Or: the behavior of intellectual moths and intellectual ermine fleas
On November 23, at the presentation of my painted tribute to Dorothy Milne Murdock, I hope to also be able to hand over the first copies of my almost completed book, entitled 49:49. Subtitle: The Emperor’s Old Rags.
Not over the counter
There is almost certainly no country in the world where this book will be offered for sale by any bookstore in the coming decade. It is also not easy to find a publisher who can and dares to publish it.
Until recently, somewhere in the back of my mind I had the idea that such a publisher might be found in Japan. The country is often considered Western, while in fact it is not really Western. There are very few Muslim extremists in Japan who could be murderously offended by the publication of 49:49.
And when followers of the teachings of Mohammed misbehave, they are expelled from Japan, are they not?
Yet I should have known that Japan does not really offer any prospects.
Already in 2016 I wrote about the murder of the Japanese translator of Rushdie’s Satanic Verses: the remarkable scholar Hitoschi Igarashi!
Like other translators (See link at the section ‘Image over Reality‘) he was the victim of an assassination attempt some time after the Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini had issued a call for murder in the form of a so-called Fatwah. (Igarashi is depicted here as a bright young man. Clearly visiting Europe. When he was Assissinated July 1991, 2 1/2 years after Ayatollah Khomenei’s Fatwah, he was 44 years old)
Salman Rushdie seriously injured
Now that I have, in connection with the approaching launch of my book, been thinking more explicitly about a publisher with a good name and a considerable reach, I delved a bit more deeply into the ‘Hitoshi Igarashi dossier’.
In doing so, I came across an extensive Japanese treatise on Igarashi in which author Shigemi Inaga suggests that in no other country would it be more difficult to find a publisher for my book than in Japan (of course apart from the members of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation).
I found that article partly ‘thanks’ to the horrific attack on Salman Rushdie himself a few years ago. Long after the death of Khomeini himself (in 1989).
The article by this gentleman with the strange title “Negative Capability of Tolerance–the Assassination of Hitoshi Igarashi” is difficult to find. I did find this link to a PDF version.
The researcher as a moth …
At the time, I actually only paid attention to the single fact that Mr. Igarashi had been murdered after that fatwa, and not to the question of what kind of person Igarashi was.
Shigemi Inaga did. Mr. Inaga, who mostly studies art, read a lot of Igarashi’s texts, studied all kinds of other activities of Igarashi and wrote a remarkable essay about it. 34 pages long, full of quotes from Hitoshi Igarashi.
At the end of that essay, Inaga shows that Igarashi compares himself to an intellectual, dying moth …
He even wrote an article entitled “The Allegory of the Moth and Candle in Comparative Perspective“.
Quote:
.. so long as you stay outside the fire, you, a moth, cannot know what the fire is; but once you know what the fire is, you cannot survive your initiation to the secret; and your experience remains enigmatic because you cannot communicate the secret you got in the fire to those who stay outside the fire.
Yes, Mr. Igarashi was so interested in the world of Islam that he also became a Mohammedan …
Mecca and the Underpant Check
When I read that, I had to think of the most famous Dutch Islam expert ever: Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje. See featured image.
He had a similar fascination with the teachings of Mohammed, but he had a completely different approach.
He was so interested that he also wanted to visit Mecca. The English Wikipedia entry about Hurgronje is (for now) surprisingly not very Islamophilic and can even be called funny.
Snouck was aware that in order to be allowed into Mecca you had to have someone looking in your underpants to check if you were circumcised and therefore had himself circumcised 2).
The author of that Wikipedia entry hints that he (or she) may know that, but does not write it!
Why I associate Snouck Hurgronje with the term ‘ermine flea’ I will address further down in this post.
First, here is a mixture of praise and criticism of him that I wrote in 2016 after reading his best-known book.
Contemporization of the past
The first few pages I read nearly made me fall off my chair.
When referring to Snouck Hurgronje, you are constantly on the edge of the pitfall of what a brilliant acquaintance of mine calls ‘contemporization of the past’: searching for and interpreting historical processes, events and statements to make a point about political issues of today.
I already knew the probably most famous story about him: in his role as advisor to the Dutch government, the professor advised to ‘hit Muslim leaders very sensitively ’ in the Indonesian colonies – particularly in Aceh – because he was of the opinion that ‘negotiation with the Ulama is impossible, because their doctrine and self-interest mean that they only succumb to violence’.
And now I read how the same Snouck spoke highly of the Mohammedan practice, including the treatment of women and slaves. There seems to be quite a bit of contradiction in that.
I already knew that Snouck, who lived from 1857 to 1936, was a special man. Really very special. Brilliant and completely sailing on his own compass. Also working very hard. Founder of Dutch Arabic studies and his fame was certainly not limited to the Netherlands. Razor-sharp observer, almost morbidly eager to learn. His book Mecca (there are actually more, but I limit myself to the book about ‘daily life’ in Mecca) was unique and still is.
Slaves and children
In his defense of the Mohammedan practice, Snouck Hurgronje goes far in his book.
Very far. He shows no indignation at all about slavery: not about keeping slaves and not about the trade in slaves.
That so many adults and children die in the hunt for African slaves is mainly the fault of Europeans who forbid slavery, he writes!
When the slaves are bought or captured, the Arabs want to deliver them to the slave markets as quickly and healthily as possible, but because the Europeans thwart the slave hunt (!), the hunters have no choice but to make long detours with the human merchandise and as a result so many die along the way…
Not a word about turning the men into eunuchs!
Even more disgust arises when reading what he writes about sex slaves.
What our visitor to the slave market perhaps likes least is looking at and touching the human merchandise, as at a cattle market, especially when it concerns young women. However, closer observation shows that no female slave (not to mention the slave) feels more disgust at such an examination than a European lady when examined by a doctor (…) Neither at the market nor at home (sic) do slaves shed tears because of their condition of unfreedom. Their anger or sadness sometimes concerns a certain owner, and sometimes also the transition to a new situation. And when they do cry after the sale, it can best be compared to the crying of the girl who is taken to boarding school (…)”
The passage that immediately follows is about a slave who is given corporal punishment by his owner. Snouck puts that in context:
The traveler has not witnessed a scene from the life of a slave, but an example of Arab education, which is the same for slaves and children, and which differs completely from modern ideas about it.
The last subordinate clause gives a special twist to the previous one.
It now suddenly seems as if Snouck is not defending the Mohammedan practice.
It seems more as if he perceives things with a detachment that is almost unimaginable to us. He reports with an inhuman absence of anything that tends towards emotion.
No other god than God
Anyone who keeps that in mind will look at the story itself, which Snouck has put into context above, in a slightly different way:
“… he could see a slave lying on his back, raising his feet, while the Arab calmly hits him a few times on the soles of his feet with a straw, while the boy (sic) keeps calling out: ‘I repent (of my sins), before God! There is no other god but God! I call upon the protection of the Prophet, help me, Lord (…)!’
Such scenes are not attractive, and they are not rare in either Mecca or Jeddah.
The attentive reader will recognize the exclamation “There is no other god but Allah” –because of course it refers to the god Allah and not to Wodan, Yahweh or Dionysus– as part of the Mohammedan confession of faith. And I confess: I get really annoyed when I let what is actually written here sink in.
A slave or child is beaten and then it apparently occurs to him or her at that moment to start shouting: “Allah does exist and other gods do not exist”!
What does that say about the central place of threats and violence in this ‘religion’?
No better illustration of the fact that God and power relations merge seamlessly.
As long as your intentions are good
But I realize: indignation about this is of course completely useless and misplaced,
After all, the observations are from about a century and a half ago and far away from here and even: what could have been done about it then?
In the West, it is now the most normal thing in the world not only to show that you are indignant and shocked about all kinds of nastiness in the world, but also to act as if that more or less determines ‘what to do’.
“Why is the international community doing nothing in Libya?” tweeted a Dutch member of parliament. When I questioned it, he responds with: “Should we accept that people are being slaughtered?”
As if that is what politics is all about: letting everyone know about what you are indignant, surprised or hurt about today.
Image over Reality
Back to Mr. Hitoshi Igarashi and his critic Shigemi Inaga.
I am not the only one who found more information about Igarashi ‘thanks’ to the horrific attack on Salman Rushdie.
So did Avi Landau of the Japanese, English-written weblog Tsukublog.
He writes a lot of important and sensible things. He criticizes what he sees as all too common in Japan: Image over Reality, he calls it.
He concludes in a way that almost directly refers to the title of my blog post: he chooses not to be a coward either 1) .
Exactly the opposite of what Shigemi Inaga does. He actually has all kinds of half-veiled accusations against the murdered translator.
That slavery-thingy
Here you find an impression of art critic Inaga. A nervous man who – for the US Congress Library, mind you – is giving a lecture on “The aesthetics in politics“. I kid you not.
The man has delved into what that strange mister Igarashi wrote and did, but not at all into Mohammedanism as such.
The core of his story is this:
On the contrary, the fatwa was issued because the Imam’s authority did not permit him to keep silence any longer on the riots provoked – or manipulated – in reaction to, or under the pretext of, Rushdie’s novel.
Poor Khomeini was, as it were, forced to come up with that call for murder.
Just before that on the same page he writes:
With this problematic confusion of two independent issues, The Satanic Verses ceased to be a literary work and was reduced to a propaganda machine for “Freedom of expression”, as Tehran had suspected with some pertinence. (page 326)
This scared fool could write a similar critique of Harriet Beecher Stowe! After all, she “pretended” to write Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a novel, but she actually had a political goal in mind: abolishing slavery in the US.
Inaga’s cowardly approach is well considered: “There is nothing of value, outside of my business model”.
On page 333:
It was in this sense of “total surrender” to the search for the truth that Igarashi, as an intellectual initiated in Islamic wisdom, was ready to die.
If he had studied the teachings of Mohammed in depth, he would have known that there is no such thing as ‘Islamic wisdom’.
Snouck as Ermine Flea?
Above I wrote about Snouck Hurgronje that he reports with an almost inhuman absence of anything that tends towards emotion. No, Snouck Hurgronje was definitely not an intellectue moth, but an ermine flea?
Ermine fur in the past was used in particular by kings and similar people.
The swear word “ermine flea” has a special connotation in the Netherlands.
The background to this is that it was coined by Bernhard Von Lippe Biesterfeld, a Dutch prince with German, Nazi-background, as a description of the behavior of people who rub up against the monarchy in all sorts of ways.
(Here is some more background on this prince and his royal in-laws).
Snouck Hurgronje’s attitude towards the nobility and the powerful in the world of that time was really something special.
While looking for a photo of a young Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje, I only discovered that his family was also of a kind of nobility!
On a Dutch-language site, completely dedicated to that stuff, I came across a long piece about the so-called ‘family tree’ 3) of that family. It is written with an approach of “people of nobility are superior“.
After noting that Christiaan is very well-known, this ermine flea (author John Töpfer) comes up with this:
But Christiaan was married to a Javanese woman during his long stay in Java according to Islamic law and after her death to a second Javanese woman. He had children from both marriages, who did not bear his name and were raised Islamically. After Christiaan had settled permanently in the Netherlands, he married a Dutch woman in 1910, with whom he had a daughter. These previous marriages will in all probability have prevented Christiaan from also submitting a request for elevation to the nobility. (…) And Christiaan had sufficient knowledge of the matter to know that any aspirations in that direction were doomed to failure. He did not need it either.
You could say that within the Dutch context he was not an ermine flea, rather the opposite.
But in all other countries where he went, he naturally made contact with all kinds of people with power, whether or not based on their descent.
Yes, I am Against All Aristocracies.
More than one third of all posts on this weblog are categorized as such.
Notes:
- Landau also writes about other murdered translators. If you have time, I especially recommend reading more about the death of the Turkish translator in Sivas.
- Most jews are also circumsized. The Saudi-Arabs then apparently could not fathom a jew having the courage to try to enter Mecca.
- I cannot not remind of the fact that the very concept Family tree is horribly misogynist.
- The featuring image originates here.
There the caption reads: “The story of a colonial spy who entered Mecca and disguised himself as a scholar to conquer Aceh“.
Disguised himself as a scholar ….