Final Blog

So here we are, the class is done. This is my last blog, my last record of this class. I know I'm supposed to write about the book I read independently, but since I did my paper on it, the idea feels redundant. Instead, I'd prefer for this, my last blog, to be a reflection on the past semester.

When I came into this class, I had no clue what I was getting into. I had a vague idea that we would be studying literature that originated in the Middle East, but I wasn't clear what would happen.

I have to admit, the things I enjoyed the most were the graphic novels, particularly the ones by Marjane Satrapi. She has a fantastic sense of humor, and a clear way of relating that made her seem so familiar.

All in all, I'm glad I took this course, and I hope the others enjoyed it too.

Turkey: Something I Don't Know

First off, I figured that this would be a basically easy assignment. After all, my background knowledge of the Republic of Turkey is extremely limited. And since I love folklore, I tried a google search for it. And came up empty. Ok, I didn't look very hard. First off, one of our guests said folklore wasn't a big thing anymore in the middle east. Also, I suffered a lapse of ADD and got distracted. I found the website for the Republic of Turkey: Ministry of Culture and Tourism http://www.kultur.gov.tr/EN/Default.aspx?17A16AE30572D313D4AF1EF75F7A79681D9DD78D03148A6E

Guess what caught my attention? They have a whole section on works that have been stolen over the years. Now there's a greeting; "Hi, welcome to the Republic of Turkey. I'm Jan, and I'll be your hostess for your visit. Now, here at the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, we welcome all nationalities and faiths. Incidentally, here's our section of what famous works have been stolen. Now over here to the left..."

These are artifacts stolen from museums and libraries. The one I thought was the funniest was the bibliographic list of the 62 stolen bindıigs from Yusuf Ağa Library. I guess some Rent-A-Cop wasn't doing his job. The one commonality of them all is that they were made of leather. I wonder if the local vegans were suspected. But seriously, it's bit strange to have that on the official home website. On the other hand, they also had a Recipies section.

When I checked the all-knowing wikipedia for something, all I could find that was interesting was this segment from Prose of the Republic of Turkey: Orhan Pamuk is a leading Turkish novelist of post-modern literature. His work has been translated into more than twenty languages. He is the recipient of major Turkish and international literary awards. The most recent of his novels is "Snow." Pamuk is the winner of Nobel Prize for Literature in 2006.

That was really all I could find that was remotely entertaining.

Embroideries

Wow! This book is very sexually explicit!. After dinner with friends, the men go off into one room and the women into another. Basically, the whole book is in one setting: the Satrapi home. The time frame is set sometime after Persepolis 2, and Marjane is an experienced divorcee. Because of this, the women (who are all older than Marjane) feel free to discuss past marriages and sexual experiences. They also are comfortable with relating anecdotes of others' experiences.

One of the stories I personally found most horrifying was that of Parvine. When she was 13 years old, one of her father's acquaintances was 69. He was General Mafakherolmolouk, and her parents thought the union was fine. They were married a month later. Fortunately, on her wedding night, Parvine decided this was out of the question and said she had to go to the bathroom. She sneaked away to her aunt's house, who was more progressive. Parvine stayed with her aunt for the next four years, until he kicked it.

When I first read this story, I was so shocked at her parents that I just sat there for a minute. How could loving parents do something like that to their daughter? Why would anyone in Iran think that it was okay, and have it actually be legal? Since to me this is very much a moral issue, I checked from where Muslims get their ethical standards: Muhammad. Apparently, Muhammad's third marriage around 622 was to a girl named Aisha, who was only six at the time. He was 53. Considering this historical backdrop, I would find it hard for a Muslim to explain to me how the Koran doesn't repress women. I think the whole thing is disgusting, and my heart goes out to that young girl.

Another segment I found interesting was on nose jobs. When Marjane was young, she and her friend Payman decided that her grandmother's nose was so ugly, that the two of them should go into business to buy her a nose job. According to grandma, "Their solution consisted of buying cigarettes and biscuits at the supermarket and reselling them a little more expensively in the street." I guess they must have been pretty cute then, because they ended up making 750 tumans. However, since the operation cost 7,500 tumans, Marjane's mom took them to the toy store, where they blew it all in one glorious spree.

I think it's interesting how we talk about appearance being such a big issue here in the US, but here are two Iranian girls working all summer to get Marjane's grandmother a nose job! I wonder if she was at all offended, but I guess the age factor of the two girls outweighed the inappropriateness of their business venture.

Persepolis II

The sequel to Persepolis covers Marjane Satrapi's life from age 14 through 22. The beginning starts off with her living in Austria in a boarding house run by nuns. Eventually she leaves to live with her friend Julie. There, she explores western culture while growing up physically. When she comes to terms with herself, she goes to live in a wohngemeinschaft, which is a kind of communal apartment. Her mother coes to visit for awhile, and helps Marjane to find new lodgings. In the months following, she has problems with her boyfriend and at the university, which eventually convinces her to return to her parents' home in Tehran. Through the next few years, she meets someone, gets married at 21, and gets divorced. The book ends in June 1994, with Marjane leaving to go to the School of Decorative Arts in Strasbourg.

That's just the basic outline. There is really so much more to these books. The issues she covers are complex, personal, political, moral. Although the format would possibly lend itself to elementary, due to the sensitive issues inside I wouldn't recommend it to anyone before late junior high. It is wonderfully accessible, though, and it would be nice if parts were included in world studies classes. I've liked graphic novels for years, but this is the first I've read from the Middle East, and the first autobiography. In many ways, I love how the world is becoming more globalized. American comic books sparked interest in Japan through America's occupation during WWII. By the 70's, manga had been developed in Japan and American comic books were extremely successful. And now for the past few years, manga has been gaining popularity in the US. The fact that this back and forth has attracted attention in the Middle East along the way is very encouraging to me. A woman from Iran has taken a form that is not native to her country, and used it to tell parts of her life. She tells it with humor and conviction, and while being sensitive to all aspects as far as I can tell, she still lays the bald truth out there. For that, I admire her.

Persepolis, # 2

It took me forever, but I found a trailer for persepolis that had english subtitles! Take out 52 seconds at: http://youtube.com/watch?v=UPrPPg56_zA

Persepolis

Persepolis is a graphic novel by Marjane Satrapi. The introduction gives the reader background information of Iranian history from the second millenium B.C. until today. The first chapter of this book opened with the 1980 'veil'. The year before was the "Islamic Revolution", and after the law made it mandatory for females to wear a veil. At this time, the author is ten years old. She flips back and forth between childish impressions and an omniscient view. It's actually very effective, giving us perspective while also giving us the big picture. It allows the reader to make comparisons of how what things happen to the country affect the author at the time.

One of the things I found the most interesting and confusing was the idea that at the age of six she wanted to be a prophet, and God visited her at bedtime. She created her own commandments and read them to her grandmother, who was the only one who would listen. She even told her teacher in school that she wanted to be a prophet. Since this caused some waves, she started saying she wanted to be a doctor. This makes her feel guilty to God, and eventually they become distant (I know, strange, but it's her story, not mine).

A site & a YouTube

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECaMeMl6--4
Robert Spencer gives a short speech about Iraq at the Heritage Foundation.

http://jihadwatch.org/
Robert Spencer’s blog on current issues of the war in Iraq. Unabashedly conservative, his blog gives an ultra-conservative view on the war.

AIPAC Debate

For this blog, we are supposed to respond to a four minute segment of the McNeil News Hour Debate, specifically regarding to The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy (released March 23, 2006) by John Mercheimer (a professor at the University of Chicago) and Stephen Wald (a professor at Harvard), and The Deadliest Lies by Abraham H. Foxman (director of the anti-defamation league).


The whole discussion was sparked when, “A year ago, two American political scientists raised a storm with an article asserting that Israel and its supporters in the United States have far too much influence over American policy.” Meircheimer and Wald assert that the US’s support of Israel is a “strategic liability” for America. Conversely, Foxman insists that The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy is built on “half-truths” and “distortions.”


For the McNeil Debate, Mercheimer and Wald were invited on the show to comment, as well as Foxman. Basically, Mercheimer and Wald believe that were it not for AIPAC, we would not have gone to war in Iraq, which was a bad move (also according to them).


I personally think we would have gone to war anyway, support AIPAC, and think that if anything, AIPAC doesn’t have enough influence in America.


As a side note, one of the most powerful images I saw in the AIPAC videos was the poster where someone had written ‘Holocaust’, but had rendered the o’s into handcuffs with a pair of hands grasping upward through them.

Carter

The thirty-ninth President of the United States is a professed Christian, and bases his insights and conclusions on the background of his faith. Considering the fact that we all do this in some shape or form, I was impressed that he simply admitted it outright. Although I did not agree with all of his observations and beliefs in his book, I do respect his ability to write what he sees as truth, putting all of his cards on the table, and his repeated attempts for a peaceful solution in such a volatile area.

According to Carter, "There are two interrelated obstacles to permanent peace in the Middle East: 1. Some Israelis believe they have the right to confiscate and colonize Arab land and try to justify the sustained subjugation and persecution of increasingly hopeless and aggravated Palestinians; and 2. Some Palestinians react by honoring suicide bombers as martyrs to be rewarded in heaven and consider the killing of Israelis as victories."

Carter believes that the United States has all but abandoned the effort for serious peace negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians, and so it is basically up to "the International Quartet to implement its Roadmap for Peace. "For this to occur, there are three key requirements: "1. The security of Israel must be guaranteed. 2. The internal debate within Israel must be resolved in order to define Israel’s permanent legal boundary. 3. The sovereignty of all Middle East nations and sanctity of international borders must be honored."

Carter holds to his old opinion that the people want peace, it’s the leaders that are in the way. He offers proof of this idea with public opinion surveys, "Over the years, public opinion surveys have consistently shown that a majority of Israelis favor withdrawing from Palestinian territory in exchange for peace, and recent polls show that 80 percent of Palestinians still want a two-state peace agreement with Israel, with nearly 70 percent supporting the moderate Mahmoud Abbas as their president and spokesperson."

Carter’s bottom line is this: "Peace will come to Israel and the Middle East only when the Israeli government is willing to comply with international law, with the Roadmap for Peace, with official American policy, with the wishes of a majority of its own citizens-and honor its own previous commitments-by accepting its legal borders. All Arab neighbors must pledge to honor Israel’s right to live in peace under these conditions." But, however eloquent and reasonable as his proposal seems to be, I for one can never accept it, and I can’t see it ever being truly accepted for any more than a decade.

Wild Thorns

Wild Thorns (according to the dustjacket) is, "a chronicle of life in Israeli-occupied West Bank." It opens with the young Palestinian Usama crossing the border into Israel, and we are given immediate insight to his character; "A romantic, right? No way! Not since the training, the shooting, the crawling on all fours; such things make a man unromantic in thought and deed."

The next thing that caught my attention was the section on house of Usama’s cousin Nuwar. "The house is always dirty,’ Nuwar said sadly. ‘See?’ She ran her hand lightly along the balustrade and showed him the dust on her finger. ‘And to think,’ she said, ‘that people are still proud of owning big houses like this. It’s an outdated way of life, it doesn’t work anymore. This house needs at least three servants, but it doesn’t even have one- except me!’ Usama nodded. ‘Yes, the time when everyone had servants is over,’ he said. ‘Does that bother you?’ ‘No, it’s natural. It’s up to us to learn how to look after ourselves." At first this section depressed me. The idea of people losing their way of life felt disheartening. But then, I realized it was simply an example of change. No society can stay the same; a society in stasis will atrophy. Besides, can I truly feel badly for people who no longer have their servants and have to take care of themselves?

The rest of the book is an emotional journey, with interesting characters interspersed. However, it wasn’t until the very end that my attention was caught again. The last few paragraphs just stunned me with their clear juxtaposition of the turmoil throughout the novel with the life right after: "The house lay in ruins. The men dispersed. The women came down from the roofs. Adil slipped away from the crowd, cutting through the narrow back streets and heading for the main square. He stood on the pavement watching the people on their way home, on their way to work. They lived their everyday lives stoically, silently. Nothing had changed. The square stood where it always had; the town clock ticked slowly as it always had. Only the flowers seemed to have grown larger, taller; otherwise nothing had changed...The liquorice and carob-drink peddler clashed his cymbals rhythmically...People went about their buisness, buying vegetables, fruit and bread." After everything that has happened in this novel, there is still no impact to the rest of the town, much less the country.

Men in the Sun

Ghassan Kanafani’s 1962 work Men in the Sun features three male Palestinian refugees of different generations heading for Kuwait. The storyline and theme of the text is highly political, although Kanafani generally avoids being preachy. However, after doing a little background work, I found that Kanafani wrote all of his texts specifically to stir up resistance against Israel. Kanafani was a writer and journalist from Acre, the editor of al-Hadaf. A member of the Political Bureau of PFLP and its spokesperson, he published their newspapers (Al-Ray, The Opinion). Kanafani was killed by a car bomb on July 8, 1972 in Beirut.

The characters are Abu Qais (the eldest), Assad (middle-aged), and Marwan (youngest). They represent the different outlooks and troubles of the situation for those immigrants of the time who smuggled themselves through borders in the hopes of a better life. Their route was out of Jordan and across Iraq, where they met up in Basra. Because the action is as much internal as it is external, we see into the characters than we would have otherwise.

The eldest, Abu Qais, has a wife and son. He leaves his refugee camp at the urging of his wife; "In the last ten years you have done nothing but wait. You have needed ten big hungry years to be convinced that you have lost your trees, your house, your youth, and your whole village. People have been making their own way during these long years, while you have been squatting like an old dog in a miserable hut. What do you think you were waiting for?" Assad’s uncle gives him fifty dinars, on an agreement that when Assad comes back with money, he’ll marry his cousin. Marwan is 16, idealistic and unable to put up with his father and his father’s new wife.

I think the thing that depressed me the most was the fact that not one of them reached Kuwait. In fact, the three of them suffocatein a water tanker. As an American who loves her happy endings, I never want to read this book again simply because none of the protagonists succeeded in their goal. For the record, I HATE downer endings, and with the relentlessly slow pacing of this book, the ending made the whole experience intolerable. I had to watch three of my favorite romantic comedies to put me in a good mood again.

History of the Middle East

The first section that really caught my attention was around the middle of the page, concerning the discovery of oil. In Wikipedia, it said, "Another turning point in the history of the Middle East came when oil was discovered, first in Persia in 1908 and later in Saudi Arabia (in 1938) and the other Persian Gulf states, and also in Libya and Algeria. The Middle East, it turned out, possessed the world's largest easily accessible reserves of crude oil, the most important commodity in the 20th century industrial world. Although western oil companies pumped and exported nearly all of the oil to fuel the rapidly expanding automobile industry and other western industrial developments, the kings and emirs of the oil states became immensely rich, enabling them to consolidate their hold on power and giving them a stake in preserving western hegemony over the region. Oil wealth also had the effect of stultifying whatever movement towards economic, political or social reform might have emerged in the Arab world under the influence of the Kemalist revolution in Turkey."

What snagged me is how this made an impact on the American Industrial Revolution. According to another Wikipedia article, "The first production of automobiles was by Karl Benz in 1888 in Germany and under licence to Benz, in France by Emile Roger. By 1900 mass production of automobiles had begun in France and the United States." In particular, the Ford Model T was "the most widely produced and available car of the era," especially between 1908 and 1927. Trains had already been around and popularized in the US by the 1850’s, but cars are the real gas-guzzlers.

The other section in the Middle East article that I found engaging was the 1979 peace treaty between Egypt and Israel. According to Wiki, "Egypt under Nasser's successor, Anwar Sadat, concluded a peace treaty with Israel, ending the prospects of a united Arab military front. From the 1970s the Palestinians, led by Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization, resorted to a prolonged campaign of violence against Israel and against American, Jewish and western targets generally, as a means of weakening Israeli resolve and undermining western support for Israel. The Palestinians were supported in this, to varying degrees, by the regimes in Syria, Libya, Iran and Iraq. The high point of this campaign came in the 1975 United Nations General Assembly Resolution 3379 condemning Zionism as a form of racism and the reception given to Arafat by the United Nations General Assembly. The Resolution 3379 was revoked in 1991 by the UNGA Resolution 4686."

I confess I was rather shocked that the UN had ever thought Zionism was a form of racism. I have certainly never thought it could be interpreted that way, and am still rather confused as to how they came to that conclusion. Anyway, it seems to me that the majority of fighting in the Middle East today is over oil, Israel, or a combination of the two. So, I thought this covered a lot of pertinent information.

Koran Response

Obviously, this was only two sections of the Koran, and that’s not much to create an opinion of a religion on. I, myself, have a Christian background, so most of the things I will be commenting on will be in conjunction with my experiences with Christianity.

In the Maryam section, there were a few things that caught my attention. First, the birth of Jesus is significantly different than any Christmas story I’ve ever heard. It never included Mary giving birth next to a palm tree or having dates showered on her, and Jesus is not recorded in the Bible as being able to speak while still an infant. Also, in the Christmas story Joseph was around, whereas in the Koran he was never mentioned. Then there were also those shepherds that never showed up at the non-existent stables (after all, she gave birth leaning on a palm tree). Also, according to the Koran, she’s taken a vow of silence. There are some places where the Bible and the Koran agree, but this area is notably not one of them.

The second thing I found interesting in the Maryam section was the description of life after death. The Bible talks about every man individually standing before God on His throne and being judged. In the Koran, it says that all men and devils being assembled together around hell. From there, according to 019.069, "Then We shall pluck out from every sect whichever of them was most stubborn in rebellion to the Beneficent." Those people will stay and be burned. So apparently we are condemned if, in comparison to our neighbors, we are MORE evil. Our salvation depends on how bad other people have been. In comparison, the Bible in Titus 3:5 says, "Not by the good works that we have done, but according to His (God’s) mercy, He saved us." Also, it also says in Ephesians 2:8-9, "For you are saved by grace though faith, and not of yourselves. It is the gift of God, not of works, so that no man can boast." To me, how a person is saved is a pretty important thing for a religion. Such a fundamental difference in theology shows clearly a point of contention between Muslims and Christians.

Those were the only two things that really struck me. Considering how long they were, I was really hoping to find more theology in them, but oh well.

Smut for Sense

When in past days of lore – epoch of old
our world was puerile, tales would unfold.
The legends hewn, cut, molded through, and forged
for people knelt ‘round fires, braced from cold.

From minds of old and young, creation bent
to heroes sprung with powers from gods lent
for journeys, odysseys, of great import.
These epics, crafted o’er, became advent.

Then nation conquered nation, and with the fall,
recast or lost, old yarns were marred for all.
And so, initial chronicle was razed,
the maxims gone, with so few to recall.

Some proverbs have survived, some anecdotes,
some adages of whimsy and some quotes
are left for us to ponder. Now your test
of education, wisdom. Take Good Notes!

Jinni

I always loved the big blue guy in Disney’s Aladdin, and reading the 1001 Nights has just made me want to look into the lore more thoroughly. Since I found about 5 pages of info, I'm just going to put the bare bones of what I found on Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica (concise). The rest of this blog is directly quoted from these sites.

The jinn are said to be creatures with free will, made from 'smokeless fire' by God (the literal translation being “subtle fire”, i.e., a fire which does not give itself away through smoke), much in the same way humans were made of earth. According to the Recitation, jinn have free choice, and Iblis used this freedom in front of God by refusing to bow to Adam when God told Iblis to do so. By refusing to obey God’s order he was thrown out of the Paradise and called “Shaitan” (See Shaitan). In the Qur'an, jinn are frequently mentioned and Sura 72 of the Qur'an named Al-Jinn is entirely about them. Another Sura (Al-Naas) mentions the Jinn in the last verse. In fact, it is mentioned in the Qur'an that Muhammad was sent as a prophet to both “humanity and the jinn”.

The jinn have communities much like human societies: they eat, marry, die, etc. They live in tribes and have boundaries. They follow religions as humans do, and follow the same ranks in armies as humans do. Jinns can settle in a vast area to a tiny hole, as they are massless and can be fit into any space they find sufficient for them. They are invisible to humans, but they can see humans. Sometimes they accidentally or deliberately come into view or into contact with humans. Jinn are believed to live much longer than humans: some of whom are said to be still alive having seen Muhammad (who lived during the 7th century), which would affirm their long life. Much like humans, jinn have learned to assimilate into the human world when they desire to do so. In many cases they live unnoticed among people marked only by the rather unusual or somewhat secretive practices they keep. They cannot breed with humans. Jinn can transform themselves into humans and can be summoned by humans.

Types of jinn include the ghul (“night shade”, which can change shape), the si'la (which cannot change shape), the Ifrit, and “marid”. From information in The Arabian Nights, marid seem to be the strongest form of jinn, followed by Ifrit, and then the rest of the jinn. Arabs believed that the jinn were spirits of fire, although sometimes they associated them with succubi (demons in the forms of beautiful women). The feminine form of jinn is “jinniyah” or “jinneyeh”.

Ifrits in contemporary popular mythology are jinn spirits that embody fire. A Marid in common mythology is a djinn related to the element of water. Evil Ifrit in The Book of One Thousand and One Nights are called “the seed of Iblis”. The Spirit of the Lamp in the story of Aladdin, a familiar djinn to the Western world (see next section), was such a jinni, bound to an oil lamp. Ways of summoning jinn were told in The Thousand and One Nights: by writing the name of God in Hebrew characters on a knife (whether the Hebrew name for God, Yahweh, or the Arabic Allah is used is not specified), and drawing a diagram, with strange symbols and incantations around it. The jinn’s power of possession was also addressed in the fictional Nights. It is said that by taking seven hairs out of the tail of a cat that was all black except for a white spot on the end of its tail, and then burning the hairs in a small closed room with the possessed, filling their nose with the scent, this would release them from the spell of the jinn inside them.

Sinbad

For my blog, I decided to refer to the stories of Sinbad. I have read the Sinbad stories before, and I have also seen the DreamWorks adaptation. In fact, I read the stories first, and was shocked when I saw the movie. The differences are staggering, and not just when you look at what the stories’ MPAA rating would be compared to the movie’s PG.

The movie is a swashbuckling adventure with some romance and comedy. According to the online Internet Movie Database (IMDb), “Sinbad, the most daring and notorious rogue ever to sail the seven seas, has spent his life asking for trouble, and trouble has finally answered in a big way. Framed for stealing one of the world's most priceless and powerful treasures--the Book of Peace--Sinbad has one chance to find and return the precious book, or his best friend Proteus will die. Sinbad decides not to take that chance and instead sets a course for the fun and sun of the Fiji Islands. However, Proteus' beautiful betrothed, Marina, has stowed away on Sinbad's ship, determined to make sure that Sinbad fulfills his mission and saves Proteus' life. Now the man who put the "bad" in Sinbad is about to find out how bad bad can be. Written by Sujit R. Varma.” It’s a fun little bit of fluff, with a few life lessons to consider. I was strongly reminded of the old Disney movies (Little Mermaid, Aladdin…).

The stories, on the other hand, are an entirely different matter. In fact, the few similarities that I saw were the existence of the same monsters (although not always in the same environments or situations). In order to clearly juxtapose the movie with the original storyline, I decided to pick just one thing for close perusal: the moving island.

First, here is the Sinbad’s account in The 1001 Nights: “So I embarked in a ship, and... We continued our voyage until we arrived at an island like one of the gardens of Paradise... But while we were thus engaged, lo, the master of the ship, standing upon its side, called out…Come up quickly in to the ship…for this apparent island, upon which ye are, is not really an island, but it is a great fish that hath become stationary in the midst of the sea, and the sand hath accumulated upon it, so that it hath become like an island, and trees have grown upon it since times of old; and when ye lighted the fire upon it, the fish felt the heat, and put itself in motion, and now it will descend with you into the sea, and ye will all be drowned.”

In the movie, there were these random ogres/cyclopes on the island, and the fight between Sinbad (and his crew) and these things is what woke the fish up. In fact, the only continuity between the two situations was that the island was a fish. For all of that, I think both are pretty enjoyable, and worth the time.

Emilia

Since my last article was more what Dr. Allen wanted for this one, I’m just going to write what I should have written for the last one. I’m going to write about Emilia. Although not a main character, I think Em has a significant role. After all, the reason Iago decides to destroy Othello is because he believes that Em had been cheating on him with O. The first time Em is really involved in the story, Cassio is kissing her in front of Iago. What kind of a kiss is subject for interpretation. During this section, we can infer some ideas about Iago and Em’s marriage. She seems to be the nagging type, they have little respect for each other, and Iago may have reasonable grounds for his jealousy.

In Act II, Scene III, Em is with her mistress, Des. She seems to trust Des enough to admit that Cassio’s downfall has upset Iago. On the other hand, when Em find’s the handkerchief (napkin) that O gave to Des, she doesn’t immediately return it, she gives it to her husband. We see that Iago and Em don’t have the healthiest relationship, but it’s difficult to tell why she favors him. Options: Em could naively believe that he’s not going to do anything wrong; she could have an inkling of what he’s planning and is deliberately trying to hurt Des, O, or both; or she could have an inkling but is choosing to ignore it because she wants Iago to love her. However, keep in mind Em’s speech on jealousy in reference to O. Can she be speaking of Iago as well?
In Act III, Scene II, when O is accusing Des of infidelity, Em staunchly defends Des, and there is reason to believe she knows exactly what Iago’s thinking and been doing. Em says in front of Des and Iago, "I will be hang’d, if some eternal villain, Some busy and insinuating rogue, Some cogging, cozening slave, to get some office, Have not devised this slander." She also says to Iago, "fie upon...some such squire he was That turn’d your wit the seamy side without, And made you to suspect me with the Moor."

In Scene III, Em and Des discuss if they would cheat on their husbands. Em would, and Des wouldn’t. Em reasons that if husband abuses, or is unfaithful to his wife, he’s the one to blame. This begs the question: has Em cheated on Iago, and if so, what did he do first?

In Scene IV, we return to THE question: Does Em really think Iago is at fault? She says to him (concerning O), "He says thou told’st him that his wife was false: I know thou didst not, thou’rt not such a villain." When Iago admits he did, Em tells everyone what really happened, and Iago kills her for it.

So this is my analysis: I don’t know if Em was self or truly deceived, but I think that she is the most REAL character of the whole play. Em seems like the everyday person caught in a bad situation. I read a quote by a famous author, and the jist of it stuck with me. He said that in fiction, the more fantastic the situation, the more basic and everyday the main people have to be for your story to stay believable. I think Emilia, though not THE main character, is what really grounds this story.

Othello

Since I already read Othello my senior year of high school, I didn’t have any new revelations about it. So, I’m going on to what new things I have learned. I suppose the aspect that has now interested me the most is the effect of the Barbary privateering on the public idea of Turks during this time period. Most specifically, how Shakespeare expressed those ideas in his writing of Othello. It seems one of the more lucrative trades during the time was the enslavement of British and other European women. An very informative, if equally boring abstract that I found was titled Britons, Muslims, and American Indians: Gender and Power and this link will take you to the page the PDF is on.

According to this article, "there were numerous women captives who were seized in the first half of the seventeenth century by North African privateers and hauled to the slave markets of Salee, Algiers, or Tunis". On the other hand, it also says that, "European dramatists did not seem to have much of a clue of as to what was really happening to women in captivity: their fiction was quite different from Mediterranean reality. For while they were fantasizing, captured women from Britain and the rest of Christendom were confined in the boudoirs of Muslim rulers, husbands and masters. Such a stark reality may explain why, in the whole corpus of English dramatic literature of the early modern period, there is not a single play about an English woman captive in North Africa, suggesting perhaps that no English writer could address a situation where the compatriots he described would not be "possessors" but "possessed.""
Another intriguing fact was that although Christians and Jews were not allowed to intermarry, there were no prohibitions against the marriage of a Christian to a Muslim (either Turkish or Moorish).

However, there was a catch that wasn’t so obvious in Othello. Although a Muslim male could marry a Christian woman while staying a Muslim, any male that wanted to marry a Muslim woman had to convert to Islam. The author of the article chalks it all up to a theory of religious and sexual domination. A great deal of Othello revolves around ideas of sexuality; either sexual purity and monogamy, or adultery. Othello is deceived by believing Cassio and Desdemona had an illicit sexual relationship. Then he goes nuts and kills her. Obviously there were other factors involved, but this was the aspect that interested me the most.

Middle East Before 1400AD

Considering the fact that the majority of the Middle East is Islamic, I first set about trying to find as clear and concise a history of Islam up to 1400 A.D. that I could. This timetable was the best that I could find in terms of covering the holistic aspects of Islamic influence, while still remaining succinct. I actually found it in a handout from a conference I attended back in 2005, so sadly there isn’t a website to link to.

"Important dates in the Development of Islam"
c. 1900 B.C. Abraham is willing to sacrifice Isaac; Muslims say Ishmael was the almost-sacrifice.

c. 30 Christ, crucified, dies, and is resurrected; Muslims say He was a Muslim and did not die.

610 Muhammad rejects both Christianity and Judaism and begins to develop his own monotheistic religion.

622 Muhammad flees Mecca-this becomes year one in the Muslim calendar-and over the next 10 years succeeds as both teacher and general.

632 Muhammad dies without a clear political heir; Muslim infighting begins.

637 Muslims capture Jerusalem and soon possess Egypt, Syria, Mesopotamia, and Persia.

661 Muhammad’s nephew Ali is murdered and the Sunni-Shiite division begins.

700 Muslims, sweeping across North Africa and virtually wiping out Christianity there, conquer Algiers.

711 Muslims conquer most of Spain.

732 Muslims are defeated at Tours/Poitiers in what is now southern France; they conquer little more of western Europe.

786 Harun al-Rashid, Caliph in Bagdad, leads the way toward a golden age of Muslim learning.

846 Muslims sack Rome and the Vatican; meanwhile, mathematician and geographer al-Khwarazmi (algorithm is derived from his name) advances knowledge.

900 The writing of the 1001 Arabian Nights begins, and the Arab physician Rhases becomes the first to describe smallpox, plague, and other infectious diseases.

963 Al Sufi’s Book of Fixed Stars, which mentions nebula, is one indication of Muslim superiority in astronomy.

1006 Muslims settle in northwest India.

1037 Ibn Sina (Avicenna), the most influential Islamic philosopher/physician, dies.

1094 El Cid defeats Muslims in Spain.

1095 Pope Urban II calls for a Crusade.

1099 Crusaders capture and sack Jerusalem.

1187 Muslims under Saladin retake Jerusalem.

1250 First Muslim states in southeast Asia are developing.

1380 Ottoman empire emerges.

Excerpt taken from Summit Ministeries 2005 Islam and Terrorism Supplement, pg.9.
Sources include Gerhard Endress, An Introduction to Islam; Malise Ruthven, Islam; and Bernard Grun, The Timetables of History By Marvin Olasky, editor in chief of World magazine. "Reprinted with permission from WORLD Magazine (www.worldmag.com), Copyright 2001. For subscription information call 1-800-951-NEWS."

Here is a link to an article in Wikipedia on the Islamic Golden Age. I hadn’t realized quite how much this period of time had contributed to the European Renaissance. I knew the Chinese had developed paper, but I hadn’t before realized how it was integrated into Europe. Even though I love learning about how philosophies and religions are created, I think the Golden Age is the most interesting part of Islamic history. In some respects, even more interesting than what is happening now. After all, isn’t everything else just fighting? It’s probably just me, but I never could enjoy sitting through my dad’s war movies.

The Lawyer's Tale
Although I should probably be putting some resounding insight onto this section, the truth is that the Emperor of Syria just ticked me off. Now, I'm sure there are some girls who would find it very romantic for a guy to give up his deepest beliefs for love. I'm not one of them. More than anything else, I believe in absolute truth. If something is true, than it doesn't matter whether we love it or not. It doesn't matter if we like it or not. It doesn't even matter if we know about it or not. It's still true.

The idea that this guy was willing to renounce what he held as true merely to attain some idea of a perfect woman is frankly disgusting. I have no idea how he would have managed to hold on to his throne for as long as he did, because I can't see how anyone can respect another person who has such a Charlie Brown mentality toward their convictions of right and wrong. His mom might have been a lying, progeny-murdering deciever, but she stuck with her beliefs.

That said, those who will not even consider that they might be wrong are almost as bad. Even if they are right about that particular thing, people should be constantly reassessing what they believe. If you don't, you run the risk of never maturing past a certain point. And let's face it, we're ALL wrong about something.

1st Blog

This is the first blog I have ever done, so this is a new experience for me. Whee!