The Veil 4
Jun. 21st, 2010 08:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
purejuiceWhether or not God is at work in the history of men's power relations, and whether or not it is incumbent upon us, as God's children, to enact politically his will for us, is a matter of debate among people of good will. The agenda of Islamists is to make the law of Islam, sharia, the law of the nation, a project much discussed among Muslims of good will explicitly along the lines of a liberal and democratic Islamic state.
I appreciate the degree to which the Protestant ethic has formed capitalism, and vice versa, as well as the codes and imperialisms of the liberal democracies, and the varying degrees to which liberal democracies morph as theocratic constituencies vote their agendas into power. But this is fair; it is the dictatorship of the proletariat as required by the tenets of democracy.
Islamist theocracies, and their agenda to unite in a new world-wide caliphate, may come down to this: if Osama bin Laden relies upon the internet to organiz eJihad, kidney dialysis machines and cell phones, as he is alleged to do, he must also accept the political -- and not just the technological -- results of the scientific method, capitalism and the protestant reformation, the combined force of which now impels liberal democracy. Or, to deploy a more demotic commodity, if the newly sexualized soap operas of Turkey, and their stars, are the cynosure of the Arab world, in which some people are not aware that kissing may be a part of married love,* then the democratic impetus for sex as life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness cannot be halted. It has long been a Catholic joke that the Protestant reformation started when Luther wanted to marry a nun -- a Taj Mahal built on a fuck, in Lawrence Durrell's immortal phrase. The struggle to regulate men's -- or is it women's? -- sexuality may be the fulcrum of power relations through history, with Luther's right to take the nun in marriage as the first stone thrown against the Bastille of Roman-Christian hegemony. Was the Holy Roman Empire itself -- and thus the caliphate -- just basically the droit de seigneur? This insight may be the great contribution of queer theory to the pushing out of the light inch by inch against the darkness.
It is not a matter of debate, among people of good will, that the enfranchisement of racist national policy -- for example, the Gush Emunim argument that victory in the 1967 war meant God wants Israel to settle the west bank, or the U.S. government's decision to "kill the Indian and save the man" by forcible transfer of Indian children to government boarding schools, or the fatwa against Salman Rushdie who, no matter how bad a writer he is, must be allowed to do so -- often borrows awful power and compels obedience by the conscription of God's will to political expediency.
If there is a God, people of good will may agree that there is only one, not one who hates Jews, and another who hates Palestinians, and a third who hates Christians and the godless Chinee.
There is one who loves us all, and if this is not true, then a God who hates my enemy is not worthy of worship by me. The exact nature of the debate in Islam over whether or not Mohammed requires war, and precisely what that word means, is unknown to me. I suspect it mirrors that of Christendom -- because religion, as opposed to God, is about human emotion; even the universally-documented sensation of the presence of God is said to be a biochemical event. Jesus says we are to love our enemies as ourselves, because they are close relatives, and to fight evil -- not our enemies -- without ceasing. It is certain that Mohammed's reputation for war and Jesus' for pacifism are much obscured by text provenance, politics and interpretation, and that even the actual revelation direct from God that his avatars experience must be conformed to the time and place in which the experience was undergone. We can only recall James' three criteria for pragmatic spiritual practice: a revelation itself, the direct experience of the prophet, must have immediate luminousness, philosophical reasonableness, and moral helpfulness for it to have any bearing on the systems of ethics by which people of good will seek to conduct and console themselves two thousand years after one man's revelation.
Quite independent of perplexities on the existence of God, one may take note that fashions in what God requires of his ministers on earth change. It was thought to be God who ordered the 19th and 20th century Protestants and Catholics to torture Irish orphan and Indian children in their care, in the name of extirpating the demons in them. If God today requires the torture of Muslim women, he will cease to do so tomorrow and the Islamist governments will award women, as the Canadians recently did the survivors of the Indian schools, $2 billion in reparation for genocide. The United Church of Christ, whose medical missionaries were in the forefront of torturing Indian children, is working on an apology in the wake of being accused of genocide by the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission on the native Canadian residential schools. We can look forward to the Taliban's apology in God's time.
What we believe God requires of us is often wrong, frequently genocide, and it changes, as every scholar of Islam, the hadith, and sharia understands.
Back to the idea that you can wage war with what you wear on your head.
to be continued
arafat's keffiyeh, the guest workers, the blackwomans guide to understanding the blackman, and the quakers' hats
women's literacy, islamic canon system and protestant reformation
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/rwright.htm liberal democ and prot ref
http://www.drsoroush.com/English/On_DrSoroush/E-CMO-20040314-1.html souroush, mu'tazilites
Reprints
This copy is for your personal, noncommercial use only. You can order presentation-ready copies for distribution to your colleagues, clients or customers here or use the "Reprints" tool that appears next to any article. Visit www.nytreprints.com for samples and additional information. Order a reprint of this article now.
June 17, 2010
Turks Put Twist in Racy Soaps
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
ISTANBUL — A topless hunk lights candles in the bedroom.
A woman appears in the doorway.
“Come on, let’s not be late,” she begs him, although her dark brown eyes say something different.
They kiss. He lets down her hair and there’s a flash of his wedding ring as they move toward the bed. A spaghetti strap slips off her naked shoulder.
Just another day at the office for the stars of “Gumus,” the Turkish soap opera that during its two-year run here on Kanal D has offered Turks not only the daytime-television miracle of sexual foreplay, but the standard sudsy compendium of shotgun weddings, kidnappings, car accidents and crazy plot twists like the one when the dead girlfriend of the aforementioned married dreamboat turns out to be alive and the mother of his illegitimate baby.
Usual stuff to American aficionados of the genre. But Turkish television has given the soap a fresh twist by making the connivers, kidnappers and canoodlers Muslims. And it is Arab audiences, even more than Turks, who have been swept off their feet.
Led by “Gumus” (“Noor” in Arabic), a wave of Turkish melodramas, police procedurals and conspiracy thrillers — “Yaprak Dokumu,” “Kurtlar Vadisi,” “Asmali Konak,” “Ihlamurlar Altinda” and now the steamy “Ask-i Memnu,” the top-rated series in Turkey (think Madame Bovary on the Bosporus) — are making their way onto Arab televisions, wielding a kind of soft power.
Through the small screen, Turkey has begun to exercise a big influence at Arab dinner tables, in boardrooms and bedrooms from Morocco to Iraq of a sort that the United States can only dream about. Turkey’s cultural exports, not coincidentally, have also advanced its political ambitions as it asserts itself on that front, too, sending a flotilla to Gaza, defying the United States over sanctions on Iran, talking tough to its onetime ally, Israel, and giving Kemal Ataturk’s constitutionally secular state an Islamic tinge.
Politics and culture go hand in hand, here as elsewhere. If most Arabs watch Turkish shows to ogle beautiful people in exotic locales, Arab women have also made clear their particular admiration for the rags-to-riches story of the title character in “Noor,” a strong, business-savvy woman with a doting husband named Muhannad. Dr. Shafira Alghamdi, a Saudi pediatrician, was on vacation here the other day, shopping with two Saudi friends, and volunteered how Arab husbands often ignore their wives, while on “Noor,” within what remains to Arabs a familiar context of arranged marriages, respect for elders and big families living together, Noor and Muhannad openly love and admire each other.
“A lot of Saudi men have gotten seriously jealous of Muhannad because their wives say, ‘Why can’t you be more like him?’ ” Dr. Alghamdi said. Meanwhile, she was illustrating another consequence of the show: the sudden, spectacular boom in Arab tourism to Turkey. Millions of Arabs now flock here. Turkish Airlines has started direct flights to gulf countries (using soap stars as spokespeople). Turkish travel companies charter boats to ferry Arabs who want a glimpse of the waterfront villa where “Noor” was filmed. The owner recently put the house on the market for $50 million. Until lately he charged $60 for a tour, more than four times the price of a ticket to the Topkapi Palace.
Even fatwas by Saudi clerics calling for the murder of the soap’s distributors haven’t discouraged a store in Gaza City from hawking knockoffs of Noor’s sleeveless dresses (long-sleeved leotards included, to preserve feminine modesty). A recent cartoon in a Saudi newspaper showed a homely Saudi man visiting a plastic surgeon, toting a picture of Noor’s husband, who is played by Kivanc Tatlitug, a blue-eyed former basketball player turned model turned actor who also plays the philandering Adonis in “Ask-i-Memnu.” The man in the cartoon asks the surgeon if he can get Mr. Tatlitug’s stubbled good looks.
“Arab men say they don’t watch these shows but they watch,” said Arzum Damar, who works for Barracuda Tours in Istanbul and was in her office, where a television broadcast Mr. Tatlitug silently demonstrating how to tango before a daytime studio audience of half-faint women. “The men like to see the fancy houses. The women like to look at him.” It’s true. A Hamas leader not long ago was describing to a reporter plans by his government to start a network of Shariah-compliant TV entertainment when his teenage son arrived, complaining about Western music and his sister’s taste for the Turkish soap operas. Then the son’s cellphone rang.
The ring tone was the theme song from “Noor.”
If this seems like a triumph of Western values by proxy, the Muslim context remains the crucial bridge. “Ultimately, it’s all about local culture,” said Irfan Sahin, the chief executive of Dogan TV Holding, Turkey’s largest media company, which owns Kanal D. “People respond to what’s familiar.” By which he meant that regionalism, not globalism, sells, as demonstrated by the finale of “Noor” last summer on MBC, the Saudi-owned, Dubai-based, pan-Arab network that bought rebroadcast rights from Mr. Sahin. A record 85 million Arab viewers tuned in.
That said, during the last 20 years or so Turkey has ingested so much American culture that it has experienced a sexual revolution that most of the Arab world hasn’t, which accounts for why “Noor” triumphed in the Middle East but was considered too tame for most Turks. Even Mr. Sahin wonders, by contrast, whether the racier “Ask-i Memnu,” a smash with young Turks, threatens to offend Arabs unless it is heavily edited.
“You have to understand that there are people still living even in this city who say they only learned how to kiss or learned there is kissing involved in lovemaking by watching ‘Noor,’ ” explained Sengul Ozerkan, a professor of television here who conducts surveys of such things. “So you can imagine why the impact of that show was so great in the Arab world and why ‘Ask-i Memnu’ may be too much.
“But then, Turkey always acts like a kind of intermediary between the West and the Middle East,” she added.
Or as Sina Kologlu, the television critic for Milliyet, a Turkish daily, phrased it the other day: “U.S. cultural imperialism is finished. Years ago we took reruns of ‘Dallas’ and ‘The Young and the Restless.’ Now Turkish screenwriters have learned to adapt these shows to local themes with Muslim storylines, Turkish production values have improved, and Asians and Eastern Europeans are buying Turkish series, not American or Brazilian or Mexican ones. They get the same cheating and the children out of wedlock and the incestuous affairs but with a Turkish sauce on top.”
Ali Demirhan is a Turkish construction executive whose company in Dubai plans to help stage the next Turkish Emmys there. One recent morning he was at a sunny cafe in a mall here recalling a Turkish colleague who had just closed a deal with a Qatari sheik by rustling up three Turkish soap stars the sheik wanted to meet.
Mr. Demirhan sipped Turkish coffee while Arabs shopped nearby. “In the same way American culture changed our society, we’re changing Arab society,” he said, then paused for dramatic effect. “If America wants to make peace with the Middle East today, it must first make peace with Turkey.”
Sebnem Arsu contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/18/arts/18abroad.html
I appreciate the degree to which the Protestant ethic has formed capitalism, and vice versa, as well as the codes and imperialisms of the liberal democracies, and the varying degrees to which liberal democracies morph as theocratic constituencies vote their agendas into power. But this is fair; it is the dictatorship of the proletariat as required by the tenets of democracy.
Islamist theocracies, and their agenda to unite in a new world-wide caliphate, may come down to this: if Osama bin Laden relies upon the internet to organiz eJihad, kidney dialysis machines and cell phones, as he is alleged to do, he must also accept the political -- and not just the technological -- results of the scientific method, capitalism and the protestant reformation, the combined force of which now impels liberal democracy. Or, to deploy a more demotic commodity, if the newly sexualized soap operas of Turkey, and their stars, are the cynosure of the Arab world, in which some people are not aware that kissing may be a part of married love,* then the democratic impetus for sex as life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness cannot be halted. It has long been a Catholic joke that the Protestant reformation started when Luther wanted to marry a nun -- a Taj Mahal built on a fuck, in Lawrence Durrell's immortal phrase. The struggle to regulate men's -- or is it women's? -- sexuality may be the fulcrum of power relations through history, with Luther's right to take the nun in marriage as the first stone thrown against the Bastille of Roman-Christian hegemony. Was the Holy Roman Empire itself -- and thus the caliphate -- just basically the droit de seigneur? This insight may be the great contribution of queer theory to the pushing out of the light inch by inch against the darkness.
It is not a matter of debate, among people of good will, that the enfranchisement of racist national policy -- for example, the Gush Emunim argument that victory in the 1967 war meant God wants Israel to settle the west bank, or the U.S. government's decision to "kill the Indian and save the man" by forcible transfer of Indian children to government boarding schools, or the fatwa against Salman Rushdie who, no matter how bad a writer he is, must be allowed to do so -- often borrows awful power and compels obedience by the conscription of God's will to political expediency.
If there is a God, people of good will may agree that there is only one, not one who hates Jews, and another who hates Palestinians, and a third who hates Christians and the godless Chinee.
There is one who loves us all, and if this is not true, then a God who hates my enemy is not worthy of worship by me. The exact nature of the debate in Islam over whether or not Mohammed requires war, and precisely what that word means, is unknown to me. I suspect it mirrors that of Christendom -- because religion, as opposed to God, is about human emotion; even the universally-documented sensation of the presence of God is said to be a biochemical event. Jesus says we are to love our enemies as ourselves, because they are close relatives, and to fight evil -- not our enemies -- without ceasing. It is certain that Mohammed's reputation for war and Jesus' for pacifism are much obscured by text provenance, politics and interpretation, and that even the actual revelation direct from God that his avatars experience must be conformed to the time and place in which the experience was undergone. We can only recall James' three criteria for pragmatic spiritual practice: a revelation itself, the direct experience of the prophet, must have immediate luminousness, philosophical reasonableness, and moral helpfulness for it to have any bearing on the systems of ethics by which people of good will seek to conduct and console themselves two thousand years after one man's revelation.
Quite independent of perplexities on the existence of God, one may take note that fashions in what God requires of his ministers on earth change. It was thought to be God who ordered the 19th and 20th century Protestants and Catholics to torture Irish orphan and Indian children in their care, in the name of extirpating the demons in them. If God today requires the torture of Muslim women, he will cease to do so tomorrow and the Islamist governments will award women, as the Canadians recently did the survivors of the Indian schools, $2 billion in reparation for genocide. The United Church of Christ, whose medical missionaries were in the forefront of torturing Indian children, is working on an apology in the wake of being accused of genocide by the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission on the native Canadian residential schools. We can look forward to the Taliban's apology in God's time.
What we believe God requires of us is often wrong, frequently genocide, and it changes, as every scholar of Islam, the hadith, and sharia understands.
Back to the idea that you can wage war with what you wear on your head.
to be continued
arafat's keffiyeh, the guest workers, the blackwomans guide to understanding the blackman, and the quakers' hats
women's literacy, islamic canon system and protestant reformation
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/rwright.htm liberal democ and prot ref
http://www.drsoroush.com/English/On_DrSoroush/E-CMO-20040314-1.html souroush, mu'tazilites
Reprints
This copy is for your personal, noncommercial use only. You can order presentation-ready copies for distribution to your colleagues, clients or customers here or use the "Reprints" tool that appears next to any article. Visit www.nytreprints.com for samples and additional information. Order a reprint of this article now.
June 17, 2010
Turks Put Twist in Racy Soaps
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
ISTANBUL — A topless hunk lights candles in the bedroom.
A woman appears in the doorway.
“Come on, let’s not be late,” she begs him, although her dark brown eyes say something different.
They kiss. He lets down her hair and there’s a flash of his wedding ring as they move toward the bed. A spaghetti strap slips off her naked shoulder.
Just another day at the office for the stars of “Gumus,” the Turkish soap opera that during its two-year run here on Kanal D has offered Turks not only the daytime-television miracle of sexual foreplay, but the standard sudsy compendium of shotgun weddings, kidnappings, car accidents and crazy plot twists like the one when the dead girlfriend of the aforementioned married dreamboat turns out to be alive and the mother of his illegitimate baby.
Usual stuff to American aficionados of the genre. But Turkish television has given the soap a fresh twist by making the connivers, kidnappers and canoodlers Muslims. And it is Arab audiences, even more than Turks, who have been swept off their feet.
Led by “Gumus” (“Noor” in Arabic), a wave of Turkish melodramas, police procedurals and conspiracy thrillers — “Yaprak Dokumu,” “Kurtlar Vadisi,” “Asmali Konak,” “Ihlamurlar Altinda” and now the steamy “Ask-i Memnu,” the top-rated series in Turkey (think Madame Bovary on the Bosporus) — are making their way onto Arab televisions, wielding a kind of soft power.
Through the small screen, Turkey has begun to exercise a big influence at Arab dinner tables, in boardrooms and bedrooms from Morocco to Iraq of a sort that the United States can only dream about. Turkey’s cultural exports, not coincidentally, have also advanced its political ambitions as it asserts itself on that front, too, sending a flotilla to Gaza, defying the United States over sanctions on Iran, talking tough to its onetime ally, Israel, and giving Kemal Ataturk’s constitutionally secular state an Islamic tinge.
Politics and culture go hand in hand, here as elsewhere. If most Arabs watch Turkish shows to ogle beautiful people in exotic locales, Arab women have also made clear their particular admiration for the rags-to-riches story of the title character in “Noor,” a strong, business-savvy woman with a doting husband named Muhannad. Dr. Shafira Alghamdi, a Saudi pediatrician, was on vacation here the other day, shopping with two Saudi friends, and volunteered how Arab husbands often ignore their wives, while on “Noor,” within what remains to Arabs a familiar context of arranged marriages, respect for elders and big families living together, Noor and Muhannad openly love and admire each other.
“A lot of Saudi men have gotten seriously jealous of Muhannad because their wives say, ‘Why can’t you be more like him?’ ” Dr. Alghamdi said. Meanwhile, she was illustrating another consequence of the show: the sudden, spectacular boom in Arab tourism to Turkey. Millions of Arabs now flock here. Turkish Airlines has started direct flights to gulf countries (using soap stars as spokespeople). Turkish travel companies charter boats to ferry Arabs who want a glimpse of the waterfront villa where “Noor” was filmed. The owner recently put the house on the market for $50 million. Until lately he charged $60 for a tour, more than four times the price of a ticket to the Topkapi Palace.
Even fatwas by Saudi clerics calling for the murder of the soap’s distributors haven’t discouraged a store in Gaza City from hawking knockoffs of Noor’s sleeveless dresses (long-sleeved leotards included, to preserve feminine modesty). A recent cartoon in a Saudi newspaper showed a homely Saudi man visiting a plastic surgeon, toting a picture of Noor’s husband, who is played by Kivanc Tatlitug, a blue-eyed former basketball player turned model turned actor who also plays the philandering Adonis in “Ask-i-Memnu.” The man in the cartoon asks the surgeon if he can get Mr. Tatlitug’s stubbled good looks.
“Arab men say they don’t watch these shows but they watch,” said Arzum Damar, who works for Barracuda Tours in Istanbul and was in her office, where a television broadcast Mr. Tatlitug silently demonstrating how to tango before a daytime studio audience of half-faint women. “The men like to see the fancy houses. The women like to look at him.” It’s true. A Hamas leader not long ago was describing to a reporter plans by his government to start a network of Shariah-compliant TV entertainment when his teenage son arrived, complaining about Western music and his sister’s taste for the Turkish soap operas. Then the son’s cellphone rang.
The ring tone was the theme song from “Noor.”
If this seems like a triumph of Western values by proxy, the Muslim context remains the crucial bridge. “Ultimately, it’s all about local culture,” said Irfan Sahin, the chief executive of Dogan TV Holding, Turkey’s largest media company, which owns Kanal D. “People respond to what’s familiar.” By which he meant that regionalism, not globalism, sells, as demonstrated by the finale of “Noor” last summer on MBC, the Saudi-owned, Dubai-based, pan-Arab network that bought rebroadcast rights from Mr. Sahin. A record 85 million Arab viewers tuned in.
That said, during the last 20 years or so Turkey has ingested so much American culture that it has experienced a sexual revolution that most of the Arab world hasn’t, which accounts for why “Noor” triumphed in the Middle East but was considered too tame for most Turks. Even Mr. Sahin wonders, by contrast, whether the racier “Ask-i Memnu,” a smash with young Turks, threatens to offend Arabs unless it is heavily edited.
“You have to understand that there are people still living even in this city who say they only learned how to kiss or learned there is kissing involved in lovemaking by watching ‘Noor,’ ” explained Sengul Ozerkan, a professor of television here who conducts surveys of such things. “So you can imagine why the impact of that show was so great in the Arab world and why ‘Ask-i Memnu’ may be too much.
“But then, Turkey always acts like a kind of intermediary between the West and the Middle East,” she added.
Or as Sina Kologlu, the television critic for Milliyet, a Turkish daily, phrased it the other day: “U.S. cultural imperialism is finished. Years ago we took reruns of ‘Dallas’ and ‘The Young and the Restless.’ Now Turkish screenwriters have learned to adapt these shows to local themes with Muslim storylines, Turkish production values have improved, and Asians and Eastern Europeans are buying Turkish series, not American or Brazilian or Mexican ones. They get the same cheating and the children out of wedlock and the incestuous affairs but with a Turkish sauce on top.”
Ali Demirhan is a Turkish construction executive whose company in Dubai plans to help stage the next Turkish Emmys there. One recent morning he was at a sunny cafe in a mall here recalling a Turkish colleague who had just closed a deal with a Qatari sheik by rustling up three Turkish soap stars the sheik wanted to meet.
Mr. Demirhan sipped Turkish coffee while Arabs shopped nearby. “In the same way American culture changed our society, we’re changing Arab society,” he said, then paused for dramatic effect. “If America wants to make peace with the Middle East today, it must first make peace with Turkey.”
Sebnem Arsu contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/18/arts/18abroad.html
