An Interview with the Undersecretary

Q: What are the legal ramifications of U.S. Government personnel being involved in torture?

A: I think you have to qualify "torture." Or better, quantify "torture." How many genitals? How many anal penetrations? What were the decibel levels of the screams? How fast was the train traveling when we saw the sunset over the secret detention center?

Q: Can you tell us how long, exactly, U.S. forces will be in Iraq?

A: How long is anyone in Iraq? How long were the Persians in Iraq? The Brits? How long have the Sufis been in Iraq? Why do they do that weird dancing thing? Are they still doing it in Baghdad? In the Anbar Province? If so, how do we stop them? As long as there are Iraqis in Iraq, I think we have to ask ourselves some hard questions about staying the course, fighting the fight, and basting the chicken.

Q: How many American troops will make up the residual force and what will be their specific mission?

A: Have you noticed the layer of dust on this window sill? Why doesn't anyone clean this place? Don't worry about the residual force. The residual force will consist of four American troops: John, Paul, George and Ringo. Their mission will entail various security functions, training Iraqis in food handling, defusing that cute little redhead in CENTCOM, recording two new albums and, God willing and the creek don't spin, cleaning this damn room.

Q: What about Afghanistan? How many American troops will be stationed there and for what length of time?

A: As long as it takes to gut the pig, root out the poets, pickle the pretties, and negotiate poppy production and heroin distribution between the locals and Citigroup.

Q: How would you characterize our relationship with Pakistan at the moment?

A: It's not good. We sent roses and a box of chocolates, but she still hung up on us. Christ, anybody can drink too much and get a little out of control. Just because I shoot up a wedding party doesn't mean she's got the right to change the lock on the damn door, you know what I mean? It's not like those Pak kids could speak English anyhow. But we'll work something out. She like-y the money. And we've got syndication rights for Seinfeld to sweeten the pot.

Q: Does Iran have the capability to produce nuclear weapons? If so, what position will the administration take?

A: Whatever position makes us last longer and brings her more pleasure. Here, smell this. Does this smell like turpentine to you? I thought it was cologne, but I may have grabbed the wrong bottle. Something's not right.

Q: China is the largest overseas holder of U.S. Treasury bonds and has bought over $1 trillion dollars in American debt. How does this affect our country's policies towards China? Will the administration be able to pursue a human rights agenda for Tibet, for example?

A: Have you ever tried paddle-roasted barbecued baby pig? That's really something. But you've got it all bass-ackwards. We're the stray dogs to China's porcelain poodle. Whose piss do you think is gonna be harder to get out of the rug? Our output in needles alone could fill Beijing ten times over. And, don't forget, we have the Boy Scouts. Mr. Bubble. Bobble-heads. The administration will continue to bail out AIG and Citigroup, and I think those CEOs could teach China a thing or two, don't you? No matter how much we screw up and destroy our economy, no matter how bad our test scores, or how low our spinach quotient, Uncle Bam's gonna bail us out. You see where I'm going with this? Now I'm all juicy and craving that paddle-roasted pig.

Q: Can you talk about Palestine and Israel and the administration's road map in the Middle East?

A: It's all pretty high tech and, to be honest, a little above my pay grade. But we've got this super-duper Middle Eastern GPS system we're going to implement. Produced by an Israeli company that started with seed money from us back when we thought we had money. It can pinpoint a baby in Gaza from outer space and resolve the situation remotely if necessary. And then there's our major infrastructure stimulus package. We think a two-state solution is the most feasible option, but it's going to requite some heavy lifting. Building a new Palestinian state under the sand, or - the Atlantis scenario - moving them to the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea, ain't gonna be cheap. No sir. But think of all the new green jobs. Green money. Green cars. Green hair and lashes. Lots of exciting green technology to eliminate those babies. I shouldn't say "eliminate." Relocate those babies under the sand.

Q: The U.S. Joint Forces Command recently reported that Mexico and Pakistan were at risk of "rapid and sudden collapse." What is the United States doing about the escalating drug violence in Mexico and the security threat it poses on our very own doorstep?

A: We will be negotiating between the locals and Citigroup over production and distribution. Consumption levels are still good, despite our collapsing economy. But as long as there are Mexicans in Mexico, I think we have to ask ourselves some hard questions about staying the course, fighting the fight, and basting the pocho. We didn't invent the border, the border invented us. Maybe we can get some Mexicans to clean this damn room. I do like me a mole poblano, though. Look, I'm due at Langley for a debriefing and the office potluck, and I have to change out of these clothes first. Without splitting hairs or tweaking the turkey, let me just say that you worry too much.

Have some of these pills. We got plenty more where those came from.


[(thought dream 030409)]

The Golden Orchard

Combinatorial Wheel of Ramón Llull, 13th century

Liam has an interesting post right now on Ramón Llull, the 13th-century Spanish mystic, poet and philosopher. While reading about Llull's Ars, his system of mystic contemplation, and looking at the fascinating images of his combinatorial wheels, I was instantly struck by similarities to other systems developed by Jewish and Islamic mystics on the Iberian Peninsula around the same time period. I started digging around for information and, suddenly, Liam's post had revived my own interest in the history of mysticism in medieval Spain, which I began investigating about 10 years ago while living in Madrid.

Without overstating the case, I would argue that the world has rarely seen a more spiritually charged atmosphere than the one on the Iberian Peninsula in the 13th century. The most important work in Jewish mysticism, the Sefer Ha-Zohar [Book of Splendor], also known as the Zohar, was composed by Moses de Leon in Castile around 1280. Abraham Abulafia, creator of "ecstatic kabbalah," and one of the key figures in Jewish mysticism [Gershom Scholem dedicates an entire chapter to him in his landmark study Major Trends in Jewish Msyticsm], was born in Zaragoza in 1240. Abulafia had his first visions and started studying the kabbalah around 1270 in Barcelona, which was one of the major centers of kabbalah, along with Girona, just to the north. Other important kabbalists were scattered throughout Catalunya and Castile. Meanwhile, in Al-Andalus, the Moorish kingdom in the south of the peninsula, Ibn Arabi was born (Murcia, 1165) and spent the first part of his life. Arabi is one of the principle figures in the history of Islamic mysticism, and his magnum opus Futuhat is considered by some to be the major text of Sufism. Other important Sufis also thrived in Al-Andalus during that time, as Ibn Arabi discusses in his Sufis of Andalusia. Thus, some of the most important mystics in the history of Christianity, Judaism and Islam were composing some of the most important mystical texts of all time during a one-hundred year period in an area roughly the size of California.

Title page of the Zohar, Mantua edition, 1558.

(Just for good measure, this was also the time when the Knights Templar were active in Spain, and when St. Francis was walking across the country on his pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostella. Both the Templars and Francis had their own interesting interactions with Jews and Muslims of the time.)

But how did this Golden Age of Mysticism blossom in Spain? What brought about the Golden Orchard?

Christians probably arrived in Spain not long after the time of Christ, but there doesn't seem to have developed a tradition of mystical writing until after the conquest of the Moors. Saint Isidore did write a treatise on the allegorical meaning of numbers (Allegorise scripturae sacrae et liber numerorum), but he seems to have been an exception. Perhaps the dearth of Christian mysticism before the conquest was due to what Miguel Asín Palacios, an important scholar of Moorish Spain, called the "philosophical poverty of the Visigoths in the midst of their material plenty. Their culture, basically Biblical, had as its sources the works of some of the Holy Fathers, and did not include metaphysics." [The Mystical Philosophy of Ibn Masarra and His Followers. (E.J. Brill, 1978). A translation of the original Spanish work published in Madrid in 1914.] Early Moorish writers also commented on the apparent lack of science and philosophy in the peninsula before the conquest in 711. This is an interesting observation, as medieval mysticism was so interrelated with science, philosophy and poetry.

There are legends of Jews arriving in Spain during Biblical times (Tarshish is thought by some to have been in southern Spain), and some Jews probably came after Rome defeated Carthage in the Second Punic War, around 250 BC, but a large-scale immigration of the Jewish community to the peninsula didn't begin until after Titus' destruction of Judea in 135 AD, what we know as the Diaspora. Again, though, there seems to have been no real flowering of mysticism before the arrival of the Moors, probably for the same reasons that Christian mysticism didn't develop - the intellectual culture of the Visigoths. In addition, the Jews were often persecuted by the Visigoths and were probably just trying to survive. This persecution reached such a pitch that the Jews welcomed the Moors upon their arrival in 711.

The seeds of what I call the Golden Orchard, this time-space realm of tremendous mystical activity within the Iberian Peninsula, seem to have been planted in the 800s, with the arrival of Sufi mystics in Al-Andalus from the eastern parts of the Islamic empire. As the Moors consolidated their power on the peninsula and began to thrive economically, the fields of science, philosophy and especially poetry began to flourish throughout the kingdom.

The Jewish community, no longer persecuted as they were under the Visigoths, experienced an intellectual and cultural revival as well. A key factor was their learning of Arabic. The Moors placed great value on poetry and philosophy, and a great number of high-quality works were published, including most Greek classics which were translated into Arabic as part of an official program after the conquest. According to Jane Gerber in The Jews of Spain: A History of the Sephardic Experience (Free Press 1994), "[F]or the first time, Jews were exposed fully to the conceptual world of classical antiquity. . . . In this way, Arabization introduced them to an entire philosophical literature, originally written in Greek and Syriac, and to a new theological language capable of expressing new concepts. . . . Muslims and Jews both began to contemplate religious questions in a new way, thanks to the Arabic translations of Greek thought."

In addition to this Greek influence by way of translation, the Jews were also influenced by the Arabic language itself. As they wrote more and more in Arabic, it was only natural to incorporate terminology and phrasing from the Arabic culture around them. Religious terms and concepts from Sufism began to find their way into Jewish mystical works. Diana Lobel discusses this religious cross-fertilization in A Sufi-Jewish Dialogue: Philosophy and Mysticism in Bahya Ibn Paquda's Duties of the Heart (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). "Muslim Spain of the tenth through twelfth century, known as the 'Golden Age' of Hispano-Jewish poetry and letters, is a time of great convergence and cutltural creativity. Jewish courtiers such as Samuel Hanagrid are writing wine poetry; erotic Arabic poetry finds its way into the synagogue liturgy, even on the holiest days. Jewish philosophers are reading and writing philosophy in Arabic; Jews are studying with Sufi masters, integrating aesthetic practices and mystical thought into their own spiritual creativity."

Unfortunately, this "Golden Age" in Al-Andalus came to a close with the conquest of the kingdom in 1147 by the religiously intolerant Almohads, who once again began persecuting the Jews. This led to a Jewish migration to the northern Christian kingdoms. The tremendous sprouting of philosophical and mystical thought that began in the south not only survived the transition but began to blossom even more as kabbalistic centers sprang up in Barcelona, Girona and across Castile. Meanwhile, in Al-Andalus, Sufis such as Ibn Arabi continued to explore and write about their mystical paths.

Ramón Llull

These two threads, the Sufi and Kabbalistic, come together in the work of the Christian mystic Ramón Llull. Hebrew and Arabic both have numeric values for each letter of the alphabet, and Kabbalah and Sufism both have very developed mathematical-mystical systems. Gematria is the Jewish version. Abraham Abulafia, who I mentioned earlier, was the principle exponent of Gematria, and his system seems to have influenced Llull, particularly in the combinatorial wheels. Abulafia was active in the Kabbalistic circles of Gerona and Barcelona, where his system made its first appearance in 1270, not long before Llull's work. Moshe Idel, in his article "Ramon Lull and Ecstatic Kabbalah: A Preliminary Observation" (Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Vol. 51. (1988), pp. 170-174.), says that "Lull was in contact with important Jewish figures living in Barcelona, as the incipit of a lost work of his demonstrates." Llull scholars Pring-Mill and Hillgarth encouraged Idel to "pursue the line" on the "probability of the historical relationship between [Lull's theory of ars combinatoria] and the ecstatic Kabbalah," particularly the work of Abulafia.

Llull was also influenced by the work of Ibn Arabi. As Liam points out in his Llull post, the Ars was "a vast systemization of the world that had as an aim the demonstration of the relationship of all of reality to a certain number of God’s attributes or “dignities:” goodness, greatness, power, wisdom, etc. Llull's dignities are very similar to the Sufi concept of Hadras, or the one hundred names of Allah. I mentioned earlier Miguel Asín Palacios and his book The Mystical Philosophy of Ibn Masarra and His Followers (Brill 1978). Appendix VI is entitled “The Theory of the Hadras of Ibn Arabi and of the Dignities of Raymond Lull and other Analogies of the Two Systems.” Palacios says: “The terminology of the divine Dignities (Dignitates) is one of the indisputable keys of the relationship of Lull to Sufism. . . . This became completely confirmed when later the theory of Ibn Arabi about the divine names was compared with the development by Lull in his book Els cent noms de Deus and in the rest of his works. . . . Thus a comparative study of these one hundred Hadras with the Dignities of Lull leads to the full conviction that they are intimately related. First of all, one must note that Lull in his Els cent noms de Deus confesses to have written it in imitation of those [works] of the Muslims that revolve about the identical theme. . . . And if by chance there still should be a shade of doubt, Lull himself dissipates it in his Disputatio Raymundi christiani et Hamar sarraceni by putting in the mouth of the latter an enumeration of the ‘dignitates,’ almost identical in number and names with his. . . . The evidence of this imitation of the Hadras by the Dignities of Lull is reinforced when it is considered not singly but as one more case of the many which the system of Lull offers when compared with that of Ibn Arabi.”

The principle of the universe is movement... If it stops moving, it will return to non-existence. Ibn 'Arabi.

(The calligraphy is a property of Marsam Gallery Rabat - Editions Marsam, 15 avenue des Nations Unies, Rabat, Maroc)

It's not that Llull's work was not his own. As Palacios goes on to say, "Lull did not wish to be a Muslim but a sincere and very fervent Christian. For that reason the number and designation of hadras and Dignities cannot coincide. Lull chose those that do not conflict with the Christian and Catholic concept of God." Nor did Llull want to be a Jew. He simply incorporated aspects of other systems into his work, as the Jewish mystics had done in Al-Andalus. Going back even further, one can point to the influence of Christian monasticism and Gnosticism on the Sufis before they even arrived in Spain. Abraham Abulafia incoporated breathing exercises from Yoga into his own mystical technique. So the influences come and go like pollen carried by the honeybee from one field to another.

There are different kinds of trees in the Golden Orchard. But they all sway and are moved by the same wind, all watered by the same rain, and, in the end, they all reach up their branches to the same magnificent sun.

UPDATE: Liam has pointed out that today, June 26, is the Feast Day of Ramón Llull. (Some give the date as June 30.) He has, therefore, declared this Ramón Llull Week. Glad to participate. While I appreciate this sudden Llull-mania, however, I fear what will happen when the excitement passes. We will then be faced with the dreaded Llull lull.

If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Ibn-Arabi

Title page of The Zohar, by Moses de Leon

While living in Spain, I began reading about some of the Jewish mystics who thrived there in the Middle Ages. One of the most important texts in Kabbalah, The Zohar, by Moses de Leon, was only one of many works that came out of that environment. Moses de Leon eventually moved to, and was buried in, Ávila, one of the most spiritually charged places I’ve ever visited. About two hundred years later, the Christian mystic, Santa Teresa de Ávila, was born there to a family descended from Jewish converts. Her confessor was the great poet and fellow mystic, San Juan de la Cruz.

One afternoon, strolling down a dirt road outside of the village of Chinchón, I was mulling over all these Christian and Jewish mystics in Spain, when I had a thought that literally stopped me in my tracks: What about all the Moors in Spain? Were there Islamic mystics as well? Staring out at the orchards of olive trees and the small vineyards cascading down the terraced hill, I knew without a doubt that I was going to discover something interesting.

The Ecstasy of Santa Teresa, by Bernini

Turns out there were many, many Sufis in Spain in the Middle Ages. In fact, one of the greatest Islamic mystics of all-time was from Murcia: Muhammad Ibn 'Arabi. He was the author of over 300 works, including the al-Futuhat al-Makkiyya, which was over 5,000 pages long and ranks among the most significant books in Sufism.

In addition to a lot of other great information, The Muhyiddin Ibn 'Arabi Society offers the following brief bio:

Mystic, philosopher, poet, sage, Muhammad Ibn 'Arabi is one of the world's great spiritual teachers. Known as Muhyiddin (the Revivifier of Religion) and the Shaykh al-Akbar (the Greatest Master), he was born in 1165 AD into the Moorish culture of Andalusian Spain, the center of an extraordinary flourishing and cross-fertilization of Jewish, Christian and Islamic thought, through which the major scientific and philosophical works of antiquity were transmitted to Northern Europe. Ibn 'Arabi's spiritual attainments were evident from an early age, and he was renowned for his great visionary capacity as well as being a superlative teacher. He travelled extensively in the Islamic world and died in Damascus in 1240 AD.

Moorish Script in the Alhambra - Granada, Spain.
"There is no other sovereign but God."

So, in the space of approximately 400 years, Muslims, Jews and Christians living in Spain produced some of the most important mystical works in each of their respective religions. The Convivencia (“coexistence” or “cohabitation” in English) was a period of several hundred years when people from all three faiths lived together in Spain. Sometimes it’s made out to be more idealistic than it probably was in reality. On the other hand, especially given some of the hostile attitudes in the world today, the Convivencia proved at certain times in certain places to be one of the more positive and wondrous occasions in human history. But I digress.

I simply wanted to offer a poem by Ibn Arabi, who I discovered while experiencing my own weird version of the Convivencia:

A white-blazed gazelle
Is an amazing sight,
Red-dye signaling,
eyelids hinting,
Pasture between breastbones
And innards.
Marvel,
A garden among the flames!
My heart can take on
Any form:
Gazelles in a meadow,
A cloister for monks,
For the idols, sacred ground,
Kaaba for the circling pilgrim,
The tables of a Torah,
The scrolls of the Qur'an.
I profess the religion of love;
Wherever its caravan turns
Along the way, that is the belief,
The faith I keep.

The translation of his poem comes from a paper delivered in 2004 by Iberian medievalist María Rosa Menocal at the University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Humanities Forum on Belief: Three Cultures or One? Muslims, Jews, and Christians and the Art of Coexistence in Medieval Spain.

Peace/Paz on a beautiful Tuesday . . .