Censorship is an endlessly fascinating subject; a puzzle box, a Russian nesting doll in which the writer's truth is buried and often lost. Czeslaw Milosz's 1953 classic "The Captive Mind" revealed the insidious and creative ways that censorship enters and inhabits the mind of the artist. Shahriar Mandanipour, an Iranian film critic and the editor of a literary journal in Iran, was not allowed to publish fiction from 1992 to 1997. He came to the United States in 2006. "Censoring an Iranian Love Story" is his first book published in English. In this novel, a writer (also named Shahriar Mandanipour and the author's alter ego) tries to write the story of Sara and Dara, a young couple in love, and finds himself in a metaphorical burka. He is forced to change his story, characters and dialogue to comply with the restrictions of the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance in the person of a Dostoevskian character, Mr. Petrovich.

"I am an Iranian writer tired of writing dark and bitter stories," he tells his reader, "stories populated by ghosts and dead narrators with predictable endings of death and destruction. I am a writer who at the threshold of fifty has understood that the purportedly real world around us has enough death and destruction and sorrow, and that I did not have the right to add even more defeat and hopelessness to it with my stories." The key word here is, of course, "purportedly."

Censorship, seen as its own art form, is just another way of messing with reality. It's hard enough to generate one's own ideas without having someone else's superimposed over them, but the fictional Mandanipour tries.   more »

Ari Folman's semiautobiographical "Waltz With Bashir" is nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at this year's Oscars. It also was considered a potential nominee in the documentary and animation categories. I suppose you could call it an animated documentary by way of oral history, but it's best not to get caught up with labels concerning this film.

What begins as an introspective odyssey examining the effects of war on the young Israeli soldiers turns into a provocative exposé on the Sabra and Shatila massacre, an event that sent shock waves through Israelis who were made inadvertent collaborators. But the final word is not their emotional trauma, but the stark reality of the event itself.   more »

Thus Amos, unlike so many of the land-fixated commentators among his fellow countrymen, was one of the first to recognize that the settlements in the territories Israel has occupied since 1967 were a self-imposed catastrophe: "The settlements...have tied Israel's hands in any negotiation to achieve lasting peace.... [They] have only made it less secure."[2] That a country with the strongest military in its region, and with an unbroken string of armed victories behind it, should be so obsessed with the security risks of relinquishing a few square miles of land may seem odd indeed. But it speaks to the changes that have overtaken Elon's homeland in recent decades.

As he foresaw in 2003, Israeli insistence upon ruling over an Arab population that will eventually become a majority within the country's borders can only lead to a single authoritarian state encompassing two mutually hostile nations: one dominant, the other subservient. With what outcome? "If Israel persists in its current settlement policy,...the end result is more likely to resemble Zimbabwe than post-apartheid South Africa."[3] Many have since come to this depressing conclusion; I believe Amos was the first to make the point.

Amos wrote more in sorrow than anger. Many years ago, when few nonspecialists were even paying attention, he wrote despairingly of "the hu-man energies wasted for more than a generation on short-sighted settlement programs.... Think of what might have been achieved had the billions poured into the shifting sands of Sinai, the Golan Heights, and the West Bank, been spent on more useful causes."[4] Such misplaced efforts he attributed to what he called "the astonishing mediocrity of Israeli politicians." That was written in 2002. The incompetence and political cowardice of a generation of Israeli Labor statesmen, from the sainted Golda Meir to the egregious Shimon Peres, were already manifest. But there was worse to come: Amos Elon would live to see the resurrection of Benjamin Netanyahu and the obscene elevation to foreign minister of Avigdor Lieberman, sad confirmation of his assessment....   more »

Shlomo Fischer opened the conference by questioning the validity of the term "fundamentalism" when referring to radical religious Zionists. In particular, Fischer suggested that the defining text in the world of fundamentalism studies—the monumental five volumes of the Chicago Fundamentalism Project—may actually hinder more than help understanding religious extremism in and around Israel. Because the Chicago volumes sought to synthesize a massive amount of data, they had to be necessarily selective in both the questions they pursued and the data they included. This led the volumes to leave out significant material regarding the Zionism. For, as Fischer pointed out repeatedly, politics and religion are nothing if not local affairs. We cannot understand radical religious Zionism without paying close attention the peculiarities of small, sometimes disparate subgroups that nevertheless exert a political and religious influence beyond their numbers. This attention to peculiarity requires us also to pay attention to the constantly shifting nature of Zionist discourse. So called "Jewish Fundamentalism" is a moving target, changing with circumstance, re-inventing itself again and again in response to historical, political and social developments. This has caused the material about Zionism in the Chicago Fundamentalist Project to become quickly dated. Consider the way the Landscape has changed in the twelve years since these 5 volumes were published: Prime Minister Rabin was assassinated, the Oslo accords fell apart, the state of Israel initiated a nonviolent disengagement from Gaza, and, most recently, the Second Lebanon War (the 2006 Israel-Lebanon Conflict) occurred.   more »

Excellent interview and associated article from the New York Review that opens a way to understand present day Iran by tracing the genealogy of its apocalyptic Islamic ideology to its location in the Zoroastrian world view. The review of the book by Abbas Amanat and his interview sheds needed light on current events (rc)

"During the past decade the Jamkaran mosque near Qom in Iran has become one of the most visited Shiite shrines, rivaling Karbala and Kufa in Iraq as pilgrim destinations. Here thousands of believers pray for intercessions to their messiah—the Mahdi or Twelfth Imam—whose return they believe to be imminent. Written petitions are placed in the "well of the Lord of the Age," from which many believe the imam will emerge to bring about universal justice and peace. Six months after his surprise election to the Iranian presidency in June 2005, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad predicted that this momentous eschatological event would occur within two years. With the turmoil in neighboring Iraq, where Shiites continue to be attacked by Sunni extremists, expectations for the return retain their appeal.

While the Shiite faithful (along with their Jewish and Christian counterparts) are still awaiting their messiah, the Islamic Republic is investing heavily in the Jamkaran shrine, spending more than half a billion dollars on enlargements that rival those of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, with vast interior courtyards and facilities—including offices, research centers, cultural departments, slaughterhouses, and soup kitchens—not to mention the farms where Jamkaran raises its meat. In a country where the religious establishment dominates state institutions, Jamkaran's burgeoning bureaucracy seems set to outstrip that of the longer- established shrine complexes of Mashhad and Qom.

While external observers perceive the struggle in Iran between conservatives and moderates in political terms, the Islamic Republic's conflicting ideological currents also find expression in the age-old rhetoric of the apocalypse, which originated in the region more than two thousand years ago. As Abbas Amanat explains in Apocalyptic Islam and Iranian Shi'ism, the Jamkaran makeover was part of the campaign orchestrated by conservative clerics in Qom against the government of former President Mohammad Khatami and his reformist allies.

Unlike many academics, Amanat, a professor of history at Yale, is willing to venture into regions outside his specialty of Iranian studies, which makes his book particularly valuable, as it is informed by the knowledge—all too rare among Islamicists—that Islam is one variant in a cluster of religions rather than a subject to be treated on its own. Messianic expectations are fundamental to all the West Asian religions, articulating forces that are both dynamic and dangerous:

The vast number of visitors to Jamkaran demonstrates the resurgence of interest in the Mahdi among Iranians of all classes—including the affluent middle classes in the capital—and the triumph of the Islamic Republic in capitalizing on symbols of public piety.

Although these symbols, such as the Jamkaran shrine, are specific to Shiism, their appeal—not to mention their mobilizing power—is universal. As Amanat points out, apocalyptic movements have been motors of religious change throughout history. Christian origins are inseparable from the spirit of apocalypticism that consumed the Judeo-Hellenistic world in late antiquity. Muhammad's early mission cannot be explained without reference to the "apocalyptic admonitions, the foreseen calamities, and the terror of the Day of Judgement, apparent in the early suras [chapters] of the Qu'ran." Later examples—to name but a few—include Martin Luther's call for reforming the Catholic Church and Sabbatai Zevi's claim in the seventeenth century to be the Jewish messiah. The Mormon church, the most successful of the new American religions, was born in the millennial frenzy that swept through the "Burnt-Over District" of upstate New York in the 1830s. Amanat sees all these as conscious attempts to fulfill messianic visions conceived on the ancient models preserved in Zoroastrian and biblical scriptures.

In a brief but masterful compression of insights gained from readings of Norman Cohn, founding father of millennial studies, and other scholars in the field, Amanat reviews the dynamics of apocalyptic histories. On the positive side the anticipation of imminent divine judgment can be translated into a message of social justice, with individual choice replacing dogmas handed down by ancestors, tribes, or communities. Historically, apocalyptic movements tend to be socially inclusive, appealing especially to the deprived, marginalized, and dispossessed. The negative side is the demonization of perceived enemies in a world where the People of God—the saved remnant of humanity—see themselves as the sole bearers of divine wisdom or knowledge. The utopian project of realizing paradise—when the messiah's followers choose to enact the millennial scenario in real historical time—may be as devastating as the earthquakes, fires, plagues, and wars of apocalyptic imaginings.... (see article)   more »

Iran: Fundamentalism and the Future

Asked about the state of civil liberties in Iran, Ahmadinejad said Iranians enjoyed "absolute freedom" of speech.
"Don't worry about freedom in Iran," Ahmadinejad told reporters. "Newspapers come and go and reappear. Don't worry about it."   more »

With the 1978 publication of Orientalism, Edward Said launched a critique of Western scholarship on the Middle East that still reverberates through academia and government. By characterizing Middle Eastern cultures as incapable of adapting to modern life, the early Orientalists, in Said’s view, hid their colonial, and indeed racist, biases. In the process, he suggested, Orientalists fooled themselves—and Westerners generally—into believing that their studies were undertaken with total neutrality. Said particularly attacked Bernard Lewis as the contemporary exemplar of this entrenched view. In a series of exchanges, Said argued that such scholarly bias contributed to the failure of the West to recognize Palestinians as a distinct people or to value Middle Eastern nations except for their oil. While Said did not live to see how Lewis’s views would influence the Bush administration’s policies in Iraq, the terms of his critique still divide scholars.

Despite decades of controversy, however, neither Said’s most recent supporters, such as Juan Cole and Rashid Khalidi, nor his most ardent critics, Raphael Patai and Daniel Pipes, have succeeded in subjecting Said’s concerns to a serious analysis that might address the central question: can scholarship on the Middle East ever be freed from its political context? ...   more »

...The concept behind the project, which Negroponte unveiled at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, less than two years ago, is as simple as its name: give all children in the developing world laptop computers of their own. If we achieved that, he believes, we could bridge what's usually termed the "digital divide." The laptops would offer children everywhere the opportunity to benefit from the Internet and would enable them to work with and learn from each other in new ways. OLPC, the nonprofit organization that Negroponte set up to manage the project, has taken responsibility for designing the computer and engaging an outside manufacturer to produce it. But the nonprofit is not going to buy the computers. That, at least for now, is the responsibility of governments, ...   more »

VIENNA, Austria: As many as 150,000 Iraqis have been killed by insurgents over the past three and a half years, a senior Iraqi official estimated Thursday. -- For every person killed, about three have been injured in violence since the U.S.-led invasion, Iraq's Health Minister Ali al-Shemari said at a news conference in Vienna. -- Al-Shemari initially said he estimated that at least 150,000 had died, but in a follow-up interview with The Associated Press late Thursday, he said it could be in the range of 140,000 to 150,000. ...   more »

I had the pleasure of meeting Mark Lehner a few year's ago at Paolo Soleri's Arcosanti project, located in central Arizona, USA. I was very impressed with Mark's work, in which he's been directing the largest and most comprehensive archeological dig ever undertaken at the Great Pyramid of Giza.

Welcome to the official web site of Ancient Egypt Research Associates (AERA). We're excited to provide this window into the ongoing work of Dr. Mark Lehner and the international team of the Giza Plateau Mapping Project. ...   more »