Festival Theatre, Edinburgh International Festival, 4 September 2008On TV, when I got home, Seth Lakeman was blazing through his set at the Cambridge Folk Festival. Blazing, high octane intensity; that’s what I had expected from the Whirling Dervishes. Instead, imagine the choir of the Sistine Chapel appearing on a theatre stage and not just singing liturgy but presenting the whole missal, smells and bells included. It is difficult to convey the sense of incongruity between the expressly spiritual content of tonight’s performance and the expressly secular setting in which it took place. The chair applause – the normal racket of seats snapping up as people rise to leave – seemed unnecessarily urgent, but in Edinburgh there is always the next show to go to.
This year’s festival theme has been ‘artists without borders’, inviting audiences to ‘create their own pathway’ through the fare. A number of Mediterranean cultures have featured in the mix, and it is noticeable how fluid the musical currents are, even when fixed to ideas and ide
Whirling Dervishes of Turkey at the Edinburgh Festival – MusicalCriticism.com (Concert review).
Closing the Edinburgh International festival dance programme, this concert of Turkish classical and Sufi music climaxes with a still sacred religious ceremony little changed since its conception in the 15th century.
There is essentially only one repeated movement to review – the whirling. And this spinning is performed, rather surprisingly given the dance billing, for only a short period in the second half. Pre-interval, the group concentrates on ancient music performed on delicately beautiful traditional instruments and five deeply male voices. There are readings from religious texts too. Delivered in English, they are sincere but add little.
So, the slow build-up to the whirling lasts nearly two thirds of the evening. The rhythms are soporific and mystical, the words sung low and sonorous, the verses many and repetitive. Hypnosis seems the aim. Much of the six-part Sema ceremony consists of walking in circles, gesturing and bowing with respect. Meanwhile, a moth dances in the lights above.
When the dervishes finally treat us to the main attraction, their billowing white full-length skirts (the ego’s shroud) are freed from black cloaks (the grave) and transcendence is gentle and without extravagance. One hand turned to the sky and God, and the other to earth, their tall fez-like hats (the ego’s tombstone) tilt to one side in unison. It is as simple as that. A beautiful, poetic, meditative gesture. The only concession to performance are pink, blue and orange spotlights catching each turn.
[Edinburgh festival dance review: Istanbul Music and Sema Group, Edinburgh Playhouse – This article appeared in the Guardian on Tuesday September 02 2008 on p36 of the Features & reviews section. It was last updated at 00:57 on September 02 2008]
Decades before Herzl, Benjamin Disraeli wrote a novel that grappled with Zionism
by Adam Kirsch
An undated portrait of Disraeli
By the beginning of 1830, when he was twenty-five, Benjamin Disraeli was tired of England. For three years, he had been suffering from acute depression, brought on by the triple fiasco that marked his entrance into public life. Before he turned twenty-two, Disraeli had lost thousands of pounds in stock-market speculations; alienated the publisher John Murray after their plan to launch a newspaper ended in failure; and caused a scandal with his first novel, Vivian Gray, a satirical roman à clef about high society. For the young Disraeli, already supremely ambitious, these reverses had come as a terrible shock, and it took him years to recover his nerve.
Now, with his second novel completed and the advance in his pocket, Disraeli was set on traveling. But he did not want to follow the usual itinerary of the Grand Tour, which took rich young Englishmen to the churches of Rome and the salons of Paris. Instead, he set his sights on the East—Greece, Turkey, Egypt, and Palestine. In part, he was following the example of his beloved Byron, who had created a vogue for the East in his highly colored poems. But for Disraeli, a journey to Jerusalem had more than literary significance. Although he had been baptized at the age of twelve into the Church of England, Disraeli’s very name made clear that he was a Jew, and the experience of visiting the Jewish homeland was to transform the way he thought about himself, his ancestors, and politics in general. Almost fifty years later, when he was Prime Minister of England, it would be his destiny to redraw the maps of the countries he visited as a young man.
The first fruit of Disraeli’s pilgrimage, however, was a novel—The Wondrous Tale of Alroy, published in 1833. Disraeli wrote that he had been “attracted” to the “marvellous career” of David Alroy even as a child. But Disraeli’s Alroy bears little resemblance to the minor figure mentioned by Benjamin of Tudela, the Spanish Jew whose Travels are a classic of medieval Hebrew literature. According to Benjamin, Alroy, a Kurdish Jew, raised a revolt against the Seljuk Turks in Azerbaijan around 1160 AD. He was credited with magic powers by his followers, who proclaimed him the Messiah, but this pretension won him the hostility of Jewish leaders in Baghdad, who begged him not to antagonize the Turks. Finally he was betrayed by his father-in-law and killed, probably without winning a single battle.
Disraeli’s Alroy is a much grander figure, a kind of Jewish Alexander the Great. In his novel, Alroy wins victory after victory, conquers Baghdad, and comes close to establishing a new empire in the Middle East. Disraeli also provides his hero with a loyal sister, Miriam, and a lover, the Princess Schirene. There is also a good deal of what Disraeli called “supernatural machinery” in the novel, including a magic ring, a secret underground temple, and the Scepter of Solomon, which Alroy must claim if he is to conquer Jerusalem.
Disraeli writes that all this is based on Jewish tradition—“Cabalistical and correct,” he puts it—but it is clear that the real sources of the novel’s mysticism lie in The Thousand and One Nights, the Eastern tales of Byron, and the quest poems of Shelley. In general, Alroy is better understood as high Orientalist fantasy than historical fiction. Even Disraeli’s prose, the emphatic rhythms and repetitions of which suggest that some sections started out as verse, is kitschily intoxicated: “‘Ah! bright gazelle! Ah! bright gazelle!’ the princess cried, the princess cried; ‘thy lips are softer than the swan, thy lips are softer than the swan; but his breathed passion when they pressed, my bright gazelle! my bright gazelle!’”
But if Alroy seems impossibly overripe today, its psychological core remains entirely serious. Disraeli said that he began to write the novel in Jerusalem in 1831, at a moment when he was pondering the role Jewishness might play in his own life and career. And in his hands, the story of David Alroy becomes a veiled meditation on the state of the Jews in Europe, and a parable of his own possible future.
From the beginning of the novel, Alroy, a scion of the house of David, rages against the degradation of the Jews under Muslim rule. But as Disraeli makes clear, the condition of the Jews is hardly unbearable. On the contrary, Alroy’s uncle, Bostenay, is a rich man, and enjoys the honorary title of Prince of the Captivity. “The age of power has passed; it is by prudence now that we must flourish,” he declares. He is, perhaps, Disraeli’s critical portrait of the wealthy English Jews of his own day—men like the Rothschilds and Montefiores, who had all the advantages of wealth, but none of the dignity of power.
Alroy, like Disraeli himself, cannot be satisfied with making money. He is an ardent patriot, disgusted by the state into which his people have fallen: “I am ashamed, uncle, ashamed, ashamed,” he tells Bostenay. When he sees a Turkish official accost his sister, Alroy impetuously kills him and flees into the desert. He is about to die of thirst when he is rescued by Jabaster, a magician and fanatical Jewish patriot. When Alroy has a dream of being acclaimed by a vast army as “the great Messiah of our ancient hopes,” Jabaster decides that the young man represents his long-awaited chance to reestablish the kingdom of David. After a series of romantic adventures, Alroy begins to put Jabaster’s plan into action, scattering the Turks and conquering Baghdad.
But in the meantime, Alroy acquires another advisor—Jabaster’s brother and mirror image, Honain. Honain represents the tempting path of Jewish assimilation: He has achieved wealth and honor, but only at the price of “passing” as a Muslim. In his own view, however, he has not betrayed his people, but simply effected his own liberation. “I too would be free and honoured,” he tells Alroy. “Freedom and honour are mine, but I was my own messiah.” Honain introduces Alroy to the beautiful Princess Schirene, the daughter of the Caliph, and though she is a Muslim he falls in love with her. (“The daughters of my tribe, they please me not, though they are passing fair,” Alroy admits—a sentiment Disraeli himself shared.)
But now, at the height of his fortune, with an empire in his grasp and a princess for his wife, Alroy begins to succumb to Honain’s worldly counsel. Why, he asks, should he exchange rich Baghdad for poor Jerusalem? Why not rule over a cosmopolitan empire, rather than a single small nation? “The world is mine: and shall I yield the prize, the universal and heroic prize, to realise the dull tradition of some dreaming priest, and consecrate a legend?” Alroy asks. “Is the Lord of Hosts so slight a God that we must place a barrier to His sovereignty, and fix the boundaries of Omnipotence between the Jordan and the Lebanon?” Mischievously, Disraeli even makes Alroy begin to speak in the stock phrases of modern English liberalism: “Universal empire must not be founded on sectarian prejudices and exclusive rights.”
From a portrait by Count D’Orsay, 1834
Jabaster tries to recall his king to the righteous, Jewish path, but to no avail. At last he attempts a coup against Alroy, but he is defeated and sentenced to death. From that moment, however, God’s favor deserts Alroy. In his next battle he is defeated, and a Muslim king, Alp Arslan, takes him prisoner. Now Honain reappears with one last, Satanic temptation: If Alroy converts to Islam, his life will be spared. But the scion of the house of David has learned his lesson. His strength is not his own but his nation’s, and individual glory means nothing next to the redemption of the Jews. He taunts Alp Arslan with his refusal, and the king, in a rage, cuts off his head.
For Disraeli, writing at the very beginning of his own career as an English politician, the moral of Alroy was deeply ambiguous. After all, David Alroy is a gifted youth like himself, but one who sacrifices worldly ambitions for love of the Jewish people, and is exalted by that love. The novel does not endorse the Jewish sectarianism of Jabaster—Disraeli expresses a Voltairean hatred of priestcraft—but it clearly repudiates the plausible assimilationism of Honain, which leads only to dishonor and disaster. Indeed, it is Disraeli’s distinction between Jewish belief and Jewish solidarity, and his insistence that it is possible to have the latter without the former, that makes Alroy a significant proto-Zionist text. If Disraeli had obeyed the novel’s logic in his own life, if he had tried to translate Alroy’s vision to the nineteenth century, he might have become a real-life Daniel Deronda.
Source: www.nextbook.org, 08.26.08
“The world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes.”
From the following quotation, guess the identity of the household name examining the branches of his family tree tonight. “She saw his name on a list of people to be hanged under a clock in the next few days. Cripes!” Yes, it could only be Boris Johnson.The London Mayor and Daily Telegraph columnist is referring to a letter his grandmother wrote 100 years ago reporting news of Johnson’s great-grandfather – a controversial political journalist in Istanbul.
advertisementJohnson’s ancestry is a stew of nationalities: Turkish, English, Russian, German, French (“We were led to believe that Granny Butter had some immensely distinguished Alsatian antecedents. When I say Alsatian I mean ‘from Alsace’, they weren’t dogs”).
Like almost all episodes of Who Do You Think You Are?, tonight’s is impressively varied in tone (funny, sad, even at times uplifting) and uncovers surprising things: it turns out that Johnson has ancestors even more exalted than Granny Butter let on.
But perhaps Johnson’s most intriguing disclosure is that he won his school’s scripture prize.
As devotees of PG Wodehouse will know, this is the regular boast of a man to whom Johnson has been fondly likened: one Bertram Wooster.
SULAIMANIYAH, Iraq (AFP) — An influential Kurdish member of the Iraqi parliament on Saturday accused Turkey of undermining the influence Kurds have gained since the fall of the regime of Saddam Hussein in 2003.
“Turkey has manoeuvred to create an anti-Kurdish (Iraqi) parliament,” Mahmoud Othman told a press conference in Sulaimaniyah, one of the main cities of the autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq.
“It is behind the adoption of article 24 of the electoral law as it is trying by all means to reduce the gains made by the Kurds after the fall of Saddam Hussein,” he said.
Iraq’s parliament proposed under article 24 of the election bill a deal that will share power equally between Arabs, Kurds and Turkmen in the oil-rich Kirkuk region, a move bitterly opposed by the Kurds, given their numerical superiority.
Othman did not elaborate on how he thought Ankara had managed to influence Iraqi MPs to write a clause in the electoral bill, though Kurds have long complained of Turkish efforts to undermine them through alliance with ethnic Turkmen and Sunni Arabs.
Saddam placed Kirkuk outside the Kurdish region, which has behaved essentially as an independent entity since 1991.
But Iraqi Kurds, many of whom see Kirkuk’s oil wealth as vital to the future viability of their region, have called for the city to be placed within the autonomous region.
Kirkuk has a large population of Sunni and Shiite Arabs, as well as Turkmen, making for a fragile ethnic mix.
The failure to find a solution to Kirkuk has forced the postponement of local elections in Iraq initially scheduled for October 1.
Othman also singled out the United States and Britain, claiming they had played negative roles.
He said the US had “not reacted” to Turkish attempts to push the bill through parliament while Britain had pressured the Kurds to accept the demands of the Arabs and Turkmen.
Turkey, which once ruled Iraq for 400 years, sees itself as the traditional protector of the Turkmen community who, together with the Arabs, complain of being bullied by the Kurds.
With its own large Kurdish minority in the south, Turkey has viewed the increasing independence of the Iraqi Kurdish autonomous region with deep misgivings.
Europe had the chance to end the chasm between Islam and the West. It chose to be bigoted
Monday, 4 August 2008
Just back from Dalyan in Turkey, a place of such natural beauty and human kindness you almost cry with relief and released joy. A lush river full of fat turtles and thin, dancing water snakes runs through the smallish town (only a hamlet when we last stopped over 15 years ago), making its way to the Aegean/Mediterranean seas, warm and playful. Although tourism is changing the nature of Dalyan, nobody hassles you and you don’t begrudge the inhabitants the economic surge delivered by delighted visitors.
Our compatriots behaved with such courtesy, it made us proud to be British. Most were non-Metropolitan, involved in building, making and selling awnings and blinds, engineering, farming and so on. A few were in public service. Several came back every year because, they said, the people were even warmer than the summer sun. No moody novelists or sulky media types were spotted. At a local fish restaurant (sea bass and bream for £4 with real chips and the sharpest rocket leaves in the world) sat a tipsy, buxom northern English blonde in a red polka-dotted dress. Oh, she loved this place, she said, most of all the Turkish Tommy Cooper in the café, who told bad jokes in his fez.
This goodwill only helped to emphasize the criminal failures of the EU political classes, who have betrayed their own post-war ideals. Western Europe promised to confront its heart of darkness after the war and Holocaust. Zero tolerance against anti-Semitism was the ransom that had to be paid and was, rightly and properly. But other racisms have been allowed to grow and ancient enmities reawakened. Fresh hate victims have been found to fill the continent’s gaping pits.
Black migrants are treated like vermin, including in those EU countries known for easy charm; Muslims have had to accept institutionalised prejudice and Turkey has been treated as an abject and alien supplicant who must be kept that way. An essentialist, Christian definition of Europe has been settled upon, arguably one of the most self destructive of EU ideologies.
Sarkozy says: “Europe must give itself borders … beginning with Turkey which has no place in the EU.” Merkel and others in the enlarged club are even more phobic and Britain’s honourable opposition to such a view has no effect. Patiently waiting to be admitted since 1987, the Turks are no longer asking. Never have I met so many young graduates and older secularists so violently opposed to joining the Union.
They believe a new power bloc of India and some of the more enlightened Muslim states offers them better prospects. In 2002, 70 per cent wanted to go in; in 2006 the figure had gone down to 35 per cent. Today I would guess enthusiasm has dropped to single figures. The Turkish journalist Farina Ahaeuser astutely observes that by keeping Turkey on the edge ( and on edge) relations with Europe “have certainly hit rock bottom”.
This is appalling news for both sides. The EU has admirably democratized nations previously under authoritarianism. Turkey’s ruling Islamicist AKP party has shown better governance because it wanted to impress Europe. The death penalty was abolished, human and minority rights were finally getting somewhere and the PM, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, agreed to abolish the abominable Article 301 that makes it unlawful to “insult the Turkish nation”. He has reneged on this commitment.
The latest, failed attempt by the Turkish Constitutional court to undemocratically close down the AKP is another sign that the country is abandoning EU principles of politics and justice. Islamicisation is creeping in. Almost all the wives of government ministers are hijabed and “pious” homemakers. It frightens modern Turkish women who have had equal rights for longer than we have in the UK. I used to love meeting these sisters who were as deeply religious as I am but also strong secularists. These days they are depressed and angry.
Europe had the chance to end the ideological chasm between hardline Islam and the west by embracing its Christian and Muslim heritages, to heal the world. It has chosen instead to be injudicious, obtuse and bigoted. Even George Bush understands how dumb this is.
At a bar in Dalyan, the owner, a handsome man with green eyes said some mosque elders would soon close up and come over for a glass of rose wine: “Our God is inside. We are not crazy like those Saudis. We are both west and east. But these people in Brussels don’t understand us and I am afraid they will push us away too far and then who knows what will happen? Only Allah knows.“
