Abdal Hakim Murad – The Nature of Nature
AI: Summary ©
AI: Transcript ©
Cambridge Muslim college training the next generation of Muslim
thinkers Smilla Alhamdulillah wa salatu salam ala Rasulillah. Early
he was off by a woman who Allah
has become something of an annual institution. Now my little pep
talk in the middle of the CMC donors retreat. It's been only 24
hours or so since we started. But already we're bonding into a
wonderful fraternity. Alhamdulillah. It's so great to
see so many familiar faces. I want to start just by
reminding you that CMC is not just about training the new generation
of Imams and thought leaders for Britain's Muslim communities, but
we have a very strong research dimension as well. So I thought
I'd just make a happy announcement. And first time it's
been plugged publicly, our former dean, and still one of our
research fellows, Dr. Michael Medine, hammered aside, many of
you will remember him with great affection is now in retirement.
His great book has just come out just last week, with IB tourists
reader on the Middle East Sir Mark Sykes, imperialism and the Sykes
picot agreement. And it's hot stuff, it's now the 100th
anniversary of the
shenanigans that created the modern Middle East. He was
basically the man who drew those straight lines across the desert
and created Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and so forth. And sitting Mohammed
has gone behind the scenes to family and other archival material
not before seen to explain Britain's role in creating what
turned out to be an extraordinarily unhappy and
unstable settlement. So worth getting, I think,
and an indication of the ongoing research activity of the college.
So what I want to do this evening, isn't really that academic. It's
an odd kind of lecture more perhaps in the nature of a
documentary, I suppose, with lots of interesting pictures.
And in a sense, it's going to be quite sort of modern about the
contemporary period. I suppose I'll be reflecting on the fact
that if the old mind body spirit turnery, which historically tended
to define human creatures, and just about every culture, their
cultural becoming has now been really unbalanced or even
disrupted by modern physicalism.
The emphasis on the idea that matter is all that really is,
then the body seems to be increasingly the center of our
modern concerns. Remember, the recent parliamentary debate, which
recommended body image lessons in all British schools, and major
cause of juvenile depression seems to do with seems to be to do with
body image issues. Cosmetic surgery is a booming industry,
self harm among girls, is on the up and politics increasingly as
body politics. Key issues for us today to look at the headlines
seem to revolve not around truth or the meaning of life, but around
questions of the body, sexual identity and so on. It's part of
the Zeitgeist. So what I want to do to respond to this is to take
us back 100 years or so, to a very different time, but also a modern
time, when very rapid social change was responding to the
collapse in Europe's older Christian belief systems.
Physics and Darwin had convinced very many people that God had
died, and the race was on to find an alternative way of satisfying
the human need for morality and meaning that very many of the 20th
century outcomes of that race turned out to be the genocidal and
harrowing with the return of the far right today across Europe, and
even in the world, where I think, justified in thinking carefully
about those times and what it is about the modern project in those
days that generated such catastrophic outcomes that were
some of the greatest minds of the time went so terribly wrong.
Evidently, the loss of the spirit leaves us just with our bodies,
our physical selves, and they do tend to grant materialistic
ideologies, potentially, I guess, totalitarian sway over us the
spirit after all, and all that goes with it. Geist allows
difference. Science has a habit of seeking a single correct solution.
So when we combine this totalizing and reductionist aspect of
science, with the liberal desire for maximal options and refusal of
closure, we have one of the defining anti enemies and sources
of tension in modern culture. Science is about the truth of
things. But modernity wants there to be an indefinite number of
truths sort of subjectively defined by each individual, equal
subject and liberal society and this tension
caused this
systemic dysfunction in Europe and much of the 20th century and we
can see that starting to creep back nowadays. So let's go way
back in time,
to where not where it all began, but at least our contemporary
sense of
the kind of folk idea we have ancient times as representing a
time when body and spirit were in harmony, a kind of happy pagan
Eden, when nature and soul and thought were harmoniously,
integrated,
and a lot of anthropological work in Primal societies does seem to
confirm our general cultural conviction that there was an
ancient world of sucker ality determined by cycles of Sun and
Moon movement, the seasons, growth and decay and humanity's general
sense of a pertinence to a great cosmic wheel what Mircea Eliade
called the myth of eternal return, everything was cyclical, and we
were harmoniously incorporated within the cycle of the natural
world. And this goes not back to the dawn of recorded history, but
as far as we can tell, to Neolithic, or Paleolithic times,
it's how we work and we have a strong kind of odd nostalgia in
our culture for for that time. That's been one of the key
tensions in the 20th century narrative about progress.
Recently, there's of course been in this country and elsewhere
turned to Neo paganism, witchcraft, and more new agey
dimensions of the environmental movement. So we see that there is
even today
this is a Victorian image, but even today, there is a strong
attempt to remember or recreate that somewhat sort of mythologized
Eden.
But here you have this is actually ALMA to daima. The Tate Gallery it
might be awkward anyway, this is his painting, Sappho and Alcestis
are a characteristic of the kind of tension in European art in the
late 19th century, where on the one hand, there was a desire to
return to a kind of idealized medieval period of knights errant
and Gamble's damsels in distress and much of the
sort of Victorian Gothic nostalgia was about that, but also existing
intention with a desire or kind of nostalgia for a pre Christian kind
of pagan environment where there was thought to be harmony were
that European quest increasingly in the modern period to draw away
from medieval strictures, monastic inhibitions towards some kind of
valorizing of the body and its organic, organic and natural
erotic functions tended to provide very significant clash. So this is
where it seems to come to an end for many in Europe and one of the
huge debates for Europeans as they drew away from their Christian
heritage in the 19th, early 20th century, although this is
obviously an older image, this is TFR law.
St. Catherine of Siena was how to square the modern desire to
somehow we encounter nature through some kind of harmonized
human sense of belongingness, a pertinence to the natural realm
with the European desire to be in harmony with the dominant
Christian narrative of monotheistic Europe. And this
tension became the reason for the apostasy of very many educated
Europeans. As we shall see, here's a fun image. This is present day
with the decline of the Christian paradigm. In Britain, the older
paradigm of pagan Britain is breaking surface again. So
paganism is possibly Britain's fastest growing religion. This is
the Beltane celebrations. I think last year in Edinburgh, that's one
of the biggest Beltane rituals, I think this is the bit where really
not many of you go to Beltane. But it's the bit where the queen of
the May is led in procession to meet the Green Man. If you want to
modern British paganism, this is a big deal.
It represents again, the desire of Europeans to reconnect to some
form of spirituality that incorporates nature, the seasons,
Eros and so forth, as post Christian but not post religious.
This is an important transition in modern Europe and some people who
go to these things take it absolutely deadly seriously, other
people to to just the kind of rave or kind of Cabaret experience. It
often the Edinburgh one in particular was one of the biggest
ever Beltane in Cambridge, Edinburgh is much bigger.
It tends to be very sort of cinematic almost in the way in
which it's choreographed. And, of course, the pagan tradition didn't
continue
In England, it was truncated amputated in the Middle Ages. So
this is a kind of recreation.
I doubt very much whether many of these people are actually in
contact with the spirit world with sprites and fairies, and
leprechauns and so forth. Unlikely, but who knows, maybe
some of the old spells still work their magic, but this is an
important transition that's happening now in,
in European culture, but so that tension,
Christianity perceived as being the termination of this, the happy
human relationship to the natural world, and reproduction,
and the possibility of some kind of pagan recruit essence as the
alternative. But there's another alternative, which is represented
here.
taking some time to work out what this is, these are both by Rubens.
and Western culture always liked to define itself through a kind of
dichotomizing process against a dark other. And when Roman
paganism collapsed, this other other was often figured as
fleshly, bodily since your natural opposing the Christian self, the
soul, which was to be pure and transcendent. So very often, even
in the decoration of medieval cathedrals and churches and in
Europe, you see, there's always iconographic tension between
nature and the risen Christ.
It's a dualism that isn't really derived, obviously, from the
Gospels, it probably comes more from Plato ultimately. But it
picked a number of biblical dichotomies as figures of this
representations of two modalities of our humanity. On the left in
the picture.
You have Abraham, the patriarch, and Sarah.
And on the the banishing into the wilderness, of course, hijab
is the story in Genesis, Genesis 23, or somewhere. But it's, of
course, the founding moment of Islam. And for the authors of the
biblical text, we didn't really know who composed them. But this
was figured as an othering, of the Gentile other that was thence
forth to be the Ishmaelites, ultimately the Saracen and of
course in the Islamic tradition that bears fruit ultimately, and
the Holy Prophet and the great lineage of Islam.
On the right, you have Rubens again.
But this time, he is glorifying a woman who is not a symbol of
rejection, but a symbol of election. This is the Assumption
of the Virgin Mary.
Obviously, he wasn't an eyewitness to the event, he probably wouldn't
have seen exactly that scene, but it's very Baroque, colorful,
exuberant flying babies everywhere. And there she is
ascending to heaven, because she can't die because she's born free
of original senses. She's lifted up. And you can see that if you
juxtapose these paintings or whatever, they're not really
supposed to be seen together. But he's part of the European moment,
which treated these two women's as figures of two alternate
possibilities of humanity. Hotjar looks kind of pregnant. And she's
looking down. And she's going off into nature, Virgin nature, she
belongs with a natural world.
Because it's Isaac, who is to be the son of the promise. And
Ishmael is just the son of nature, the child of nature. And the
Virgin Mary, of course, is leaving nature, flying up into the
Imperium counted up by these flying babies.
And is looking up, she's not looking down, she's looking up and
the color for Hotjar is red, which is the color of the senses.
And the Virgin Mary, of course already has the color of blue,
which is the color of heaven, that's a natural habitat. So as
well as the tension in European culture between the pagan thing
about nature and the Christian thing about mortification,
Transcendence, priestly celibacy, monasticism, you have this other
tension, which is also very much suddenly the medieval European
mind between the Hadrian, in other words, Ishmael light was always
figured in West, the Western imagination as sensual.
Even had a sensual paradise, which to medieval Christians in
completely free key. And on the other side, the true covenant, the
Virgin Mary's are two mothers but indicating two very different
forms of human
human becoming. So
Europe often has dealt with its issues of the other, not just in
terms of the pagan other, which Christianity fought and which is
now seems to be coming back, but also the Ishmaelites other which
is also coming back.
But in the form of
For all of you
as a symptomatic piece of Victorian angst
Swinburne more or less anti Christian, complaining about what
Jesus in His understanding did, whereas once there had been an
exuberant pluralistic paganism, now there is a kind of death the
body has to be repudiated Swinburne very fond of wine, women
and song, and everything is kind of gray, El Greco. It's like
death, Christianity, death, no more. No more fun.
So this again, for the Victorians was an absolutely vast tension and
much of the drift of England towards
secularity and of course, it's college, Selwyn was created by the
Anglican Church to try and push back against that because
it was a place where you could be an Anglican that within the
university, and was founded almost deliberately against places like
UCL and other places in London, which were deliberately secular.
It's part of the the fundamental tension of the 19th century.
Often, this 19th century anxiety fixes on a particular figure, it's
kind of watershed between the old and the new, and this is the Roman
emperor.
Julian the Apostate
dies in 363. This is the Roman Emperor, who tried to take the
whole empire after it had been,
at least much of it had been Christianized. Back to the
supposed good old days of pagan diversity and the embedding of
religious cults in nature.
And the emperor who spent some time with some of the great church
fathers, he had big arguments with Gregory Nazianzus. For instance,
one of the biggest one chose ultimately to repudiate the new
ascetical monotheism, and had himself formally repaid agonized
and initiated into some of the mystery religions, the Eleusinian,
mysteries, and so forth. And this,
again, became a comeback kind of icon for a lot of Europeans.
Should we do the same? Should we go back to the days of the Roman
Empire which, following the Renaissance, everybody had seen as
a kind of climax of civilization was it as given suggested
Christianity which brought about the collapse of the Roman empire
through its insistence on unrealistic asceticism and a total
totalitarian vision of a theocracy.
But he wasn't only artists to kind of thinking about this scandalous
reversion to the old ways.
The famous Norwegian playwright Henrik Gibson wrote a play about
it emperor and Galilean, which he actually thought was his best
achievement, his greatest work. It's not often staged in this
country, and it's hard to see exactly what he thought he was
doing when he was writing it because to stage the whole thing
will take about eight hours. That's a lot of intervals.
But it was recently staged in the UK at the National Theatre. They
they amputated and truncated it down to about three and a half
hours.
Andrew Scott was starring as Julian you may remember him as
Moriarty from TV.
Sherlock, very kind of conspiratorial figure. Nabil
Shaban with this country's best known actors also plays a role as
the Emperor's predecessor. Deeply people were in it and even in the
kind of abbreviated 21st century Islington friendly version, you
still get a lot of theological and philosophical discussions and
agonizing So, Basil of Caesar Rhea turns up and has a battle with the
guy who reconvert Julian to paganism, Maximus. And what it's
all about is Epson just using it as a stage on which he can act out
his own internal traumas about what is happening in Europe and
his is more or less monomaniac theme is the crisis of European
selfhood. Relationship to body desire nature, Christianity, Hedda
Gabler,
the best known example of that, and the idea of a kind of very
puritanical, Scandinavian Protestantism, suffocating human
fulfillment, under what Ibsen calls the doctrines of guilt and
misery and denial.
So it's a tragedy, of course, and it is fairly close to the
historical record.
Julian's legions make the mistake of many other
arrogant empires by invading Iraq and they're actually defeated by
Iraqi insurgents. And the final scene has the Emperor realizing
that the old ways are not
Getting to be revived something new is on its way. And he has this
dialogue with his pagan counselor which I regard as very suggestive.
What exactly as we ponder these words, and remember, this is the
climax of the greatest play of the 19th century's greatest
playwright.
This is how it goes. The Emperor says Say it then who shall
conquer, the Emperor will the Galilean
Christ the church.
And Maximus that is pagan confessor says, both emperor and
Galilean shall go down, if in our time or hundreds of years hence, I
know not, but it shall happen when the right man comes, oh, Thou
fool, who has drawn by sword against the future, against that
third empire, whether two sided will reign.
The third empire, Messiah, not the kingdom of the Jewish people, but
of the Spirit, and the Messiah of the kingdom of the world.
logos in Pan Pan in logos, that's enigmatic. You can imagine even a
National Theatre audience, half of them with PhDs working as is this,
this is looking to the future. The Emperor is turned back to the old
pagan joyful dances and Garland had goals and is a Tarik
ceremonies that celebrated nature
has failed.
But it looks as if it won't be the the grey skinned bloodless
Christianity which is the future but something else is being
forecasted the third Empire
not the Jewish empire, spiritual Empire, but also the kingdom of
the world. So there's going to be some kind of Savior figure coming
along logos in Pan Pan in Lagos. In other words, Lagace spirit,
articulate spirit, and pan, the spirit of exuberant participation
in the beauties of nature, these are to come together something or
somebody is going to come? Well, for Muslims, of course, that's a
very interesting prophecy with the quintessence of Epson ism.
And it's really about his key angst. Victorian man is caught
between spirit and flesh to extremes,
strict Lutheranism of the Scandinavian north, and on the
other hand, this charming paganism, but neither seem viable
a new messiah has to come. Now for a lot of people in 19th century
culture of course, there would be a secular Messiah, either Marx or
Freud or somebody who would open up a new, a new way of
interpreting things, but it may well be that Epson is here in some
curious way, pointing the way forward to the founder of Islam.
Maybe Israelite prophet has descended from the girl, not in
the blue dress, but in the red dress
offers a reintegration with nature and Eros while maintaining the
appeal of the rigorous monotheism of the of the Hebrew prophets. So
I find this to be a very teasing moment in the history of European
literature.
So in any case, Europe has another moment where it feels that it's
had enough of
flagellation and renunciation and the resources is very strange. For
his sudden rebirth. It's as if the the natural world which has been
buried under kind of the stonework, or the cement of the
church fathers has burst forth again, starting to put out new
shoots were very quickly if you visit an Italian city, and you
look at what's happening in 1450, and then what's happening in 1480.
Suddenly, it's as if all of the old gods have come back to life
again, it's a very curious experience. It's as if in Islam,
for instance, everybody has suddenly started filling their
homes with pictures of Matt and Hubel and Alloxan. Very odd, that
the old pagan way suddenly became celebrated, again, not believed in
but at least embraced as the interesting center of elite
culture. And architecture is suddenly changed. The Gothic died
almost overnight, everything started to look like ancient Rome.
Again.
Curious This, of course, is Botticelli. You've been to the
National Gallery lives that you'll have seen this Venus and Mars 1483
is actually a very comical kind of depiction, I suppose.
Superficially, it's about the battle of the sexes.
Which as everybody knows, when the playing field is even women always
win.
So look at her she's wise and composed, and his kind of all and
done.
Who, but there's mysteries Who are these forms who are trying to wake
him up? Or the angels or the devils? Art historians can't work
it out.
Probably there's some resource near platonic allegory here about
soul and matter. But here woman seems to be identified with with
soul the man is kind of playing the passive and unresponsive role.
But what really matters here is that it's the end of medieval
flagellant stories about the body and nature is mired in the
gravitational field of sin. What you get with the Renaissance is a
sudden exuberant, loving rediscovery of the natural world
and really From this time on Europe's cultural is shaped by
this very odd, often quite a rich dialectic between them resurrected
classical heritage and the Western Christian legacy of monasticism
and anti physicalism.
But it wasn't just the pagan possibility, that is bubbling up
again and now leads to Beltane and all kinds of things in our
culture.
But it was also the Serra cynic or the Ishmaelites possibility, your
other significant other
so in the Romantic era,
along with the stirrings of the emotions, the Back to Nature
ideology that produces the pre raphaelites and alienation from
the world of steam engines and equations, the romantic reaction,
you have odd events like this. Again, this is not insignificant
Gertler is Ibsen was the greatest playwright of the 19th century
Gertler is the greatest poet of the preceding century, new mean
figure. And here he is with his famous poem about the Ishmaelites
profit.
So the Renee sauce, look back to the Roman past. The Romantics
sometimes did that as an alma to namers picture but also they
looked east, to a romantic, East and Morgan lands, either the Indic
world or the Sarah cynic world, there was a new romanticism that
found the Middle East to be particularly charming. Here, they
thought they could find a new wisdom, which would compensate for
the unspiritual nature of modern Europe, the physicalism, the new
elite Western discourses of science and materialistic
philosophy. So this is the moment ska sang. This, incidentally, is
one of the two settings of the poem by Schubert but the other
musicians who
put it to music as well.
Yeah, there is gain. interesting moment, isn't it? This is the the
title page of the first edition of the Deewan, which Greta wrote, of
which then Muhammad ski sang is one of the highlights. He'd read a
lot of rather gruesome German translations of half his and other
Persian poets, and decided to try his hand as a divine writer
himself, and got into it. So much of the Arabic script is actually
said to be good as an Arabic handwriting. Not perfect, but hey,
he was a long way from the nearest place where you could get an E
Jaza. In calligraphy.
So another curious event that get to get to the heart of this. What
we find is, the poem is long, but here's
a kind of climax of it.
And the poet's the point of the poem is to compare the Englishman
like prophet to a mountain stream, see it in Filson 12 Why the *
he dances over the rocks, full of virile spirits, his kind of
romantic hero, he originates his source is heavens rains, but is
nonetheless part of the Earth's nature. But he's his function is
to bring life to it as a kind of romantic hero. And in this
segment, you find that the Holy Prophet has figuratively become a
great river, whose fertilizing waters conjured forth cities and
great civilizations, but always Unlike Europe, directed towards
God, the ultimate data and the everlasting ocean, that the place
is returned than the ad is the as well. So this is
the climax of the permanent, fairly literal English.
TRANSLATION A gives you the yearning, early profit here
presented in this moment of European literature as the
romantic hero part externals, the one who will reunite us to nature
and we'll gather up the Lost Children of the Heavenly Father
and take us back to the ocean ocean of being is working, I
suppose with Harper's his conception of almost a kind of
mechanistic understanding of the Supreme Being.
So with the rehabilitation of the Israelite principle, one of the
reasons for the existence of Islam you might say
The principle of prophecy in nature, we get this other
dimension of Europe brought to the surface again. Europe is not just
about Christianity versus paganism. But the old struggle
between Christian and Saracen has now taken a new form because it
turns out the Saracens way is attractive. This is what *
Goldie calls the third heritage,
the Ishmaelites way of being
human in a non pagan and monotheistic way that is actually
also a natural way. In other words, the Hadrian principle
driven into the desert in her nice silk red dress, because she's just
about passion and the senses and the eternity in a materialistic
way.
As a kind of false materiality, the false prophet s, she's now
being belatedly called back, you could say Europe is calling harder
back again. So Jeff Hein Bowden who studied at this university has
looked into this, and particularly at Islamic themes in German
Romantic literature, has actually reminded us of the enormous
importance of this, in forming some of the key assumptions of not
just European but also American literature. His most recent book
is on 19th century
American romantic poetry as essentially a reaction to
translations of Sufi classics into the English language really
interesting. But
the trouble was, this wasn't the way in which your ended up going.
This pan in logos, was not the preferred option, Europe ended up
increasingly gravitating away from spiritual reactions to modern
paradigms in favor of various clashing explorations of the
meaning of scientific reductionism, we are just matter.
What does this mean for our self understanding as embodied human
subjects? What can be a humanism that only believes in matter, and
that comes to dominate the 20th century conversation? So let's now
move away from the Romantics, alas,
towards some more gritty, 20th century grappling with the
consequences of atheism, and the rejection of the pagan paradigm
and the rejection of the Hadrian paradigm. Here is one indicative
figure if you need for Marinetti
one of the most influential and turbulent of early 20th century
thinkers and artists. He's born in 1876, and brought up in Egypt,
Alexandria, part of the significant Italian colony that
his father was working with a very modernizing Egyptian ruler, the
Fadeev Ismail who built the Suez Canal, he was in his employ, and
the marionette he moved to Italy, where he experienced the kind of
fast forward movement of the founding of the consequences of
the founding of the Italian Republic in places where the
arrival of modern paradigms and actually come quite late, a little
bit like the sense of accelerated change in many parts of the modern
Muslim world that were almost medieval and people's lifestyle
and worldview until very recently, and and suddenly they're being
pushed into a world of post modernism and Stephen Hawking's
very febrile, unhappy, explosive, Unstable Times, Italy was like
that, in the late 19th century. The huge battleground between
Freemasons and communists and nationalists, scientists, in fact,
just about everything was in the air and available.
Marinetti, I suppose you could describe as a kind of logical
positivist he believed in
articulating an imposing a kind of optimistic militant atheism. By
using the power of art and the corporate state, he wanted to
impose the new truths on everybody. For him, science had
shown the falsity of the old religious stories. He didn't want,
Italy or the Western world to slide back into romantic dreams of
knights errant, or Ishmael or whatever else it might be, but we
have to be honest, and turn our sense of desolate aloneness in a
godless universe into something that will actually benefit us. So
we don't we are not called just to turn our backs on the past for
Marinetti, but we have to act actively fight it. So he launched
a very well, everything in that age was extreme, but it's pretty
extreme to call for the closure of all of Italy's museums and to
destroy all the libraries. And he wanted to destroy the city of
Venice and turn it into a giant aeroplane factory. He saw this as
just being the logical consequence of atheism and modernity. You have
to grasp it by the horns, don't try and get sloppy and
sentimental about nature and God knows this out there is only
matter.
And the only short guide to the human condition is Darwin. So he
takes what Daniel Dennett calls Darwin's dangerous idea in
directions that definitely were dangerous. Even consciousness, he
said, is just brain function. And eventually it's going to be
explained away and scientific reductionist term. So he's
actually one of the first theorist of artificial intelligence. It
even seems that he invented the idea of the robot. The pulpy
electric, he called it the electric doll, and one of his
plays is actually has robots
on the list of players, so really a kind of icon over really honest,
Uber modernity. Now, this isn't the outcome that was dreamed of by
either side really, in the dichotomy explored by delta or by
Gibson, is not Ishmaelites is not Galilean. It's an unflinching
modernity. Mater alone is an Marionette, he was absolutely
clear, sighted about where it ought to go. So he was an
immensely vigorous person. And one of his most explosive works was
his manifesto of Futurism, published on the front page of the
French newspaper Le Figaro in 1909. It was a sensation.
And what he's saying is evolution shows us that we are creatures
participating in nature, but not nature as something sacred. But
we're just another part of the stuff of the world. We're a
dimension of it strange onward, and upward. teleology, the strange
thing about nature, as Darwin shows us, he thought is that kind
of, even though there's nothing there, it pushes us onward and
upward. So natural selection explains absolutely everything
that we are. And to deal with this, we have to embrace the fact
that we have to embrace our tools, which have made us top dogs in the
Battle of the species, particularly tools involving
weapons and speed, because that's what gives us the edge. And in
this way, we're going to find inner peace. Because in this way,
we will be conforming to how the world really is, we'll be
conforming to the nature of the world, and to ourselves.
Evolution, the story of the Blind Watchmaker, has nothing moral
about it. So he writes that, for instance, art can be nothing but
cruelty, injustice and violence. Romantic love has to be replaced
with free love and the acceptance of all alternative sexualities. In
a rather Nietzschean way. He thought that we are free when
we're free from every kind of restraint.
Very influential and one of the key tributaries in the whole
modernist movement in art and to some extent, theater as well.
A major shift in European sensibility go around, say, the
Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge and look at what art was like in
1900. And what it was like in 1920, and it's like the
Renaissance, except now everything is kind of frantic and broken.
Because no longer is there an underlying meaning or morality or
sensibility, or hope, there is only matter. And what's
interesting is the vertiginous sense of standing at the edge of
the void, left by the absence of a Christian God. That's the essence
the Dine dynamism principle of the modern sensibility in art and
music, the sheer vertiginous excitement of standing on the edge
of nothingness, which was to replace the old sense of being
drawn to the sacred and to salvation. So all of the old
pre-raphaelite sloppiness was abolished and replaced by a
materialistic art that insisted that we have to be true to our own
selves, which are competitive last fall and magnificent.
So, groups that come out of this futurism was largely an Italian
movement, even though everybody was very interested in it.
Vorticism was, I suppose its main UK extension, Windham Lewis, and
particularly in the history of English sculpture. A lot comes
from Futurism and the focus on
machines and progress and technology, and speed data also,
these both portraits and Marinetti by the way, I'm not sure which is
the least flattering but probably like both of them.
Love of angularity, love of movement, new revelation of
mechanism and a delight in senselessness, the Void is really
exciting. So we really owe a lot of the sensibilities of modern art
including everything from Gilbert and George to Tracy and then to
the all of the rest of them that Britt up people to this
extraordinary
A moment of what Marinette it took to talk to be the only faithful
way of of being modern, no morality, no truth, no meaning no
symmetry, notice that it's only the excitement of the new and of
competition and violence. So vertigo replaces piety.
Here is again
another charming aphorism. Ours is a youthful and innovative banner,
anti traditional, optimistic, heroic and dynamic, that has to be
hoisted over the ruins of all attachment to the past, we have to
live in keeping with the harsh rules of history. And this means
also that human beings are naturally divided. And to be truly
ourselves, we have to be part of the Darwinian law, nature is red
in tooth and claw, and hence tribal affiliation is essential to
defining ourselves as human beings. So, ideally, he thought
the perfect form of the tribe is the modern Republican nation
state. In order to reinforce the Darwinian truth, that strength
will prevail by using the latest technology. Everything is
essentially a conflict and it's only in conflict that we will, he
thought gloriously find ourselves, conflict with the past, conflict
with the church, with representational art with
sentimental fiction, with sexual restraint with a class system and
of course, contract with other nations. So a kind of
hypertrophic patriotism is also a part of this
is an example and it really was an extraordinary modernity, here is
his most famous poem.
You might think that doesn't mean anything. Even if you know
Italian, it's not supposed to mean anything. It's a sound poem,
marionette. He was a war correspondent who was present at
the Bulgarian siege of a dinner, Turkish city, climax of the Balkan
Wars, towards the end of 1912. And in this poem, which is entirely
made up of warlike and mechanical sounds, it's a poem that tries to
replicate the sound of aircraft and explosives and so forth. It's
purely machines sound. And the point of this is to celebrate the
victory of European military hardware over the primitive
oriental civilization of Asiatic Ottoman turkey.
So his early engagement with hardeeville modernizing programs
in Egypt, here reaches a kind of consummation, and this symphonic
rendering of the sounds of batteries of artillery, artillery,
and air engines and so forth as the Turkish city is smashed, and
reduced to submission. And the glory of western man over the
evolutionary dead end of Turkey is assured.
Anyway, probably by now, you've had enough of senior marinating,
his futurism, predictably enough, after the Great War morphs into
Italian fascism, and more or less disappears as recognizable
artistic movement, Futurism had a future but it wasn't called
futurism. So I want to move on, again now to reactions against
Marinetti and we're people who are bringing together the other
significant others to European culture. And here is the first of
the two ladies I want to introduce to you
very much part of the avant garde in Paris at the time, a dancer but
also widely published poet, Valentina soundpoint.
There she is performing one of her very experimental
dance pieces. She was very much a grand lady grandniece of the
philosopher Lamartine. She is from MASL, but she lived in Paris, very
rich, lots of leisure time, so she was kind of GrandAm of the arts
and how health saddles in her beautiful flat in the 60s Evelyn
de small. She was one of four dance models for a while, and hung
out with all of the avant garde figures like a poly nerve and
Picabia and also published a lot of futurist poetry. In fact, she
was the best known female member of the futurist movement.
Okay, she also publishes manifestos. Marinetti has
published his
manifestos futurist manifesto, she breaks with him, even though he
had published some of her poems and really saw her as his leading
exponent, the great futurist of Paris, but in 1912, she creates a
rift with her master with this document manifesto of futurist
winning
what's the manifesto about why she doing essentially she's writing as
a woman who is offended by a marionette is very harsh reading
of the doctrine of The Selfish Gene
For Marinetti, if you take Darwin seriously, we are only the product
of natural selection. And primordial gender roles are the
natural healthy state of the species. And Marinette, he assumed
that these were based on the kind of radical subjection of females
that you get in other primates like chimpanzees, and so forth. So
for him part of moving forward into the machine age is to
recognize the natural subordination of women and of
course, she finds this rather odd, gentlemanly thing. So these are
two manifestos. I'll talk about the other one later. So on the
left hand side Manifesto of the futurist woman, and then the
futurist manifesto of lust, which is a kind of meta name for nature,
and the rediscovery of nature, which we're going to talk about.
So here you can see Marinetti, even though apparently the ladies
loved him wasn't particularly gentlemanly in his opinions. Here
he goes, will glorify war, the world's only hygiene, militarism,
patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom bringers
beautiful ideas worth dying for and scorn for woman. Oops. So this
is the question really, that catalyzes her alienation from
marionette is project. She remains wedded to many of the futuristic
ideas. She doesn't think Christianity and the Catholic
clergy
have anything to offer.
She really believes we should be part of the logic of the natural
world. She was also heavily patriotic throughout her life you
retain these elements, but his insistence on a Darwinian doctrine
of humanity of survival of the fittest, nature, red in tooth and
claw, amoral and successful, wherever it turns women just into
kind of subjugated reproduction machines were just too much for
her. And so they they break and this is something of a sensation
in avant garde circles at the time that she is in her
apartment. And from this moment on, she develops a very
distinctive voice, which he raises through actually quite a wide
variety of
artistic genres. So this is from her refutation of
the
extreme sexism on steroids, represented by these modernists.
The fecund periods when the most heroes and geniuses come forth
from the train of culture in all its bullies are rich in
masculinity and femininity.
Those periods that are only wars with few representative heroes,
because the epic breath flatten the map will exclusively be Virol
period, those that deny the heroic instinct, and turning towards the
past annihilated themselves in dreams of peace were periods in
which femininity was dominant. We're living at the end of one of
these periods. That is why futurism even with all its
exaggerations is right, so she likes. And nowadays, some would
say these elicit ramifications or essentialism about gender, but
she's certainly working with them. That's the virail principle, which
Marinette he takes to be the dominant principle, which is going
to cleanse the world through war and technology. But there's also
the feminine principle, and she wants some kind of
complementarity, rather than this kind of hypertrophic extreme
virility.
A better move forward.
You Yeah, but she's a feminist, anti feminist, which is one reason
why she's not remembered very much nowadays, because she doesn't fit
anybody's narrative really.
She believes in a very kind of traditional sense of the male as
linear and the female as inclusive, the maternal instincts,
the earthly figure of, of the woman, woman's particular
connectedness to nature.
So we must not give woman any of the rights claimed by feminists,
to grant them to her bring about not any of the disorders the
futurists desire, but on the contrary, an excess of order. So
what she seems to be saying there is that the futurists are saying
push femininity out completely because it has no role to play in
the new, versatile, mechanistic future of aeroplanes and racing
cars.
She is saying
that
the feminine principle must not be subverted by simply being defined
in the conventional masculine terms. She doesn't want women to
enter the professions and to become just like men, because she
thinks society has to have this complementarity. So she has a
complementary wrist type, technically speaking.
Now, this other book that she published, which is not really
about
Eros as such, but is about the the teleology of of the body towards a
legitimate participation in in creation which is essentially an
anti Christian document.
She here
joins the perennial European debate over the body we've seen
Ibsen in a kind of state of permanent angst about it and the
pre raphaelites as well not sure what to do. Like a lot of other
radicals of her time, she typically identifies the church as
a repressive principle which makes war on the body it's dualistic,
the spirit must be liberated and travelled to heaven by the body
being left behind. For her, the men and women of the future are to
be liberated from the chains, forged by the priests and the
monsters and inhuman, inhuman fables which they teach to
children. So here she's, as it were, taking Julian side against
Gregory or, Hey, jar aside against the patristic consensus, lots of
pictures of her I think she quite fancied herself which is why
there's so many photographs.
She was
celebrated now how to articulate this.
This new vision that she's developing well, her feud with
Mary Nettie, and the future is project was expressed primarily
through experimental dance, particularly a dance which she
herself invented, which she calls her mother obscurely. lameta Kali.
This image, incidentally, is a modern experimental dancer, Maria
sidbury, that thinks she's one of the Saudis today, there is not a
branch perhaps, of the family. And she's worked on recreations of
this metaphoric form, which is noted for the sort of full veiling
of the dancer and it's
quite unsensible in a paradoxical way. Now, she performs this in a
variety of locations, including the Metropolitan Opera House in
New York. And there's recently been quite a lot of academic
interest in this and what she is trying to do so an academic called
curl federal, which says actually, this is the enactment of a kind of
sacred principle, which is reacting against the future is by
using the body in order to indicate our irrefragable
connectedness to the natural world. And Kandinsky who she knew,
was a devout theosophist Of course, and so there's speculation
that this is influenced by theosophy.
The dance exists with beyond and before its realisation in
performance. So one is acting out something that is part of the
structure of, of, of creation, rather like that you Ruth, me of
Rudolf, Steiner,
and anthroposophists
But she's kind of on her own. This is a great period for avant garde
dance in Paris. She doesn't like Nijinsky, or the ballet tradition,
she sees it as rooted in a kind of perverse formalism, denying the
natural fleshly architecture of the body. But also she doesn't
like the kind of emotive subjectivism of somebody like
Isidore or Duncan who just kind of flips around and lets it all, hang
out.
Instead, this medically is an exploration of the body's
relationship to geometrical shapes which define the physical world
and which underpin its symmetries. And for her it's sacred
significance.
So good to have Bauhaus has also written about this meta coffee
says it's the power and beauty of the interview tile, the warm and
vibrant force, and the physical richness of the Dionysian flux of
life. Now, this comes at a very significant time. You might have
heard of the famous scandal caused by the premier Stravinsky's
Ballet, the rites of spring in 1913, when Opera House was more or
less turned into Battlezone because it was just so
experimental and extraordinary Stravinsky trying to recreate a
pagan sensibility on stage with these kind of jerky marionettes.
Just a year before his Petrushka had been more like a kind of
classical ballet at this time, that three or four years before
the First World War is when these transitions are happening. The
Eternity is really taking root with the rites of spring, gravity
seems to seems to have grabbed the dancers, you can say one of the
features of modern dance is that it recognizes the power of gravity
and the inexorable mortality of the dances whereas earlier forms
of dance aspired upwards. So the modern dance seem to be a way of
getting away from the old Christian desire to to float
upwards, constantly and to leave the earth it seemed to integrate
the soul and natural forces. So it's kind of pagan but futurist at
the same time. So
if you can read that this is the program of the opening night of
hermetically at the
net at the Metropole.
Oh, no Opera House in New York
there she is, it was again,
this is just before the First World War. So all of this gets
erased and forgotten quite quickly, but it did create quite a
splash at the time some more contemporary images of this metric
or these images, I guess of her dancing that were done by various
artists at the time.
Okay, so
the significance of a lot of recent publications on it, this
turn away from marionette is atheistic mechanism towards
something that seems to be spiritual, that is not Christian,
but is to do with the body's participation. And as it were
bodying forth of the symmetries and the geometrical forms of of
God Earth, there's been quite a lot of work done on this. So, a
work of art performed both instinctively and consciously a
synthesis that indicates the, the perfections of the human being
what we are supposed to be, it's an enactment. So this meta chi
which means kind of dance, but a metadata of super dots, aims as
she says, a union of consciousness, the human
reinsertion into nature. She says LFCSP to L, a plastic.
The geometric archetypes, triangles, pentagrams polygons
various forms which govern the movement, have as he wrote an
esoteric meaning which cannot escape the interested spectator
while academics are still struggling to see exactly what the
esoteric meaning is, but
the dance is,
although it's an affirmation of nature, it really is emphatically
not erotic. This is not the Martha Graham or Isidora Duncan that
Orientalist clothes face veil which he wants to indicate that
it's proclaiming a human subject that is almost in this state of
annihilation bodying forth, the deep mathematical structures of
the worlds that beyond mere personality.
It's at about this time. Also, we don't have an exact date that she
makes definitive her break with Marinetti by announcing her
conversion to Islam, which apparently happens on a trip that
she made to Tangiers. And it does seem that in her way, she had
found the resolution of this European dialectic in a turn
towards the woman in red towards larger, a form that reconciles
that body and soul. This is, I suppose, her discovery of absence,
third empire. So notice 35 She moves decisively to Egypt, where
she becomes very active, she becomes an agitator for Egyptian
independence.
There's a book on salads alone, there's a picture of her looking
very much the gone down in Egyptian newspaper, her book on
Egypt, Egypt floppy, some kind of real Egyptian nationalist and
publishes a book also against French colonial excesses in Syria.
She hadn't been terribly political before when she moves to the Arab
world as a Muslim and she really does get into these anti colonial
issues, but also observance, practicing the forms of Islam, and
she dies at the age of 78. Here is a magazine, cultural magazine,
which she edited when she was in Egypt.
It also that regrowth rebirth of
that Arab personalities who dies at the age of 78, and then she's
buried
right next to him and machete between a mammoth chef a and a
lathe been sad. She was genuinely devout and was recognized as such
as raffia Nora Dean, um, she was a real Muslim. And I guess that was
in the early 1950s, that she died. I knew people when I was in Egypt,
who had known people in her circle, and she continued to
publish poetry and was significant figure who followed this
trajectory. But what's this meta Collie about that clearly is her
great contribution. He sampled ruled that the tragic French poet,
there's an image of one of these metaphoric figures.
This was his view she served the future of poetry by tracing the
outline of the original World, or Edenic paradise, whose Unity has
been lost the greatest human movements and nothing more than
the image of the great cosmic motion. So there's something
cosmological This is the human being as an incentive. So here, if
you like the microcosm, that indicates the totality of God's
God's world
So this obviously is a long way from Marinetti.
He also had had this idea had ideas of how modern dance should
be future is dance. So his most famous dances which he proposed
and choreographed were called the dance of the aviator, the dance of
the machine gun and the dance of shrapnel. That was where he was
going. But for some point, by contrast,
there has to be a harmony, which mirrors the harmony of nature,
indicated by the geometries of her dance. So the orchestra is
playing.
There, we'll see Lavelle Sati, and so forth. It's harmonious thing.
Ego is not paramount. Unlike a lot of say, Stravinsky, here is gone.
Instead, there's a kind of human anonymous enactment, almost like
an arabesque of the repeated geometrical forms which indicate
that behind nature, there is an ordering principle.
And this idea of annihilation had been important to her she also had
a play, which he wrote, which was performed in Paris called
additional, which is about how we're fully human only when we
transcend our desires and are annihilated. And the veil in these
metaphoric dances another indication of that, so a lot more
could be said about this moment in European culture.
some extent its purposes, the purposes of this dance do remain
rather veiled, but its insistence on the enactment of the living
body as a specimen, of the world's meaning meaning which precedes the
dance itself. So there's an archetype to this form, and does
seem to point to the idea of live lived Cosmos which precedes
observation, and measurement. Human as in its embodied and is a
form of pre cognition, and the rejection of the formulaic and the
linear in favor of an in flesh but chaste sensuality. So it's a
chiasm you know, that word? Ch I, a s, and d intertwining,
proceeding reason, exceeding reason in it, we Intuit a
transcendence of our mere physical chemistry and enter a zone of pure
life and perfection.
And the practice that she ended up was of course, the NAMA has, right
rod Blackhurst. The Australian scholar has interesting article on
the symbolism of Muslim prayer and the geometry what happens to the
body geometrically algebraically as it moves through the rock as
and the cosmic cosmological symbolism of it says from his
article, both the prayer times and the records of the canonical
prayer rehearse both astronomical and cosmic cycles. While the Salat
is ostensibly a restoration of the ancient Abrahamic prayer, these
postures enact primordial and Edenic Adamic themes. Certain of
the movements of the ritual also reenact the embryonic dead in
their graves and the resurrection into the afterlife. The new cycle
growing out of the earth like plants, when the Muslim prays all
of these parallels of symbolism are activated and by constant
repetition. Day after day cycle after cycle Islam hopes to
actualize these symbols into believers soul seems to be rather
like what sample who thought was going on in meta coffee.
So that's the first of the two ladies that I wanted to talk
about. The other one also comes out of Marionette circle. Later a
finale a little bit better known
against a person very individualistic and impossible to
characterize. There's been a number of recent books about the
penalty to San Juan Adrienne Cena has the best known one. Linda
Fanelli has been served by a
lady called Pakia. Sir, I think Andre Pakia Sir, who is the
Sorbonne? There's a book on Rafanelli So 1880 1971 kind of
contemporaries.
Again, one of merrionette his most avid Associates, and when she was
very young in her early 20s, she founded a political publishing
house which published Marionette his writings and also did things
like for instance, publishing the first complete Italian version of
the works of Swedish Nietzsche. And she started her career as a
novelist and a typesetter.
She, in 1900, also ends up in Alexandria, she moves to Egypt,
associating mainly with anarchist circles that throughout her life,
she's anarchism has her political position, and she married somebody
can really pudgy who's one of the main figures of Luigi Polly, one
of the main figures of Italian anarchism at the time. Italy again
is this kind of extraordinary, bubbling cauldron of every
possible ideology and anarchism was one of the most significant
and
She starts to produce fiction on Sonia D'Amore is the first one in
1904. She has a romantic liaison with Benito Mussolini,
who at that time is still a socialist. And after the Second
World War, she publishes their love letters.
Which actually, if you're interested in that particular
epistolary, John Mussolini was very, very, very good at writing
love letters. And
so she she published these after the war, basically, because she
was
completely bankrupt and needed an income. But yeah, she was close to
Mussolini for a while.
But of course, when Mussolini moves into his fascist mode,
actually, he sends his brown shirts to smash up her publishing
house one reason why she experienced such poverty, but
still enormously prolific, she never stopped writing. These are
just some of her writing 50 novels published 49 short stories,
hundreds of essays. It's really in the novels that you find.
Developing critique of the modern project
seems very political, very anti colonial, anti bourgeois, but also
working with
perhaps problematic slightly hackneyed images of the romantic
east.
A certain Orientalist illusion of the romantic east with with the
Bohemian
she again violently attacks Catholicism because of its war on
the body and its identification with the political status quo. And
in many of these novels, she proposes an alternative to Europe,
which is an ideal kind of mushrik, where Nietzsche and a kind of
supercharged lifeforce replace the linearity of the West with
something sin, you, us indirect and Frank embrace of a kind of
naturalistic fallacy, only by rejecting the church and by the
Cartesian Dualism that separates us from nature, that we're going
to find inner peace, and as a result, social justice.
You find this very emphatically in her early works, and it's there in
her correspondence on the Salini. Certainly, eventually, it becomes
the discourse of an embodied pneus that in the fullness of
its acceptance of biology, saves human beings from the brutal
consequences of a machine age. So she surprises Mussolini by like
Sandpoint converting to Islam, which seems to have done during
her stay in Alexandria, and she remains a faithful Muslim or for
the rest of her life, and there's been a surge of interest in her in
Italy recently. This is the the flyer for a recent exhibition, set
of performances based on her life, particularly anarchist circles in
Italy now very fond of Rafanelli. The kind of anarchism she
supported was a kind of individual anarchism, she didn't think there
should be structural changes in society. But there has to be,
first of all, an inner discipline of change. Oppressive structures
in the soul have to be overcome. There's been inner liberation. So
at this time, she still before the First World War she establishes
one of Italy's best known anarchist magazines last shout
Panera.
I mentioned that she was connected to the Arab Marinetti, there's
another picture of him looking very futuristic.
He was very much a comrade in arms. As I mentioned, she was
publishing some of his outputs, but she breaks within the way Sam
pointed and Sandpoint moves away from him because of his insistence
that a scientific view has to regard women as necessarily
radically subservient.
The catalyst here for Rafanelli was actually musical.
It was the performance in Milan theater of a concert by an
instrument which Marinetti had himself invented.
He thought that since Darwin and science have proved that
traditional ideas about harmony and rhythm and tunes were kind of
vacuous. We can only accept efficient mechanical sounds as
being consonant with our true nature. So he invented a newish
new musical instrument, called the noise internal
instrument in question, which was to generate sounds that are purely
mechanical, and are about the way in which humanity was now going to
go so no myth of harmony, or the idea of the music of the spheres.
This is a music for our fast moving, modern age.
So this was performed to an audience in Milan Rafanelli was
present. And this is what she recalls,
quite amusing. As the wooden wheels turned, producing shrill
and discordant sounds, there was an almost fearsome reaction from
the audience, and various projectiles began to fall onto the
stage. First happily welcomed by the leader, Marinetti, who began
to peel an orange that fell near him, but then received
apprehensively by those present in the front of the audience. As now
pieces of wood and stone began to fly. Suddenly, from higher a chair
sailed through the air. The futurists who had maintained their
distance from the frackers were lucky since small groups
representing different ideological trends also came to blows. So this
really is her
moment of truth, she's not going to buy into futurism. This is her
shift, she brings into her discourse.
She also has a thing about
the body and chastity and is particularly offended by the
Western Christians specifically Catholic insistence that spiritual
excellence can only be cultivated in
the context of vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. In an
Italian context, this was particularly important and
particularly outrageous. So she has a polemic against religion.
But on behalf of what she calls Feder, which is faith.
So she makes the rather standard point about the degeneracy of
religious structures.
As free spirits, we will always object to how religious movements
which over the years have moved away from their legendary and
luminous origins, degraded and darkened by their own clergy,
disguise entirely material interests with statements that are
more useful to certain men certainly, than the gods they
claim to represent. priests do not neglect their ordinary human
needs, they have no faith for the only religion.
So, spirituality, yes, the church, absolutely not.
But more often,
very idiosyncratic blend of Islam, with anarchism with the class
struggle with a return to nature with anti clericalism. All of
these ingredients bubbling away in the pot of our mind,
expressed itself in terms of the need for social liberation. So
this is quite characteristic of her writing in a period.
We know that while one class squandered away in luxury the
other class which achieves whatever luxury has to work
suffers from the cold hunger, distress and fatigue. We know that
for every 100 bourgeois women wearing silk garments 1000s of
proletariat, women fall ill with tuberculosis in the spinning
mills, we know that behind the a pig splendor of every little pearl
on our necklaces, looms, the gloomy shadow of an indigenous
diver who died while harvesting oysters. So
what you
note is, it sounds like
the Communist Manifesto, but it's actually better written, she was
really at her best she was a good Italian, pro stylist, but not
advocating some kind of
forced egalitarianism imposed by the dictatorship of the
proletariat, but more something individualistic, based on the idea
of self improvement and a revolution within the more human
beings can govern themselves, the less they're going to need
government.
She has again,
we must admit that almost all of us live badly, without any
comprehension of what our lives consist of spiritually and
materially without ever questioning why we do what we do,
without ever analyzing the value and social utility of our acts,
which implies individual responsibility, even if it is
solely performed to meet the needs of living and feeding ourselves,
without ever reflecting upon the sacred importance of each and
every one of our actions, whether the more common act of putting
food into our mouths, or the poison of fermented drink, or more
complex act driven by our sensibility. So another thing she
often writes about is I guess what we've been hearing about today
mindfulness, that there is a kind of ruffler or heedlessness
distracted Ness which the modern condition in particular can
generate, and he or she is lamenting the fact that we're kind
of comatose going through our lives in this nice digitized
state. Here is something very beautiful ITALIAN ESSAY says.
Quite prophetic in a way
Understanding life and living it serenely happily in a blossom of
joy in a constant and intense full affirmation of love, giving life
to healthy fruit, offering all of our brothers and sisters
affectionate and constructive acceptance, understanding the
inevitable pain, and remaining calm throughout mortal struggles,
all with knowing awareness and a sense of peace. This is the human
mission, that all who strive to fulfill it do not live in vain.
So there is an emphasis on some form of spirituality, which in
this form of life is kind of
rather vaguely articulated. And again, just like sandpark, she is
allergic to feminism.
strong language here.
But for slightly different reasons. Feminism is a poisonous
fruit of modern society that strives to do nothing else and
create female attorneys, who just like male lawyers will be
perfectly useless in the society of the future. As soon as we the
people render laws and courts useless and therefore eliminates
them. So here, she seems to be against the feminist idea that
women should enter the professions because in her anarchistic future,
there aren't going to be any professions. Anyway, all of these
complex regulated structures, disciplines and gills are going to
be done away with in favor of some kind of
flux.
And there she is, again, yeah, so a strong anti feminist.
She has
a book on the feminine 1922 first chapters called first day of
Ramadan, 1339.
And she says that women can rise to spiritual heights by
experiencing the greatness of womanhood, which includes the
control of passion, she saw a lot of feminism of her a lot of the
feminist of her day as being ruled by a kind of will to power a kind
of willfulness a kind of ego. That was one reason it seems why she
was against it.
Yup, so here's the kind of simple, maybe simple minded aphorism
a modern sense of alienation is not as Marx thought, due to our
distance from the factors of production, but because we're
distant, exiled from nature. She writes a lot about nature, and our
embodied subjectivity.
nature's laws are going to help us overcome that alienation. You can
see some kind of rootedness in Marionette his project that
Christianity has alienated us from nature. And science emphasizes
that there is only nature so we're part of it. But she does this in a
very specifically Islamic way in her snotty Orientalist Muslim
attire, devotional practices she likes her prime thought that she
had found ritual and social forms which reconnected her with the
body and the cycles of the natural world. For her Islam is simply a
kind of natural law, Dino fitrah, I guess.
As a study of Arabic and the Quran progresses, at the beginning of
Vanderford conversion, she doesn't really seem to know much about
Islam other than some romantic idea of the mystic east, but she
does teach herself Arabic and studies the Quran, and then
develops more articulate idea that it is only through this sound,
natural disposition. Or Muslims call fitrah that you can
successfully access God's speech, both his signs in Scripture and
also the order of creation. So
there's a picture of her in a recent
cartoon book.
Here she's talking about the book, but the book of nature, how do we
intuit the divine, to intuiting the divine through signs in
nature. So for some point, it had been through seeing the underlying
geometries and symmetries that are the support the armature of the
forms and consistencies of the physical world, indicating the
existence of the designer for Rafanelli. It's a more kind of
intuitive process. So this is how she reflects on it. It's a
difficult subject. It's not enough to have goodwill or tenacity or
even extraordinary intelligence in order to read that book. In other
words, to get the true meaning, the real nature of nature. One
needs to be adapted to that purpose, to have powers that are
not necessarily superior. But a different from those held by
people who cannot practice this postulate. Not everyone, even if
they slowly walk across the ground holding a willow branch in their
hand will become a water diviner
She's dealing here with the deep mystery of why it is that some
people can see the sanctity of nature and of things and of people
on other people who are blind. Because the opening verses of
Surah Al Baqarah are about this, some people have a sealed set of
their hearts. And here she's reflecting through other nice
image that we go through the world looking for God looking for the
sacred, like the water diviner, the dowser, with the dowsing stick
in his hand, and it kind of happens without our bidding. But
there has to be a certain inner aptitude or sensibility that makes
that possible. So she remains very keen in her Islam, although it
seems that she never actually joined formally a Muslim
congregation or a tariqa. This time in the mid 20th century,
there were very, very few Muslims living in Italy, but she was very
much kind of individualist.
Even in the 1960s, there wasn't much of a Muslim population in
Italy, but
still quite a fighter. So a newspaper article and things
Melanie's newspaper Corriere della Sera was kind of poking fun at her
as this kind of Orientalist woman with exotic clothes and her talk
of a Mr. East
publishing a kind of lurid article saying she was a kind of
gypsy not heard renounced normal Italian lives, she writes a fiery
letter towards the end of her life.
Along these lines, which do give an insight into her commitment, my
name is not my name was Linda Rafanelli as I'm still alive and
in Charlotte in excellent health, thanks to my lifestyle, nourishing
my body with the yoga method and practicing the ritual of Ramadan.
I was not a fanatic of the Muslim religion, because I'm a faithful
and practicing follower of Islamic law, expert in the Arabic
language, and still an individualist anarchist activist.
Perhaps my extravagance is due to the fact that I've remained
faithful to my ideas and to my Mohammedan religion. So if there's
anything odd about her, she thought it's the fact that I'm an
anarchist, but also really practicing the religion of Islam.
She has come a long way
from the days of
Marinetti so one of the people who was alive you could talk to him
quite recently, who knew her quite well and of living link with the
past was Gabriella Mendell, who is a professor of
psychology at Monash University, died just a couple of years ago,
who wrote a lot of books and did a full Italian translation of
commentary on the Holy Quran.
And this is book on her
leather often Elytra letter, Torah and archaea.
And he likes to see her very much as being in the Sufi tradition, as
with sanguine that that's what they were. But that's what
everybody was before the rise of modern fundamentalism, the idea
that there could be an Islam divorced from its inherited
spiritual forms that have been just odd to suggest the Muslims in
the early 20th century. So here is Gabriella Sufism is above all else
in Islamic method of internal perfection of balance, a source of
deeply felt and gradually ascending further, far from being
an innovation or divergent parallel path to canonical
practice, is primarily a resolute mark of a category of stricken
souls, thirsty for God moved by the shock of his grace to live
only with him. And thanks to him within the framework of his
connected, internalized, tested
law. He was an interesting guy who was married for a while of city
Hamza boubakeur, who was the rector of the main mosque in
Paris. But he went back a long way. He was with Italian
partisans, as of Jun was actually tortured by the Nazis during the
Second World War, and has some Sufi novels.
So Author of dozens of books, and he's somebody who's been working
to keep the memory of this rather private person alive. That's one
of her pieces of calligraphy.
That insha Allah is the end of this presentation. Sorry for going
on. So long, but the basic point has been to take you on this
rather large sort of meta historical journey through an
essentially European narrative. I'm not talking about Middle
Eastern Islam, sub continental Islam, the glories of Turkish
Islam, but what happens when the European oscillation between
various others Christianity, paganism, letter, spirit, body,
flesh, soul,
and also the Israelite possibilities, a hater
impossibility, Europe's third heritage, come together in the
extraordinary ferment of the 20th century to produce these
individuals who are kind of bringing things together in a way
that represents not
the importation of an Eastern Islam into a western city, but the
continuation of the West and Europe's own internal arguments
and linear narratives. So this is if you're looking for that will of
the wisp think of European Islam. This is the kind of place to find
it, not Muslims who come to Europe and become Europeans.
That's a positive way of doing that. But Europeans who are
continuing with their narrative, and discovering in Islam, the
resolution, the the Ishmaelites way, the third Empire pan in
Lagace logos in pan
Baraka, percolo Feeco salam o aleikum wa rahmatullah Cambridge
Muslim College, training the next generation of Muslim thinkers