The Retreat

Just a quick post to reiterate that The Retreat is on BBC2 at 9.0 on Monday evenings. I'll be interesting to see how much of the programme does relate to the themes of our course, and on that front I have some exciting news! I discovered today that Abdullah Trevathan, the leader of the retreat, is a colleague at Roehampton (he's a senior lecturer in Education). In spite of him being a leading figure in the field of Islamic education, I had no idea that he was at Roehampton, but have now made contact and have invited him to come to talk to our class. We've yet to discuss what he would come to talk about, but he has said that he is keen to learn from students on the course too, so I hope to set up some kind of dialogue which we can all benefit from.

Barca

I am trying to prepare next week's lecture on cosmopolitanism for the course, but I keep getting distracted by thoughts of football, so I thought I'd purge them here before returning to the lecture. The game that is very much on my mind is that played between Barcelona and Liverpool earlier this week and I was trying to work out why I was so pleased that Liverpool had won the game. I am by no means a Liverpool fan but I was truly delighted that they beat Barca in their own back yard and I was wondering quite why this is the case. There are a mixture of footballing and political reasons involved and I think I ought to concentrate on the latter (fyi, I think Barca's style has become somewhat parodic and a little pointless, however beautiful it can occasionally be). More than most teams, Barca are desperate to convey the idea that they are much more than a football club and that supporting Barca involves buying into a wonderful set of shared values. This is enshrined in their slogan "Mes que un club", which you can see in the accompanying picture, at their Camp Nou stadium. These shared values are mainly to do with Barca being seen as the unfofficial national team of Catalonia and a form of memorialisation of the repression of Catalan identities under Franco, when support for Barca, especially against Real Madrid, was seen to be an outlet for that expression of national identity.

So what is Gallois's problem with all this then? After all, to be a football fan is to be a tribalist of some sort, but my issue with Barca is that their kind of nationalism represents a smug, self-satisfied form of provincialism which lies at the least pleasant end of Catalan identity politics. This kind of nationalism tends towards the exclusionary, especially in questions of language, which have a much deeper historical resonance than one might think. While one can understand the Catalan desire to promote their language in contradistinction to Castilian Spanish, I have a serious issue with the aside that has often been made to me that "Catalan is the superior language because it is the purest Latin tongue". Now on one level this is really stupid, since languages are in the end neither superior nor inferior to others, but it also masks a subtle form of racism, since the allegation being alluded to here is that Castilian is a language that was corrupted by Arabic, whereas the brave Catalans successfully resisted Islamic influences on their society and their language. That actually happens to be untrue, but it is widely believed, and it's for that reason that I restrained some of my better instincts and managed to cheer even a Craig Bellamy goal on Wednesday night...

Apologies

First-up, apologies for there having been no posts on this blog for a week. In neglecting the blog like this I have broken what is thought to be the number one commandment of blogging, which is that you must blog often. People seem to think that this is actually even more important than blogging interestingly and I suspect that they are probably right... I don't feel that I have any one topic that I particularly want to blog about today, but a number of smaller ideas come to mind:

1. Rob Morello was asking whether it was OK for blog entries to be very short and the answer to that is "yes". He suggested that a blog entry could simply be a question and that seems like it could be a good thing, especially if you return to it later.

2. One thing about teaching is that there are always surprises, in that you can never judge how some things will be received. I was really surprised on Tuesday to learn that people perceived Menocal to be the "easy to read" text and the Constable collection to be "the difficult book". Thinking about this, I can understand why people feel this is the case, but I want to urge you all to make sure that you take your dose of Constable every week because the long-run gain to you will be very great I believe. While you are operating, mainly, with reasonably limited knowledge of al-Andalus, some of the documents are going to be hard to grasp, but they'll ultimately allow you to access discussions about Andalusi society in a much more profound way. Next week we'll spend more time probing some of these documents.

3. Mark Ravenhill's recent article on religion and university teaching seemed pretty interesting to me: http://arts.guardian.co.uk/theatre/drama/story/0,,2006078,00.html
While I agree with him that students shouldn't be allowed to opt-out of parts of courses on religious or moral grounds, I am not quite sure that this is as big an issue as he makes out, and I am also uncertain as to whether claiming the university as a bastion of liberalism is quite as good a thing as he believes. To me the interesting thing about universities is that as free-speech environments they can be bastions of all sorts of things, including forms of belief and expression which many would find not to be to their liking. In this way the university is the natural home of, for instance, libertarian conservatism or Islamism, as it is liberalism. To deny this would, I think, take us down the direction of the kind of culture wars which exist on American campuses, though I guess that Ravenhill would quite reasonably point out that it is the liberal consensus in Britain which has prevented such conflicts occurring, up until now.

4. I was also thinking about Ibn Hazm's Tawq al-hamama (translated rather poorly as The Dove's Neck-Ring - it really deserves a more poetic title like The Ring of the Dove), which is one of the Andalusi texts which generates most interest and controversy these days, as it is a pretty frank treatise on love. Only one early manuscript copy remains, which can be seen here:
http://bc.ub.leidenuniv.nl/bc/olg/selec/tawq/index.html
The translated text can be found here: http://www.muslimphilosophy.com/hazm/dove/index.html
Re-reading some of the chapters is just a real delight, partly because of the mix of the confessional tone, partly the fantastic choice of subjects (on sending love letters, on the dangers of spies, on falling in love while asleep!) and partly because one has a sense of how scandalised parts of Andalusi society were by this text, with its clear allusions to the love lives of all sorts of prominent figures of Cordoban society. An important text to read for anyone who harbours an idea that Islamic culture is somehow narrow, sterile or conservative.

Some links

Julie Hall in educational development kindly supplied me with the following interesting links about blogging:

http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue44/trafford/
http://thecommunityengine.com/home/archives/2005/03/a_learning_blog.html

I also found the following article about teaching and liberal freedom by Mark Ravenhill interesting:

http://arts.guardian.co.uk/theatre/drama/story/0,,2006078,00.html

On a course like this one, it seems to me that the article is relevant in two ways: 1) it is useful in making us think about the university as a home of free speech and liberal culture and what this means, and 2) in an indirect way it also helps us think about debates which took place in al-Andalus since they too struggled in battles over liberalism. Elsewhere (in an article I wrote on Andalusi cosmopolitanism) I have claimed that the key division in al-Andalus was not between religions (Muslims, Jews, Christians) or race (Arabs, Berbers, Europeans, others), but between liberal cosmopolitans (who liked freedom of expression and cultural borrowing) and conservative parochialists (who felt the state should control freedoms of expression and who valorised cultural cohesion and group identities). For a long time, cosmopolitans held sway in al-Andalus, which, to my mind, is why we find such a vibrant and interesting culture there, but the proachialists won out in the end. Is it too simplistic to say that parochialists always tend to win out because their appeal is to the gut and the heart, whilst the cosmopolitan's appeal is to the mind?

Leighton House

I'd recommend that everyone taking this course visit Leighton House near Holland Park (details here: http://www.rbkc.gov.uk/LeightonHouseMuseum/general/). We'd have visited on the day we're going to look at the Islamic collection at the V&A, but unfortunately the one day a week that the museum is closed is a Tuesday. Anyhow, my visit made me think about two things:

1. First, walking through the Arab Hall at Leighton House is a great tonic for the spirits of anyone who feels battered down by contemporary rhetoric and debate about the Arab-Islamic world. If there are two phrases from such debates which express current ignorance and intellectual poverty, they are "Londonistan" and "the Arab Street". The latter phrase numbs the mind in its conviction that there is some kind of Arab mentality which can be discerned and which can then ground American/British policy, whilst the odious "Londonistan" debases the contributions of Arabs and Muslims to the cosmopolitanism of this city, preferring to trust the slurs of intelligence services in Washington and Paris over the experiences of Londoners. What's more, it turns what should be a source of pride into a cause for shame, for it is indeed admirable that London has been the home of most dissident movements in the Arab-Islamic world for decades, and just as we now celebrate, in a heritage-y kind of way, Marx working in the British Museum, and Lenin at his printing press in Clerkenwell, we need to reclaim the positive story of Arab-Islamic London. So, to go back to Leighton House, the feeling I had on walking into the Arab Hall was just the kind of celebratory sensation I have on walking down Edgware Road late at night, or sitting amongst families eating at Abu Zaad in Shepherd's Bush: of the positive contribution of Arabs and Muslims to this city.

2. The Arab Hall also got me thinking about what has probably been the dominant debate within the academic study of "the Middle East" for nearly thirty years, namely Edward's Said's critique of Orientalism. Leighton, like many of his peers, was in many ways a classic nineteenth-century Orientalist, in that his paintings display a passion for an exotic other and a desire to represent that alterity to audiences back home. Yet, when one stands in the Arab Hall, filled as it is with tiles which Leighton brought back with him from Syria, the sensation I had was more one of awe than a sense of approaching some kind of pastiche. In a relatively small space, Leighton and his collaborators made a space which is a a form of summary of the vocabulary of Islamic architecture, from the interior use of water, the tiles, the carpets, the mashrabiya screens, the dome, the use of geometry, the mosaics, the use of columns and the muqarnas. Looking back at that list, I can see see how this might be regarded as a classic example of Orientalist excess in its desire to describe Islamic culture, rather than understand it, but the feeling I had in the room was of Leighton's evident respect for the art of what he evidently regarded as a truly great culture. Now such discussions are tricky, because we ought to try to establish whether a typical Orientalist gambit was at play here, where respect was accorded to Islamic culture in the past as a means of denigrating the present state of Islamic civilization, but this room also made me recall that when Said wrote about the Orientalists, he had a great deal of admiration for some of their texts. Some of his followers have created an image of Said as a scourge of the west, but he was no such thing; simply an elegant critic of the political consequences of art and ideals.
So can we now enjoy Leighton's Arab Hall in an uncomplicated fashion, impressed by the faithfulness of its reproduction of the styles of a great culture? My answer is yes, because although I haven't conveyed the full complexity of is construction (its relations to Sicilian Islamic styles, and the manner in which Aitchison, Leighton's architect, used British crafts to fit together this collection of Syrian, Turkish and other artefacts), walking into this room one felt like one had walked into a great building in the Arab-Islamic world.