any Sura thereof.

The whole meaning of any Sura, may be confidently derived, from the deepest meaning, of any individual ayah of the same.

And that (for them that understand), from any one word within.

And  -- that -- from any letter therein.

And …  that  …  from but … the merest (least) [minimal] diacritical

   point thereon …..

-- Received Muslim wisdom

To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in an hour.

-- Wm. Blake

The period at the end of this sentence  looks, from afar, like a connected, dimension-0 manifold

-- Timothy Gowers, ed., The Princeton Companion to Mathematics (2008), p. 398

[Note to connoisseurs:  Notice that there is actually no period at the end of that sentence …]

The general idea expressed in the first two meditations  was classically denoted by the phrase ex pede Herculem (i.e., given knowledge of proportions, you could 'project' the full statue from the ruin remains of just a foot).

A more startling analogue from mathematics:  the "Reflection Principle" in Set Theory.

--  I fear lest the promising compound subject of the title of this post, may have misled many into explecting that the trio in question would jointly walk into a bar.  Alas!  I have as yet no continuation for that promising premise --  a fact lamented  here:
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2013/12/a-mathematician-and-theologian-walk.html

For a walk-into-a-bar joke, replete with religious mysticism:
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2011/08/woodchuck-priest-and-qadi-walk-into-bar.html

For the contemplation of the afterlife by mathematicians, try this:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2011/03/mathematicians-contemplate-afterlife.html

As for theologians, well, they’re well beyond that.

Kafka on gallantry

A bi-Abrahamic perspective, aus Mitteleuropa:

“Ich rate Ihnen, die Sache im guten  beizulegen.”

“Ich habe mir ja auch gedacht, daß es besser wäre.  Sie ist ja eine Frau.  Frauen haben keine Seele, sagt Mohamet mit Recht.  Zu verzeihen wäre auch menschlicher, goethischer.”

-- Franz Kafka, Tagebücher:  Aufzeichnungen aus dem Jahre 1912:  28 Februar

Leçon de grammaire:

      goethisch;   goethischer;    am goethischsten

Words from the Smithy: “Islamist(ic(al(ly)))”

In an earlier post (“Dominionism”),  we discussed the terminological distinction between Islamic and Islamist (the latter being a professorial confection, originally French, which later events propelled onto the Public Square), along with a proposed newer word, Christianist.   But the battle-lines have hardened since then, with Islamist becoming ever more consistently pejorative, by now so overflowing with negativity that some of it splashes over onto its blamesless paronym, Islamic.    So, we need some semantic clarification, and lexicographic legislation.  The point here is not to argue one politico-theological position or another, but simply to provide writers with a clean, precise set of tools.

So let it be written, so let it be said:

Islam (Islamic) : one of the Abrahamic faiths. (Cf. Judaism, Christianity.)

Islamism  (Islamist) :  theologically, a distilled and stiffened variety of the above (cf. Orthodox flavors of Judaism and Christianity), but with a dominionist addition (cf. Muslim Brotherhood;  aspects of ancient and of modern Israel;  Caesaropapism).  A less lapidary formulation is "Political Islam".

A Muslim (anyhow on Fridays),

but i’ faith, no Islamist.

To these we add coinages of our own, for yet finer semantic distinctions:

Islamistic :  exaggeratedly Islamist.  (Cf. Fundamentalism.  ISIL probably fits in here.)

Islamistical : exaggeratedly Islamistic. (Cf. Branch Dravidians, Boko Haram.)

Islamistically: in an Islamistic(al) manner 

Islamisticality:  the property of proceding Islamistically.

Islamisticaloidal : a to-tall-ly over-the-top wacko distortion of Islam (Cf. the medieval Persian cult of the Assassins, and (for Christianity) the contemporary Lord’s Resistance Army, of central Africa.)

Abu-Hamza:  un tant soit peu  islamisticaloïde

Islamisticaloidaliferous :   ? -- No, sorry, that one’s just plain silly.
[Though compare, to be sure, Fouad Laroui's anti-Da`ish coinage  califarfelutique, of similar meaning.]

post-meta-Islamisticaloidaliferosity:  [Sorry, this Premium Content is reserved for Gold Card ™ subscribers to the World of Dr Justice © ]

  

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That is part parody;  but it is a fact of the English language that extra suffixes are sometimes tacked on with pejorative intent.  Thus, for -ist/-ism:

C.S. Lewis, Christian Reflections (1967), p. 112: "If we call the speculations of Whitehead or Jeans or Eddington `scientism' (as distinct from 'science')"

This on its own  stamped her  not only as an irremediable third-rate genteelist bullshitter, but…

-- Kingsley Amis, The Folks that Live on the Hill (1990), p. 31

-istic:

Gerd Gigerenzer et al, The Empire of Chance (1989), p. 240: "He inaugurated the scientific, or perhaps scientistic, phase of baseball statistics."

Cf. further military vs. militaristic.

[Update 5 March 2015] An article in this morning’s Washington Post reports that the new Saudi King, Salman, has awarded a prize to an Indian Muslim, whom the Post labels an “Islamic supremacist”.

More on this charmer:

His orthodox, Wahhabist views — affiliated closely with the Saudi state — are polarizing in India, which is home to a diverse set of Muslim traditions and sects. His conservatism has led him to make statements endorsing the use of female sex slaves and allegedly expressing sympathy for terrorists.

In a 2008 video, he claimed President George W. Bush was behind the Sept. 11 attacks. "Even a fool will know that this was an inside job," Naik said. Years before, he appeared to offer tacit backing to terrorist masterminds such as Osama bin Laden.

"If [Bin Laden] is terrorizing America the terrorist, the biggest terrorist, I am with him," he said in one video. "Every Muslim should be a terrorist."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2015/03/04/the-saudi-king-gave-a-prize-to-an-islamic-scholar-who-says-911-was-an-inside-job/?hpid=z5

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Next comes the question as to the proper pronunciation of this relatively new term Islamist.   The version I came away with after having spent a few years in and around the Near Eastern Studies department at Berkeley, is forestressed:  IS-lam-ist; and that is the version heard just a moment ago on a BBC broadcast   But the U.S. media is now regularly saying is-LAM-ist.    So the question is:  where did this form IS-lam-ist come from -- is -ist, like -ic, one of those suffixes that rearrange stress?

The classic Chomsky-Halle Sound Pattern of English  appears not to give decisive examples, nor a rule, for this affix.  But Hans Marchand’s The Categories and Types of Present-Day English Word-Formation has several fine pages on -ist, and on page 310 states definitely:  “The stress of the -ist word is on the same syllable as in the unsufixed basis.”  And indeed, upon reflection:  we say car-TOON-ist, re-FORM-ist.    So no, -ist need not repel the stress.   And yet is-LAM-ist sounds odd to me;  I have no idea why.

[Footnote:  Marchand's work is inexhaustibly rich; but unfortunately he does not discuss the semantic nuances among -ist/-istic/-istical.]

It might seem mildly paradoxical that the longer, rather abstruse-looking coinages I have offered, are actually more determinate in pronunciation, since they contain suffixes which overrule the stress-pattern of whatever they attach to.  Thus, unambiguously:   is-lam-IST-ic, is-lam-IST-ic-al-ly, versus is-lam-ist-i-CAL-it-y.

[Update 15 March 2015]  Further expert testimony against those who would absolve ISIL and Islam from any taint of each other, via the No True Scotsman maneuver.  Reviewing a new monograph by Cole Brunzel:

The Islamic State’s version of jihadi-Salafism is predicated on an extremist reading of Islamic scripture that is also textually rigorous, deeply rooted in a premodern theological tradition, and elaborated on by a recognized cadre of religious authorities.

http://www.brookings.edu/research/papers/2015/03/ideology-of-islamic-state

[Update 3 April 2015]  King Salman of KSA is hanging tough on the islamistical front, and this at a time when he needs an international coalition to support his invasion of Yemen:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2015/04/02/saudi-arabia-warns-canada-to-not-support-blogger-sentenced-to-1000-lashes/

Here he accuses Canada of lèse-shariah. 

[Update 6 juin 2015] French belletrists now have a word for islamisticality:  le Nazislamisme

[7 juin 2015]  And:  Islamikaze (Islamic kamikaze).

[26 Juni 2015]  Leser-kommentar, apud Die Presse (Wien):

Diejenigen, die den Asyl-wahnsinn mitmachen, sind als Eurabier zu bezeichnen.

[4 March 2016]
An apparently slighting term that is cropping up in current Arabic prose is thawrji, from thawrah ‘revolution’ plus the humble, Turkish-derived agent-suffix -ji : thus, ‘revolutionary poseur’.