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Authors: Fatima Mernissi, Mary Jo Lakeland
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Marxism have never been able to do the hard work that might have yielded up other schemas and other ideas. For many experiencing the collapse of democratic movements in the Muslim world, the cold war was the American struggle against the socialist Left. For them the CIA plot against Mossadeq was a representative example. The cold war derailed the cultural development of Muslim societies and, in Iran, allowed the imams to emerge as deformed mirrors of stifled aspirations: “What is happening today with the fundamentalists of all sorts not only does not renew the spirit of Islam, but is in fact a funeral cortege of petrified dreams that will disappear in the desert sands. Fundamentalism lowers intelligence to the level of emotional, visceral reflexes. And any drop in intelligence bears within it the germs of decay.” 10
Our mutilated modernity, void of the great democratic advances as well as cultural and scientific accomplishments, opens the way to the merchants of hope who are so familiar to us. Since we lack a vision anchored in the present and still less in the future, they are leading all of us toward the only area where phantasms can flourish—toward the past. They are unscrupulously manipulating its rich language, charged as it is with symbols and images saturated with emotion and bursting with hope, but connected to the subterranean vagaries of ancestral terrors. And well ensconced there we find the fear of women—a fear strongly linked to the disorder of the jahiliyya, which Arabs have never taken the pains to analyze coolly, as a first step toward moving beyond it. At the beginning Islam tried to break with the fears and superstitions of the heathen Arabs. But very quickly the example of the Prophet, who insisted on the necessity of change, disappeared from people’s consciousness. The caliphs slid back toward the jahiliyya, locking women up and excluding them from the mosques. Women fell into ignorance and sank into silence. 11
CONCLUSION
THE SIMORGH IS US!
It happened in Nishapur in Iran in the spring of A.D. 1175. A man dreamed of a world without fear, without boudnaries, where you could travel very far and find yourself in the company of strangers whom you knew as you knew yourself, strangers who were neither hostile nor aggressive. It was the land of the Simorgh.
In his long meditations in Nishapur, all by himself Attar imagined that land where strangeness only enriched what we are to the ultimate degree. He committed his dream to paper, a long poem that he called Mantiq al-tayr (The Conference of the Birds). It instantly became famous, but intolerance and violence knocked one night at Attar’s door. Genghis Khan’s Mongol soldiers murdered Attar in 1230. The poet died, but the dream lived on through the centuries and continues to haunt our imaginations.
Thousands of birds had heard of a fabulous being called the Simorgh, whom they longed to see and know. They decided to go together, by their thousands, to the place where they were told he could be found. For years and years they crossed rivers and oceans to find the Simorgh, that fabulous creature, radiant and dazzling. Many birds died along the way and never finished the journey. Fatigue and the rigors of the climate decimated most of the seekers. Only thirty succeeded in arriving at the gates of the fortress of the legendary Simorgh. But when they were finally received, a surprise awaited them which we will understand better if we know that in Persian si means thirty and morgh means birds:
There in the Simorgh’s radiant face they saw
Themselves, the Simorgh of the world—with awe
They gazed, and dared at last to comprehend
They were the Simorgh and the journey’s end.
They see the Simorgh—at themselves they stare,
And see a second Simorgh standing there;
They look at both and see the two are one,
That this is that, that this, the goal is won.
They ask (but inwardly; they make no sound)
The meaning of these mysteries that
Our mutilated modernity, void of the great democratic advances as well as cultural and scientific accomplishments, opens the way to the merchants of hope who are so familiar to us. Since we lack a vision anchored in the present and still less in the future, they are leading all of us toward the only area where phantasms can flourish—toward the past. They are unscrupulously manipulating its rich language, charged as it is with symbols and images saturated with emotion and bursting with hope, but connected to the subterranean vagaries of ancestral terrors. And well ensconced there we find the fear of women—a fear strongly linked to the disorder of the jahiliyya, which Arabs have never taken the pains to analyze coolly, as a first step toward moving beyond it. At the beginning Islam tried to break with the fears and superstitions of the heathen Arabs. But very quickly the example of the Prophet, who insisted on the necessity of change, disappeared from people’s consciousness. The caliphs slid back toward the jahiliyya, locking women up and excluding them from the mosques. Women fell into ignorance and sank into silence. 11
CONCLUSION
THE SIMORGH IS US!
It happened in Nishapur in Iran in the spring of A.D. 1175. A man dreamed of a world without fear, without boudnaries, where you could travel very far and find yourself in the company of strangers whom you knew as you knew yourself, strangers who were neither hostile nor aggressive. It was the land of the Simorgh.
In his long meditations in Nishapur, all by himself Attar imagined that land where strangeness only enriched what we are to the ultimate degree. He committed his dream to paper, a long poem that he called Mantiq al-tayr (The Conference of the Birds). It instantly became famous, but intolerance and violence knocked one night at Attar’s door. Genghis Khan’s Mongol soldiers murdered Attar in 1230. The poet died, but the dream lived on through the centuries and continues to haunt our imaginations.
Thousands of birds had heard of a fabulous being called the Simorgh, whom they longed to see and know. They decided to go together, by their thousands, to the place where they were told he could be found. For years and years they crossed rivers and oceans to find the Simorgh, that fabulous creature, radiant and dazzling. Many birds died along the way and never finished the journey. Fatigue and the rigors of the climate decimated most of the seekers. Only thirty succeeded in arriving at the gates of the fortress of the legendary Simorgh. But when they were finally received, a surprise awaited them which we will understand better if we know that in Persian si means thirty and morgh means birds:
There in the Simorgh’s radiant face they saw
Themselves, the Simorgh of the world—with awe
They gazed, and dared at last to comprehend
They were the Simorgh and the journey’s end.
They see the Simorgh—at themselves they stare,
And see a second Simorgh standing there;
They look at both and see the two are one,
That this is that, that this, the goal is won.
They ask (but inwardly; they make no sound)
The meaning of these mysteries that
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