Boy Soldiers, Boy Brides

In Afghanistan child soldiers, boys, are increasingly being used and abused.

Afghanistan's Child Soldiers

And in another old tradition child brides are not just girls in Afghanistan but boys as well, who are used by patriarchal warlords, police chiefs and other older men as boy brides.

Young boys are being sexually abused in Afghanistan

"Some men enjoy playing with dogs, some with women. I enjoy playing with boys," said 44-year-old Allah Daad, a one-time Mujahedin commander in the northern Afghan province of Kunduz

The practice of "bacha baazi", meaning "boy-play", is enjoying a resurgence in the North of Afghanistan where ownership is seen as a status symbol by militia leaders according to Afghan news site, e-Ariana.

While condemned by clerics and human rights groups, authorities are doing little to end it.Dancers, known as "bacha bereesh" or "beardless boys", are under 18, with 14 being the "ideal" age.

Owners or "kaatah" meet at bacha baazi parties in large halls where the boys dance late into the night, before being sexually abused.

Of course these manly he men are not gay, since there are no homosexuals in Islam. Nope of course not after all these are just boys dancing in drag.

This is not a new phenomena but a rather old one nor is it restricted to Afghanistan.


It was first reported on in the 19th Century by Sir Captain Richard Burton, who went undercover into the Hindu Kush and discovered the tradition of boy brides amongst the peoples of the region. He also discovered that British officers were using boy brides for their entertainment. His report got him summarily punished by the High Command who were embarrassed by his findings.

In revenge it is told that Burton held a dinner party and invited his commanding officers to attend. When they did they were treated to boy brides being present. Typical of Burton's rapacious wit and nasty sense of humour when the officers protested that they were scandalized by his use of boy brides, he assured them they were no such thing. He revealed they were in fact monkeys in drag.

Burton had actually worked on developing an early form of communication with the monkeys, which was lost when his collected notes and works were burnt posthumously by his widow.

Boy brides, child brides, child labour and child soldiers, the legacy of our war in Afghanistan.

It reveals the hypocrisy of the Conservatives claim we are there fighting for the rights of women and children.

This sobering image, showing a 40-year-old groom sitting beside his 11-year-old future bride in Afghanistan, brought Stephanie Sinclair top honors in the annual Photo of the Year 2007 contest sponsored by the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF).

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Canada,Afhganistan,girls,drag, homosexuality, Kandahar, kabul, Harper, Canadian Armed Forces Afghanistan, Conservatives, politics, military, NATO, Sir Captain Richard Burton, boy brideschild labour, bacha bereesh, child bride, P3, warlords

US intelligence errors helped build myth of Nazi Alpine redoubt, says historian

New book claims intercepted cables sent in second world war by Allen Dulles, later head of CIA, enabled disinformation campaign

The myth of Nazis barricading themselves on snowy mountaintops later became a staple of such films as Where Eagles Dare, starring Clint Eastwood and Richard Burton. Photograph: MGM/Allstar


Philip Oltermann in Berlin
@philipoltermann

Mon 3 Jan 2022


A US spymaster inadvertently helped the Nazis develop one of the most effective disinformation campaigns of the second world war by spreading rumours about Hitler’s plans for a Where Eagles Dare-style Alpine redoubt, a historian with access to classified US military records has found.

The myth that the Nazis were amassing weapons and crack units of 100,000 fanatical soldiers in the spring of 1945 for a last stand in the Austro-Bavarian Alps was without any basis in fact but had a powerful hold on the imagination of American and British military leaders, who feared it could prolong the war for years.

Thomas Boghardt, a German historian at the US Army Center of Military History in Washington DC, argues in a new book that the myth of an Alpine Nazi fortress was not a crucial factor behind American forces abandoning the race to Berlin in favour of a southward push but was one that US spycraft had a hand in making.

The Nazi leadership first got wind of allied fears of a mountaintop last stand in 1944, after the SS’s intelligence service intercepted a cable sent from the US embassy in Berne, Switzerland. As Boghardt shows in Covert Legions: US Army Intelligence in Germany 1944-1949, the message had most likely been sent by Allen Dulles, later the head of the CIA during the Bay of Pigs invasion fiasco but at the time the Berne station chief for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS).

Allen Dulles, pictured in 1954, when he was the director of the CIA. 

Photograph: Associated Press

British intelligence had discovered that the special cipher used to secure Dulles’s communications had been compromised, but the American spymaster continued to ignore their warnings, driving one irate British agent to despair.

“[C]ould you report to the fool [Dulles] who knows his code was compromised if he has used that code to report meetings with anyone, Germans probably identified persons concerned and use them for stuffing [disinformation]”, the agent vented to his station chief. “He swallows easily.”

As the British had feared, Goebbels’s propaganda ministry would spend the following months building up the myth of a German defence effort in Austria and Bavaria via disinformation and media reports, hoping a sidetracked US military leadership could be drawn into separate peace talks or even an alliance against the Soviets.

“Dulles was a very capable case officer who excelled at working with human sources, but when it came to signals intelligence he was indeed highly negligent,” Boghardt told the Guardian.

As Covert Legions shows, allied forces were extremely susceptible to disinformation campaigns in the final stages of the war, with Field Marshal Montgomery arrested at one point as an impostor by American guards following a rumour that the Germans were planning to impersonate the British commander.

After the end of the war, Nazis barricading themselves on snowy mountaintops became a staple of swashbuckling war movies, such as 1968’s Where Eagles Dare, starring Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood.

However, while some allied intelligence reports explicitly cited the Alpine redoubt theory as an argument for an allied push into southern Germany in 1945, Boghardt rejects the idea that it played a crucial part in shaping the second world war endgame and setting the ground for cold war tensions with the Soviet Union, as Winston Churchill later claimed.

The US decision not to back a British plan for a “pencil-like thrust” to Berlin likely owed more to the fact that the Red Army was already within 20 miles of the German capital while Anglo-American forces were still 300 miles away, he said, and a deal to divide up the city had already been agreed.

“My impression is that the US command ultimately didn’t really believe in the Alpine redoubt myth, but may have kept it alive to persuade the British of their overriding strategy.”

“Captain Burton's Oriental Muck Heap”: 

The Book of the Thousand Nights 

and the Uses of Orientalism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 January 2014

Dane Kennedy
  

Extract

In the final decade of his remarkable life, the Victorian explorer and linguist Richard Francis Burton made a daring bid to provoke a confrontation with those forces in British society that he identified with moral intolerance and intellectual pedantry. Unlikely though it might seem, the instrument of this provocation was a work widely regarded as children's literature—the tales of the Arabian Nights. In 1885–86, Burton published a ten-volume translation of the tales, The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, followed in 1886–88 by an additional six-volume Supplemental Nights to the Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night. The mammoth scale of the endeavor was matched by its audacity. Burton not only offered an English reading public the first frank and unexpurgated translation of the tales themselves; he also peppered the text with footnotes about esoteric aspects of Islamic culture, especially sexual customs, and closed the tenth volume with a “Terminal Essay” that included a lengthy discourse on pederasty. This quixotic enterprise thrust Burton into the middle of an intersecting network of debates about sexuality and purity, state regulation and personal freedom, the Occident and the Orient. To examine the intentions that motivated Burton's translation of the Nights and the reception it received is to explore some of the crucial elements of the late Victorian crisis of identity.

While the crumbling of a Victorian cultural consensus has long been a matter of interest, only recently has attention turned to the role that non-Western influences played in this process.

---

Type

Research Article

Information

Journal of British Studies , Volume 39 , Issue 3 , July 2000 , pp. 317 - 339

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1086/386222[Opens in a new window]

Copyright

Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 2000

REST IN POWER

'Majestic' Greek 'Zorba' star Irene Papas dies at 93

Issued on: 14/09/2022 - 

Irene Papas was one of Greece's most renowned actors - 

INTERCONTINENTALE/AFP

Athens (AFP) – Greek-born actor Irene Papas, famous for her fiery appearances in the internationally acclaimed "The Guns of Navarone" and "Zorba the Greek", died Wednesday at the age of 93.

Greece's Culture Minister Lina Mendoni in a statement said Papas was "majestic" and "the personification of Greek beauty on the cinema screen and theatre stage".

Her cause of death was not immediately known, but the actor had Alzheimer's Disease and had been frail for some time.

One of Greece's most renowned actors, Papas appeared in over 60 films in a career spanning nearly six decades.

On screen and stage she starred with A-list partners, including Richard Burton, Kirk Douglas and Jon Voight.

"Ordinary actors have trouble sharing the screen with her," the late film critic Roger Ebert wrote in 1969.

Widely known as Pappas but personally preferring a single 'p' in her surname, the actor was born Irene Lelekou in 1929 in the village of Chiliomodi near Corinth, into a family of schoolteachers.

Gifted with a deep voice, piercing eyes and a chiselled face likened to the Caryatid statues of ancient Greece, Papas began performing at the age of 15 in local cultural events before studying drama in Athens.

She made her cinema debut in the 1948 Greek drama "Fallen Angels", and later broke onto the international scene with "Dead City", the first Greek movie shown at the Cannes Film Festival in 1952.

'Not looking for a career'

"The Guns of Navarone" in 1961, in which she starred alongside Gregory Peck and Anthony Quinn, as a brooding Greek guerrilla fighter, was a landmark role in Papas's career.

She would again partner up with Quinn in 1964's "Zorba the Greek", another timeless classic.

"I left Greece to discover where the best acting was. I wanted to learn. I was not looking for a career," she told state TV ERT in 2002.

"If you do your job well, a career comes on its own."

In 1969, she played the widow of a murdered lawmaker in Costa-Gavras's Oscar-winning drama "Z".

Papas won several awards, including best actress at the 1961 Berlin Film Festival and the 2009 Golden Lion for lifetime achievement award in Venice.

Yet, she described herself as a "coward" who turned to theatre to overcome timidness and struggled to reconcile her fiery on-screen persona with her real self.
'Fame gave me nothing'

"Fame gave me nothing," Papas said in a 2003 interview with Greek daily Eleftherotypia.

"In contrast, it destroyed my private life. Because the person who will approach me, let's say sexually, has already fallen in love with my image."

In 2004, she revealed a secret, long affair with Marlon Brando in the 1950s.

"We had a love story," she told Italy's Corriere della Sera daily.

At the age of 18, Papas married her acting tutor Alkis Papas. They had no children and soon divorced, but she kept her husband's surname.

In her final years, she lived near Athens' Acropolis, cared for by a niece as she battled Alzheimer's.

© 2022 AFP

Irene Papas, Actress in ‘Zorba the Greek’ and Greek Tragedies, Dies at 96

She was best known for commanding movie roles in the 1960s but received the greatest plaudits for playing heroines of the ancient stage.

Irene Papas was best known by American moviegoers for her intensely serious and sultry-strong roles in films like “The Guns of Navarone,” “Z” and “Zorba the Greek.” Credit...Associated Press


By Anita Gates
Sept. 14, 2022, 

Irene Papas, a Greek actress who starred in films like “Z,” “Zorba the Greek” and “The Guns of Navarone” but won the greatest acclaim of her career playing the heroines of Greek tragedy, died on Wednesday. She was 96.

The death was confirmed by a spokesman for the Greek Culture Ministry in an email. He did not know the cause of death, but in 2018, it was announced that Ms. Papas had been living with Alzheimer’s disease for five years.

Ms. Papas was best known by American moviegoers for her intensely serious and sultry-strong roles in the 1960s. In “The Guns of Navarone” (1961), filmed partly on the island of Rhodes, she played a World War II resistance fighter who dared to do what a team of Allied saboteurs (among them Gregory Peck, David Niven and Anthony Quinn) would not: shoot an unarmed woman because she was a traitor


In “Zorba the Greek” (1964), with Mr. Quinn, she was a Greek widow who is stoned by her fellow villagers because of her choice of lover. In Costa-Gavras’s Oscar-winning political thriller “Z” (1969), set in the Greek city of Thessaloniki, she played Yves Montand’s widow, who evoked the film’s meaning with one final grief-ridden look out to sea.

But in the same decade, she was making her name in Greek film versions of classical plays, often directed by her countryman Michael Cacoyannis, who also directed “Zorba.” She played the title characters in “Antigone” (1961), Sophocles’s tale of a woman who pays dearly after fighting for her brother’s right to an honorable burial; and in “Electra” (1962), in which she and her brother plot matricide. She was also Electra’s mother, Clytemnestra, in “Iphigenia” (1977), the drama of a daughter offered as human sacrifice.

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In 1971, she received the National Board of Review’s best actress award for her role as Helen of Troy in “The Trojan Women.” Her co-stars were Katharine Hepburn and Vanessa Redgrave.

Ms. Papas was born Eirini Lelekou on Sept. 3, 1926, in Chiliomodi, Greece, a small village near Corinth, and grew up in Athens. She was one of four daughters of two schoolteachers and entered drama school at age 12. By the time she was 18, she had already played both Electra and Lady Macbeth. But her first professional stage role, in 1948, was as a party-hopping society girl in a musical.
She made her film debut the same year, in Nikos Tsiforos’s drama “Hamenoi Angeloi” (“Fallen Angels”), and appeared in 14 films during the 1950s — some American, some European — before her breakout role in “The Guns of Navarone.”

Ms. Papas with James Darren, center, and Anthony Quinn in 

“The Guns of Navarone” (1961).Credit... Everett Collection

The director Elia Kazan is often credited with discovering Ms. Papas. On a 1954 trip to the United States, she read a scene from “The Country Girl” for him. The following year, she was given a seven-year contract by MGM, although she made only one film under it: “Tribute to a Bad Man” (1956), a western starring James Cagney.

Ms. Papas’s other films included “Bouboulina” (1959), in which she played an 18th-century Greek revolutionary heroine; “The Brotherhood” (1968), as a Mafia wife (to Kirk Douglas); “Anne of the Thousand Days” (1969), as the discarded Catherine of Aragon opposite Richard Burton’s Henry VIII; and “Chronicle of a Death Foretold” (1987), based on the novel by Gabriel García Márquez.

The Greek tragedies were the focus of her New York stage career as well. She made her Broadway debut in 1967 in “That Summer — That Fall,” based on “Phèdre,” playing a passionate second wife in love with her stepson (Jon Voight), but the production closed after only 12 performances. The following year, she was Clytemnestra in a Circle in the Square production of “Iphigenia in Aulis.” She returned to Circle in the Square as the title character, a woman who kills her own children, in “Medea” (1973) and as Agave, who mistakenly kills her own son during an orgy of drugs, drink and violence, in “The Bacchae” (1980).

She was also a singer. She made two albums of Greek folk songs and hymns, “Odes” (1979) and “Rapsodies” (1986), and created something of a scandal with vocals that were condemned by some as lewd on “666,” the 1971 album by the rock group Aphrodite’s Child.

She had strong political feelings about her country and made them public. In 1967, she risked her citizenship by calling for a “cultural boycott” of Greece after a military junta took control, saying “Nazism is back in Greece” and describing the country’s new leaders as “no more than a band of blackmailers.” She never returned.

Although Ms. Papas spoke in interviews about a desire to give up acting and a regrettable tendency to be too obedient to directors, she continued film acting well into her 70s. Her final screen appearances included “Captain Corelli’s Mandolin” (2001), in which she played Drosoula, the formidable mother of Mandras (Christian Bale), and “Um Filme Falado” (“A Talking Picture”), Manoel de Oliveira’s 2003 meditation on civilization, in which she portrayed a privileged actress sailing the Mediterranean.

She married Alkis Papas, a director and actor, in 1947, and they divorced four years later. A brief 1957 marriage to José Kohn, a producer, was annulled. She never married again.

She is survived by her nephews, the spokesman for the Greek Culture Ministry said.

Having played all those characters from ancient Greece, Ms. Papas had a worldview that took thousands of years of history and philosophy into account. “Plato made the first mistake,” she told Roger Ebert of The Chicago Sun-Times in 1969, lamenting an unnecessary delay in the scientific revolution. “He began to talk about the soul and morality, and he prevented the Epicureans from searching the nature of man.”

RIP
Al Jaffee, longtime Mad magazine cartoonist, dead at 102

NEW YORK (AP) — Al Jaffee, Mad magazine's award-winning cartoonist and ageless wise guy who delighted millions of kids with the sneaky fun of the Fold-In and the snark of "Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions," has died. He was 102.


Al Jaffee, longtime Mad magazine cartoonist, dead at 102© Provided by The Canadian Press

Jaffee died Monday in Manhattan from multiple organ failure, according to his granddaughter, Fani Thomson. He had retired at the age of 99.

Mad magazine, with its wry, sometimes pointed send-ups of politics and culture, was essential reading for teens and preteens during the baby-boom era and inspiration for countless future comedians. Few of the magazine’s self-billed “Usual Gang of Idiots” contributed as much — and as dependably — as the impish, bearded cartoonist. For decades, virtually every issue featured new material by Jaffee. His collected "Fold-Ins," taking on everyone in his unmistakably broad visual style from the Beatles to TMZ, was enough for a four-volume box set published in 2011.

Readers savored his Fold-Ins like dessert, turning to them on the inside back cover after looking through such other favorites as Antonio Prohías' "Spy vs. Spy" and Dave Berg's "The Lighter Side." The premise, originally a spoof of the old Sports Illustrated and Playboy magazine foldouts, was that you started with a full-page drawing and question on top, folded two designated points toward the middle and produced a new and surprising image, along with the answer.

The Fold-In was supposed to be a onetime gag, tried out in 1964 when Jaffee satirized the biggest celebrity news of the time: Elizabeth Taylor dumping her husband, Eddie Fisher, in favor of "Cleopatra" co-star Richard Burton. Jaffee first showed Taylor and Burton arm in arm on one side of the picture, and on the opposite side a young, handsome man being held back by a policeman.

Fold the picture in and Taylor and the young man are kissing.

The idea was so popular that Mad editor Al Feldstein wanted a follow-up. Jaffee devised a picture of 1964 GOP presidential contenders Nelson Rockefeller and Barry Goldwater that, when collapsed, became an image of Richard Nixon.

"That one really set the tone for what the cleverness of the Fold-Ins has to be," Jaffee told the Boston Phoenix in 2010. "It couldn't just be bringing someone from the left to kiss someone on the right.”

Jaffee was also known for "Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions," which delivered exactly what the title promised. A comic from 1980 showed a man on a fishing boat with a noticeably bent reel. “Are you going to reel in the fish?” his wife asks. “No,” he says, “I’m going to jump into the water and marry the gorgeous thing.”

Jaffee didn’t just satirize the culture; he helped change it. His parodies of advertisements included such future real-life products as automatic redialing for a telephone, a computer spell checker and graffiti-proof surfaces. He also anticipated peelable stamps, multiblade razors and self-extinguishing cigarettes.

Jaffee's admirers ranged from Charles M. Schulz of "Peanuts" fame and “Far Side" creator Gary Larson to Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, who marked Jaffee’s 85th birthday by featuring a Fold-In cake on “The Colbert Report.” When Stewart and "The Daily Show" writers put together the best-selling "America (The Book)," they asked Jaffee to contribute a Fold-In.

"When I was done, I called up the producer who'd contacted me, and I said, 'I've finished the Fold-In, where shall I send it?' And he said — and this was a great compliment — 'Oh, please Mr. Jaffee, could you deliver it in person? The whole crew wants to meet you,'" he told The Boston Phoenix.

Jaffee received numerous awards, and in 2013 was inducted into the Will Eisner Hall of Fame, the ceremony taking place at San Diego Comic-Con International. In 2010, he contributed illustrations to Mary-Lou Weisman's "Al Jaffee's Mad Life: A Biography." The following year, Chronicle Books published "The MAD Fold-In Collection: 1964-2010."

Art was the saving presence of his childhood, which left him with permanent distrust of adults and authority. He was born in Savannah, Georgia, but for years was torn between the U.S., where his father (a department store manager) preferred to live, and Lithuania, where his mother (a religious Jew) longed to return. In Lithuania, Jaffee endured poverty and bullying, but also developed his craft. With paper scarce and no school to attend, he learned to read and write through the comic strips mailed by his father.

By his teens, he was settled in New York City and so obviously gifted that he was accepted into the High School of Music & Art. His schoolmates included Will Elder, a future Mad illustrator, and Harvey Kurtzmann, a future Mad editor. (His mother, meanwhile, remained in Lithuania and was apparently killed during the war).

He had a long career before Mad. He drew for Timely Comics, which became Marvel Comics; and for several years sketched the "Tall Tales" panel for the New York Herald Tribune. Jaffee first contributed to Mad in the mid-1950s. He left when Kurtzmann quit the magazine, but came back in 1964.

Mad lost much of its readership and edge after the 1970s, and Jaffee outlived virtually all of the magazine's stars. But he rarely lacked for ideas even as his method, drawing by hand, remained mostly unchanged in the digital era.

“I’m so used to being involved in drawing and knowing so many people that do it, that I don’t see the magic of it,” Jaffee told the publication Graphic NYC in 2009. “If you reflect and think about it, I’m sitting down and suddenly there’s a whole big illustration of people that appears. I’m astounded when I see magicians work; even though I know they’re all tricks. You can imagine what someone thinks when they see someone drawing freehand and it’s not a trick. It’s very impressive."

___

This story has been corrected to show that Antonio Prohías was the creator of the “Spy vs. Spy” comic strip.

Hillel Italie, The Associated Press

Five things to know about Cyprus

Paris (AFP) – The eastern Mediterranean island of Cyprus has been divided along ethnic lines since Turkish troops invaded its northern third in 1974.

Issued on: 10/07/2024

The Mediterranean island of Cyprus has been divided along ethnic lines for the past 50 years

 © Iakovos Hatzistavrou / AFP/File


The internationally recognised Republic of Cyprus, which controls the Greek Cypriot southern two-thirds of the island, is a member of the European Union.

Here are five things to know about Cyprus:

Aphrodite and empires

Cyprus is the mythical birthplace of the Greek goddess of love Aphrodite, who, legend has it, rose out of the foam near the ancient city of Paphos.

The island's strategic location at the crossroads between east and west has made it a target for a succession of empires from the Assyrians and early Greek settlers to the British.

It was given by Roman general Mark Anthony to his Egyptian lover Cleopatra and used by England's King Richard the Lionheart as a staging post during the Crusades.

For 300 years, it was part of the Ottoman Empire before the British took control in 1878. After an insurgency by fighters seeking union with Greece, the British granted Cyprus independence in 1960.

50 years of division

The UN-controlled Green Line in Nicosia separates the Turkish-occupied north of Cyprus from the southern Greek Cypriot side © Hasan MROUE / AFP/File

Turkish troops invaded and occupied the northern third of the island in 1974 in response to a coup sponsored by the military junta that ruled Greece at the time.

Ankara's intervention followed a decade of intercommunal tension and violence between the Greek majority and the Turkish minority and the deployment of UN peacekeepers.

Cyprus joined the European Union in 2004 still a divided island. Greek Cypriot voters had rejected a UN reunification plan that was approved by Turkish Cypriots in a simultaneous referendum.

A new UN-backed peace push was launched in 2008 but collapsed in 2017.

Holiday island

With its year-round sunshine, sandy beaches and crystal-clear waters, Cyprus has long been a holiday destination.

With its sandy beaches and crystal-clear waters Cyprus has long been a tourist destination © Etienne TORBEY / AFP/File

Around 3.8 million tourists visited in 2023.

Before the division, the international jet set graced the beaches of Famagusta on the east coast. Actress Sophia Loren owned a house there, and it was a favourite of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.

On the south coast, the largest casino resort in Europe opened in July 2023, with the authorities hoping it will attract an extra 300,000, high-spending tourists annually.

Russian money

Cyprus is home to a large Russian diaspora, especially Limassol on the south coast, nicknamed "Moscow on the Med".

It has faced allegations that it has been a hub for Russian money-laundering enabling oligarchs to bypass Western sanctions.

It has cracked down on those named by the United States and Britain for allegedly helping Russians to evade sanctions imposed over the Ukraine war.
Influx of asylum-seekers

Varosha, in the fenced off area of Famagusta, in the Turkish-controlled north of the divided island of Cyprus © Amir MAKAR / AFP/File

As the EU's easternmost member, Cyprus has been heavily affected by the exodus of refugees from Syria since civil war erupted in 2011.

EU figures show Cyprus has the highest number of first-time asylum applications relative to population in the 27-member bloc.

Five percent of the 915,000 people living in the south are asylum seekers.

© 2024 AFP

Hope and resignation as Cypriots mark 50 years of division



By AFP
July 9, 2024

Cyprus marks a half-century of division this month - Copyright AFP/File Amir MAKAR
Daniel Capurro and Benoit Finck

Cyprus marks a half-century of division this month, with the unresolved conflict between Greek and Turkish Cypriots branded on the landscape in a UN-patrolled buffer zone that cuts across the island.

Ghost villages, watchtowers and streets blocked off by concrete-filled oil drums offer a daily reminder of the brief but seismic events of 1974 that split the country in two.

As Cypriots contemplate the five decades since their communities were torn apart, many see little reason for optimism after witnessing round after round of abortive reunification talks, the most recent in 2017.

Demetris Toumazis had been due to finish his military service in the Greek Cypriot National Guard on July 20, 1974. Instead, he found himself fighting an invading Turkish army.

Taken to Turkey as a prisoner, he returned three months later to a divided homeland.

“Nobody expected things to turn out the way they did, and it’s 50 years now and there’s still no solution, and there’s no hope,” Toumazis said.

George Fialas, a fellow Greek Cypriot veteran of the conflict, told AFP that reunification was “a lost cause”.

“I don’t believe that we will be back (reunified),” he said.

Fialas too was performing his military service that summer. Like Toumazis, he was posted close to his family home in Varosha, a suburb of the costal city of Famagusta that was then the island’s premier beach resort.

He described chaotic scenes during the invasion with little information available, deadly air strikes and no news of his family just a few kilometres away.

“I didn’t know where they went, and they didn’t know where I was… there was no communication,” Fialas said. It would be months before he saw them again.



– Intercommunal violence –



The invasion was the culmination of a fractious period in the island’s history.

A British colony since 1878, Cyprus became independent in 1960, but only after a bloody four-year insurgency by Greek Cypriots seeking union with Greece.

Instead, Britain, Greece, Turkey and Cypriot leaders negotiated for the island to become independent under a delicately balanced constitution.

This guaranteed representation for the Turkish Cypriots, who then made up around 18 percent of the population, and forbade both union with Greece or Turkey and partition.

That system collapsed in intercommunal violence in late 1963 that prompted Turkish Cypriots to retreat into enclaves before international peacekeepers deployed.

An uneasy status quo lasted a decade, before the military junta in Athens instigated a coup on July 15, 1974 seeking to unite the island with Greece.

Turkey responded by landing troops on the island’s north coast.

It was during the invasion that Toumazis and his mortar unit were captured outside Nicosia when Turkish tanks burst through National Guard lines and surrounded them.

“The whole line was broken,” he said. “We were behind factories — we had no idea what was happening and so we were stuck there.”

He was eventually taken to Turkey, only returning to Cyprus in October, by which time most of his family had fled abroad.



– Changing attitudes –



In 1983, the north unilaterally declared independence as the Turkish Republic of North Cyprus, a state recognised only by Ankara, which keeps thousands of troops on the island.

The United Nations, whose peacekeepers patrol the buffer zone between the two parts of the island, is making a push for new talks, but Stefan Talmon, an expert on Cyprus at the University of Bonn, doubts there will be any breakthrough.

“Any solution would mean that each side has to compromise and has to give up its sole decision-making power for its community. And I don’t think that either side is interested,” he said.

A new UN envoy was appointed this year hoping to rekindle talks, but decades of failure have left little grounds for optimism.

“We have now had at least two or three generations that… never knew a united Cyprus,” Talmon said.

Huseyin Silman, a 40-year-old from Nicosia who works at the Turkish Cypriot Global Policies Center think tank, said the younger generation, who grew up after the opening of crossing points between north and south in 2003, gave him hope for the future.

“When I was in school, the history books were quite one-sided. They were teaching us that it was all the Greek Cypriots’ fault, that Turkey came and saved us, and Greek Cypriots were our enemies and they killed us,” he said.

Younger Cypriots, however, had grown up in an era when crossing between the two sides is as simple as presenting an ID card.

“They’re establishing more and more youth organisations, where Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots are participating together,” Silman said.

“Cyprus is too small to be divided.”

Despite the existence of the crossings, the two communities still live apart. The invasion turned Cyprus into an island of displaced people, with more than a third of Cypriots forced from or fleeing their homes in 1974.

The Varosha that Fialas and Toumazis knew is now a ghost town and a symbol both of displacement and decades of failed diplomacy.

Toumazis left Cyprus to study abroad and never moved back. He has no plans to mark the anniversary.

“I don’t see why we should celebrate,” he said.


Key dates in Cyprus’s post-independence history

By AFP
July 9, 2024

Turkish soldiers in Yialia on September 9, 1974 following their invasion of Cyprus following a Greek-backed coup - Copyright AFP/File -

This month marks 50 years since the dramatic events of 1974 left the Mediterranean holiday island of Cyprus divided to this day.

On July 15, 1974, the military junta then in power in Athens engineered a coup in Cyprus seeking to end its independence and unite the island with Greece.

Five days later, Turkish troops landed on the north coast, beginning an invasion that saw them occupy a third of the island, including Turkish Cypriot neighbourhoods of the divided capital Nicosia.

AFP looks at key dates in the island’s history:



– 1960: Independence from Britain –



On August 16, 1960, Cyprus becomes independent from Britain after a guerrilla campaign waged by fighters aiming to unite the island with Greece.

Its constitution guarantees representation for the Turkish Cypriots, who at the time make up around 18 percent of the population, and forbids both union with Greece or Turkey and partition.

In December 1963, violence erupts between the two communities as Greek Cypriot leaders seek to override parts of the constitution. Turkish Cypriots withdraw to enclaves, some of them defended by armed fighters.

In March 1964, a UN peacekeeping force for Cyprus (UNFICYP) is established.

Between 1963 and 1974, around 2,000 people are listed as missing in clashes between the two communities.



– 1974: Coup triggers invasion –



On July 15, 1974, members of the Greek Cypriot National Guard overthrow president Archbishop Makarios in a coup sponsored by the military junta then ruling Greece.

On July 20, Turkey, invoking a 1959 agreement with Greece and Cyprus’s then colonial ruler Britain, invades the north of the island saying its aim is to protect the Turkish Cypriot minority.

Three days later, the collapse of the juntas in both Athens and Nicosia leads to an interim administration and the eventual restoration of Makarios.

On July 30, Turkey, Greece and Britain meet in Geneva and establish a 180-kilometre (112 mile) long Green Line patrolled by UN troops dividing the island.

The Greek Cypriot community says the conflict left 3,000 dead and 1,400 missing. It also led to major population movements affecting around 162,000 Greek Cypriots and 48,000 Turkish Cypriots, according to the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO).



– 1983: Turkish Cypriots break away –



On November 15, 1983, Turkish Cypriot leader Rauf Denktas proclaims a breakaway Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus in the 38 percent of the island controlled by Turkish troops. It is recognised only by Turkey.



– 2003: Crossing the Green Line –



In April 2003, as peace talks falter, Turkish Cypriot authorities allow Greek Cypriots to visit the north and Turkish Cypriots to travel in the other direction across the Green Line for the first time.



– 2004: Greek Cypriot ‘no’ vote –



On April 24, 2004, Greek Cypriot voters overwhelmingly reject a UN reunification plan approved by Turkish Cypriots in a simultaneous referendum.

On May 1, Cyprus joins the European Union still a divided island, with Turkish Cypriots denied the full benefits of membership.



– 2008-2017: Peace talks collapse –



On September 3, 2008, the leaders of the two communities enter intensive UN-sponsored peace talks, which are joined by the three treaty powers Britain, Greece and Turkey before collapsing in 2017.



– 2020: Turkish Cypriots elect nationalist –



In October 2020, Turkish Cypriots elect nationalist Ersin Tatar, an ally of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, as their leader.

Tatar narrowly defeats pro-reunification incumbent Mustafa Akinci, in what is widely seen as a symptom of growing Turkish Cypriot disillusion over the prospects for a deal.

My Favorite Muslim

Abou el Moughith al Hussein ibn Mansour al Hallaj

أبو المغيث الحسين إبن منصور الحلاج

ana'l -Haqq - I am the Truth.

(this is the saying which apparently earned al-Hallaj his martyrdom - al Haqq also means God)

The school of Islam that most represents the heresy of Gnosticism, freethinking, the enlightenment values that so offend the fundamentalist Christian, Jew and Muslim alike, is Sufism.

One of the greatest Sufi thinkers a gnostic, a freethinker, an apostate and heretic was Mansur el Hallaj, who when after meditating for a long period was asked what he learned of Allah, and replied; "I say, I am the Absolute Truth. Inside my cloak is nothing but Allah.". For this he was stoned to death.

Not unlike the mythological stoning and death of Hiram the builder, whom the Freemasons draw on as the source of their initiatory wisdom. The mythos is about the building of Solomon's temple and the betrayl of the architect Hiram Abiff for whom, like Mansur el Halaj, the truth was that he was God. For this heresy he was stoned to death. The modern version of this legend is key to Masonic teachings, showing a link however tenuous to Sufism as well as hermeticism.

The Old Testament of the Bible, on the evolution of the work, says to us:

"Hiram Abiff fused two bronze columns. It had each one eighteen elbows of stop, and a thread of twelve elbows was the one that could surround each one by the columns. They were not massive, but hollow; the thickness of its walls was of four fingers. It fused bronze capitals stops upon the columns; of five elbows of height the one and five elbows of height other... It erected the first column of the right and it gave the name him of Jakin, and soon the column of the left and gave the Boaz name him. As it ends of the columns were a species of iris. Thus the work of the columns was finished ". (I Re 7, 15-22).

Idries Shaw, the Grand Sheik of the Sufi s and historian of their faith, commented on the connection between the Templars and the Sufis:

That the Templars were thinking in terms of the Sufi , and not the Solomonic, Temple in Jerusalem, and its building, is strongly suggested by one important fact. “Temple” churches which they erected, such as one in London, were modeled upon the Temple as found by the Crusaders, not upon any earlier building. This Temple was none other than the octagonal Dome of the Rock, built in the seventh century on a Sufi mathematical design, and restored in 913. The Sufi legend of the building of the Temple accords with the alleged Masonic version. As an example we may note that the “Solomon” of the Sufi Builders is not King Solomon but the Sufi “King” Maaruf Karkhi (died 815), disciple of David (Daud of Tai, died 781) and hence by extension considered the son of David, and referenced cryptically as Solomon — who was the son of David. The Great murder commemorated by the Sufi Builders is not that of the person (Hiram) supposed by the Masonic tradition to have been killed. The martyr of the Sufi Builders is Mansur el-Hallaj (858-922), juridically murdered because of the Sufi secret, which he spoke in a manner which could not be understood, and thus was dismembered as a heretic.’ — Idries Shaw, The Sufis

Mansur el Hallaj remains controversial not only to strict Muslims, but even to
Sufi's.

He was a gnostic, prefering direct knowledge of the universe than faith. He was the model for Michael Valentine Smith in Robert Heinlein's Stranger in A Strange Land. Smith's motto Thou Art God is the grand heresy that all freethinking enlightened heretics have been killed for. He was in fact a deist and a monist.

He was also the original author of the Satanic Verses.

His most well known written work is the Kitab al Tawasin or Ta Sin al Azal, a dialogue of Satan (Iblis) and God, where Satan refuses to bow to Adam, although God asks him to do so. His refusal is due to a misconceived idea of God's uniqueness and because of his refusal to abandon himself to God in love. Hallaj criticizes the staleness of his adoration (Mason, 51-3)

Themes of 'The Erotic' in Sufi Mysticism

by Jonah Winters

Rabi'a seems to have loved a God who was an other, a being who created her and yet was distinct from her. al-Hallaj, though, often has been interpreted as loving a God who was identical with himself. Inspired by Qur'anic verses such as "He who hath given thee the Qur'an for a law will surely bring thee back home again," (28:85), al-Hallaj wrote: "I have become the One I love, and the One I love has become me! We are two spirits infused in a (single) body."[66] This sense of tawhid, of a complete unification of the lover and the beloved, led al-Hallaj to speak of God in very amorous terms. al-Hallaj's biographer Louis Massignon, in describing his ideas of mystical ontology, wrote that, for al-Hallaj, divine union is consummated in "the amorous nuptial in which the Creator ultimately rejoins his creature ...and in which the latter opens his heart to his Beloved in intimate, familiar" discourse.[67]

Al-Hallaj and Hulul:

A Sufi leader by the name Abu Mansoor al-Hallaj went so far in disbelief as to claim he was god himself. He was crucified for his blasphemous claim, and for his defiance of shari'ah, or Islamic jurisprudence, in Baghdad, Iraq, in 309 A.H. (922 A.D.) He said,

"I am He Whom I love; He Whom I love is I; we are two souls co-inhabiting one body. If you see me you see Him and if you see Him you see me."(67)

Abdul-Karim el-Jili, Ibn Arabi's closest disciple, went a step ahead of his master, claiming that he was commanded by Allah to bring to the people his own book, The Perfect Man, the theme of which is pantheism. He claimed that the perfect man could represent all the attributes of God, even though Allah the Exalted is far above the qualities of men.

El-Jili went on to purport to prove that nothing in essence exists in the universe other than Allah, and that all other things, human, animan and non-living are only manifestations of God Almighty Allah. He further asserted in his book that the Prophet Muhammad (s.a.w) is the perfect man and the perfect god. From these blasphemous theories, el-Jili went on to declare himself to be a god also, and exclaimed, "To me belongs sovereignty in both worlds." (68)

This assertion is blatant enough to condemn anyone who utters it of clear kufr, or disbelief. Whenever such zindiqs, or heretics are mentioned, Sufis live up to their beliefs by invoking Allah's mercy on them, unaware of the fact that tolerance of kufr is itself an act of kufr, and that whoever invokes Allah's mercy on an unbeliever commits a grave sin.

The Tawasin

of Mansur Al-Hallaj

Translated by
Aisha Abd Ar-Rahman At-Tarjumana

The Ta-Sin of the Prophetic Lamp

The Ta-Sin of Understanding

The Ta-Sin of Purity

The Ta-Sin of the Circle

The Ta-Sin of the Point

The Ta-Sin of Before Endless-Time and Equivocation

The Ta-Sin of the Divine Will

The Ta-Sin of the Declaration of Unity

The Ta-Sin of the Self-Awarenesses in Tawhid

The Ta-Sin of the Disconnection-From-Forms

The Garden of Gnosis

The Ta-Sin of the Self-Awarenesses in Tawhid

1. The attribute of the Ta-Sin of the self-awareness in Tawhid is such:
   
   (Alif - the Unity, Tawhid. Hamza - the self-awarenesses, some on one side some on the other. ‘Ayn at beginning and end - The Essence.)
   
   The self-awarenesses proceed from Him and return to Him, operate in Him, but they are not logically necessary.
   
2. The real subject of the Tawhid moves across the multiplicity of subjects because He is not included in the subject nor in the object nor in the pronouns of the proposition. Its pronominal suffix does not belong to its Object, its possessive ‘h’ is His ‘Ah’ and not the other ‘h’ which does not make us unitarians.
3. If I say of this ‘h’ ‘wah!’ the others say to me, ‘Alas.’
4. These are epithets and specifications and a demonstrative allusion pierces this so we could see Allah through the substantive conditional.
5. All human individualities are ‘like a building well-compacted.’ It is a definition and the Unity of Allah does not make exception to the definition. But every definition is a limitation, and the attributes of a limitation apply to a limited object. However the object of Tawhid does not admit of limitation.
6. The Truth (Al-Haqq) itself is none other than the abode of Allah not necessarily Allah.
7. Saying the Tawhid does not realize it because the syntactical role of a term and its proper sense do not mix with each other when it concerns an appended term. So how can they be mixed when it concerns Allah?
8. If I say ‘the Tawhid emanates from Him’ then I double the Divine Essence, and I make an emanation of itself, co-existent with it, being and not being this Essence at the same time.
9. If I say that it was hidden in Allah, and He manifests it, how was it hidden where there is no ‘how’ or ‘what’ or ‘this’ and there is no place (‘where’) contained in Him.
10. Because ‘in this’ is a creation of Allah, as is ‘where.’
11. That which supports an accident is not without a substance. That which is not separated from a body is not without some part of a body. That which is not separated from spirit, in not without some part of a spirit. The Tawhid is therefore an assimilant.
12. We return then, beyond this to the center (of our Object) and isolate it from adjunctions, assimilations, qualifications, pulverizations and attributions.
13. The first circle (in the next diagram) comprises the actions of Allah, the second comprises their traces and these are two circles of the created.
14. The central point symbolizes the Tawhid, but it is not the Tawhid. If not, how would it be separable from the circle?

Here in is a text worthy of comparison with the Tao Teh King, for it is not just a spiritual and moral text, but a scientific one, that in its monism, compares with the ideas of the Tao; all is one all is nothing, and in the works of Heraclites that all is fire. Mansur el Hallaj thus had developed his own school of dialectics as an enlightened Muslim.

The idea is that like the Tao; the Tawhid is all and not all. The very earliest expression of monism. And as a scientist, el Hallaj's text is about the science of cosmology and mathematics. That of the point in space. Which is the origin not only of the idea of mans relationship to the universe, but it has the same religious and philisophical impact as Rene Descartes I Think Therefore I Am. It is the recognition of the indivdual in relationship to the whole, of society that they exist in.

XXXVIII. CONCERNETH THE TEH

1. those who possessed perfectly the powers (Teh) did not manifest them, and so they preserved them. those who possessed them imperfectly feared to lose them, and so lost them.
2. the former did nothing, nor had need to do. the latter did, and had need to do.
3. those who possessed benevolence exercised it, and had need of it; so also was it with them who possessed justice.
4. those whom possessed the conventions displayed them; and when men would not agree; they made ready to fight them.
Teh appears as Chokmah - Binah, Benevolence as Chesed, Justice as Geburah, Convention as Tiphereth. thus Kether alone is 'safe'; even Chokmah-Binah risks fall unless it keep Silence.
5. thus when the Tao was lost, the Magick Powers (Teh) appeared; then, by successive degradations, came Benevolence, Justice, Convention.
6. now convention is the shadow of loyalty and good-will, and so the herald of disorder. yea, even understanding (binah) is but a Blossom of the Tao, and promises Stupidity.
this repeats the doctrine of the danger of Binah. the attack on Tipereth is to be regarded as a reference to the 'Fall', death of Hiram at high noon, etc.
7. so then the Tao-Man holds to Mass, and avoids Motion; he is attached to the root, not to the flower. he leaves the one, and cleaves to the other.
that is, if his raod be toward the Tao. in our language, he adores Nuit; but the perfect Man, when he needs to manifest, is on the opposite curve.
Cf. The Book of Lies, 'the Brothers of the A A are Women; the Aspirants to A A are Men'.

The importance of el Hallaj cannot be underestimated. His thoughts influenced French religious thinking as well as its humanistic spiritual philosophy prior to the advent of the materialist philosophers and it would continue later in the development of existentialism.

Fifty years of French philosophy - Cross-pieces/ Philosophy and religion
Cinquante ans de philosophie française - Traverses - [ Translate this page ]
The heading "Philosophy and religion" was not essential itself: it thus calls some explanations. In this respect, it would not be bad to return to some sometimes forgotten basic obviousnesses. Since the Fathers of the Church until the Rebirth at least, it is clear that philosophy and theology were consubstantielles, no philosophical development not being a long time possible out of the Christian dogma which governed at the same time the ways of thinking and the modes of organization of the concrete existence of the men. It is with Descartes in a sense, Kant especially, one knows it, that philosophy as such will take its take-off while separating from the theological supervision, separation which the French philosophy of the Lights will greet like the triumph (late) of the finally adult reason and of the released thought of the dreams metaphysics. The things, however, are not so simple. The philosophy of Kant congédie not purely and simply the religion, but reinterprets it "within the limits of the simple reason" by integrating into its equations the metaphysical enigma of the radical evil. Philosophy hégélienne in its turn is thought like completion, in the form of the absolute knowledge, of this "phenomenology of the Spirit" in work of oneself whose religion is one of the ultimate figures, and it will be necessary forces it proclamation of "dead of God" in the lyricism of Nietzsche so that one comes from there to think that a systematically atheistic philosophy is possible which opens with the unknown of a new era.

The late arrival in France of Nietzsche, Hegel, Marx as well, undoubtedly explains the long insistence of a spiritualistic philosophy which will have known to resist the power of the rationalist currents (neo-kantian in particular), even frankly scientistic. This tendency could be expressed brillamment in a whole side of the philosophy of Bergson, but also in the analyses metaphysics of Maurice Blondel ( the Action , 1893; The Thought , 2 vol., 1934; The Being and Beings , 1935), of Jacques Maritain ( integral Humanism , 1936; Short Treaty of the existence and existing , 1947) or of Gabriel Marcel ( To be and To have , 1935; Metaphysical newspaper , 1927). This philosophy then appeared able to oppose a Christian humanism to a humanism existentialist which was in a direction its interlocutor privileged, able also to maintain the anchoring of the thought in an ontology inherited the thomism (in a form it is true often scholastic and dogmatic). It is in fact that this "Christian philosophy" mainly moved away from us with the language which she spoke, and which the historical bond between philosophy and theology then strongly distended. However, it is not impossible to suppose that this situation is changing, not certainly in the direction of a return behind, but in that of a revival of the interrogation and dialogue. The collapse of the insurrectionary movements of the années70, the collapse of the communist universe belong to this news gives: handing-over with foreground of the ethical question caused for example by recent progress of the life sciences, the collapse of the Utopias émancipatrices, the new forms of destructuration of the personality which psychoanalysis and psychotherapies approach according to their respective protocols, all that resulted reopening a field of interrogation and in again questioning this long memory of Occident in the heart of which the message of the three monotheisms insists - to contemplate the powerful consistency of a report/ratio of the subject to the law and the history which is formulated there.

ABDELWAHAB MEDDEB - [ Translate this page ]

Massignon, L., The Passion of al-Hallaj, Mystic and Martyr of Islam. Translated by Mason, H. 4 Vols, Princeton, NJ, Princeton, 1982.

Christianity and Islam in Historical Perspective: A Christian’s View by Sidney Griffith, Catholic University of America

Like others of his faith, when Louis Massignon learned the Arabic language and became immersed in the lives of Muslims in Cairo and Baghdad in the early twentieth century he was deeply impressed by the rigor and regularity of their religious observances. He was struck by the power of Islamic mystical poetry, and especially by the life and passion of the Muslim Sufi saint and martyr, Husayn ibn Mansur al-Hallaj (d. 922).54 He began an intensive study of the life and work of al-Hallaj, culminating in the publication in 1922 of two major books on the biography of al-Hallaj and on Islamic, mystical vocabulary, works that would revolutionize the study of Islamic mysticism in Europe.55 But personally the most important experience for Massignon was his religious conversion in 1908 in Iraq, from a life of profligacy. as he saw it, back to the intense practice of the Roman Catholic faith he had earlier abandoned. It was precipitated by a dramatic moment in his life, fraught with sickness and physical danger. He always believed that al-Hallaj, the Muslim mystic and martyr, interceded for him with God on this occasion. The experience gave Massignon a deeper, religious appreciation of Islam, and he thereafter and throughout his life sought ways to bring about a rapprochement between Islam and Christianity.56 Eventually he became associated with Charles de Foucauld (1858-1916), the Christian hermit in Muslim North Africa,57 whose spirituality was to inspire many in the twentieth century. In later life Massignon, together with a ‘Melkite’ woman of Cairo named Mary Kahil (1889-1979), founded an ecclesiastically approved sodality of prayer, called in Arabic al-Badaliyya. The purpose of the sodality was for its members mystically to offer their prayer and fasting in behalf of Muslims. A notable, early member of the sodality was Giovanni Batista Montini, the future Pope Paul VI.

Massignon’s experience, while it was dramatically more striking than that of most people, was nevertheless in many ways fairly typical of that of many Christians from the west who lived with Muslims in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Kenneth Cragg, who had a long experience as an Anglican priest in Jerusalem and Cairo, eventually being ordained an assistant bishop of the Anglican see in Jerusalem, was similarly inspired by Islamic religious life. He has written numerous books explaining Islam and Muslims to Christians, becoming in the process the most prominent voice in the English-speaking world to commend a religious respect for Muhammad, the Qur’an, and Islam.58

The Sufi tradition of openess and questioning has led them and other Shia sects to be considered blashphemous and irreligious to those who like their counterparts in the West believe in the literalness of the Koran or the Bible.

This Gnosis that infuses Sufism was later embraced by the great British explorer, linguist, and author Sir Captain Richard Burton. He wrote his famous paen to Sufism and Arabic Gnosticism; the Kasidah, I am sure not without passing knowledge of the work of Mansur el Hallaj.

"All Faith is false, all Faith is true" says Burton in the Kasidah.

Many of el Hallaj's ideas are within Burtons clever text. I say clever because he claims it is an original work in Arabic that he merely translated, when in reality he wrote in Arabic and then translated. In order to get the poetic scanning correct.

NOTE: "Kasidah" is an Arabic or Persian panegyric. A panegyric is a public speech or writing in praise of some person, thing, or achievement; a laudatory discourse, a formal or elaborate encomium or eulogy. According to the ancient rules the author of a "qasîda" must begin by a reference to the forsaken camping-grounds. Next he must lament, and pray his comrades to halt, while he calls up the memory of the dwellers who had departed. The Kasidah is a very artificial composition; the same rhyme has to run through the whole of the verses, however long the poem may be. (OED.)

Burton takes the last name of el-Yezdi. Which in Farsi is Devil or Satan. The Yezedi are a Gnostic sect of believers who exist in modern day Iraq, Armenia, Turkey and Iran. They are Kurds whose religion predates all others in the region.

The Encyclopaedia Britannica 1986' explains : "The Yazidi religion is a syncretic combination of Zoroastrian, Manichaean, Jewish, Nestorian Christian and Islamic elements. The Yazidi themselves are thought to be descended from supporters of the Umayyad Caliph Yazid 1. They themselves believe that they are created quite separately from the rest of mankind, not even being descended from Adam, and they have kept themselves strictly segregated from the people among whom they live. Although scattered and probably numbering fewer than 1,00,000, they have a well-organized society, with a chief shaykh as the supreme religious head and an amir, or prince, as the secular head.

As early as 2000 BC, the vanguards of the Indo-European speaking tribal immigrants, such as the Hittites and Mittanis, had arrived in southwestern Asia. While the Hittites only marginally affected the mountain communities in Kurdistan, the Mittanis settled in Kurdistan and influenced the natives in several fields worthy of note, in particular the introduction of knotted rug weaving. Even rug designs introduced by the Mittanis and recognizable in Assyrian floor carvings remain the hallmark of Kurdish rugs and kelims. The modern minakhani and chwarsuch styles are basically the same as those the Assyrians depicted nearly 3000 years ago.

The Mittanis seem to have been an Indic, and not an Iranic group of people. Their pantheon, which includes names like Indra, Varuna, Suriya, Nasatya, is typically Indic. The Mittanis could have introduced during this early period some of the Indic tradition that appears to be manifest in the Kurdish religion of Yazdanism.

Burtons Kasidah can be seen as a tribute to el-Hallaj and his original Satanic Verses. Because of his dark features, wicked sense of humour and irrelgious views Burton was referred to as "that Devil" by his friends and enemies.

Sir Richard Burton's Kasidah, written in 1880 after his return from Mecca, has been called one of the greatest poems of the Earth, and the essence of the explorer's life and work. In exquisite verse and extensive author's notes, Burton adapts the style, techniques and ideas of the classical Sufi masters such as Hafiz and Omar Khayyam, exploring the limitation of man's undeveloped reason, egoism and self-made religions in fulfilling real human destiny.

Idries Shah devotes almost an entire chapter of The Sufis to The Kasidah, calling it, "One of the most interesting productions of Western Sufic literature... Burton provided a bridge whereby the thinking Westerner could accept essential Sufi concepts."

The Kasîdah of Hâjî Abdû El-Yezdî

or

“Lay of the Higher Law”

“Translated and annotated by his friend and pupil, F.B.”

by

Richard F. Burton

TO THE READER

The Translator has ventured to entitle a “Lay of the Higher Law” the following composition, which aims at being in advance of its time; and he has not feared the danger of collision with such unpleasant forms as the “Higher Culture.” The principles which justify the name are as follows:—

The Author asserts that Happiness and Misery are equally divided and distributed in the world.

He makes Self-cultivation, with due regard to others, the sole and sufficient object of human life.

He suggests that the affections, the sympathies, and the “divine gift of Pity” are man’s highest enjoyments.

He advocates suspension of judgment, with a proper suspicion of “Facts, the idlest of superstitions.”

Finally, although destructive to appearance, he is essentially reconstructive.

For other details concerning the Poem and the Poet, the curious reader is referred to the end of the volume.

F. B.

Vienna, Nov., 1880.

The Sufi's originating in Persia, Iran, are a school of Shi'ism that Dr. Ali Shariati calls Red Shi'ism

Shi'ism is the Islam which differentiates itself and selects its direction in the history of Islam with the "No" of the great Ali, the heir of Mohammad and the manifestation of the Islam of Justice and Truth, a "No" which he gives to the Council for the Election of the Caliph, in answer to Abdul Rahman, who was the manifestation of Islamic aristocracy and compromise. This "No", up until pre-Safavid times, is recognized as part of the Shi'ite movement in the history of Islam, an indication of the social and political role of a group who are the followers of Ali, known for their association with the kindness of the family of the Prophet. It is a movement based upon the Qoran and the Traditions; not the Qoran and the traditions as proclaimed by the dynasties of the Omayyids, Abbasids, Ghaznavids, Seljuks, Mongols and Timurids, but the ones proclaimed by the family of Mohammad.

That "NO" is the libertarian expression we find in the poetic morality of Omar Khayyam, the politics of the Old Man of the Mountain, and in the economic libertarianism of Ibn Khaldun. Like Mansur el Hallaj they were Shia, Persian and Sufi's. Which is why he is one of my favorite Muslim's.

See:The Need for Arab Anarchism

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