Pictory

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Truthseeker9

Well thanks; I think improvement will come just about when IRI goes! Then I will move back to Iran; get me a "bagh" in some nice out of the way town and retire. Maybe near Zahedan so I can get plenty of the good stuff :-)

VPK

Let's not mix Ferdowsi, Zoroastrians, Sa'adi and dervishes with Khomeini and his ilk. 

Out of here. Next time, next blog. ;o)

VPK

"Thanks to two stock market crashes and the astronomical housing prices I have to work round the clock."

Sorry you appear to have had a hard time. Hope things get better soon.

Responses

• Rea: Saadi was a great poet. Iran has had many poets. In my opinion they just happened to live in the Islamic era. It does not mean that their greatness is due to Islam. Just like we don't attibute Western discoveries to Christianity. The pre-Islamic writings were mostly destroyed by Muslims. There are a few remaining one around. There was one that lasted until the 12 century and became the basis of Shahnameh. That one was named "Khoday Namak" or the book of Kings. It was not in poetry and was destroyed by Muslims. Ferdowsi took its stories and turned them into poetry. Of the real old ones the oldest is the Gathas which are hymns written by the prophet Zoroaster. It survived because it is the basis of the Zoroastrian religion and the faithful make sure to keep it safe and around.
• Sufi add Dervish: Are an esoteric offshoot of Islam. Many Muslims know very little about them and know as little about them as Westerners. I would hardly use them as an example of Islam. 

Speaking for my self only

Love Sa'adi and often cite him in my writings. Less familiar with Rumi except for the fascinating dervishes.

However, neither has anything to do with this dark character called Khomeini. And this is where I stop.

Tabarzin

Honestly I have little interest in mingling with people. I am too busy with my work and being a father. Best I can do is to write on IC. Thanks to two stock market crashes and the astronomical housing prices I have to work round the clock.

As for poetry I don't like renditions. I was talking to a friend about Khayyam reading a version with Persian and English versions by Fitzgerald. It was interesting how far the translation gets from the actual poetry. You can not translate poetry without context. So I don't put much stock in them. I mean without knowing a culture how do you know what something means? But if it works for Westerners: great. Let them read what they want and have fun with it.

Ditto!

The final part of your comment. That is why. Yes.

Get out more and mingle especially in intellectual and Western spiritual circles. You will see that Rumi (esp. through the translations of Coleman Barkes, that are really renditions and not real translations, and which imv are pure crap) has become the most popular poet of our times, esp. in the USA.

Tabarzin

I really do not know that Rumi is the most popular poet in the West. The people I know prefer Khayyam. Now that is just the people I know; maybe you know other people. Most Westerners I know are not even interested in poetry. The ones who are like Western poetry more than Eastern. Plus they read Iranian poetry in translation which really means they are reading something different. 

Now about the dehumanization of Muslims. Yes that is true and it is done. However the actions of Khomeini; Taliban and AQ do not help. They just go to confirm it. Maybe that is why West is deliberately promoting radical Islam. 

Brown Skin, White Masks - Hamid Dabashi

True to the historic
services they are now performing for their white masters, our native
informers are particularly adamant in reducing both the historical and
the contemporary polyvocality of Muslims to an essentialist conception
of Islam, and then summarizing this Islam with a number of key iconic
insignia (Prophet Muhammad and the Quran in particular); and then
denouncing or ridiculing Muhammad and the Quran and seeking to embarrass
Muslims at large by appealing to the superior authority of "the West"
and Enlightenment modernity. The 10 million plus Muslims who live in the
United States (about 3 percent of the total population) and the 20
million plus Muslims who live in Europe (about 5 percent of the total
population) are the principal target, with the 1.5 billion Muslims
around the globe as a secondary target, mostly via the racist and
imperial foreign policies of Europe and the United States. In any film,
fiction, or "documentary" about Muhammad or the Quran one is almost
certain to find these native informers—ex-Muslims, as they often proudly
call themselves—ridiculing Muhammad and disparaging the Quran. What
they are selling their white audiences has little to do with the
realities of Muslim societies. They are creating a Muslim enemy (reduced
to a few manufactured icons) they can dehumanize and subjugate by
assuming a superior civilizing mission—before they begin dropping tons
of bombs... pp.85-6.

 
"There is not a community
anywhere on earth without a sense of inviolable sanctity to its
collective identity, history, culture—all resting on certain iconic sets
of evidence, from the Hebrew Bible to the American Constitution. It is
that sanctity, integral to a people's sense of dignity, that Ibn Warraq
wants to steal from Muslims—thus preparing them to become what Giorgio
Agamben calls homo sacer, "naked life", so that when they are massacred
in multitudes, not even the dignity of the word "Palestinians" will be
attached to their slaughtered numbers," p.105.

?

What does the fact that Rumi is the most popular poet in America have to do with the IRI?

But since you say actions matter: exactly what role do Sufi Orders or the Isma'ilis have in the atrocities of the IRI who is also oppressing them? Nothing. The IRI is a cancer. It does not represent the whole body.

murderous Khomeini, the true embodiment of the shiat islam cult.

That is a cult within a cult for you.

Every single act of murder  he committed upon Iranian people, muslim, Bahai, christian, Jew, godless,  were backed up by a Quranic verse or written "recommendations" by Mohammad himself and the 12 shiat emams (or was it 11? I guess we'll never know!)

For example when he ordered the mass execution of Iranian political prisoners in 1989, he backed his infamous order by the example of how Mohamed treated his own prisoners.

Yep, here you have ladies and gentlemen, the religion of peace staring at you with it's shameless murdering eyes.... 

"Personal business must yield to collective interest."

I don't

care what some book says ehen I see what IRI does. Books say lots of things but it is actions that matter.

Then visit a local bookstore...

And see for yourself.

Tabarzin

Please do me a favor and keep the big words to a minimum. You should be able to get your point across withotut resort to them. It does not add to your credibility just make is sound silly.

If you have a point make it. And do it in plain English. As for Rumi I don't know too many Americans who consider him their favorite poet. No disrespect to Rumi but Americans are more into English poets. Or in reality in Britteny Spears.

These are terms from the language of critical theory

Polivocality (a term from semiotics meaning "many voices") contrasts with univocality (meaning "one voice"). With polivocality there is the employment of multiple voices within a given textual mode demonstrating diverse textual readings and so interpretations (of even a single text, say the Qur'an) rather than say a singular voice or interpretation. So here when someone says Khomeini is representative of Islam and his reading of the Qur'an representative of the whole tradition, they are making a fallacious univocal claim, because in contrast to Khomeini there are also the readings of, say, a Nasir-i-Khosrow, Rumi or an Ibn 'Arabi whose interpretations (i.e. "voices") significantly differ from Khomeini.

A dialectial permutation is a neologism I have coined in some of my own ongoing, unpublished writings in critical theory. Basically the dual dialectical process of thesis/antithesis produces a synthesis uniting opposite terms into a new thing. Yet within even this basic process we have an infinite array of permutation and sameness-in-difference that both distinguishes as well as unites a synthesis which becomes simultaneously antithesis as well as thesis to itself and as well as to its other. This idea came to me as a result of reading alchemical texts and the process they describe together with critical theory.

Multifarious means 'many' and 'hermenuetics' denotes interpretation.

Tabarzin

"...the polyvocality of Islamic discourses..."

".. dialectial permutations or multifarious hermenuetical developments within that civilization."

wtf are you talking about ?

Had the pope pronounced the same discourse 30 yrs ago he would've gone to a history dustbin. He still should, mind you. 

VPK

It is Mowlana Jalaluddin Rumi, not Omar Khayyam.

//fariha.instablogs.com/entry/mevlana-rumi-the-most-popular-poet-in-america/

Besides, arguably Omar Khayyam never penned a single one of the poems attributed to him in the Ruba'iyyat but these were rather an assorted anthology of poems authored by others (one or two of which have been identified to belong to the Muslim Sufi Fakhruddin 'Araqi) put under one cover and claimed by Edward Fitzgerald to be by Khayyam.

You do not understand the polyvocality of Islamic discourses (meaning, there is more than one kind of Islam), and never have, and neither do any of the North American Iranian Islamophobes talking here either. Khomeini and the Islamists are as much a representative of the totality of Islamicate civilization as George W Bush and the Neo-Cons represent the totality of the thinking of the American Founding Fathers and the European Enlightenment philosophes. Khomeinism and Islamism is a peculiarly idiosyncratic and totalitarian development in the course of Iranian Shi'ite Islamic historical developments just as Straussian Neo-Conservative ideology, with its mix of Schmittian Nazism with Trotskyism, is an aberration to what the John Lockes, Jeffersons or Alexander Hamiltons were about. To make Islamism and Khomeinism as  representative of the entire gamut of the civilization is downright ignorant and reveals no grasp of either historical forces, dialectical permutations or multifarious hermenuetical developments within that civilization.

Tabarzin

I have not taken a poll ofthe most popular poet in America: have you? But I assume you want to say Khayyam or something like that. This is my response to you:

• I may like someone's art. That does not mean I like their religion.
• I have read Khayyam and find him about as "Muslim" as myself. Hint: I am not a Muslim.

If you really thing Islam is in then you are living in a different world.

VPK

Who is considered the most popular poet in America today and what religion did this poet belong to? That should prove your assertion about what is "in" and what is "out" untrue.

Brother asadabad

Thank you for reminding me of your total absence of hadith and Qur'anic knowledge. Khomeini's words and deeds were in complete contrast of  Quran and Hadith, case in point: velayti- faqih.

A Belated al-Fitr greetings brother.

For an Islamic democracy

Khomeinie Legacy

is the destruction of Shia and more so Islam in Iran. Most Iranians I know have become secularists. A number have seeked refuge in Christianity; Zoroastrianism or even Buddhism or Hinduism. 

Islam is just not "in" anymore. I remember very well the 60's and 70s when Islam was it. When people like "Cat Stevens" proudly proclaimed themselves Muslims. I used to  proudly tell Americans in the mid 70s I was a "Muslim". Thanks to Khomeini no one in my whole immediate family is a Muslim now. He may have damaged Iran but he destroyed Islam! Add to that Taliban and AQ and you got a mess no one in their right mind wants.

What a dark person

Very much Stalin alike.

There is a very Funny Side to Everything...

I am having serious trouble finding the very funny side of this Revolution,  the USA could have made it a little fairer, I mean this deal wasn't exactly handled very well, we exchanged a patriotic and noble King for a lying, thieving, smelly mullah.

I don't care what all you anti-monarchists keep saying, the people were not rebelling because the king was so tyrannical and was not serving the people of Iran.  The biggest losers were the people of Iran, because of who they betrayed.

@salmanfarsi

Your statement is ridiculous.  Every single thing Khomeini said or did had a scriptural basis in shiism (either hadith or Quran).  Khomeini was not a perversion of shiism.  He just did exactly what his religion said he should do. 

Who do you think he quotes in all of his books?  Michael Jackson?

God damn him

Khomeini hoped to propagate shiism by coming to power in Iran, but his power grab had the exact opposite effect.  When Iranians saw how stupid, violent and backwards shiism really was, it encouraged them to become secularists and Christians--and that's still happening today.

Contrast this...

With his statements several months before, especially when he was still in France.

BTW this footage has to be from the period after the April 1979 referendum because he is referring to a vote.

With Salman I also echo the curse la'anat'ullah 'aleyhi!

What's with the deletions in here?

I really resent this kind of censorship. What gives?

va en islam bood ke

va en islam bood ke kar to pache mardom va bar az 30 sal daran chobesho mikhoran.

I strongly agree with

I strongly agree with KAROON1