Robert Luongo's Blog

To The Place Where I Come From

2012-01-15T19:13:00.000+02:00

How strange it is that here in mid January I find myself in the southern tip of Africa on a warm summer afternoon that would almost be too hot except for a gentle breeze that moves in from where two oceans meet, yet never cross. I had been asked by a magazine editor in Germany about a poem I may possibly know of, something by Robert Frost. Off hand the theme that the poem was meant to express was not something I recognised as being within Frost’s domain, but it did cause me to pull from my book case a volume of his complete works, The Poetry of Robert Frost, and scan through the long list of titles.

In less than a week’s time I will be taking a flight from Cape Town to Boston, via Paris. When I land in Boston Logan it will be winter, proper winter, cold with snow defied by heated homes with fireplaces burning. Like Robert Frost, I was born and raised in New England. I recall he lived in New Hampshire, the state that borders Massachusetts to the north. The cluster of states known as New England, shares not only a common climate but also a similar history, as they were the early English colonies. Apart from the city of Boston, there are the well-known towns of Arlington, Lexington, Concord and Braintree. There is Walden Pond, which is surprisingly small, that provided Henry David Thoreau’s setting for his famous On Walden Pond and also where he worked on his treatise Civil Disobedience. Back then Thoreau was a young man and devoted to his intellectual hero and self chosen teacher, Ralph Waldo Emerson. It seems only natural that in my youth the generation I was part of identified with Thoreau, while like him, I too looked up to the universal intellect of Emerson, whose library included works from the great poet Goethe, that Emerson read in their original German, to the Persian poet Hafiz.

While I have not been able to locate the poem purported to be by Robert Frost that the magazine editor asked about, I did start to read through several of Frost’s poems that I remember reading when still at school. Frost became a cultural icon after the Second World War, and every English class across America studied his poems. Furthermore, he was specifically connected to rural New England, its woodlands and small farms that so acutely expressed an intimate understanding of a stoic yet unpretentious ethic. If Emerson was the foremost poet and thinker of the early American Transcendentalists, who were born into the Unitarianism of New England in the early decades of the nineteenth century, then Frost was a voice of an outwardly more simple folk who possessed a depth of homely wisdom that barely managed to survive the tumult of two world wars only to then dissipate before the rise of an unmitigated hubris that took hold of the American psyche and would land it in the Bay of Pigs, then Vietnam; both of which went terribly wrong. There was the proto model of Indonesia, a massive victory for unrestrained capitalism while plunging America into a moral quagmire as it sequestered a whole region’s vast wealth of natural resources in the name of halting the spread of Communism. Then on to Chile and El Salvador, for which the writing of Joan Didion is essential to see the true face of a two faced foreign policy, and so many other places around the world where the claim was always the same: America was going to put things right. They would halt Communism and the spreading of its evil empire. Later, with the Cold War over it became the miasma of global terrorism that provided yet another carte blanche to secure needed energy resources for a rapacious society with a most heterodox anomaly: being somehow so incredibly naive and outrageously arrogant at the same time.

Today, the claim of putting things right around the world seems less and less palatable as its home situation has been exposed as far from exemplary. The unmitigated avariciousness of its financial institutions has shocked a people who had been lulled into consumerist complacency. The impotency of their political leaders in the face of supra-banking fuelled by a debt-based economy has left a country wondering who is actually running the show. But, as they say on Broadway: ‘The show must go on’, so its proving hard for a country that has been so enamoured by its own myth to face the bare facts of what is happening.

At least there is the build up to the American presidential elections, which is always its own form of Roman circus, so if nothing else it should provide some degree of distraction from an otherwise tenuous at best, or otherwise immitigably perilous fiscal landscape. Again you can see that efflorescent innocence of hope coupled with the largest fucking military machine in the world. It has worked before, so it may work yet again – or maybe not. For too long not only the general public but also Congress and its sacred House of (elected) Representatives have been far too willing not to ask how the country was kept safe and prosperous. Maybe better not to know. But now it seems far less safe, and also nowhere near as prosperous.

Well, I am soon to be travelling to America. It is there more than any place else in the world that I feel most a stranger, upon the familiar soil from which I grew. It is late now, just past midnight on a warm summer night in January, and I have arrived at a poem by Robert Frost that most seems to take me back to the place where I come from:

Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening

Whose woods these are I think I know.

His house is in the village, though;

He will not see me stopping here

To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer

To stop without a farmhouse near

Between the woods and frozen lake

The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake

To ask if there is some mistake.

The only other sound’s the sweep

Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.

Coriolanus - Shakespeare's Most Political Play

2011-12-16T20:31:00.003+02:00

The Defence Rests

2011-12-10T11:54:00.001+02:00

In re Ezra Pound

A Nation

That Will Not

Get itself Into Debt

Drives The Usurers

To Fury

The above quote is from Ezra Pound’s prose work The Enemy Is Ignorance.

I do not want to take up any serious student’s valuable time with the countering of acrimonious slander, but there are two predominant lies that are propagated about Ezra Pound, both of which attempt to tarnish the splendour of his work and his extraordinary genius, but most of all obfuscate the seminal theme of his lifelong effort to expose what he identified as the most pernicious injustice that had infected the world.

The first accusation is that he was a Fascist. He was not. He did support Mussolini and in particular certain of his ‘land reform initiatives’ such as the reclamation of previously unproductive land, the breaking-up of certain capitalist monopolies that were crippling the economy, and also his attempt to rein in the Church’s enormous wealth that they extracted from people who were suffering under the weight of extreme hardship. It can be argued that Mussolini was something of a mountebank, as he frequently plagiarized Gabriele D’Annunzio, who at the end of the First World War was not only a literary legend but by then a military and political one as well. When D’Annunzio rallied the Italian nation to help rescue ‘their sister France’ during the First World War, Mussolini used the same words when France had been occupied by Germany under the Nazis. It was, nevertheless, the bellicose British Prime Minister who not only pushed Mussolini away, but into the arms of Hitler whom Il Duce is on record as saying he could not stand. On numerous occasions Pound very clearly expressed that Italian style Fascism was in no way suitable to the American psyche, and therefore, to the American people, while he did see it as beneficial to Italy at that time.

The second thing said about him was that he was rabidly anti-Semitic. He was not. An important note: Semitic is a linguistic classification not a racial one, and therefore, includes all the Arabic-speaking people of the world. It also includes any Aramaic-speaking people, the old form of which was spoken during the time of Jesus, peace be upon him, and is now the exclusive preserve of philologists, historians and archaeologists.

In Pound’s literary masterpiece, The Cantos, the name of Rothschild is used as an allegorical personification of usurers, those that practice riba, as it is referred to in Qur’anic Arabic, or neschek in Hebrew scripture, which appears in The Cantos explicitly as being non-racially directed.

The Evil is Usury, neschek

the serpent

neschek whose name is known, the defiler,

beyond race and against race

the defiler

Tόxos hic mali medium est

In one place he refers to them as Stinkschuld. This is a potent metaphor as schuld in German means debt, and also, interestingly, guilt. It could, of course, as well be described as a pungent metaphor.

There is a direct reference to William Paterson, who founded the Bank of England in 1694.

Said Paterson:

Hath benefit of interest on all

the moneys which it, the bank, creates out of nothing.

(Canto XLVI)

This line was taken from a letter found by Pound in the British Library and refers to the fractional reserve system whereby a bank can legally multiply what money it has and so lend out at interest money it does not actually have. The ratio of tangible assets (real wealth) to credit currency is today astronomical and virtually incalculable. Paterson was a Scot.

There is an inspirational prose text by Pound called Guide to Kulchur. The dedication at the front of the book reads:

LOUIS ZUKOFSKY

and

BASIL BUNTING

strugglers

In the

desert

Zukofsky was a second generation protégé of Pound and dedicated nearly all his life work as a poet to Ezra Pound. Zukofsky was born in 1904 and died in 1978. His parents were Lithuanian Jews who raised their family in New York’s Lower East Side. Pound helped him publish his first poems in a literary magazine called Exile.

During WWII while Pound was living in the fishing village of Rapallo the mayor announced that due to severe shortages caused by the war, the town’s orchestra would have to be disbanded. It was now 1940-41 and word of the terrible atrocities that were taking place in Germany and Poland had made their way to outside countries. Let us remember that even most Germans were not aware as to what was taking place. Pound literally went door to door to find sponsors for these people, realising that nearly a third of the orchestra were German and Polish Jews and subsequently what fate awaited them if they were repatriated in accordance with a bi-lateral agreement between Italy and Germany for anyone without a valid work permit. He did this despite the fact that people, himself included, were having a very hard time feeding their own families. Subsequently, the mayor was able to rescind his previous edict.

Ezra Pound took as the warp and woof of his masterwork, The Cantos, the theme of usury or usura as he wrote it. He made war on riba!

Oh you who believe, fear God

and give up what remains of

your demand for usury, if you

are indeed are believers.

If you do not, take notice of War

from God and His Messenger.

Qur’an: 2.275/279

They severely punished Pound, not only for his condemnation of usury itself, but more significantly, for his condemnation of those who practised it, and who have never forgotten or forgiven him for what he wrote and spoke. He was put in a wire cage at an American detention centre in Pisa, and then extradited to the United States on charges of treason. He was denied the right of habeas corpus, and spent over eleven and a half years in a mental hospital in Washington, D.C. for the criminally insane. That is what was done to the most important poet of the twentieth century.

Remembering what Ezra Pound wrote - You defeat the bankers (drive them to fury) by not needing them.

As far as Ezra Pound’s political affiliations, he was notably a Jeffersonian. There are two salient quotes from Jefferson found in Pound’s writing. The first is: “I believe that the banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. Already they have raised up a moneyed aristocracy that has set government at defiance. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs.” The second quote that Pound used was: “If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of currency, first by inflation, then deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.”

Philosophically Pound was a Confucian, and his brilliant translations of the master Kung, as Pound called him, are a testament to that. What follows is a segment from The Great Digest.

TA S’EU

“The men of old wanting to clarify and diffuse throughout the empire that light that comes from looking straight into the heart and then acting, first set up good government in their own states; wanting good government in their states, they first established order in their own families; wanting order in the home, they first disciplined themselves; desiring self-discipline, they rectified their own hearts; and wanting to rectify their hearts, they sought precise verbal definitions of their inarticulate thoughts [the tones given off by the heart]; wishing to attain precise verbal definitions, they set to extend their knowledge to the utmost. This completion of knowledge is rooted in sorting things into organic categories.”

As far as religion, he was adamant about “no Popery”, while he often expressed his enormous admiration for the architectural magnificence and beauty that expressed Christian transcendence made manifest by the superb craftsmanship of the artisans who built breathtaking structures, and the sublime artistry of those that painted the frescos that adorned them. One need only walk along the pathways of Venice or Rimini to witness what Pound so loved.

In The Cantos Pound singled out the theologian Johannes Scotus Erigena, condemned by Pope Honorius as a heretic, a follower of Averroes (Ibn Rushd) who he identified as a hero, as indeed Dante had done some centuries earlier although, according to Dante, was unable to enter Paradise as he was not a Christian. As a defender of the Canon Law of the Church against usury they should have canonised him and made him a saint, but the Vatican was enmeshed in banking and remained silent while Pound remained vilified and locked up in a madhouse. It was only Hemingway, in A Movable Feast, recalling his youth in Paris in the 1920s, who called him Saint Ezra on account of his indefatigable efforts on behalf of the literary and artist friends he so assiduously tried to help.

We are today experiencing the aftershocks of what has been called the financial crisis of 2008-2009. Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs and even poor Bernie Madoff who stole 47 billion dollars that never actually existed, have entered the public discourse in a way that Rothschild, Sassoon and Sir Basil Zaharoff did in Pound’s era. A corrupt and flaccid political class has been inexorably exposed, and has left people unable to comprehend the ineluctable truth that their vaunted democratically elected leaders are simply not in charge. Pound had believed in the vision of men like John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, just as he celebrated the Monte dei Paschi (Mount of Grazing Lands) established by the Arch Duke Ferdinando in 1600 as being sufficient collateral for those who needed seed money at the start of the new growing season. The God-given abundance was in nature itself, and there was no un-natural increase by means of interest.

Pound also saw the time of the American Civil War (fought between 1861-1864) and the passing of the Banking Act that immediately followed and with it the handing over of political power to a mercantile class of profiteers, as the end of the great American experiment.

M’amour, m’amour

what do I love and

where are you?

That I lost my center

fighting the world.

The dreams clash

and are shattered –

and that I tried to make a paradiso

terrestre.

Do not move

Let the wind speak

that is paradise.

Let the Gods forgive what I have made

Let those I love try to forgive

what I have made.

(From: Notes for CXVIII et seq.)

The defence rests its case.

Robert Luongo

Dear Prime Minister

2011-11-30T18:50:00.002+02:00

An Open Letter to Recep Tayyip Erdogan

Dear Prime Minister Erdogan,

It is with the greatest respect for you that I acknowledge what I perceive of the complex and dangerous minefield you must traverse on a daily basis in order to continue in your efforts to lead Turkey at this most critical moment and to steer the ship of State across threatening geopolitical currents. It is, therefore, in apprehension of the treacherous reefs that your rivals and opponents long to see you founder upon, that I venture firstly to convey my sincere hope for your continued safety, and also, if you will excuse my forwardness, volunteer myself to you as a marker buoy for certain dangers that lie in wait for you.

Before going further, I must mention that I first visited Turkey in 1996 as part of a delegation that came to attend a conference in Istanbul, and was, in fact, your guest at a dinner given by you as Mayor of that most noble and beautiful city. Unfortunately, I did not get the opportunity on that memorable occasion to thank you personally for your generous hospitality.

It was during this visit that Shaykh Dr. Abdalqadir as-Sufi presented the Islamic Gold Dinar and Silver Dirham to the recently deceased Dr. Necmettin Erbakan, the newly elected Prime Minister of Turkey. I had the opportunity to visit again the following year and recall doing a live radio interview on a student-run station. In 1996 Shaykh Dr. Abdalqadir had numerous invitations to speak and of all the places offered, he chose Bosphorus University, acknowledged at the time as the most prestigious secular university in the country. Shaykh Abdalqadir presented a major paper, subsequently published under the title of The Return of The Khalifate. The result of his discourse was thunderous applause and excitement as young men and women rushed forward to meet and greet the Shaykh. A series of smaller gatherings took place and, as mentioned, a second visit was made the following year.

I hope you will permit me, respectfully, to make one or two observations regarding the late Dr. Erbakan, whose dignified, gentlemanly and urbane demeanour exemplified the innate courtesy of the Turkish people. The difficulties he experienced in forming a majority government are, I am sure, better known to you than to me. A coalition had to be formed and it was to Tansu Çiller that he turned. She had, as you know, two options open to her. The first was to face criminal charges of fraud, which according to Turkish law she could not be prosecuted for if in office, or to team up with a declared political enemy. History has recorded that she chose the latter. It was a sensible move by her and a politically strategic one by Dr. Erbakan. Nevertheless, she wasted not one minute in sowing the seeds of discord within the Turkish Administration. Whilst reiterating that you will know far more of the Machiavellian intrigues and machinations that ensued, I find the first two official State visits that the new Prime Minister made worthy of some attention.

The Prime Minister went to Iran, a country that was already fixed within the crosshairs of the Pentagon. It is common knowledge that Iran is run by a cadre of Shias, and it is not disputed that the Shias split off as a faction from the body politic (Ummah) of the Muslims many centuries ago. The etymological root of the Arabic word shi’ah, which they adopted as a name for themselves, indicates that which splits away. Their religion openly slanders the noble Companions of the Prophet, as well as his wife Aisha and declares as non-believers numerous people that were promised the Garden in the Hereafter, either in Qur’an or on the tongue of the blessed Messenger. It also sanctions the practice of taqi’a, permitting them to resort to dissemblance and concealment of their true beliefs and motives whenever it suits them to do so.

Then there are the Ismailis, an even more radical sect within the Shia religion, who established suicide assassination as a tactic to be seen not only valid, but laudable. Any form of suicide is against the teaching of Islam, not to mention the killing of innocent victims who are written off as collateral damage. It is of the utmost importance that the most knowledgeable specialists upon whom you rely to inform your position on these matters provide you with the means to take up a clear and unequivocal stance on this. Of course, Iran is your neighbour, possibly a valuable trading partner, and therefore, a détente must be maintained to secure a safe border with them.

It is now fifteen years on since the late Dr. Erbakan made that visit. What was he thinking? What did he imagine the response of the Turkish military and his other enemies within the country would be? Lacking the advantage of your proximity to the circumstances, certainly the wisdom of hindsight persuades me that it was a fatal lack of political acumen that allowed Dr. Erbakan to choose that destination as one of his first official tours. Iran is still under the aim of the Pentagon for a possible military strike, but given that the US is presently embroiled in two unwinnable wars, and that Iran has gained ascendancy as the major power broker in nearly all Mid-Eastern affairs, it is my view that the US is prepared, despite Israel’s protestations, to jump into bed with Iran as a temporary strategic convenience. Please sir, do not get caught between them, because that is precisely what is now being asked of you!

The second country he visited was Libya, a profitable ‘petrol station’ that was of considerable value to BP and certain American oil companies, run by a man I am convinced was clinically mad (although I am not a qualified psychiatrist). There was all the vitriolic rhetoric between Libya and the US during the Reagan years, but, as I was informed by reliable sources, business between the two countries was at its all time best. As you know, recent events have resulted in the disgraceful murder of Colonel Gaddafi, backed by a pro democracy contingent that was funded by the very same people who had allowed him to remain in power for over forty years. Once more, sir, please do not be drawn into the maelstrom of a hostile corporate takeover of a country’s oil wealth masked as part of a fantasy that was first launched on Facebook as ‘The Arab Spring’.

From my relatively distant perspective, the choice of these two countries by Dr. Erbakan suggests a lack of understanding of the political arena into which he had entered. When the military threatened to roll tanks through the streets he, being a man of honour and one with true concern for the welfare of the Turkish people, stepped aside. If only Osama Bin Laden had followed this example of how a true Muslim leader behaves - instead of choosing to remain in Afghanistan when it was clear that his presence there would rain down death and destruction upon the brave people of that country.

Leaving the past and what mistakes were made, it is of the utmost exigency that you have a clear view of the political terrain that is open before you. Syria is a quagmire, with its citizens being slaughtered by the Assad regime, as they, like lemmings, are going to their deaths. What do they want? Do they want to be Greece? Similar to the situation with Iran Turkey is being asked to serve as a broker on behalf of those countries that have a geopolitical interest in the region. Egypt has gone from bad to worse, as now it is reported that the military, called in to maintain calm while the new democratic government has time to organise, is proving more brutal than under Mubarak. You must know that after Israel, Egypt receives more US aid than any other country. So who kept a rabid dog in power and made him rich? The same ones that funded the ‘spontaneous revolution’ to usher in a new era of democracy.

From Nasser to Sadat to Mubarak; each one worse than the one they succeeded. And all the while who has been lurking in the background, pretending to be this secret organisation - that everyone knows about, including who its leaders are? Of course, I refer to the Ikhwan al-Muslimeen. In all the years of their recreant existence what have they ever accomplished but shameful defeat and the sending of misguided young men to their graves? Meanwhile, their leadership have occupied lucrative government positions in the countries they secretly denounce as kafir. Where are they? Egypt, Jordan, the oil-rich Gulf States and Turkey! When you trace their antecedents you arrive at the door of Muhammad Abduh, the late nineteenth century founder of Islamic Modernism in Egypt, who, despite his vituperative railing against British imperialism was, according to Lord Cromer, referred to as ‘our friend Abduh’ and ‘most likely an agnostic’ who would help put in place all of the pro British initiatives, including a fatwa to allow the Post Office Bank, with its ‘moderate’ interest rates, to operate in Egypt. After him came Rashid Rida and the disasters of the 20^th century that opened the way for the Ikhwan. Weed them out of Turkey! Be sure to get to the roots and not just the stems.

Before proceeding further, I must reiterate my high regard for you and the assiduousness you have applied to the task before you. Being at the forefront of your country’s undoubted political progress, and importantly her commercial vigour, you have genuinely helped your people and consequently expanded your support base. Whether Turkey is admitted into the EU or not (you are more aware of that than I), what has been most telling is your indefatigable resolve to bring Turkish goods to the world marketplace. A leader that actually helps his own people: what an anomaly in today’s political environment!

Equally commendable has been your consummate handling of the hard-core nationalists who have persisted in maintaining an acrimonious attitude towards the Kurdish people within Turkey. You have opened a direct dialogue with them. You have permitted the use of Kurdish in local political affairs, allowed it to be taught in schools and used on regional radio stations. They are a minority with a distinct culture and language that are part of Turkey. Most significantly they are Muslim people, brothers and sisters in Islam. A weapon against you and your government has been taken away from your enemies in Europe and at home.

Please permit me to speak of friendship. One must chose one’s friends carefully. The last Shah of Iran sat at the family dining room table in the White House of five consecutive American presidents. I do not refer to State dinners but family meals. The Shah and his wife were on intimate terms with those presidents and their families. When the writing was on the wall, and it was clear that the Shah would fall, not one of them would take his calls. He flew around and around in his private luxury jet running out of fuel with no one allowing him to land. The decision was that it would be imprudent to be seen backing a loser, and better to come to some form of amenable terms with the ‘fellow in the turban’ who was being flown in from Paris. Now, that’s how they treat their friends! Let me also turn to the case of Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines, a staunch anti-communist and recipient of lavish amounts of US aid that he and his wife lavishly spent on themselves. When it was obvious that he would not last the latest uprising and that a newly elected democratic leader, Corazon Aquino, would be president, his friends deserted him. Basta! As they say in Italian.

The last matter I want to raise with you is that of finance. At the moment Turkey is running on a high. Ten years ago Ireland had the fastest growing economy in Europe and Dublin was a boomtown with a bonanza of new money pouring in.

A Nation

That Will Not

Get itself Into Debt

Drives The Usurers

To Fury

The above quote is by Ezra Pound from his prose work The Enemy Is Ignorance.

Ezra Pound took as the warp and woof of his masterwork, The Cantos, the theme of usury or usura as he wrote it. He made war on riba! They severely punished him for it and have never forgotten or forgiven him for what he wrote and spoke. He was put in a wire cage at an American detention centre in Pisa, and then extradited to the United States on charges of treason. He was denied the right of habeas corpus, and spent over eleven and a half years in a mental hospital in Washington, D.C. for the criminally insane. That is what was done to the most important English speaking poet of the twentieth century.

Returning to the twenty-first century you must be fully aware of the generous line of credit being offered to Turkey. Your economy we are told is one of the few that is growing and doing well. Think of this line of credit as a rope. There is an anecdote taken directly from a chronicler during the time of Louis XV of France: “And we saw the King walking in the garden with his Jew...” “The bank supports the State like the rope supports a hanging man”.

The banks are not defeated by attacking them. Berlusconi refused to sign the austerity measures bill demanded by the banks to ‘restore confidence in Italy’s finances’. Overnight he was gone. He has been replaced by Mario Monti, the previous Minister of Economy and Finance. He is openly a member of the Bilderberg Group as well as chairman of the Trilateral Commission, the influential think-tank founded in 1973 by David Rockefeller. He has also been a key advisor to Goldman Sachs. Italians were seen dancing in the streets after Berlusconi was forced to step down, as people shouted “clown, clown, clown”. We will hear a different chant when Monti signs the austerity bill, which he will; he is a banker.

In 1965 a recalcitrant Achmed Sukarno had the temerity to throw the IMF and World Bank out of Indonesia. In 1966 a CIA backed initiative was put into motion to overthrow him and place General Suharto in power. All of Indonesia’s vast natural resources were handed to US, UK and Australian multi-nationals, the IMF were welcomed back, and Suharto undertook the task, under the cover of being anti-communist, of carrying out the worst cases of torture and genocide against his own people. The US and others simply looked the other way.

I remind you again of what Ezra Pound wrote. You defeat them (drive them to fury) by not needing them. Your customary politeness and cordiality is a shield. Courtesy was the hallmark of the best of mankind. And he, God bless him and cover him with peace, also said, “Strategy is part of warfare”. The astonishing advances you have made so far for your people were not accomplished in a day, and lately we have seen how much can be destroyed overnight. However, a great opportunity awaits you and the Turkish people, and as Pound also said, quoting Confucius: Make It New!

I thank you very much for your valuable time, and pray for your continued success and safety - for you and all of the people of Turkey. Certainly, we must want this for all people around the world in need of the good news - as well as the warning.

Yours truly,

Robert Luongo

Pre-Graduation Day

2011-11-08T17:26:00.001+02:00

There is the need to record an event, to put down in words, so as not to forget something, something of importance. From it may very well come an understanding, even if much later, within which one can find benefit. Homer had such a need and we are grateful to him for it. We have The Iliad and The Odyssey.

There was firstly Homer’s narrative poem; to which my approach was then deepened through The Cantos of Ezra Pound; and more recently Odysseus (or Ulysses as he was known to the Romans) makes a guest appearance in Shakespeare, whose political plays are the theme of the subject I teach at a college in South Africa. Presently I am reading a fascinating study by Barbara Reynolds of the Italian poet, political thinker and the man, Dante, who lived from 1469-1527; and who should show up in her book but the celebrated Greek general, who served under King Agamemnon, and not without trepidation and intense daring managed to survive a terrible war, and after a long and arduous journey finally makes his way home to his wife, Penelope, their son and an ageing father. When he arrived he found his homestead in Ithaca infested by property developers, speculators and bankers, all wanting to convert his land into a housing estate. As the potential for profit was enormous they had been besieging his wife day and night, all the while feasting on her husband’s food and drinking his wine, in hopes of their imminent gain if she would simply sign the papers and seal the deal. By all accounts Odysseus was presumed to have perished, dead, either in battle or upon his return journey. It would simply be better all around if she sold.

There is not a general consensus as to the inherent character of the 13^th century BC mythical figure, for some have portrayed him as a cunning Machiavellian who drove his men not only in war, but also into dangerous detours, exploiting their desire for both fame and riches, while others have depicted him far more favourably and heroically. It is worthy of note that he and his son Telemachus unsheathed their swords against those that were intent on obtaining his property, killing them all, except for those that managed to escape with their tails curled between their legs: a fair warning to modern day bankers and speculators. It seems certain that I’ll never be a ‘proper’ academic, maintaining that detached and distinguished objectivity. Not, of course, that they ever forget who signs their pay cheques. Academia operates by corporate sponsorship, which along with major banks and financial institutions are the largest contributors to the arts and sciences within both private and state universities.

This past Thursday was the last day of formal classes at Dallas College, and we were all honoured that the founder, Dr. Dallas, whose name the college bears (also known to all of us as Shaykh Dr. Abdalqadir as-Sufi) came and delivered an address to the students and faculty. A third year student, who is hafiz of Qur’an, recited the first part of Al-Baqara to begin the morning programme.

Dallas College, established in 2005, was created to produce future leaders - as well as those capable of recognising such men, pledging their allegiance and serving them by whatever means and expertise they have obtained. It was said to me a short time ago by our Chancellor, who is not only a prominent attorney from Johannesburg but most importantly an indefatigable supporter of the college: “Not all of our graduates will become leaders, but none of them will ever be led astray”.

The central theme of Dr. Dallas’s address was the study of history as a means of making sense of the time in which one is living. He made mention of Sir Roland Syme’s magisterial work: The Roman Revolution, and also Thucydides’s classic: The Peloponnesian War. Speaking directly to the students, all of whom are in their late teens and early twenties, he spoke about what lies ahead in a world that is rapidly changing and with it new challenges that await them.

Dr. Dallas made mention of a recently aired television docudrama on the Second World War. It was mostly comprised of black and white footage from the 1930s, ‘40s and early ‘50s, all of which had been converted into technicolour and had added a dramatic and “rather vulgar” sound track. The effect was that history had been repackaged like a Hollywood movie and presented in a manner in which an ideological overview was superimposed upon what were the “undeniably terrible events” of a war and the unconscionable things that occurred during it. From this I understood that the message being impressed upon the viewers was that one and only one choice remains for peace and prosperity in the world. It is marketed as the freedom of democracy.

He then spoke of human anxieties, like that of the safety of one’s family, the quality of education for our children, or the crime rate in the places we live, but also included the unavoidable anxiety of, for example, the impending financial crisis in Greece, with a referendum passed into law by politicians that the people adamantly reject, and similar such cases in Spain, Portugal and Britain, all of which have seen thousands of angry protesters in the streets of their major cities. Breaking news from around the world crashes in, even in this most southern tip of Africa, and you are made to feel helpless. Although not directly stated by Dr. Dallas, what I understood is that we are repeatedly told on a daily basis that more credit is the only solution to stimulate a flagging world economy, which the banks are willing to provide, obviously tied to strict austerity measures to assure the minimal expenditure on unprofitable social welfare programmes, while concentrating instead on programmes aimed at sustainable debt repayment. Democratically elected governments will assure that their debtor citizenry will pay.

Another example was provided to the gathering that on face value was rather humorous, but upon closer examination, if reflected upon, something serious. He spoke of a man who suffered from a delusion that he was a grain of wheat. After a period of intensive psychotherapy the patient was cured, as he now knew he was not a grain of wheat but a man, and was released from hospital. It was only a day later that the very same man came banging on the hospital doors demanding to be let in. When the doctors opened the doors for him they could only exclaim that he had been cured, that he knew he was not a grain of wheat but a man! He replied, “Yes, but do the chickens know?” There is a shared perception of what ‘reality’ is, and it is broadcast to all of us via Internet, TV, film, cinema and printed media. I could grasp that not only must one understand and decode the nature of events, that more often than not function as smokescreens that obfuscate rather than clarify what is taking place, but also the need to recognise the contextualised world view in which others are led to believe in them.

Dr. Dallas brought his most inspiring talk to a close, as he submitted the entire matter to what is the Truth, and in so doing specifically referred to Tawhid (the Oneness of Existence) and that all power belongs to Allah. Then admitting that his Latin was no longer what it once was, he deferred to our Vice-Chancellor, Dr. Azzali, a scholar in Medieval History who graduated from the University of Parma, and also our lecturer in Roman History, for confirmation of a word in that ancient language. Dr. Dallas had, in fact, got it right. We ended with everyone reciting Al-Fatiha.

The morning’s event finished with coffee and cakes, with the Vice-Chancellor and the third year graduates having the special privilege of sitting with the Shaykh.

The final examinations will be starting shortly.

Everything moves on. The academic year has been a success and, moreover, as well as being included in this most auspicious college for the past seven years, I have been most fortunate that what I embarked upon in the summer of 1970 when I first met this unique man of his time, has been a most remarkable journey: truly an odyssey! What is of the utmost of importance is to see that the Shaykh is a guide, he indicates the way, which he also embodies. Nevertheless, he has never allowed anyone to make this affair about him. About this he is most adamant. And what has he personally said to me? “Follow him [the Messenger] / so that hopefully you will be guided,” (Al-A’raf). Dr. Dallas turned 81 this past autumn while I am nineteen years younger. I do think it a fair assessment that I am no longer young, although in no way do I concede to being old. After ten years in Cape Town, it is quite probable that he will return to Europe. For myself, I have been here going on eleven years, far longer than I had ever thought I would be. Nevertheless, the college remains based in Cape Town, and while I could, of course, be replaced, for now my work is here. Therefore, this year is also a kind of graduation for me. It has taken me a terribly long time, but having been shown a way must now embark on another kind of journey.

Odysseus lived to a ripe old age. He planted his oar on a hillside overlooking the sea. Such extraordinary times!

-----------------

Robert Luongo’s new book: The Power Template: Shakespeare’s Political Plays is available in paperback through Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk and also from Kindle Direct as an ebook. You can also visit: www.thepowertemplate.com

A Precise Terminology

2011-10-28T09:57:00.000+02:00

He taught Adam the names of all things.

Then He arrayed them before the angels and said,

‘Tell Me the names of these if you are telling the truth.’

They said, ‘Glory be to You! We have no knowledge

Except what You have taught us.

You are the All-Knowing All-Wise.’

The above quoted lines are from uncreated Word of Allah, from His Book, of which there are copies, at first written down by scribes and in latter times, till the present, in printed editions. From these copies, which are referred to as mus’hafs, literally ‘copies’, there have been numerous renderings of its meanings into a great many languages, with the majority of scholars being exceedingly careful not to refer to them as translations, per se. Already we are acutely aware of the essential importance of having a precise understanding of the meaning of words, thereby to say exactly what it is we mean to say.

It must be clear that I am in no manner a qualified authority on that Book, or its meanings. I have neither access to it in the original language, nor am I learned in its meanings and interpretations, except from what little I have understood through those scholars who have acquired that well defined science, passed down from generation to generation. Again, I read the line: “He taught Adam the names of all things.” It is upon the men of knowledge, both past and present, that I rely to gain a correct understanding, and in so doing, not make a mistake, or say something of which I have no knowledge. Therefore, as someone for whom the use of language and obtaining a precise terminology is of the utmost importance; finding le mot juste, whether in attempting to convey an understanding of an idea, a deep inner emotion, a command or prohibition, or an insight required to plumb the depth of a particular meaning; great care is required.

He taught Adam the names of all things. To know the name of something is to connect it to its meaning. Getting it right or getting it wrong makes all the difference. We are living in a time in which men have, to a great extent, lost that Adamic knowledge, the meanings of the names of things. We could, for example, identify the word money. What is it and what do people understand it to be: a value, a medium of exchange by which goods and services are exchanged? Yet, the whole world has had a terrible shock as it became abundantly clear that what people understood to be a value, was in fact a credit, created ex nihilo, a debt, that was traded and exchanged across the world through a mysterious medium, an Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM), via computer terminals by an elite but seemingly innocuous group of people, as well as the more quotidian use of money as a medium of exchange, that has been revealed to be devoid of value. Subsequently, all those things to which we refer by their names, property quite possibly being one of the most important, and one could say most valuable, lost its value. Just like that! Truly, this is most astounding!

As a small stream, like the many I can recall from the woodlands of my native New England, that through a myriad of twists and turns finds its way to a mighty river (the Merrimack comes to mind), that is itself being pulled into the great Atlantic Ocean, I find myself drawn again to what I have understood from the study of the writings of Ezra Pound. In addition to his magnum opus, the Cantos, there are his prose essays and expositions and also his immensely important translations of the major works of Confucius: The Great Digest or Ta Hio, The Unwobbling Pivot or Chung-Yung and lastly The Analects, comparatively less orderly in their sequence, yet believed by his students to be indispensable. I have tenaciously tried to hold to the proper name of the ancient sage as Kung-futz-æ. Pound settled upon the more intimate, yet respectful, name of Kung - acknowledging that both Master and Kung are synonyms.

What follows is Pound’s translation from ancient Chinese into a down to earth colloquial vernacular that you might still hear in more rural parts of the American Midwest. It should be noted that trained sinologists have often taken exception to Pound’s translations that he made using a basic Chinese-English dictionary, along with a sheaf of notes bequeathed to him by a scholar by the name of Ernest Fenollosa, who had spent a lifetime in Japan studying the ideograms, and whom Pound had never met. Pound was ecstatic when the scholar’s widow approached him and handed over the notes with no more explanation than that her husband wanted the poet to have them. The basic complaint is that Ezra ‘made numerous mistakes’. This is, of course, entirely possible; though having read each of the books I am convinced he never got a meaning wrong, as each one is sound and rings true.

Tze Lu: The lord Wei is waiting for you to form a government, what are you going to do first?

Kung: Settle the names (determine a precise terminology).

Tze Lu: How’s this, your divagating, why fix’em?

Kung: You bumpkin! Sprout! When a proper man don’t know a thing, he shows some reserve.

If words, (terminology) are not (is not) precise, they cannot be followed out,

or completed in action according to specifications.

The very next Confucian principle is: ‘The creation of a just state must be established on a just means of exchange’. The Qur’anic model is much more refined and clearly defined, as it transcends to a yet higher knowledge to which mankind can aspire; although it is agreed upon by the people of knowledge that it only arrives as a gift.

Properly speaking, there is no such thing as an Islamic politics, but rather there is an Islamic economic model. That model is called dawlat, and is directly related to the movement of wealth from the highest segment of society to reach and nourish the lowest. The primary means by which this occurs is the taking of Zakat by the authority of a leader, paid on substances or merchandise of intrinsic value, in substances of equally intrinsic value, and immediately distributed to those who qualify to receive it by the clear rulings relating to it. None of which, I might add, pertain to the maintenance of a bureaucratic system whose main objective is to pay itself. It is to the body politic what the circulatory system is to the human body. Governance and, therefore, leadership devolves on the one who undertakes to ensure that that takes place. The modern fiscal state, which by its very structure is static and consolidates and holds wealth, although as was pointed out earlier does in no way have control over it, is diametrically opposed to dawlat. Consequently, an Islamic State is inimical to Islam. The name, in its most profound Adamic sense has been separated from its meaning.

In Dante’s Paradiso he presents in a most spectacular manner a line from the Book of Wisdom spoken by Solomon, where the souls of Heaven spell it out in a pattern of lights: Diligite iustitiam qui iudicatis terram. While the Commedia as a whole was written by Dante in a new vernacular prose, he would revert to the use of Latin for such an important line. Literally it would read: “You who govern the earth, cherish justice”, while most translations into English reverse the order: “Cherish Justice, oh you who govern (or make judgements) upon the earth.” The verb cherish is in the imperative, a form of the verb that corresponds to the simple present subjunctive, that expresses a command. The thing named, which is the object of the sentence, and is of the utmost significance, is clearly Justice. Dante sided with Imperial power as the upholders of justice and therefore more closely aligned with what he understood to be the Divine command, as opposed to the Papacy, to which he took exception. Needless to say, this did not make him popular with the Pope.

The role of leadership is to establish and maintain justice alongside the imperatives of worship, without which man’s raison d’être cannot be fulfilled. Together they form a single whole. Therefore, a proper man calls things by their proper names - paraphrased from Pound but connecting back to the Original Source: He taught Adam the names of all things.

This circumnavigation from the opening ayat pertaining to ‘the names’ and then returning to it, could benefit from another source that guided Pound in his Odyssey. It was the far lesser known monetary historian, Alexander Del Mar, who wrote several books, one of which was The History of Money. In it he directed Pound to Imams Shafi’i and Ibn Hanbal who explained the means of weights and measures by which gold and silver were used as a medium of exchange. The key point is that of weight, as opposed to bits of paper with larger or smaller numbers written on them, or of electronic impulses on computer screens, that determine their value. This brings us to the opening lines of Canto XCVII:

Malik & Edward struck coins with a sword,

“Emir el Moumenin” (Systems p.134)

six and a half to one, or the sword of the Prophet,

Silver being in the hands of the people.

Referring to Carroll F. Terrell’s monumental A Companion to The Cantos we are informed that in A.D. 692 the Emir Abd-el-Malik [sic] sought to assert his independence from Rome. He struck gold dinars and silver dirhams according to the practice established by the Prophet Muhammad, may God bless him and grant him peace, which adjusted the (unjust) disparity determined by Rome between the inflated value of gold that was only in the hands of the super rich, and that of silver, commonly held by ordinary folks. This meant that immediately, by the use of Muslim currency, the money in your pocket was worth more. This not only brought Islamic coins into Eastern Europe, but also Islam itself as a religion preferred by many people of the region.

The two ‘names’, in the manner in which Adam was first taught all the names, would then be money and justice. He taught Adam the names of all things. Now look at the time in which we live, where money has no real value, justice is left in the hands of a corrupt political class, and Islam, once a balm to not only the East but also the West, has become characterised as the bane. But that is about to change, as the disgraced jihadists and islamists are receding into the holes they crawled out of, and a new era is opening.

There is a link to The Power Template – Shakespeare’s Political Plays

Dallas College Press, 2011, by Robert Luongo

Or visit www.thepowertemplate.com

Your Best Shot

2011-10-03T15:59:00.000+02:00

If what you perceive is that you have but one remaining shot you had better make it count, I mean, aim well and hope like hell you hit your target. Therefore, you would do better to hope to heaven that you succeed.

It seems that starting locally, in my case, from the place where I am living, is most apropos, and then one can widen the field to a more global range.

The South African Police Commissioner Bheki Cele, ubiquitously referred to as the country’s ‘top cop’ has been served notification that he is suspended of all duties due to his role in a corruption scheme that involved the construction of new police stations for more than treble the other tendered quotes, and furthermore, were awarded to a close friend and financial supporter of both the police commissioner and the head of the ANC and South Africa’s president, Jacob Zuma. Nevertheless, the suspension has been approved by the nation’s president, who has made a statement that Cele remaining at his post undermines the credibility of the South African police force, and subsequently he has to go.

This was obviously a difficult decision for President Zuma, as he and Cele, long-time ANC cohorts, go way back. A bit more interesting, as corruption in government isn’t a particularly novel occurrence, is that the previous police commissioner, Jackie Selebi, was convicted in 2008 of corruption for his taking monies from his associate and personal friend, the Mafioso Glenn Agliotti, who was accused and later acquitted of the murder of South African mining magnate Brett Kebble, multi-millionaire and recognised ‘Don’ of the country’s underworld where lucrative contracts were traded like poker chips at a casino, while the more serious charge against Commissioner Selebi of perverting the course of justice was, upon advisement, dropped by the high-court judge. Agliotti got a walk and Selebi is still out on bail, while the country’s legal experts confirm that the conviction will stand and his appeal will fail, it remains doubtful if he will ever serve any time in jail.

All this could be attributed to what the industrialised North say is endemic within the African continent, except that Selebi was also the Interpol President from 2004-2008, and therefore, an astute and quick footed player within the global field where corruption in Africa is still in the minor league compared to, for example, the American major league where the corruption of a city’s chief of police on up to the State Governor and Attorney General has been riddled with cronyism, kick-backs and payoffs that are an intrinsic part of that nation’s colourful history. As was pointed out to me by one of South Africa’s more notorious defence attorneys, that at least when you pass money to a South African government official you do get value for your dollar, or rand as it happens to be. In the so-called advanced countries such as those in Europe or in the US you pay and get nothing in return: “now that’s corruption”. Of course, there is another level of corruption that makes nonsense of the low level venal malfeasance found within South Africa’s police force and criminal justice system. It is one that operates openly and with total impunity, which is that of the entire political class: all those elected and appointed officials from councilmen to senators, legislators, ministers and parliamentarians and up (or down) to Heads of State, who in no manner whatsoever answer to their electorate, who are, ironically, for the most part, irrelevant to the entire democratic process. The worldwide political class answer instead to an in-back, un-elected elite that can bankrupt a country on Monday and receive an enormous bailout package on Tuesday, paid for by that very same passive electorate that can be found from Paris to Pretoria. We have reached endgame, but the all-important question does remain. How can there be any manner of equity and justice within a system where the very survival of elected officials is dependant upon the funds they receive from those special interest groups that have stipulated the deregulation of banking and fiscal practices, removing, in the process, any form of ethics that could otherwise encumber the free movement of market forces. There has been a fair amount of clamouring about banking reforms and new regulatory bodies to oversee the workings of the financial sector, but with all important elections coming up in both Europe and the US, and the staggering sums needed to mount a successful campaign, it would not be at all surprising if things fell rather silent on those reform issues, at least until after the elections.

What is clear is that it is not a new system or (even worse) the correcting or reforming of the current system that can restrain the unscrupulous monetary elite. Tacitus wrote in his Annals: “...and laws were most numerous when the commonwealth was most corrupt”. Plato made this abundantly clear centuries ago when he described the inevitability of democracy lending itself as a means to instating a financial oligarchy, ultimately leading to tyranny. The new power template is therefore neither a system nor structure, as by their very nature they breed corruption, but rather a new man who accepts leadership as an unsought after responsibility that is inexorably bound to accountability, honour and service. To the modern i-pod debtor citizen of the industrially developed world it will sound preposterous as he has long since been anesthetised by media rap and the baby food pap of liberal idealism. To the masses of the world’s poor it is an incomprehensible dream. One could call it chivalry, although that certainly sounds a romantic anachronism, and would, in these opening years of the 21^st century, hardly be taken seriously. So better yet, call it futuwwah, and make your way towards it. “I have not come but to perfect good character in men”, said the Prophet from the Arabian Desert, who, we are informed, was sent as a mercy to the whole world. “Leadership is an obligation binding on good men”.

If I am to use just one time this thing called my vote, my best shot is an overwhelming vote of no confidence in the entire system, and then to proceed with vigour towards a new nomos, with men and women that educate their best and brightest youths and help them rise up to be the leaders of our future. From amongst them there will, as has throughout history been the case, emerge one who will take the lead. To him we will pledge our allegiance, loyalty and fealty.

The Power Template: Shakespeare’s Political Plays by Robert Luongo is available from Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble on-line as an ebook and in paperback.

Ezra Pound and the Political Class

2011-08-23T10:20:00.000+02:00

Ezra Pound and the Political Class

Within the vast tapestry of The Cantos, following the schemata of Dante’s La Divina Commedia, Canto XIV and Canto XV are both referred to as the “Hell Cantos”, and according to Pound were a portrait of England during the years 1919 – 1920. To his close friend and intellectual sparring partner, Wyndham Lewis, he wrote: “You will readily see that the ‘hell’ is a portrait of contemporary England, or at least Eng. as she wuz when I left her.” In a letter to John Drummond: “the hell cantos are specifically LONDON, the state of English mind in 1919 and 1920.” Lastly, in a letter written to his father in 1925, Pound wrote: “I intended Cantos XIV and XV to give an accurate picture of the spiritual state of England in the years 1919 and following.”

In taking a brief look at Canto XIV I hope to shed some light on the deepening malaise of not only the British political class, but rather of the entire gang of whom we are told are today’s world leaders.

The stench of wet coal, politicians

.........e and .....n, their wrists bound to

their ankles,

standing bare bum,

Faces smeared on their rumps,

Wide eye on flat buttock,

Bush hanging for beard,

Addressing crowds through their arse-holes.”

In the above passage there is a consensus amongst both Pound scholars and historians that the e is the last letter of Lloyd George, British prime minister from 1916-1922, and the n for Wilson, the American president, both of whom were not only complicit but directly responsible for the brutality of the Treaty of Versailles at the end of the First World War. There is extant documentation that Lloyd felt dreadfully bad about the conditions of surrender imposed on Germany, but apparently lacked the strength of conviction to do anything other than go along with the others. Wilson was as happy as a pig in shit, as J.P. Morgan and other Wall Street bankers who had financed putting him in the White House assured Woodrow that, “We made money out of destroying Europe and we’ll do it again rebuilding it.”

And the betrayers of language

......n and the press gang

And those who had lied for hire;

the perverts, the perverters of language,

the perverts, who have set money-lust

Before the pleasures of the senses;

howling, as of a hen-yard in a printing-house’

the clatter of presses,”.

As then, so today the media magnates have the politicians dancing to the tune of the banking elite. At the time Pound wrote this canto England was divided into an upper class, middleclass (not to be confused with the term as used by Americans) and the lowly working class. Today we are being told of yet another class, and they are found from England to Egypt: the underclass. They are those who see no hope. They are rioting, not for bread, but for i-phones, plasma screen TVs and expensive trainers made by poorly paid Chinese workers. The dialectic of Terrorism is giving way to a new media craze – Pro Democracy, spurred on in an unstable Middle East and North Africa by Twitter, Facebook and CNN. And what do they hope for? Maybe to become the next Greece or Portugal or Ireland, as all their natural resources (real wealth) are safely in the hands of multi-nationals with the banks eagerly standing by to offer the indebted governments, backed with no choice in the matter by the servile taxpaying masses, a series of loans wedded to IMF austerity measures. And has it not occurred to any of them that the same people who supported – both financially and militarily - the harsh dictatorships in their countries, are the same ones urging them on to “assert their rights as free people governed by leaders of their own choice?”

What are you going to do about it? Most people have a noose around their neck and are balanced precariously on a tottering stool. With one slip-up, amounting to two missed pay cheques or a missed welfare cheque, and the stool topples over. People used to avoid the homeless and indigent, ostensibly it was purported, because of the smell, but today, no more so than in major US cities, they hate them. They hate them out of fear that that could be them.

So where are the men of fealty and brotherhood who do not fear for their provision? Where are those that are not duped by a spineless political class chosen by corporate campaign contributors and sold in the media as being “the choice of the people?” And would it not be true that if such men rose up then women of equal courage, or even greater, would stand with them? Just listen to Beethoven’s opera Fidelio.

The age of chivalry seems long passed where a man’s honour precedes his desire for profit. There is a word in Qur’anic Arabic, futuwwah, that is the embodiment of these unique qualities of courage, loyalty and the protection of women’s honour. For those most qualified there is the duty of noblesse oblige, and, according to the most trustworthy and blessed of men, the Prophet Muhammad, what disqualified a person from such office was their seeking it! From where will such people emerge? Certainly, do not look to the Arabs as they do not know what this is, nor do they know the very meanings of the words they use everyday. There is the word dawla, which is to the body politic what the circulatory system is to the human body, but with the flow of blood being replaced by the movement of wealth. Yet they call it State – that sustains the hoarding of static wealth by a few, passed into law by a disgraced political class, typically in the name of the many. They even have a word they call religion whose meaning they have taken from their enemies. The word in Arabic is deen, whose root comes from the word for debt: what you owe. What you owe to your Creator, for He alone has given you life, knowing, seeing and hearing and much more, and also what you owe to other human beings, which are essentially concerned with one’s fiduciary obligations.

I started with Pound and will, therefore, return to him in order to end. Of all the Chinese ideograms, his most treasured was the one of ‘a man standing by his words’: verbal integrity. I too, love that one. Its antonym would describe the stance of today’s political class.

Georgia On My Mind

2011-07-30T23:33:00.001+02:00

Georgia On My Mind

It was my first journey into those great southern states, and while I may have thought of myself as a native New Englander departing from Cambridge, heading to the Faulknerian environs south of the Mason-Dickson Line, imagining I was a reverse (optimistic) image of Quentin Compson (Absalom, Absalom!). A more truthful description would be a seventeen year old Italian-American kid from Boston, hitchhiking, with no money, into a part of the country that was as foreign as any I would later find myself in once I’d crossed the pond and landed in Europe. But we will not get bogged down in mere details, as I’m a writer of ‘political fiction’ not an historian, and therefore, licensed to reinvent – especially myself – something I have been doing for as long as I can remember.

It was the summer of ‘68 and everywhere in America was hot. In the spring of that year Martin Luther King was shot dead on the balcony of a motel he’d been staying at and two months later Bobby Kennedy would be shot at a political rally in California. Tension was high and a lot of people were jumpy. Young black men, with some having done a stint at university, as opposed to the county jail house or a more prestigious maximum security facility, were meeting in Oakland and forming a radical political movement known as the Panthers, while middle class white kids were openly opposing a war in South-East Asia and some, moreover, walking out albeit in the middle of the night, from a secure suburban America to arrive on the streets of Boston, New York and San Francisco. It was a hot summer and people were restless.

One needs to back-up just a few years to better place the summer of 1968 into perspective. In ‘63 when President Kennedy was shot in a motorcade while driving down a street in Dallas Texas, I was in ancient history class, and the name of Nebuchadnezzar is forever etched in my mind. Lyndon Johnson stepped in as president and Robert Kennedy served as his Attorney General for nine months until they broke over their opposing positions on Viet Nam. The Kennedys were Irish Catholics and Boston Democrats, with what some people considered uppity Yankee airs, what with sending their sons to Harvard; while LBJ was a Texan Democrat that grew out of the old-boy system of the hill country with its payoffs, backhanders and political cronyism. Of course, Joe Kennedy got rich with inside tip-offs from the numerous politicians he owned over the timing of the lifting of prohibition and being first in line with cargo ships stocked with Irish whiskey, and was as much of an affront to the old Boston Brahmins (all but extinct before the outbreak of the Second World War) as his oil-rich Texan counterparts. The fact was that Vice-President Johnson, soon to be President Johnson, and his Texan political posse couldn’t stand the Kennedys, while they were obliged to get into bed together to beat the Republicans in the race for the White House.

There is one more bit of background that needs filling in before I can stick my thumb out and start hitching south. In 1968 George Wallace ran, unsuccessfully, for US president. In fact, he made a few runs at the presidency, three times as a Democratic Party candidate and once as an Independent. But it is as Governor Wallace that he is most remembered, four times elected by those people of the State of Alabama, and bulwark of the pro-segregationist position that dominated the entire southern part of the United States. It was 1963 when then Governor Wallace stood on the steps of first, a university, and a few weeks later on the steps of a high school, where a cordon of the National Guard (that’s the army), accompanied by the US Federal Marshal himself, who personally came down from Washington to tell the Governor to step aside, as four black youngsters passed into that school. Later in life, confined as he was to a wheelchair, after being shot and left paralysed, Governor Wallace reversed his position on segregation.

Now it’s too easy to project from hindsight a clear view of something one did not have the slightest clarity on at the time the particular event took place. Since I was at school and could read a book, I declared myself a firm supporter of Thomas Jefferson, who supported State’s right and fervidly opposed private banks taking control of issuing both currency and credit (which was in direct contravention to their Constitution) while on the other hand, I saw little more in Alexander Hamilton, with his fancy signature, than a pawn in the bankers’ pockets, doing their bidding, as the Federal Government would enjoy the noose of private banking interest around their necks. The banks always said that they “supported” a strong Federal Government. Like a rope supports a hanging man? Now it was one hundred years since the American Civil War ended, and with it, to a great extent, the defeat of State’s right over and against an omnipotent Federal Government.

I was adamantly opposed to the war in Viet Nam and would not be drafted, nor would I run. On top of that I had not gotten over the fact that Bill Russell of the Boston Celtics, who in 1959 I saw with my father, with both of us standing on our feet cheering in Boston Garden (now torn down), bring yet another world championship to that city, and was one of my very first real heroes (something I have always taken very seriously) who on three occasions when trying to buy a house with his wife was told by an estate agent that she was so terribly sorry but that the family had decided after all not to sell.

It was the constitutionality of State’s right that vehemently opposed the forced desegregation of southern schools by the Federal Government. I was a very young fellow who, nevertheless, thought he knew everything, without realising how damn little I did know. But the idea that black kids couldn’t attend proper schools with adequate facilities (regardless of my admiration for Thomas Jefferson and his supporting State’s right) was not ever going to be acceptable. It would only be many years later after reading a comment made by William Faulkner that I obtained, partially at least, some long awaited clarity.

Faulkner was the first major author to do what had never been done. He certainly did not romanticise the American Negro, but what he did do was humanise them in a way that was unprecedented. The abolitionists in England were a hundred years ahead in terms of romanticising the ending of the African slave trade. Faulkner, particularly in the novels set in the mythological land of Yoknapatawpha County, superimposed over Lafayette County, Mississippi, created fully developed characters, both men or women, who were coloured people. Some certainly had egregious faults, others had rich and noble qualities and some had tragic flaws comparable to those of characters found in the stories of the ancient Greeks. But they were human beings with all the complexities and contradictions that have made up some of the most memorable characters ever conceived within that vast opus of world literature that has come down through the ages.

There is a collection of short stories called Go Down Moses and one story in particular of the same name. There is a lawyer, Gavin Stevens, who is asked to help bring the grandson of an old Negro woman, a woman whom Gavin had know all his life, back to Mississippi, as he was scheduled to be executed that very evening at midnight in Chicago for the murder of a policeman. There is a sense of such pathos, dignity and courage in this woman. Gavin got a pledge from a Roth Edmonds and another from the local newspaper editor, whom he’d also roped-in, to help pay the cost of the box and the train from Chicago, and “my word flowers!” as well, and, if that weren’t enough, a promise he’d not print the story in the local paper, so that what kin Beauchamp had would not have to read about the execution, and would only be told later that Butch Beauchamp was dead and coming home to Jefferson to be buried. And old Miss Worsham was stronger and more stoic than Hecuba when she mourned her son Hector and her husband, King Priam. “He dead,” she said. “Pharaoh got him.” “Oh yes, Lord,” Worsham said. “Pharaoh got him.” “Done sold my Benjamin,” the old Negress said. “Sold him in Egypt.”

The 1960s Civil Rights Movement latched onto Faulkner and attempted to use his literary notoriety to advance the cause of Northern liberals, with some going so far as to join the March on Selma, while Faulkner was clearly difficult to handle. At one such gathering where he was being honoured as America’s great literary genius he had, as was not too unusual, gotten pretty drunk and said that if there was to be a show-down between the North, who had little or no empathy, nor understanding, of the coloured people, while advocating their ‘rights’ to rise up as long as they kept their distance and didn’t try to move next door (which surely would bring down property values), and the Southern States, who Faulkner believed were directly accountable for the most unconscionable injustice before both God and those Negro people with whom they had so long lived, he would raise the Confederate flag and arm himself against the North. The Yankee do-gooders were beside themselves and Faulkner was out as their literary icon.

The journey that would begin in the North would take me down through Washington D.C. and on to Savannah George where, on a humid late afternoon, I found myself in front of a small local diner. Having done a bit of restaurant work myself, I thought I’d walk around back and just maybe, there would be a young fellow like myself who could possibly get me something to eat from the kitchen without it causing too much of a fuss. I saw a black boy; he looked about my age, some seventeen or eighteen years old, who was scrubbing pots. I can still see him clearly, his face coal black and something gentle in his nature. I approached him, greeted him and then proceeded to tell him that I was hungry. He nodded as if to acknowledge he understood and put down his work and went in through the back screen door of the kitchen.

It was not too long before I saw a matronly white woman walking towards me with the boy I’d spoken to following behind. Damn it, I thought, he sold me out. He went and told the owner there was some long-haired beggar ‘round back aksin’ for food. I never thought, I mean I just didn’t see that in his face and was more shocked by having so misread him than whatever lay ahead from this woman coming straight at me. She motioned to the boy, not at all unkind but with directness, to go back to his work. She took me by the hand and walked me around to the front of the diner and straight in through the front door that made a bell ring every time it opened. She sat me down at a long counter, sitting on one of those round swivel stools and placed a menu in my hands. “Now darl’n, ya’all have whatever you like. You be skinny as a tooth-pick.” Well, I ordered meatloaf with mash potatoes, sweet peas and extra gravy. After that I had a big slice of that famous Georgia pecan pie and a cup of coffee. You could say I’d struck it rich and that there was no more I could want after a meal like that. Now that was real southern hospitality, and me being a Yankee clear as day. And far from selling me out it was the boy from out back that I had as much to thank as the proprietor of that local diner (well before MacDonald’s would put them all out of business). But everything wasn’t fine. My stomach was full but I’d be the worst hypocrite that ever lived if I said I did not enjoy that meal. For there was that sign, the sign in large bold letters that I could not ignore let alone pretend I’d not seen: FOR WHITES ONLY.

The Power Template by Robert Luongo (Dallas College Press 2011) is now available from Amazon Kindle and will be available as a physical printed book in early August from Amazon.com and Create Space. It is a study of Shakespeare’s political plays that discovers corollaries between politically contentious issues within Elizabethan England with themes that were explored through the early English history plays as well as Shakespeare’s Roman plays. The author then views more modern political events, some leading up to today’s current affairs, through the perspective of Shakespeare’s timeless insight into the human motives behind the machinations of what we understand as politics. Nevertheless, the work is far from being a polemical study that marginalises the wit, dexterity and delight of Shakespeare’s language.

THE NIGHT THE SNOW BLEW

2011-02-18T18:14:00.001+02:00

THE NIGHT THE SNOW BLEW

1967, Bridgton Academy, N. Bridgton, Maine

Dedicated to Mr. Freeman Whitney

Dean of Students, Lecturer of Advanced English

A gust of wind, a cloud of snow

I walked to where I do not know

I looked around, I could not see

I wondered now where I might be.

Again I felt the screaming cold

The snow blew higher down the road

And then I felt lost as in a dream

The snow whirls higher, I wished to

scream

I’d been captured in a different

world

Of wind and snow that whirled and

whirled

And then a gust beyond compare

I felt my body in the air

I called, “Oh snow, where am I?”

“You are whirling in the sky.”

I thought that if the snow did not mind

Nor would I, and something beautiful I
might find.

And as I went far and higher,

My body froze, my mind on fire,

I looked around to find the store

But it was not near there anymore.

I looked around to see the school,

Keeping my eyes closed (I’m no fool).

Suddenly the wind came still

A bell, a bell till I reached a hill

That rose up high above the ground,

And there before me I had found

The Academy was all around.

I thought for sure I’d lost my head

So to my room and into bed.

Robert Luongo

The Road Less Travelled By

2011-02-09T16:13:00.000+02:00

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference

Robert Frost

There is something that happens when I make these rare trips (although in recent years less so) back to the States. It was two years ago when I last came, and my itinerary was pretty much the same then as this visit. I remember my final day when departing from JFK in New York to head home to Cape Town, that the inauguration of Barak Obama was visible on every TV screen at the hotel I had stayed at, it appeared on electronic billboards along the route taken by the hotel limousine to my terminal drop-off, and then on all the countless airport video monitors. I distinctly recall the frenetic circus atmosphere, and how impatient I was to board my flight and depart. The Queen of Soul flubbed the lines to one of her most famous songs, Senator Ted Kennedy collapsed and the live televised swearing-in ceremony was incorrectly spoken, and would, for legal reasons, be redone off camera.

‘Change Had Come’ and ‘Yes We Can’ were the hottest tunes moving across the airwaves, while the change that was coming from before day one of the new president’s taking office was a global crash with a magnitude that would rock not only the US but the rest of the world as well, far greater than the famous 9/11 shock. The perpetrators this time were Wall Street bankers, traders in debt credits, sub-prime mortgages, derivatives, futures and a plethora of toxic assets. Unsecured home loans had been handed out like candy, highly inflated real estate ‘values’ were borrowed against, conveniently packaged as home equity loans, with the only rationale being that the balloon would just keep getting bigger and bigger, going up and up. The passenger jet that is the US economy was already into a nosedive when Obama was handed the controls. His immediate response was to put in place a rescue plan for the financial institutions, which came down to passing the controls on to a consortium of the very same individuals who had been directly responsible for the crisis in the first place. So much for change!

Part of the brilliant campaign strategy of Barak Obama was that he would build on establishing the broadest base of voter support since JFK, when in the early 1960’s folks from all over the country mailed off $5 and $10 contributions to the headquarters for the handsome young Democratic candidate. In Obama’s campaign this grass-roots support constituted about 2.5 % of the total amount raised, that total being the largest amount for any presidential candidate in US history, with the shortfall coming from Fanny Mae, Freddie Mac, Lehman Bros. and Goldman Sacs, etc. Well, there you are, and ‘No You Can’t!’

This time, my trip will carry with it a different reminder. The day before I landed at Boston Logan, my mother had been laid to rest in the cemetery in Winchester, Massachusetts. She was 87 and had been ill for a very long time. My son, on his own initiative, had flown out from San Francisco to attend his grandmother’s funeral. He departed from Logan on the morning of the same day that I would later land in Boston.

However cold this may sound, I had (emotionally) laid my folks to rest many years ago. This being said, I have instinctively believed that one must know one’s grandparents, and I have done my best to encourage my son and daughter to do just that. Have they laid me to rest in the same way? That I can not say for sure, but I have held to an implacable resolve that my children be left unfettered to be able to establish their identities for themselves.

I left home at 17, which was forty-four years ago, and have, during those long years, made short visits, sometimes for only a day or two, often separated by intervals of four or five years or more. Once I left I never went home again. I do not consider it remotely possible that I would return to New England to live; it was strikingly clear to me that, in a way, I had all but forgotten that this was the soil (presently buried under a foot and a half of snow) from which I had grown, and these unreserved, often loud, garrulous and not ungenerous people, were my family. While unlike them in many ways they are observably part of who I am. There are ways, despite a carefully cultivated differentness, in which I am a Luongo, and also a Bonaccorso. Recognisable traits appear in both them and me.

The days I spent in the small New England town outside of Boston were expressly to be with my father, who at 94 and having been married to the same woman for 64 years, was visibly shaken. While he appears in the most excellent health, he is not too sturdy on his legs, shuffles a bit, while adamantly refusing to even consider a cane. During the time spent there I also saw my two brothers (one younger by several years and the other two years older), a sister, a bunch of nieces and nephews who, much to my delight, call me Uncle Abdullah, as well as an aunt who is my father’s kid sister by 19 years, and who I haven’t seen in well over forty years. She called me Robert. My father suggested I come over again in early June to turn over the ground in his garden. A bit of hard work! During my first night in New England there was a heavy snow fall and I was awoken by the sound of my father, aged 94 remember, ploughing the drive way. I had no choice but to get up, bundle-up in warm clothes and head outside. With his wry sense of humour he said, “See if one of those snow shovels fits you and do the front steps.”

There are now other men who are in many ways far closer to me than my blood relations, some of whom I have known for forty years, as well as other much younger ones that I have obviously known a relatively shorter time. Nevertheless, this Italian American clan are family and maybe for the first time since I left home all those years ago I was, at long last, at ease with all of them.

The second leg of my trip was out to California to visit children and grand kids. That is something I’ll reserve for my personal diary, uniquely for my pleasure as a parent and a grandparent: unequivocally one of life’s great joys.

Having been in Sonoma County in California for a week, I will stay on another few days before departing, first for Amsterdam where I have a full day and night before continuing on to Cape Town. I will visit the Rijks Museum (I had discovered online that I could catch a world class exhibit of some of the famous Dutch Masters); I also plan on taking myself out to a very good lunch. Maybe I’ll have a swim in the hotel pool and then a good night’s sleep on a proper bed before embarking on the final long leg of my journey back to South Africa.

Postscript

I made it to the Rijks and there was a special exhibition of works by the Dutch master, Gabriël Metsu, as well as numerous pieces by Vermeer and Rembrandt. Apart from the cold, Amsterdam was wonderful!

Nicholas Hytner's Hamlet

2011-01-26T11:37:00.000+02:00

As the director of London’s National Theatre, Nicholas Hytner has produced a politically charged Hamlet, apropos for the 21^st century, with Rory Kinnear delivering a most sympathetic portrayal of the troubled prince. Kinnear’s Hamlet is far from heroic, but rather someone with whom audiences share a sense of empathy as a man very much of our modern age. While wanting to act he feels unsure, frustrated by his inability to do what he believes must be done, he is disempowered within a world in which he believed he was to have had a leading role.

With a play about which so much has been written, and with such memorable performances that accolades for their leading actors comprise a substantive canon of work in their own right, one may wonder what new and meaningful insight any director can bring to the production. We have seen it done by both Olivier and Gielgud, with an on-going debate as to which was the better. There is Kenneth Branagh’s epic four hour (un-cut) film version that is excellent in every way – except, I believe, that Branagh was by then too old to have played the lead in his otherwise brilliant production. An abridged version directed by Michael Almereyda starring Ethan Hawke, where Denmark is a major corporation in the ruthlessly competitive metropolis of New York, and Hamlet’s murdered father is ubiquitously referred to in both the boardroom and within the former CEO’s penthouse as King Hamlet, is likewise, a compelling production. Each of them are of the highest quality and, not withstanding that some have been judiciously cut to fit within a two hour limit, otherwise maintain a scrupulously faithful adherence to Shakespeare’s text. It is, of course, Shakespeare’s language that carries the depth of meanings and extraordinary insights into the human psyche. My personal favourite has long been Sir Richard Burton’s portrayal, which I saw when still at school, where it ended up that the final rehearsal filmed before opening night, with all of the actors in street clothes, that is today considered a classic and has been preserved on film and is available on DVD.

What is of particular interest to me is the manner in which Hytner reveals the deeply political nature of this play and the way in which he is able to portray, in a most efficacious manner, a frighteningly chilling study of realpolitik. Distrust, suspicion and surveillance pervade the entire drama, with the only exception being the relationship between Hamlet and his close friend Horatio. Curiously, despite the excellent performances of the two actors, it is the one significant shortcoming of the production. As is evident from countless films and a plethora of stage dramatisations, neither Hollywood nor the South Bank knows how to portray genuine love between men based on a deep sense of affection, honour and integrity. Either the camaraderie comes off as awkward, too aloof, or that they are simply pals, as in this case; or else, as having to have a homoerotic undercurrent. It is only in Hamlet’s death scene, where Horatio delivers his “Goodnight sweet prince”, that Shakespeare’s perfect choice of phrase enables him to communicate what ought to have been present all along. Likewise, Hamlet asks his friend to remember to tell his story so that future generations should know all of what has happened. This dimension of human existence that embodies noblesse oblige, as well as the tenderness of fraternal love (not necessarily based on a bloodline), appears to exist like a rare species within the great animal kingdom that lies on the verge of extinction.

An undercurrent of political intrigue runs through the play, depicting an atmosphere where government is suspicious of its citizens and citizens highly sceptical of their government, e.g. in “the law’s delay”. It is modern day Britain or France or the USA. It could, for that matter, be Egypt or Tunisia, which recently erupted into chaos and violence. The background of the stage in nearly every scene is canvassed with tall shadowy figures, mostly they are athletically built black men in impeccably tailored dark suits, flawless mannequins, with that conspicuously inconspicuous ear-piece with the wire that runs down the back of the neck and is attached to a tiny microphone clipped to the lapel.

King Claudius’ perfidy could hardly be more despicable as his pusillanimity seems to know no bounds. He keeps enquiring of the prince as to why he persists in his gloomy and difficult temper. His mother too, asks her son to try harder to be more congenial, while Claudius, who is now her husband, says it is unmanly of Hamlet to act in this way. Repeatedly they ask what the matter with him is. They cannot fathom why he persists in carrying-on in the manner in which he does and with his obviously feigned madness, except possibly that his father has been murdered, and in all probability by his uncle who has usurped his brother’s crown (Hamlet’s birthright according to Carl Schmitt in his essay Hamlet oder Hekuba) and, on top of all this, is screwing his mother. Of course, Claudius’ real question is not why, but rather, how much does the prince actually know, and moreover, what might he be planning to do about it?

The air of disingenuousness and distrust is nowhere more pronounced then in the character of Polonius, the personification of the political man, tediously opinionated and obsequious at the same time. He is the true politician. That Polonius is a windbag, despite his so often quoted fatherly advice, “to thine own self be true”, is well established. What this particular portrayal accentuates is the full extent to which he distrusts his own son, itself a terrible betrayal by any father, as well as his equally condescending and disparaging manner of addressing his adult daughter. Nicholas Hytner has lifted the curtain on the unsavoury characters upon the world stage of political events: the modern political class.

Robert Luongo

Latest News: The final draft of The Power Template – Shakespeare’s Political Plays, was completed at the end of September 2010. The arduous task of obtaining a literary agent to advance this work towards publication is carrying on with vigour. I remain optimistic.

Sir Basil and Ezra Pound

2010-09-22T10:09:00.001+02:00

Sir Basil and Ezra Pound

There was a certain Sir Basil Zaharoff, born Zenos Metevsky (1850-1928), who was a munitions magnate with interests in oil, international banking and several newspapers. Zaharoff started off by selling arms for Nordenfeldt and eventually took control of the company and merged with Maxim, who had invented the machine gun. Then in 1913 he took over Vickers-Amstrong, the largest munitions company in Europe, and also held controlling shares in the German company Krupp, which specialised in barbed wire, which would prove extremely useful, as it was needed for in the construction of prison camps. Shortly after the First World War he expanded into South America; this short stanza from Ezra Pound’s Canto XXXVIII bears witness to Zaharoff’s activities there:

Don’t buy until you get ours.

And he went over the boarder

And he said to the other side:

The other side has more munitions. Don’t buy

Until you get ours.

And Akers made a large profit and imported gold into England.

Metevsky, now well known as Basil Zaharhoff, was finally arrested on fraud charges, as he had embezzled huge sums of money from companies in which he held the controlling shares; not unlike our modern day Bernie Madoff. Zaharhoff, being more imaginative, managed to escape, and is reputed to have been sitting in a Wiener Café watching his own funeral after his body had been removed from the back door of the Garbola Prison in Athens that had meant to be holding him. At the time he owned the controlling shares in Humbers, a pseudonym for Vickers, the German based arms company.

With another clip from Pound, this time from Canto XVIII, we will hear from one Mr. Giddings, salesman for Humbers:

“Peace! Pieyce!!” said Mr. Giddings,

“Universal? Not while yew got tew billions ov money,”

Said Mr. Giddings, “invested in the man-u-facture

“Of war machinery…”

The charismatic Sir Basil well preceded the time of the post World War II arms build-up, and the courageous, yet ultimately ineffectual warning of American president Dwight D. Eisenhower, when he made his famous State of the Union address proclaiming the inherent dangers of an unrestrained “military industrial complex” that would view war as far too profitable to be left in the hands of politicians let alone the voting public.

On the eve of the Great War, Zaharhoff was an Englishman in England, and was awarded the Knight Grand Cross, while when in France he was a Frenchman and was raised to be Grand Officier of the Legion d’Honneur. He changed his name and even ended up with an aristocratic title. He changed his religion and was awarded the Order of Jesus Christ of Portugal. The Allied Forces were deeply indebted to the man who had used his immense banking network, together with his vast arms manufacturing empire that stretched across Europe, to facilitate the war effort.

While his newspapers beat the war-drums across all of Europe and the Americas, “EVIL HUN ON THE RISE”, his armaments manufacturing companies were working around the clock to get the world ready for a war that he would personally, together with J. P. Morgan and a handful of others, help finance. It was of no significance that Kaiser Wilhelm II neared desperation in his numerous attempts (including a personal visit to England wearing his British officer’s uniform as a sign of respect) to persuade his grandmother, Queen Victoria, not to go to war with Germany. But the die had been cast as the PM and his cabinet ministers had convinced the Her Majesty that the Empire needed the war to sustain its economic hegemony in Europe, as well as around the world.

After the war Zaharoff moved into the lucrative oil business, and partnering up with British Shell and US Standard Oil, formed joint ventures with the American investment houses Kuhn-Lohb and J.P. Morgan. At the end of his life he bought the Casino of Monte Carlo and married a Bourbon princess. Rising from a modest start as a simple money-changer in his hometown of Salonika, to become one of the most influential men of his time, Sir Basil remains a monument to the unbounded success of a man who could deftly work ‘credit based’ capital creation, together with the fractional reserve system, and tie them into the most lucrative business opportunities of the age.

The international bankers and investment brokers of today seem all too grey and painfully dull compared to Sir Basil and the men of his generation. The Rothschilds, collectively more powerful than Sir Basil, may have bankrupted European aristocracy, and impoverished a continent, but then they did give back numerous art museums and opera houses. I suppose with all that wealth one needs some culture and entertainment. Who knows, maybe Bernie will make a daring escape. The one thing I admire about him is that with the huge sum of fifty-something billion USDs he did not put it back into derivative products and stocks. He knew better. Bernie Madoff bought real estate, gold reserves, luxury yachts and priceless works of art.

All these years later we can still hear the strong cadence of Ezra Pound as his poem echoes across that immense divide between the oligarchs of today and the rest of the world’s population. From the powerful Usury Canto, XLV:

“With usura hath no man a house of good stone

each block cut smooth and well fitting,

that design may cover their face”.

“...with usura, sin against nature,

is thy bread ever more of stale rags

is thy bread dry as paper,

with no mountain wheat, no strong flour

with usura the line grows thick

with usura is no clear demarcation

and no man can find site for his dwelling”.

“Usura rusteth the chisel

It rusteth the craft and the craftman

It gnaweth the thread in the loom”.

“Usura slayeth the child in the womb

It stayeth the young man’s courting

It hath brought palsey to bed, lyeth

between young bride and her bridegroom

CONTRA NATURAM”

Robert Luongo teaches Shakespeare and Rhetoric at Dallas College in Cape Town, established in 2005 as a college of leadership under the aegis of Shaykh Dr. Abdalqadir as-Sufi.

The Tip of the Iceberg By Robert Luongo

2010-08-11T17:58:00.001+02:00

Events took place in Iceland earlier this year that directly put the country‎'s citizenry in direct opposition to their elected officials in regards to the liability incurred for the failure of the Icelandic Bank. In the aftermath, it is most exigent that the story, conspicuously dropped from the designated headlines of what is newsworthy, and therefore presented to the general public, be re-opened. The citizens of that country created a referendum by acquiring the requisite number of signatures, which was then voted upon by them. By an overwhelming majority vote they have prohibited their government to bailout the Icelandic Bank in order to repay the people or associations (many of which were local councils in the UK, such as the Norwich City Council) who had invested large sums in high yield 'financial products' on offer at various Icelandic financial institutions.

One of these products involved investment in derivatives on the futures markets for fish, something in abundance in the waters around Iceland, which were first monetised then securitised, while not yet caught but, arguably, an available asset - swimming about in the North Atlantic.

Why should the Icelandic citizens have to pay? They do not own the bank, as it is like most banks, a privately owned company; nor did they tell the investors to put their savings in them. This places the government in a terrible bind as they cannot possibly obey both 'the will of the people´ and the demands of the international financial establishment. While the people have clearly spoken, government is unable to hear. Will little Iceland be added to the Axis of Evil? Jeremy Paxton has made statements on British television indicating that the people of Iceland are violating the peace and security of British citizens. So much for a free and independent media!

What took place at the Icelandic Bank was certainly not an anomaly and as we are all aware has been replicated in nearly every major bank around the world. In addition to the wildly lucrative derivatives market, were the practices that precipitated the collapse of the sub-prime housing market in the US, as well as the failure of the home equity market based upon inflated 'values' against which endless new loans were made, pumping more and more new money into the market at the expense of the existing currency already in circulation.

That the system of usury-capitalism has collapsed upon itself cannot be viewed as a shock, as it has visibly been spiralling out of control for decades. What can be seen as shocking is that a perfidious world media is so obdurate in its attempt to persuade us not only that it can be, but that it is being patched-up as we speak.

There is, clear across the world, a total failure of the political class who are no more than mannequins dressed up as people in power. Ideological differences fade away with communist China as the number one supplier of the capitalist world's supermarkets, and the Arab leaders of what is referred to as the 'Oil Rich Gulf States' rush like lemmings head-long over the cliff of disaster as they continue to follow those they so obsequiously strive to imitate. Dubai World, much to the delight of the banking fraternity, needed to be rescued from the very brink of bankruptcy. The political class, in actuality, have no power, as has been made abundantly clear by their servile adherence to the dictates of financial institutions. This is the world we live in today.

But what about little Iceland, now overshadowed and all but forgotten as Greece takes centre stage, to be followed, we are told, by Portugal and most likely Spain?

Let's back-up a little before seeing if we can pick up the thread of Iceland's current malaise. According to Gudn Adalsteinsson, managing director of Kaupthing Treasury Department in Reykjavik, Shares in HBOS and Barclays plummeted in value following the collapse of Lehman Brothers investment bank in New York. This prompted many investors, many of which were other banks, to move their funds to the banks of Iceland, believing that they could, for the moment, avert disaster.

As of January 2010 there are literally hundreds of cases lodged in Iceland's high court on the legality of forced liability for the collapse of the 'old Icelandic banks'. Meanwhile, droves of British taxpayers are up in arms insisting that the money lost in the Icelandic banks be reimbursed to the British Government that had to step in to cover the losses of British banks that were left exposed by the failure of the banks in Iceland that now will have to be covered by the UK taxpayers. Meanwhile the 'new' Icelandic banks, nearly entirely owned by European banks such as the Royal Bank of Scotland and several of Germany's largest banks are, according to a July report, faced with yet another looming crisis.

Financial authorities in Reykjavik have been scrambling for the past two weeks to work out the implications of a landmark Supreme Court judgment outlawing car loans indexed to foreign exchange rates.

Gunnar Andersen, director of the Financial Supervisory Authority, told the Financial Times that Icelandic banks faced "deep trouble" if the verdict was applied to all forms of consumer and corporate credit linked to foreign currencies. The court decision has been described as one of the most important events in Iceland since the 2008 bank crash, potentially reducing the repayment burden on thousands of households holding foreign-indexed debt while threatening the financial system with renewed turmoil.

The court ruled that car loans paid out and collected in Icelandic krónur but indexed to foreign currencies violated laws designed to protect borrowers from exchange rate risks.

Recalling that we began with a massively supported referendum vote by the Icelandic electorate, its first national referendum since 1944, in the attempt to block their government from subjecting the people of Iceland to the burden of debt incurred by private banks, only to discover that the voice of the people fell onto deaf ears, now their judiciary is attempting to make a stand against the oligarchs of world banking.

What is now abundantly clear is that the system of modern liberal democracy was put in place to serve the requirements of the financial sector. Both have failed, both are disgraced.

Since the current disaster emanated from the epicentre of the failed New York investment houses, it is appropriate to go back to that nation's founding 'framers' of what is referred to as the world's greatest democracy.

"I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. Already they have raised up a moneyed aristocracy that has set the government at defiance. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs."

"If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered." (Thomas Jefferson)

Needless to say, Jefferson's warnings could not be heeded, as the very premise upon which US constitutional law was founded opened the door, whether wittingly or unwittingly, to what became the inevitable outcome: that the banks would take over. This is a case for the prosecution that can never go to trial, and while the turmoil we are witnessing is exceedingly alarming, it may very well be only the tip of the iceberg.

Robert Luongo is a lecturer of Shakespeare & Rhetoric at Dallas College in Cape Town. He is the author of The Gold Thread – Ezra Pound's Principles of Good Government & Sound Money (1995) and The Power Template – Shakespeare's Political Plays, scheduled for release in January 2011.

Radical Muslim Leader has Bohemian Past

2010-06-14T14:15:00.002+02:00

The 20 February 2010 edition of the Telegraph, and their on-line version, telegraph.co.uk, both ran an article entitled: Radical Muslim leader has past in swinging London. According to the Telegraph, the author and playwright Ian Dallas, who in the 1960s was purported to have been part of the hip London scene, had since become a “Radical Muslim” going by the name of Abdalqadir as-Sufi, and was now “The leader of an extreme Muslim group”. As someone with firsthand knowledge, who has known Shaykh Dr. Abdalqadir as-Sufi for forty years, I would like to take some of the most salient points raised in the Telegraph article as a springboard to offer the public a more balanced and informative introduction to a most fascinating and politically significant contemporary figure.

Ian Dallas is more accurately of the 1950s generation, as he was born in Ayr Scotland in 1930. He had already achieved both recognition and success as a playwright and author prior to the 1960s. He did once tell me that he had, as a young man, driven through the streets of Paris in a Rolls Royce, with Edith Piaf.

As the Telegraph mentions, Ian Dallas did, indeed, know Edith Piaf as well as Eric Clapton, to whom he did, in fact, give a copy of the beautiful love story, Layla and Majnun. However, this was nothing to do with Eric’s love affair with Pattie Boyd (the wife of Eric’s best friend, George Harrison) but rather, the terrible tragedy connected to the death of Eric’s son. The metaphorical tale tells of the all-consuming longing of a youth named Majnun (a word whose literal Arabic meaning is one possessed) for the love of his life, Layla (night in Arabic) who, in the coded language of the Sufis, stands for Allah as the Beloved.

As I only met Ian Dallas (or Shaykh Abdalqadir, as I have long been accustomed to refer to him) in 1970, I did not meet all of these people, although George Harrison would send over his driver with a large hamper of ‘goodies’ from Fortnum & Mason at the start of the New Year. I sat with Shaykh Abdalqadir when his friend from university, the celebrated psychiatrist R.D. Laing came by to meet him. Laing had just returned from India where he had gone with his wife to meet a guru. His wife had stayed on and moved in with the ‘spiritual master’. Needless to say, Ronald was very upset, and as I recall, not too impressed with Eastern Mysticism.

I was also present when Shaykh Abdalqadir had invited Fritjof Capra, the rising star in the world of nuclear physics, over for tea. The Shaykh’s wife, Zulaikha, had baked a plate of millefeuille. Capra had possibly just published The Tao of Physics. Over tea he explained his latest idea, which he called the ‘boot-strap theory’. Science was not my strong point, so all I can recall is that the image of the loops commonly used to pull on a certain kind of boot, were somehow being offered as a metaphor to convey his basic idea of how ‘matter came into existence’. Shaykh Abdalqadir listened very carefully, and here I remind you that he was, and still is, the most brilliant mind in Europe. He then said, “I think I’ve got it, except for the exact point at which the entire plate of French pastries disappeared and matter came into being.” Naturally, Capra was mortified, as he had not till that moment, realised he had eaten the entire plate of millefeuille. I too was most disappointed! Nevertheless, I do remember, as if it were only yesterday, the realisation from this episode that self-knowledge is over and above all other sciences. Dr. Capra is undoubtedly a brilliant physicist and this incident is in no sense intended to infer otherwise.

There are countless anecdotes, from Ian Dallas giving Bob Dylan his first copy of Rimbaud’s poems, to the wonderful story that appears in his Collected Works of how he had an acute attack of appendicitis while visiting friends on Martha’s Vineyard, and had to be rushed to hospital. He tells of a large warm-hearted nurse with a shining black face, who said one day, while he was sitting-up reading, “My grandfather caught Moby-Dick!” The nurse then told him that a very kind lady had come every day and sat in the room while he rested, and then left the books for him to read. The woman was Lillian Hellman, the American dramatist whose works include the hugely popular Little Foxes (1939), and was married to the famous writer, Dashiell Hammett, whose stories were at the centre of the Film Noir movement in Hollywood.

As is recounted in Ian Dallas - Collected Works, Hellman and Hammett were both ruthlessly persecuted by Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Witch Hunts. Mr Dallas quotes the entire speech made by Lillian to the House Committee on Un-American Activities. I will never forget the impact it made on me after reading this speech to realise that this same great woman had sat everyday at the bedside of a young intellectual called Ian Dallas who, in the fullness of time, I would also meet and come to know and admire as Shaykh Dr. Abdalqadir as-Sufi.

Returning to the Telegraph article, it goes out of its way to reveal that Shaykh Abdalqadir’s teachings are said to include the claim that, “movies and football degrade the proletariat.” I am pleased to confirm, for the record, that Shaykh Abdalqadir is an aficionado of cinema and possesses a vast DVD film collection. He recently sent over to my house a copy of the French film ‘A Prophet’ directed by Jacque Audiard. He considers it one of the best films recently made. I can also confirm, as the Telegraph states, that he did, as Ian Dallas, act in Fellini’s 8 ½, but far more interesting is the fact that he re-wrote the ending of the film, the wondrous ‘dance of life’, which ends the film. The version we all know today is, of course, Fellini’s ending; he took it and made it his. The ending opens the way - after the total failure of a film director to fulfil the expectations imposed upon him - to give up and surrender, even his greatness. That is where the film ends, but it is also, in truth, where the real story begins.

As for football, it is true that he dislikes it, together with the increasingly unsavoury tendencies from which it has become inseparable. He is rather an avid rugby fan and is almost a fanatic when it comes to cricket, especially five-day test matches. He sees in the game of cricket a means by which young men can develop good character. He does attend, from time to time, at Newlands cricket ground in Cape Town, a match in order to enjoy the game in the company of his choosing.

The Telegraph also makes mention of one of his plays acted in by Albert Finney, and another starring the late Sir Alan Bates. All this is true, but what about comments in the paper that he is a, “radical Muslim leader” and also, “the leader of an extremist Muslim group”? Putting aside his “bohemian past”, as it was referred to, what about his radical change and his espousal of an extreme interpretation of Islam? The quantity of evidence to the contrary contained in Shaykh Abdalqadir’s writings, both published and non-published, is so vast that, like the Telegraph, I too shall have to be extremely selective in my choice of observations. However, contrary to the Telegraph, whose sparse and tenuous claims seem to be dictated by negative bias and cheap sensationalism, my own primary concern will be to avoid over-burdening the reader with the sheer weight of bona fide material available to me. Before I continue, I should also, for the sake of clarity, remind the reader that Shaykh Abdalqadir continues, on occasion, to write under his Scottish family name of Ian Dallas.

There is The Book Of Strangers, published in 1972, a novel that is about the search for knowledge and the awakening to Islam told in the form of a semi-autobiographical parable (Pantheon Books). There is Letter To An African Muslim (1981), which helped inspire a whole generation of South Africans to enter Islam at a time when apartheid still restricted the options available to most blacks. Shaykh Abdalqadir was the only white European who could freely walk the streets of Soweto, although the Apartheid regime banned both him and his book.

There is Root Islamic Education, first published in Norwich in 1982 and re-released in 1993, in London. This text is based firmly on the soundest and irrefutable classical Islamic texts that have come down to the Muslims throughout the centuries. There is the Technique of the Coup de Banque, published in Spain in 2000, which takes as its thematic corollaries Machiavelli’s Renaissance classic Il Principe (The Prince) and Curzio Malpararte’s 1931 masterwork Technique Du Coup D’État. Unfortunately, it is beyond the scope of this article to give an adequate appraisal of the invaluable contributions these books have made in furthering the understanding of their respective subject matters. However, Technique of the Coup de Banque is one with which I have had a special connection.

Travelling from his base in the Scottish Highlands, Shaykh Abdalqadir made an extended visit to Cape Town in early 2001. I had already moved from Scotland to Cape Town a few months prior to this in anticipation of what we all hoped would lead to his permanent move to the city. Whilst there, he had the opportunity to overhear a conversation in a local bookstore between two young men, both of whom were University of Cape Town students. One was relating that he had heard that there was a Shaykh visiting from Europe who sounded very interesting, and that he hoped somehow to meet him. Hence, with the refined courtesy and habitual discretion which have long distinguished him, Shaykh Abdalqadir approached the student and prudently ventured, “I believe you wanted to meet me.” The next day the young man, extremely gregarious and outgoing by nature, came to have morning coffee at the house the Shaykh was renting.

Shaykh Abdalqadir did, in fact, return to the Highlands but it had become clear that a move was imminent. Therefore, in preparation for this I was asked by our local Muslim Community leader, Orhan Wadvalla, to start an evening class based on Technique of the Coup de Bank. The UCT student he had met in the bookshop, and several of his friends, some Muslims and some not, were invited to come along to a weekly reading, which was held at my small cottage in Newlands. These sessions were dynamic and exciting and soon increased to twice a week. As I did not yet have any bookcases we were surrounded by stacks of books; reading, discussing and drinking espressos, while I rummaged around for Plato’s Republic or whatever other text the Shaykh may have indicated, that I knew to be somewhere in my ‘library’, and on we went!

A few months later Shaykh Abdalqadir moved to Cape Town and I had by then assembled a good group of young guys, the one non-Muslim had become Muslim, and some basic ground work had been done to prepare these dynamic men to sit with and benefit from the Shaykh’s generosity. They were all healthy young men, interested in what most young people their age are interested in, but they had also acquired an appetite for real knowledge, and whatever you really want out of life, you’ll get!

From that first group new ones have come. Most of those men are now married and have started families of their own. All of them, without exception, are more advanced on the path to knowledge than myself, but I was privileged to have, by the Generosity of Allah, the opportunity to play a part in this phase of their education. The one last thing I want to mention about this particular text is that everything that Shaykh Abdalqadir spoke of has come to pass. The financial crisis of 2008-2009, which continues to worsen into 2010 as I write, was laid bare in his brilliant exposition. With rare exceptions, only a few have listened, certainly not the so-called leaders of the Muslim World. Nevertheless, the number of those taking notice of Shaykh Dr. Abdalqadir as-Sufi continues to grow day by day.

There is the Ian Dallas book, Time of the Bedouin (2006) - on the politics of power, and also his latest publication Political Renewal (2009) which by juxtaposition in one volume of two exceptionally penetrating essays, produces a devastating historical survey of the relentless degeneration that has characterised the British political class and its social and constitutional apparatus over the last century and more: The End of the Political Class by Ian Dallas and Hilaire Belloc’s The House of Commons and Monarchy (1920).

There is the series of four books by Shaykh Dr. Abdalqadir as-Sufi, that were all composed from lectures given in a Cape Town mosque: The Book of Tawhid [Unity of Allah] 2004, The Book of Hubb [Love of the Divine] 2007, The Book of ‘Amal [Behaviour] 2008 and finally The Book of Safar [Travel] 2008. Imagine one of those Hollywood post-apocalyptic fantasies; the world has been all but totally destroyed, and you, say a young black man, happens to rescue a copy of the Qur’an from a heap of burning rubble, and then after many a close call, you produce an act of heroism that saves the life of a pretty blond headed girl on the point of despair, whose only worldly possessions happen to be these four slim texts. It turns out that this incredible encounter contains all that is needed as the basis for recovery of civilised human society; an interesting gene pool and ready access to Divine guidance and useful knowledge. They are simple yet utterly profound texts that, based upon the love and knowledge of our Prophet Muhammad, Allah grant him blessings and peace, can, with the Qur’an, be all you would need to start anew.

There are more books and countless anecdotes and taped discourses. When I am fortunate to be invited to his house for lunch, he often, while waiting eagerly for the meal to be announced, recites whole passages from Shakespeare, or the opening of Elliot’s The Waste Land or W. H. Auden or W. B. Yeats, replete with an Irish accent. He has a library of some several thousand books, some in English, French and Arabic, an extensive collection of classical music CDs, and I have already mentioned his film collection. He is mostly surrounded by men who are all the very brightest young people you could ever wish to meet. The Shaykh is the master. Most of all, he has guided a whole generation to knowledge of Allah and a deep understanding of the practice of Islam. To sit in his company is an honour and you learn things even without realising it.

Robert Luongo, Lecturer in Shakespeare & Rhetoric at Dallas College in Cape Town

An Improper Bostonian

2010-06-04T09:21:00.001+02:00

It has been pointed out to me by several people that A Boston Brahmin in New Mexico, an article I wrote for my blog in May, left them wanting to hear more, what happened next. The story does indeed continue, although this is not the moment for me to tell it. Suffice it to say that I continued on to California and that while travelling west I met a young fellow about my age heading east. He gave me the address of a person who he described as his teacher, the playwright and poet, Daniel Moore, who is today better known as Daniel Abdalhayy Moore. I did reach California and went to the address in Berkeley. Daniel, who some years earlier had formed a radical ‘street theatre’ called the Floating Lotus Magic Opera Company, invited me to stay as his guest... It must have been early June 1970 and still a few months prior to my 21^st birthday.

In the meantime, while sitting in a café in Tangiers, the highly accomplished playwright (he had already several BBC productions to his credit) and author, Ian Dallas, had read in the Rolling Stone about this unusual theatre troupe whose plays were a bizarre mixture of Anti-Viet Nam protest and Tibetan Buddhism. He made the firm intention that should his new screenplay be accepted by one of the Hollywood studios, he would visit these people.

Within a month of my arrival in Berkeley a telegram arrived from Mr Dallas, who was then in Los Angeles, saying that he would very much like to pay Daniel and his theatre group a visit. Using the phone number that had been included with the message, Daniel keenly welcomed him to come. You could say that I was only there by chance, as I had no connection to the other people living in the house.

I do recall Daniel being asked if his theatre was still performing, to which he answered that it wasn’t. He told Mr Dallas that he was presently reading the works of Rumi. I was sitting by the phone while this conversation was taking place, so I saw Daniel put his hand over the phone and say: “He says that he knows everything about Rumi.”

I had begun to feel that I had stayed with these strange people, actors and musicians, long enough, so was about to leave. I had just seen Fellini’s Satyricon at the cinema and was ready to distance myself from the macabre company of the Eastern mystics who inhabited this large Victorian house. Nevertheless, I decided to hold on another week to meet this stranger.

It was a memorable first encounter and the source of many an amusing anecdote, as I was the driver on the day Daniel and I went to the San Francisco Bus Terminal to collect his guest. Our vehicle was the infamous ‘animal car’ (a mobile art project by an Berkeley art student) that was a 1955 Chevy covered in animal fur and without any seats, but instead contained large cushions covered in Indian fabric for the passengers to sit upon. As the driver, I sat on a raised mushroom so that I could at least see the road ahead of me. Even so, there was no way I was going to spot what was coming around the next corner.

Firstly, considering that I was the one person who wasn’t actually meant to be there, I soon embraced Islam by this stranger’s hand. Secondly, I remain indebted to him for everything I have learnt, one way or another, over the intervening forty years as a student of a man I consider the greatest intellect of this age. Of course, some of you will know that our stranger, the celebrated writer, Ian Dallas, is better known today as Shaykh Dr. Abdalqadir as-Sufi.

Well, there‘s the story I started off by saying I wasn’t going to tell. I must conclude that the Islam we were taught was that of the sound teachings of the Prophet Muhammad, may Allah bless him and grant him peace. I did not join a Sufi group. My culture is that of Western Civilization and my love of literature and classical music is part of my cultural heritage. My religion is Islam.

Robert Luongo

Pablo's Portrait by Luqman Nieto

2010-06-01T15:52:00.001+02:00

Luqman Nieto is a second year student at Dallas College in Cape Town. He was born in Seville Spain and acquired his early education at the Medrassa Mawlana Muhammad Wasany in Majorca. When he completed his studies in Majorca he had achieved the qualification of Hafiz, having recorded the entire Qur’an to memory by heart. Interspersed with his studies he and all the boys attending the medrassa practiced archery, horseback riding and swimming and sailing in the summer months. At the age of nineteen Luqman moved to Cape Town, quickly improved his English and in 2009 entered Dallas College. I am very proud to present this short story by an outstanding student.

The following short story is a dramatization based upon an anecdote that Ernst Jünger, the celebrated German soldier and poet, who served as an officer in both World Wars, told to Julien Hervier and was recorded in Hervier’s book The Details of Time, Conversations with Ernst Jünger. Jünger was the only high ranking German officer known to have been complicit in the failed attempt on Hitler’s life who was not executed by the Führer. He remains the most highly decorated soldier in all of German history. Jünger refused to be subjugated to the de-nazification process imposed by the Americans after the war, as he insisted that while he fought to defend his country, he never joined nor was he part of the Nazi Party. Jünger died at the age of 103 and is the author of numerous books, essays and articles that were published during his lifetime. His highly acclaimed Storm of Steel is considered: ‘One of the most striking accounts of the First World War’ (Richard Holms, Evening Standard).

Robert Luongo, Dallas College lecturer of Shakespeare & Rhetoric

t was a clear and fresh morning of winter. The sun had finally come to pay us a visit after a long absence. The streets of Paris smelled like a shirt that had just been washed and hung in the sun. Nadia was walking with her light and gentle pace, almost trotting like a young colt that has been locked up for too long and finally re-discovers the pleasures of running in freedom. I could hardly keep up without looking too ridiculous behind her.

I met Nadia a morning like this one in Saint Germain des Prés. While I was having a shot of espresso in the Café Fleurs, she was drawing in an artist’s sketchbook, a small detail of a beautiful corner. With precise and short movements, acquired by her impeccable Russian classical technique, Nadia was capturing the essence of that corner in that precise moment. But I did not know her name yet. All I knew was that while she was observing the corner and capturing the moment I was observing her and becoming her captive.

After the first espresso I asked for a second one, and after the second for a third. I did not want to disturb the girl who was drawing but I could not leave without saying anything to her. By the time of the fourth espresso it had become a matter of proving to myself that I could do it. Not that I had bad luck with women, actually I would say that it was rather good, they found me awkwardly handsome and rather charming - even though I never thought I was any of those things - but there was something in that girl, which was terribly challenging. Later on I would come to know her name was Nadia. She looked like a Russian princess, with long brown hair, big green eyes and marble-like sculpted features. She was not particularly pretty, as her mouth was a little big and so were her eyes, and her nose a little small, but everything put together had a special enchantment.

She was wrapped in a distant air, perhaps a bit cold, like the fresh breeze that was blowing through the terrace of the Café de Fleurs that sunny morning of winter. But what attracted me more than anything were her hands; the long thin fingers with a darkish colour at their tips, which revealed to me that what she was doing was not merely a casual moment of inspiration but a profession. The bones which revealed themselves through the skin and the light blue veins were all in perfect balance. Her hands were like the violins in a complex piece of classical music, the accents of the melody that was her face, and all accompanied by a perfect atonal harmony that was her body. If Prokofiev were to see her he would have composed the most beautiful yet dissonant piano concerto.

Suddenly she closed her notebook, organized her pencils in a small leather case and stood up. She took a long breath and I contained mine. She turned, looked around and her glance favoured me before she walked straight to the table where I was.

Before I could even realise what was happening, she was sitting in front of me and had ordered a coffee. All of that distant look had completely disappeared and gave place to a warm friendly smile. I was shocked. The kind of shock that happens when something you imagine doing suddenly dislodges from the realm of imaginations to the realm of reality, and you have to face it.

Nadia arrived a couple of years ago in Paris. She came from a bourgeois family of Moscow where she had learnt the art of painting miniatures. Her mother was part of the old aristocracy and her father a successful business man. By 1920, following the Russian Revolution, her mother foresaw the worsening of things in Russia, and so decided to send her daughter to Paris where Nadia could continue developing her talent as a painter under the careful supervision of a very good friend of her mother.

Nadia talked and I listened. She seemed like someone who had been alone for a long time and suddenly found someone with whom she could talk. From time to time she would stop and ask me a few things - which I answered as quickly and as short as possible - before carrying on as if what I had said did not really matter. I was delighted.

When I started to know her better after that first encounter, I learnt that she was like that; she would remain in silence immersed in her thoughts and would hardly speak for what seemed an eternity, and then she would emerge out of that world of hers and talk as if there was not enough time to say everything she wanted to say. Every period of silence resulted in some master piece of painting and after every period of talking I would have the most beautiful and profound lines to put in the mouth of the heroine of my latest piece of writing.

Once I asked her why she choose my table and why she sat with me that day at the café. She answered: “When I finished my painting that day and I stood up I felt like someone who had been travelling alone for a long time and when he gets back to the place from where he left he needs someone who will listen to all his stories of the journey. I looked around and the only face I saw that I could trust was yours. So I went to your table and I talked to you”.

When I finished my fifth espresso and she her first one we left the Café de Fleurs and I walked her home. Her pace that day was the same light and gentle trot that moved her through the streets of Paris that warm winter morning.

We were going to see a well known painter who was spending some time in Paris. Nadia knew him from, as she said, a random casual meeting arranged by destiny. She was painting a view of a popular café in the city, where the ordinary people usually sit, with a vivid detailed surrealism, and he passed by. He stood behind her for a long time while she did not notice it, for when she painted she was habitually unaware of what was going on around her except for that which she was painting. He admired her work, especially her amazing technique and her eye for detail. When he knew that she was from Russia he invited her to help him with a work he was doing for Diaghilev and the Russian Ballet. His name was Picasso.

When we arrived at Picasso’s house in the street of the Grands-Augustines she knocked at the door. Olga, Picasso’s wife, opened for us and Nadia, after introducing me, began a lively conversation with Olga in Russian. Olga was a ballet dancer that Picasso met while working for Diaghilev and she and Picasso got married in 1918.

A little child of about six years old came running and passed by my side without noticing me. When he saw Nadia he ran to her and she received him with open arms speaking to him in Russian with a mellow voice. He laughed and begun to talk mixing words from French, Russian and Spanish with such ease that I would have assumed it to be only one language.

Pablo, the son of Picasso and Olga, pulled Nadia without leaving her hand to the studio where his father was working. Nadia looked at me and told me with her eyes to follow them. From what I could understand, Pablo was saying his father had just finished a portrait of him and Pablo wanted Nadia to see it.

The four of us went into Picasso’s studio. The studio was a large square room with two big windows facing the street at one end of the room. The windows had no curtains and the light of the sun entered through them illuminating the whole room. Picasso was facing the wall opposite the windows with the easel in front of him and all his paints, brushes and pencils on the side. There were paintings leaning against the four walls of the room, some were finished and others were unfinished, revealing the intentions of the painter and how they developed and changed through the process of painting.

Picasso was a man in his forties of normal height and constitution with small piercing eyes. Under his apron, which had so many spots of paint that the original colour was un-recognizable, he was wearing an elegant shirt and a tie. He greeted Nadia kindly and Nadia introduced me to him. Picasso looked at me with the eyes of someone who is used to seeing the true essence of the world around him and who is then able to capture that essence in paint. And then he smiled at me and his eyes seemed to change colour, from a dark brown to a light sand one, like the earth when it is dry and has a light brown colour and then it rains and the brown becomes dark, but in reverse.

Nadia and Picasso talked about the portrait of his son while the living subject of it was running around trying to capture everyone’s attention. He probably felt that he was more important than his fake copy. Nadia and Picasso commented on the details of the painting talking about the strokes of the painter and the chromatic scale of colours he had used. For anyone who, like me, did not paint, it was almost as if they were speaking another language, Chinese for example. Soon my attention was captured by the rest of the paintings leaning against the walls, and then by Pablo himself, who was happy to finally have seized someone’s attention and was doing his best not to lose it.

Olga had gone out of the studio and her voice came to us calling Pablo. Pablo left the studio and Nadia, who suddenly felt a rush to ask Olga for the meaning of some Russian word in French, followed the child. Without really wanting to, because his presence overwhelmed me a little, I found my self alone with Picasso.

Picasso came closer to me. I was looking at the portrait trying to find something to say that would not reveal my almost complete ignorance of the subject when he looked at me and smiled. Sensing my predicament he said: “Don’t worry, I actually don’t like it”.

Picasso went to the painting and lifted it off the easel. With the painting in his hands he turned to me and said: “This painting would have a certain effect, but that effect would be exactly the same one, in the metaphysical meaning of it, if I would wrap it in paper and abandon it in a corner. It would be exactly the same as if ten thousand people would have admired it”.

Picasso put the painting on the easel again and went to join his wife, son and Nadia in the kitchen where Olga had prepared some coffee.

I stayed there, looking at the portrait of little Pablo, thinking about the casual tone of the words that Picasso had just uttered, rendering them even more shocking to me, until Nadia’s voice dragged me out of my state and rushed me to the kitchen before the coffee could get cold.

The Power Template

2010-05-26T14:45:00.001+02:00

Introduction

The Power Template

Shakespeare’s Political Plays

In 2004 a small private college was established in Cape Town South Africa. It was to be a college of leadership, a place where young people of all races who had a sufficient capacity and desire to want to excel, to take on responsibility to make a new kind of world, could come to be educated. It was not for those vast masses that only see education as a means for getting a job. The syllabus was based upon contemporary as well as classical geo-political studies, history – from Roman history through to the end of the 20^th century, bio-politics – the study of key people whose lives had an impact on their time and place in the world, then languages, and lastly fencing to cultivate noble character. It was a paideia for the 21^st century designed to produce new men. The founder of the college was Shaykh Dr. Abdalqadir as-Sufi, whose Scottish family name of Dallas became the name of this place of learning, unique in this time, yet seeking continuity in the historical model of the great Mogul and Ottoman centres of higher education.

At the inception of Dallas College I was invited to teach Shakespeare & Rhetoric, an area of world literature in which I was excited about furthering my knowledge. I was informed that the focus was to be Shakespeare’s History and Roman Plays. These plays, more so than all the others, but not exclusively so, are his political plays. I was introduced to a handful of books that I promptly ordered and which soon arrived in South Africa. There was the Essential Shakespeare Handbook, which became our basic text-book. The others were Frank Kermode’s The Age of Shakespeare and his Language of Shakespeare. There was an excellent biography by René Weis and W.H. Auden’s Lectures on Shakespeare that was derived from a lecture series he gave in Greenwich Village in 1946-47, that I was thrilled with. Then there was Jonathan Bate’s The Genius of Shakespeare and more recently his newest book, Soul of the Age, simply the best book I have ever read on Shakespeare. It is a masterpiece and I am convinced that Bate is today the preeminent Shakespearian scholar. As I continued with my lectures new books were added, many of which I will mention in the course of this study.

There are two unequivocal characteristics to this or any study of Shakespeare’s plays. The first is that you are exposed to the highest expression of the English language. It delights and excites the mind in a way that once you have tasted it your hunger only grows as you discover more of this living, pulsating language that is the very means through which meanings are communicated and shared by human beings. With extraordinary wit and a generosity of humour and humanity, Shakespeare has written characters that are as much alive today as they were four hundred years ago when he wrote them. The second characteristic, more specific to the actual plays that are covered within this book, is that they transmit an understanding of the dynamics of human politics: the play for power, position and influence that has been an unfolding drama as far back as history has been recorded.

What occurs in my lectures, and is replicated in the text that is presented here, is my attempt to awaken a curiosity and concern not only about the age of Shakespeare, which holds a very important place in our world view, but also the age we live in now. There are, therefore, numerous excursions as we move from 14^th or 15^th century England to the exigency of the early 20^th century negotiations that preceded the outbreak of the First World War. We move quite freely from Prince Hal in Henry IV Part I and II (who, portrayed as a profligate prince who neglected his duties at Court, emerged through a series of life experiences that were the means by which his character was forged into the heroic Henry V) – and then on over to King Hasan II of Morocco who in his youth was dubbed by the French press as ‘The Playboy Prince’. King Hasan was under a constant barrage of attack, from both within his own inner circle as much as from outside forces, to sell off his country’s vast mineral wealth. Not unlike Hal, the king matured and was steeled into a sober and astute ruler who held fast the reins of leadership and preserved his country from the rapacious greed of disloyal subjects and foreign invaders.

There are digressions and forays into a multitude of current political affairs that find scope within Shakespeare’s vast landscape which serves as a setting for the machinations of human politics that drive the action of world events.

From English history to ancient Rome, we have the backdrop that allowed Shakespeare to portray the whole world within that Wooden ‘O’, the original Globe Theatre. It is, therefore, my intention through this exploration of Shakespeare’s political plays to make sense of the world I find myself in, and in doing so to make sense of myself within it. That that should also be awakened in others is my aim in this work.

Robert Luongo

A Boston Brahmin In New Mexico

2010-05-15T09:31:00.001+02:00

A Boston Brahmin In New Mexico

It was in the early spring of the summer of 1970 that I made my third trans-continental crossing of the United States, originating in Boston and, as they would say in bygone days, “go west young man”. My first trip was in 67’ as I hitch-hiked 3000 miles from the East Coast to the Pacific Ocean. By 1970 I had become a rather seasoned traveller along life’s highways, and this particular journey had an even more specific intention attached to it.

The preceding year, while I was living in Cambridge Massachusetts, where I kept a small studio apartment in the garret of a large Victorian at the bottom of Plympton Street near Harvard Square, I had become aware of a woman living in New Mexico who, as both an artist and story-teller, had established a puppet theatre in collaboration with the Pueblo Indians who lived in her area. That area was that stretch of territory between Albuquerque, Santa Fe and up to Taos.

As best as I can recall it was in an issue of the Tulane Drama Review or TDR as it was generally known, that I read the story of Elsie Thetford who lived in Abiquiu New Mexico and who had founded this unique theatre. The article spoke of her unusual work as well her life among the Pueblo Indians, both of which fascinated me.

Before proceeding, it is necessary to back up yet another year to 1968 when I was living in New Haven Connecticut and had become friends with a Yale Drama School student, Jim Metzner, where I had the opportunity to develop a growing interest in various forms of theatre. Besides participating in an original play written by Jim that was performed in a local coffee house over some few weekends, I also got a small part in a Yale University production that was put on by the Yale Repertory Theatre, a professional theatre company, and included a number of drama students and at least one non-student. The play was Euripides’ Bacchae, and the wild chorus was nearly all students, with my friend Jim making a memorable impression as one of the devotees of Dionysus. My bit part was that of a Roman soldier who represented law and order, and the antithesis to rights of the god. I must admit, although it was never my intention, that I rather stole the show on opening night and had to be forcibly removed from the stage. Prior to the curtain going up I did ingest a certain substance that had the overwhelming effect of awakening that Dionysian spirit in me. Somewhere in the middle of a fierce stand-off between the followers of Dionysus and the Roman Guard I removed my clothing, except of course, my excellent Roman helmet and upright stanchion that I had adorned with a flower given to me by a most lovely girl who was a member of the bacchanal. Needless to say that was my last performance at Yale and the end of my acting career. A couple of members of the New Haven Police, who for some mysterious reason were in attendance, did not, fortunately, press formal charges, although the actor who played the lead, endlessly stating how he had appeared so many times On as well as Off Broadway, was driven to fury!

But now it is one year later and I am back living in Cambridge, which would have been in late 1969, and having made contact with Ms. Thetford by writing her a letter, was to my delight invited to come and visit her if I should ever be passing by that way. And so it was that in the early spring of 1970, with a cold New England winter behind me that I set out on my odyssey.

At some point I moved off the Interstate highway and began my way along smaller back roads, having more than once stopped to ask anyone who I saw if they could direct me to the Thetford Place. It was late afternoon but the sun was still high up in the huge New Mexico sky. I stood in front of a ‘rammed earth’ house, known as tapia in Spanish, but most commonly as pisé de terre. The front door of this modest home was wide open and only a weather beaten screen door was in place to keep the various crawling or slithering creatures that were everywhere to be found, from coming right on in. I called out: “Hello there”, and was in very short order standing in front of an elderly woman (she was in fact 87) who said; “You must be Robert.”

Elsie Thetford was born in 1883 into an old Boston Brahmin family and in 1901, at the age of 18 was presented into society at a Newport Rhode Island summer ball. Her family were friends of the famous Newport artist John La Farge, who married Margaret Mason Perry, from the even more famous family of Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry, born in Kingston Rhode Island, and his most renowned younger brother, Commodore Mathew Calbraith Perry of Newport, who, in 1853, sailed into Tokyo Bay and negotiated the first US - Japanese trade agreement. In Boston Elsie’s parents were occasional guest at the home of Isabella Stewart Gardner in the Fenway, that is when Isabella was not in her lovely house in Venice - that I did visit many years later and was actually let in by saying Robert Luongo from Boston. [That visit I made to Venice is another story altogether and concerns Henry James, who in his youth lived in Newport , and later in life was a frequent guest at the Stewart Gardner’s Palazzo Barbaro just off the Grand Canal.] Ms. Gardner, 1840-1924, is most remembered as one of the most prodigious American art collectors and, of course, by John Singer Sargent’s famous portrait of her.

And there I was, being welcomed into this charming home in the middle of the New Mexico scrub land of cacti and rattlesnakes, and the biggest sky you have ever seen. “Well how do you do Robert?” is what she said as she showed me into her modest parlour. There was an original Georgia O’Keeffe on the wall, which had been, she said, a gift, in exchange for a particular puppet Georgia loved, and seeing as they were friends and nearly neighbours, neighbours, that is, according to the American south-west where distances are thought of in a far different way.

Mid way between Abiquiu and Taos was a very small town called San Cristobal Taos where in the early 1920’s D. H. Lawrence and his wife Frieda spent, on two separate occasions separated by a return trip to England, a couple of years at a small homestead now known as the D.H. Lawrence Ranch. As an exchange for a Lawrence manuscript the house was deeded to Frieda and was the only property either of them ever owned. Elsie and her husband - I’ve not mentioned him yet - were once invited to meet the English couple and Elsie told me how Lawrence was then not very well and was ostensibly in New Mexico to rest and, as always, write. As he was tubercular the dry heat of summer was hoped to be beneficial.

Elsie was married in Boston in 1905 to a civil engineer and land surveyor from a prominent New England family. The territory of New Mexico, Arizona and most of Texas was pretty much unchartered Indian land and the US Government was offering a job to someone who would go there and map the area as well as build storm water drains and aqueducts to combat the raging waters from flash-flooding that could come on so quickly that a dry gulch one minute was a terrifying torrent capable of carrying away anything, from a large vehicle to cattle, in it’s rapids. And so a year or two after the couple married they set off for New Mexico where Elsie and her husband, with the help of local Pueblo Indians, built their home. In 1914 Europe was at war and in 1917 Lieutenant Thetford sailed for England as part of the US war effort to combat the ‘Evil Hun’ as Germany was referred to in the American press, quite possibly originating in any one of the many William Randolph Hearst newspapers. That I don’t really know for sure.

Elsie had been a widow now for quite some years and while she could have gone ‘back east’ decided to stay on in Abiquiu after her husband passed away. I stayed only two days, sleeping on a day bed in a small guest room. Elsie cooked for us and had no regular help, except if there were serious storms and then she said men from the Pueblo would check on her and make sure she was alright. We talked and also walked. Our walks are the most memorable things for me. Elsie carried a walking stick which, due to her age, I assumed was a needed support. As we moved along across the scrub land with cacti and sagebrush scattered out as far as you could see, with the San Cristobal Mountains rising up in the distance in the most vivid purple colour, I heard a sound I had only ever heard about. There was before us a rattler, about four foot long, and Elsie and I just stopped. She proceeded to put the walking stick out in front of her as far as her arm could reach. Faster than you can imagine, that deadly rattlesnake wrapped itself around the stick. With a strong movement of her arm Elsie flung the snake some several feet off to the side. She carried on walking and continued what she had been saying prior to our visitor coming up upon us. She smiled her wry smile, for she knew that this city boy had never seen that before.

The next morning after breakfast I thanked my host so much for her kindness and how easily she trusted me and welcomed me into her home, never once taking exception to this twenty year old fellow wearing his hair long, carrying only a knap-sack from the Army & Navy Store in which there was nothing but a copy of Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, James Joyce’s Ulysses and a comb I’d bought at the Five and Dime.

Robert Luongo

Death of the Poet By Mikhail Lermontov

2010-05-02T16:13:00.001+02:00

A poem written in honour of the great Russian writer Pushkin

By Mikhail Lermontov

Death of the Poet

Revenge, the Emperor, revenge!

I will fall at your feet:

Be just and punish the murderer,

That his sentence in the next century

Heralded to offspring your right court,

And that the villains will see example in it.

The Poet's dead! - a slave to honor -

He fell, by rumor slandered,

Lead in his breast and thirsting for revenge,

Hanging his proud head!...

The Poet's soul could not endure

Petty insult's disgrace.

Against society he rose,

Alone, as always...and was slain!

Slain!...What use is weeping now,

The futile chorus of empty praise

Excuses mumbled full of pathos?

Fate has pronounced its sentence!

Was it not you who spitefully

Rebuffed his free, courageous gift

And for your own amusement fanned

The nearly dying flame?

Well now, enjoy yourselves...he couldn't

Endure the final torture:

Quenched is the marvelous light of genius,

Withered is the triumphal wreath.

Cold-bloodedly his murderer

Took aim...there was no chance of flight:

His empty heart beat evenly,

The pistol steady in his hand.

No wonder...from far away

The will of fate sent him to us

Like hundreds of his fellow vagrants

In search of luck and rank;

With impudence he mocked and scorned

The tongue and mores of this strange land;

He could not spare our glory,

Nor in that bloody moment know

"gainst what he'd raised his hand!...

He's slain - and taken by the grave

Like that unknown, but happy bard,

Victim of jealousy wild,

Of whom he sang with wondrous power,

Struck down, like him, by an unyielding hand.

Why did he quit the blissful peace of simple fellowship

To enter this society, so envious and stifling

To hearts of free and fiery passion?

Why did he give his hand to worthless slanderers,

How could he have believed their hollow words

And kindness, he, who'd ever understood his fellow man?...

And they removed his wreath, and set upon his head

A crown of thorns entwined in laurel:

The hidden spines were cruel

And pierced his noble brow;

Poisoned were his final moments

By sly insinuations of mockers ignorant,

And thus he died - for vengeance vainly thirsting

Secretly vexed by false hopes deceived.

The wondrous singing's ceased,

T'will never sound again.

His refuge, gloomy and small,

His lips forever sealed.

_____

And you, the offspring arrogant

Of fathers known for malice,

Crushing with slavish heels the ruins

Of clans aggrieved by fortune's game!

You, greedy hordes around the throne,

Killers of Freedom, Genius and Glory!

You hide beneath the canopy of law

Fall silent - truth and justice before you...

But justice also comes from God, corruption's friends!

The judge most terrible awaits you:

He's hardened to the clink of gold,

He knows your future thoughts and deeds.

Then will you turn in vain to lies:

They will no longer help.

And your black blood won't wash away

The poet's sacred blood!

1837

The following notes are provided by Karim Filiakov, a first year student at Dallas College in Cape Town South Africa. The notes were originally in Russian and were translated by Karim into English.

This poem is a response to the tragic death of Pushkin who died Jan. 29, 1837. Lermontov was sick when he heard about the fatal duel. Lermontov learned of the last days of Pushkin’s from his doctor N.F. Arendt, who visited wounded poet. (Karim Filiakov, Cape Town, 2010)

In this poem Lermontov expresses his outrage at the Russian aristocracy because of their attitude towards Pushkin and also in regards to his death. Pushkin's death was not accidental, but was a consequence of the relationship between himself and the Court. According to contemporaries, Tsar Nikolay I received a copy of the poem. Lermontov and his friend – a writer and ethnographer, Svyatoslav Afanasievich Rayevski(1808-1876), who actively participated in the spreading of the poem, was arrested and prosecuted. In March, according to the sentence, Lermontov was sent to join a military regiment in the Caucasus.

Revenge, the Emperor, revenge! - The epigraph to the poem is taken from the tragedy of the French writer Jean de Rotrou (1609-1650) "Venceslas" (1648) and was modified by A.A. Gendre, a Russian playwright and translator.

The Poet's dead! - a slave to honor... - The phrase "slave of honor" was borrowed from the dedication to Pushkin's poem "The Prisoner of the Caucasus".

Cold-bloodedly his murderer took aim... - The killer of Pushkin was Georges d'Anthes(1812-1895), Lieutenant of the Cavalry Regiment (from 1834). He was adopted by Netherlands Envoy Baron L. Hecker, who, among other things, introduced Dantes to the salons at Court frequented by the Russian aristocracy. The persecution of the poet, which ended with the duel, was organized by this aristocracy. After the duel with Pushkin, Dantes was exiled to France.

...from far away тhe will of fate sent him to us, like hundreds of his fellow vagrants, in search of luck and rank... - Dantes arrives in St. Petersburg in 1833 after the War in the Vendee.

- like that unknown, but happy bard, Victim of jealousy wild... - a reminder about Vladimir Lensky from the Pushkin's novel "Eugene Onegin".

And you, the offspring arrogant of fathers known for malice... - This line and the ones that follow it were written later - in response to the words of those who justified the murder of the poet.

Shaykh Dr. Abdalqadir as-Sufi - Leading Intellectual of Our Time

2009-07-16T21:13:00.000+02:00

6^th Annual Conference

Islam in Europe

A Celebration of the Main Mosque of Granada

Shaykh Dr. Abdalqadir as-Sufi

Leading Intellectual of Our Time

By Abdullah Luongo

In 1968 I was living in Harvard Square in Cambridge Massachusetts where I had made friends with a student from Bard College, an elite liberal arts college nestled in the Adirondack Mountains of upper New York State, who, having taken a gap year, was in Cambridge working at the Grolier Poetry Book Shop. He and I would sit on the stoop of the book shop and read The Cantos of Ezra Pound. My friend was learning Chinese to help with the ideograms Pound used. I recall the last conversation we had where he said he thought Pound was the greatest poet of the 20^th century but had gotten derailed by quacky economic theories. I had no response. Not then. It would be 25 years later that I would write a small book that took off from a quote by Hugh Kenner, in my view the greatest Poundian scholar, that ‘Pound’s ideas of money and credit were not extrinsic to the Cantos, but rather its warp and woof.’

That I came to write that modest contribution to the vast opus of extant Pound scholarship was, of course, the direct result of my being encouraged to undertake that endeavour by Shaykh Abdalqadir, and which began here, in Granada, while living in this beautiful city. The theme of usury, or usura, as Pound called it, only found its full clarification within the illuminating field that had been opened up by the extraordinary intellect of a man who was, first of all, the leading Muslim intellectual of his time and moreover a Shaykh of sufism. The identifying of this root cause of injustice, which we define as riba, an un-natural increase in the transaction, has been one of the paramount tasks of the Shaykh and an essential part of his ongoing diagnosis necessary for the full recovery of the Deen of Islam in our time. Out from that illuminated clearing made possible by Shaykh Abdalqadir emerged the groundbreaking exposition, extrapolated from the Madinian amal of the Prophet, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, into the 21^st century, by the now famous scholarship of Umar Ibrahim Vadillo.

In speaking about Shaykh Abdalqadir today and his being the foremost intellectual of this time, I needed to connect to my own journey which began when I was as young man, [sitting on the stoop] and subsequently the importance of our honouring the highest aspirations of the young people amongst us. This passing on and transmitting of whatever it is of understanding Allah has favoured us with is a seminal element in Shaykh Abdalqadir’s teaching. The educating of our youth together with the dynamics of an ongoing dawa is the clear affirmation of Allah having honoured us with the highest Deen, and the only one acceptable to Him. Where ever this is taking place is where the authentic work of Shaykh Adbalqadir is happening.

I am reminded from our studies at Dallas Institute in Cape Town of Shakespeare’s Richard II, which we have just completed, and certain un-enviable words of Richard, held prisoner in Pomfret Castle awaiting his inevitable death where he says, “I have wasted time, and now doth time waste me.” Therefore, we take heed and use this time wisely. That we have gathered here to honour a man of knowledge is a most excellent use of our time and moreover an absolute delight, for the knowledge of this one man and what Allah has honoured him with is a means of guidance for Muslims all over the world.

It is the encounter itself that brings with it fresh growth and understanding. Henry James, the American novelist, said that consciousness is a shared experience and that when you enter into the place of knowing then the ones who did not see begin to see. The people of seeing take those who want to know and bring them to the place from where they look, as if to say, ‘look, look from here.’ This grasping of the event by being in the company of one who sees is an opening to the understanding that truly Allah is the Seeer. The scintillating insight through the detailed observations of the acute consciousness of Henry James, as it moves almost imperceptibly through his novels, is just one of the many profound delights that pour out continuously from being in the company of the Shaykh.

I began my preparation for coming here to Granada by re-reading The Shield of Achilleus, given as a talk in 1987 in Majorca by the Shaykh. His talk was precisely an unfolding, an opening up of a way of looking that enables us to see in a way that has always been before us, but has been obfuscated by layers of ignorance imprinted on us from our earliest childhood, then on through to the shock of puberty – devoid in modern society of any intrinsic meaning, of an understanding of our awakened sex, or an understanding of the world we find ourselves in. Young adults are adrift in a warped view of what they are told is reality and what life holds for them, who then attempt to obtain an education to prepare for a world that becomes their prison. It is more a need to de-code and be free of what one has already learned by an enforced patterning in order to begin a true education, a paideia, as known by the early Greeks, making ready the student to receive the shattering force of the ancient natural religion of Ibrahim. Remember, when Ibrahim, still a youth, who having smashed the idols of his society, save one rather large one, said, ‘That one did it -don’t blame me.’

It is then a way of being (what Heidegger called dasein), that embodies a way of looking at the world (weltanschauung) that Shaykh Abdalqadir is able to open for us. Importantly, the Shaykh is not a door or passage but a guide who indicates a way that we can take, as much as we are ready to take it, to reach for our highest possibility. As so much of what each one of us is has been determined, as our DNA is the encoded pattern from which the design of us emerges, one most essential element we carry forward for this heroic task is to desire it. Together with this desire the other key element is that we must have – from when we were in our early childhood – been loved. The one who desires freedom, here the Shaykh prefers the term freiheit, and to reach their highest possibility, has to have been loved, and then they, in turn, can love. What the Shaykh says about this in his Book of Hubb when he gives us an insight into the ayat of Qur’an where Allah says: Say, “If you love Allah, then follow me and Allah will love you and forgive you for your wrong actions. Allah is Ever-Forgiving, Most Merciful” is, he instructs us, a key to one of Allah’s great secrets.

I refer again to the Shield of Achilleus. We all know the story of Achilles from Homer’s poem – actually a song, the Iliad. Achilles had a choice, which was, when taken, in fact his destiny, and that was (to quote from the Shaykh’s text) “either dying young in glory, or a long life surrounded by his family and his wealth on the land.” We know from the story that when Achilles refused to fight because of his being angry with Agamemnon it precipitated disaster for the Greeks. Now he was not at the gates of Troy for Greece, for a State or for anything other than for himself. Yes, the war was over Helen, but Achilles fought for Achilles. Therefore, when confronted with the situation he had to either challenge Hector or loose his honour, and he, of course, makes the famous decision to fight. What was then and still is at stake is whether there will be free men able to choose their highest possibility. What you realise is that that choice, which is against the bourgeois drive, is, at the same time, what (again quoting the Shaykh’s text) ‘defends the whole of natural existence’, for that picture of life – with a city at peace, another domain at war and fields of wheat, the grape vines, fine youths and fair maidens, is we learn the very design on the shield of Achilleus.

What Shaykh Abdalqadir is speaking of is not an erudite academic exercise, but an existential encounter with our self of the utmost exigency. The man must go out, not stay at home. His project can not be his family and his business to support it. He must have a higher project and it is that he establishes justice. D.H. Lawrence saw that that man, “with that spark in him” was the endangered specie, under threat by what he called the “money man”. The new economic man fears the censure of the other, and therefore the negative discourse begins: that his wife may complain, that the mother-in-law would berate him. It is not that he does not take care, but that he should not be enslaved under an imposed tyranny. The father-in-law may appear to be successful yet has long since faded from himself, as T.S. Elliot called them ‘the hollow men…the stuffed men.’ But society says you must be responsible – to the family, to the mother and what of the children and their needs! How can he go off and be so irresponsible? So what on earth is this business of the heroic?

We are in an age where everyone has been turned in an accountant, conscientiously going to work each day to count the money that not only is not really there, but is not real. And yet we are bound to it. The terrible thing is that if you stay back and make this thing you call ‘my family’ your project - then the first victims are nearly always the children. That whole pattern of ‘natural life’ that was the design of Achilles’ shield is protected precisely by not staying back.

With Achilles we remember his story - that he did die young in glory. We sing the song of Odysseus, who reached the shores of old age…….but not because he stayed at home.

This was the sunnah of the first community of the Rasul, sullalahu alaihi wa salem, and was held to wherever the Deen was strong. With the emergence of this kind of man, with the temerity to speak the truth, whose outward project is justice and whose inner being is illuminated, who Nietzsche called ‘a bridge to the overman’, will be the woman who desires him, and they together are what Shaykh Abdalqadir identifies as the ‘collaborative couple.’

I should like to attempt to present a picture to you as a landscape, if you permit me, which is built-up by means of overlaying composite images that you will have the task of keeping in mind. The effect, if successful, will be a contextual field of vision whereby you will see something in a way that you may not have previously. This original approach, what I would call an artistic approach, but artistic in way that Leonardo De Vinci and the Renaissance movement of his time was, as you all know, also highly scientific, is a determining feature to the ‘how’ of how Shaykh Abdalqadir shows something that in our seeing it can [can] make an opening in our grasping, by means of recognition, something that was not actually hidden but, nevertheless, not seen. I will take from a theme that has on numerous occasions been presented in Shaykh Abdalqadir’s writing, for example, in The Shield of Archilleus (which I have mentioned), in The Technique of the Coup de Banque, and The Time of The Bedouin, as well as other of his brilliant web site articles that have been available over these recent years. Not withstanding a recognisable complexity in this modus operandi, it is not at all complicated.

Just as we began with the age of the poets, in particular Homer and he being our means of access to the consciousness of the hero, we took Achilles, and could have ended with Alexander, we now look at the philosophers. We make a speedy ascent to Plato and focus on the underlying theme of The Republic and to a certain extent, The Symposium. These texts allow us to say that the fundamental ‘question of the philosophers’ was how and in what manner is society best set up and governed to assure the prosperity and harmony of its people. Needless to say, democracy was not on the top of Plato’s list, and Aristotle, often in disagreement with Plato’s assessments, also saw democracy as a digression, just as he said ‘monarchy could digress into tyranny and aristocracy into rule by an oligarchy’. Throughout the ages these men we call philosophers have grappled with this theme and other extenuating themes pertaining to ‘man’ as an object in their subject dominated sentences. In referring to this activity the Shaykh says that all of what Aristotle wrote took place in the realm between his ears and his tongue. The Shaykh adds that the truly great accomplishment of Aristotle was not his philosophy but Alexander, his pupil, and we do not know what he taught him but only what Alexander the Great did when he went out into the world and did it. The momentum of his heroic life propelled Greece on another 300 years after his death, until we track the destruction and end of Greek Civilization by the onslaught of a group of Jewish immigrants who came and settled in Greece with a new religion, Christianity.

We move now to the modern age where we have in the philosopher Hegel (1770-1831) an all-encompassing system of thinking where he says ‘everything is a manifestation of spirit’. One could say that there is no place left to go as everything has been invested with spiritual meaning. Precisely now there emerges someone the Shaykh describes as ‘like a character from a children’s story comes this wild figure Marx, and all he does, like a juggler, is turn the whole thing up-side-down’. He turns Hegel up-side-down. He says, “No,[everything is not spirit] everything is matter”. Marx called this ‘dialectical materialism.’ The Shaykh continues by saying, ‘And along comes another of these jugglers, Freud, and he [Freud] says, “The Christians are wrong, there is no soul, no higher spirit. What you thought was a higher spirit is an unconscious drive. It is not just an Unconscious, it is an unconscious drive.” Therefore, instead of a spirit that reigns, you have an energy which is driving, and you are not in the driver’s seat.’ The exposition of the Shaykh continues. ‘Then comes the third clown, a scientific Harpo Marx, and this is Einstein, and he declares a relativity of knowledge.’ [Everything is relative] The last life-line is cut. While Einstein’s ‘relativity theory’ has been packed away into the storage archives in favour of more accurate theorems, the damage is done and we are left with nothing other than his other major contribution to the human race, the atom bomb.

These three figures unleashed a plague that impacted on the modern age in a way far more devastating than any Medieval Black Plague ravaged the body of Europe. I would add one other name that appears in the mid 20^th century, Jacque Derrida, who is the inheritor of the three, and whose philosophy has exerted an inordinate influence on the entire academic world. The Shaykh has referred to the outcome of the campaign of the three famous clowns as the deconstruction, or more appropriately he says, the destruction of a higher view of man and his ascent through self-knowledge to knowledge of the Devine. The father of the mid 20^th century Deconstructionists is Jacques Derrida, whose main axiom is, “There is nothing beyond the text.” He then goes on to say that as words have no absolute meaning, that they [as signifiers] are open to an unlimited range of interpretations. To attempt to follow his train of thought is to descend into a dark quagmire without any hope of finding a way to the light of day. The brilliant Michel Foucault called Derrida an ‘obfuscating terrorist’ as his thinking is nothing less than ‘contradictory paradoxes’ that lead no where and when one states that they do not make sense, Derrida retorts that your not understanding him is that you are stupid, hence the ‘terrorist’ appellation by Foucault.

Against this background (in our landscape painting) the Shaykh brings out another view originating from the Greeks (which we began with) and is brought into the modern age by Wagner and Ibsen in the 19^th century and Junger in the 20^th. Ibsen’s plays Ghosts and The Doll House are works, as those of the first Greek tragedians were, that can bring about a disturbing yet liberating catharsis within bourgeois capitalist society. These three men open up a clearing in human consciousness that allows man to move out from his disasters, to an understanding of Being that can set him free from the dark prison within which he finds himself. We must hold all this and move now to the final chapter of the Time of the Bedioun. Here the Shaykh makes a concordance with Junger, the last of his generation and a great German intellectual, who said that he was himself ‘an end not a beginning,’ who is both able to embrace technique as the defining aspect of the modern world [this is unavoidable for all of us] while also drawing from the antecedents of the Homeric tradition, the heroic age. We would then call Junger a poet, in the classical sense, as was Homer.

The next step is to join Junger’s vision of the “clearing in the forest” towards which 21^st century man must make his way, and this is not an idyllic place as you might imagine from the height of German Romanticism, but rather an inner condition, and connect it to the three stages outlined by Ibn Khaldun in the 14^th century in his master work The Muqaddima. The first of those stages is what is defined as Bedouinism (this is clearly nothing to do with what we all understand as Nomadism) which, to quote from Shaykh Abdalqadir’s text, ‘implies a dynamic movement of men in contradistinction to a prior settled culture’. ‘The Bedou is outside the urban system.’ This is no less true where, the Shaykh relates, ‘he is in it’. After some time the numbers of such people increases and they begin to recognise one another and subsequently come together. This coming together is the most powerful force social man can experience. ‘It is kinship but not of blood.’ It transcends the family, a tribe or a nation. It is what Ibn Khaldun defined as Asabiyya, and it is the 2ed stage. In the best of modern translations this term is translated as ‘esprit de corps’ which is very close although still not complete in its understanding, as this (quoting the Shaykh) special ‘unifying bond of brotherhood …is more than that… as it has in it an added moral evaluation as in the term Futuwwa, chivalry, or nobility of character.’ This is the final 3ed stage. Conclusively, we can clearly hear him, O most excellent in character, sullahu alaihi wa salem, when he says: “I have not come but to perfect good character in men.”

What takes place in the final chapter of The Time of The Bedouin brings into play all the elements of a highly detailed and meticulously researched study that has taken the French Revolution as its epicentre, and then brings into focus with such startling celerity a full blown canvas of staggering proportions that one must go back to it again and again and reflect on its meanings. It is a masterpiece!

To conclude I have taken from the wisdom of The Hikam of Ibn Ata’illah where he says: “What a difference between one who proceeds from Allah his argumentation and the one who proceeds inferentially to Him! He who has Him as his starting point knows the Real (Haqq) as It is, and proves any matter by reference to the being of its Origin.” The intellectual perspicacity of Shaykh Dr Abdalqadir as-Sufi emanates from an inviolable knowledge of the absolute Oneness of Allah, a pure Tawhid. This is his teaching.

His intellect, something by which Allah has honoured him, is firmly bound, as in the Arabic word ‘akl for intellect, which derives from the root of the word for the cord which is used to hobble a camel and makes to stay. Therefore, the greatest intellect of this age is coiled in the green turban of the lovers and defenders of the Rasul, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, and prostrates before the Majesty and Greatness of Allah. The intellectual argument of Shaykh Abdalqadir as-Sufi is that he says, from the book of Allah, “Say: Allah! And leave them plunging in their games.” With this the kufar are confounded and driven to fury. Faced with the conundrums of this age, Shaykh Abdalqadir as-Sufi draws his Alexandrian sword and standing before the Gordian Knot which the oracles say will be undone by the one who will be Lord of all Asia, he cuts it through! No argument! Allahu Akbar!

As salammu alaikum

The Albatross

2009-06-03T09:12:00.001+02:00

The Albatross

Often the idle mariners at sea

Catch albatrosses, vast birds of the deep,

Companions which follow lazily

Across the bitter gulfs the gliding ship.

They’re scarcely set on deck, these heavenly kings,

Before, clumsy, abashed, full of shame,

They piteously let their great white wings

Beside them drag, oar-like, and halt and lame.

See this winged traveller, so awkward, weak!

He was so fine: how droll and ugly now!

One sailor sticks a cutty in his beak,

Another limps to mock the bird that flew!

The Poet’s like the monarch of the clouds

Who haunts the tempest, scorns the bows and slings;

Exiled on earth amid the shouting crowds,

He cannot walk, for he has giant’s wings.

Charles Baudelaire

Translated by Joanna Richardson

Reflection on L’Albatros by Robert Luongo

Ses ailes de géant l’empêchent de marcher.

Some years ago I had been living in Spain

And restlessness overcame me, and I searched the horizon.

“I shall visit my friend in England:

“He resides in a hamlet outside of town.”

The savant was silent then said no not to go.

“He is the person to see if you need crutches,

“What you need are wings!”

The End of the Age of the Republic

2009-05-13T22:16:00.001+02:00

'Between the acting of a dreadful thing

And the first motion, all the interim is
Like a phantasma, or a hideous dream.'

Brutus in Act II, scene i:63-65, from Julius Caesar

We hear Brutus as he privately contemplates the impending murder of Caesar, in what is recognisable as a pre-emptive strike against a would-be tyrant. Caesar is a de facto king in all but name, yet we are told “three times he did refuse the crown.” For Brutus the action against Caesar is not a case of someone needing to rationalise to themselves the doing of a thing, as he is clearly convinced of his ideological, as well as moral, high-ground. Unlike Hamlet, who equivocates as the task before him pushes the limits of what he can endure, Brutus has no such dilemma, but rather an inveterate pride cloaked within the public persona of being the defender of the Roman Republic. These are exalted and high-minded ideals, such that others are to die for. He is a would-be stoic and every bit the modern man of the political class, and so it is not at all surprising that Robespierre, France’s famous first citizen, should have been so enamoured by this celebrated character.

Mark Anthony was Caesar’s friend and stands in opposition, while asking permission of Brutus to speak. In the most powerful and efficacious political speech on record, he turns the tide of support for the ‘liberators’ against them. Anthony is accused of being an ambitious Machiavellian who uses the funeral eulogy of Caesar to “unleash the dogs of war” (Act III, scene i) as he beats the drum of the explosive leitmotif: “And Brutus is an honourable man” (Act III, scene ii), until the populace are drawn into a rage against Brutus and his co-conspirators whom only moments earlier they were cheering.

With Robespierre we have the pivotal figure of the French Revolution who casts himself in the leading role of the famous Roman patrician. Was not Robespierre also a chaste and honourable man; principled and virtuous? And did he not embrace the unassailable principles of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity upon which the French Republic stands, and with such passionate reverence that thousands upon thousands of Frenchmen should die for what he believed?

Brutus, like Richard II, was a mirror-gazer. Richard did not like what he saw, for in the famous usurpation scene, when he called for a mirror to be brought, he still looked a king, “O, flattering glass!” (Act IV, scene i), which he then saw to be totally false, and smashed it. He had been un-kinged, first by Bolingbroke, then by his own volition as he violently separated ‘the two bodies of the king’ by dashing his public persona of monarch into a thousand shards of glass.

Brutus, on the other hand, liked what he saw. Therefore, when Cassius says: “Tell me good Brutus, can you see your face” (Act I, scene ii), Brutus answers his question in optics by stating that only by reflection can someone see themselves. Cassius has him, for while the other conspirators were simply suborned with the promise of secured trading concessions and retaining political favours, Brutus is roped in by his deep-rooted rectitude upheld by the high-minded democratic principles of the Republic. When Brutus looks into the metaphorical mirror held up to him by Cassius:

“I, your glass

Will modestly discover to yourself

That of yourself which you yet know not of,”

he (unlike Richard) likes what he sees. One can sense that Brutus has gazed upon himself in private to view his impeccable public image.

Marat, the popular political philosopher and journalist, exhibited the pragmatic modalities of the Revolution. Marat’s thinly veiled enmity for the enshrined citizen, whom he gloriously championed in his writings, made clear that people were simply not capable of being in charge of something as important as their liberty. The freedom of ‘The People’ must be protected at all costs. This became a matter of National Security. Marat assured the citizens that the threat was everywhere, a virtual ‘code red’ and that counter-revolutionaries were entrenched in every dark corner, lurking in the shadows of society and, moreover, that the only way to assure the protection of Freedom was to purge the State of its enemies. If the body-politic was infected then the treatment was to bleed it. These enemies were not citizens protected by law but non-citizens, dehumanised, secret enemy combatants whose very existence threatened the safety and security of the Nation. Everyone must be vigilant. Complacency is tantamount to treason. Suspicion casts its hard cold stare as everyone comes under surveillance. They were outlaws, outside the Law, and therefore, the manner of dealing with them operates by the rule of exception outside the juridical process, so that the otherwise inalienable rights, civil liberties, did not apply. This does not break the law, but rather works outside of it by the establishment of a state of emergency. The Terror of the French Revolution drove the machinery of the modern democratic State that ratified the torture and execution of so many thousands of Frenchmen in the name of Liberty.

While we do know that Robespierre admired Brutus, we have no such proof that Marat, the relentless broadsheet propagandist (the mass media of the eighteenth century) was ever so enamoured by the bony Cassius.

Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar remains an important play, very much relevant to our modern age. Caesar posed a potential threat to the very foundations of the Roman Republic. If he were to become king it would “put the sting in him”, against which no free Roman citizen would be safe. “Not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more” (Act III, scene ii) is the basis of Brutus’ argument when he painstakingly explains to the crowd why it was for their own good that Caesar had to be killed, or “sacrificed” as he said, for the greater good. “Had you rather Caesar were living, and die all slaves, than that Caesar were dead, to all live as free men?” Earlier in the play (Act II, scene i) we hear Brutus, after having been found more malleable than Cassius had originally thought possible, contemplating his impending action.

“It must be by his death; and for my part

I know no personal cause to spurn at him,

But for the general. He would be crown’d:

How that might change his nature, there’s the question.”

At the end of the same reflection, Brutus concludes:

“And therefore think him as a serpent’s egg,

Which, hatch’d, would as his kind grow mischievous,

And kill him in the shell.”

Cassius, defeated by Anthony’s accomplished army, orders his own servant to stab him as he cries out, “Caesar, thou art revenged, / Even with the sword that killed thee.” Brutus, on the other hand, has repelled the forces of Octavius, Julius Caesar’s great-nephew and heir, who upon hearing of his uncle’s murder returns to Rome. But when Brutus finds Cassius dead and his army lost, he too looses heart and runs on the sword of his servant Volumnius. When Anthony finds the body of Brutus he comments:

“This was the noblest Roman of them all.

All the conspirators save one only he

Did that they did in envy of great Caesar…” (Act V, scene v).

Young Octavius (he was still in his teens) orders the body of Brutus to be buried “With all respect and rites”, and declares an end to the battle.

Only the most educated of Shakespeare’s audience would have been moderately familiar with the (44 BC Roman) Republican form of government, or its much earlier Greek antecedent. For them Caesar’s murder was regicide. No modern audience (dating from the American and French Revolutions of the late eighteenth century) has ever cast Brutus in less than a heroic light, with Caesar as the dangerous dictator. What is remarkable is that Shakespeare prefigured an age that had not yet arrived.

The key to the richness of Shakespeare’s plays is the language itself, as it unlocks all the myriad meanings. His remarkable genius is in how he wonderfully sets the stage and then refrains from imposing a demagogic or ideological hold on the action. Consequently, fresh thematic insights and character interpretations continue to emerge in each successive age. This is true now, as we approach the end of the Age of the Republic.

A Dying Poet

2009-05-13T22:14:00.001+02:00

Jadis, si je souviens bien, ma vie était un festin ou s'ouvraient tous les coeurs,

ou tous les vins coulaient.

From Une Saison En Enfer by Arthur Rimbaud

'What thou lovest well remains,

the rest is dross

What thou lov'st well shall not be reft from thee'

From Canto LXXXI of The Pisan Cantos by Ezra Pound

A Dying Poet

Rimbaud got away; he got out young.

With a second Saison en Enfer, he travelled delirious, back to France from Abyssinia. A torturous journey, overland on a rude litter, typically reserved for the dead. By sea left for days unattended without food or water.

The last of the dross burnt away.

His leg amputated in hospital in Marseilles.

A heated arrival at Roche met with the same cold censure, reserved for her 'profligate son', although a little sister had grown up, sympathetic, someone to talk to, to tell his amazing tales. A mother grown yet even harder, more small.

He would have to leave all over again.

He could not die there in that place.

Isabelle would bring him poppy-seed tea, made from their garden flower bed to ease the horrid pain and incessant fever. The floor of his little room covered with woven prayer mats he'd brought with him from Harar. They said he would recite strange 'oriental verses', as in a trance. One night woken from a dream having forgotten his condition sprang from his bed to see through an open window the moon rise luminous and fell crashing to the floor.

He had, like his father, whom he'd never met, who while stationed in Algeria as a Legionnaire governor learnt Arabic and made an early translation of Qur'an into French, also learnt Arabic and with the assistance of his house servant, Djami, they would recite. Djami married a girl from the local village, and at twenty became a young father to a little daughter, a little light, like playful fireflies in the night. And so he would often speak of his faithful friend, who he dearly loved, sometimes calling Isabelle by his name, and how he wanted to return to Africa with a bride and have a family. After a short month lasting a near eternity he set off by train with his sister accompanying him. He was by all accounts terribly unwell, unfit for even the shortest trip let alone an arduous and now impossible journey back to Africa. In Paris they had to change stations and continue on to Lyon, then another train to Marseilles. Upon his arrival he was immediately brought to the hospital of the Immaculate Conception, which he would never leave. The doctors told Isabelle that any hope of recovery was futile and the end was near. They, on the other hand, fed Arthur unpalatable encouragement. Whenever he was conscious his sister would work on him to convert to Catholicism, and accept the holy Sacrament. What stale bread for a sublime poet whose visions poured from the Unseen.

Robert Luongo

Standing by Words

2009-04-18T15:51:00.001+02:00

irches bend beneath the weight to young lads

Climbed atop their supple branches

Springing back with the sap of Dionysus

Lost to a bitched world gone bad in the teeth

that cannot come to grips

Rotten brickwork in city slums

Held together by fetid mortar

Nations with its millions un-employed boosts the

Number of passive receptors:

Sodom of Thames . . .

heralds' conditions of imposed unemployment and that of being passive recipients of all that you are shamefully made to accept. Sodom on Thames is clipped from Canto CV by Ezra Pound, the twentieth century master of epic verse. While Sodom was that wicked city in ancient Palestine notorious for vice and corruption, the specific event Mr. Pound was referring to was the battle of Waterloo, 1815, that provided an opportunity for the Rothschild Banking Family to make an unprecedented fortune out of events. Jacob Rothschild, a Paris banker, had the earliest news (with an agent close at hand to the battle) of a French defeat. Word was sent (some say by carrier pigeon) to his brother Nathan, a London banker, to spread the news that the French had won and Napoleon was on the march to London. This caused an immediate panic on the London Gold Market, spurred on further by Nathan's rapid selling off of gold shares. Everyone holding shares began to sell for whatever they could get, fearing the worst with Napoleon's army soon to be entering the capitol. Before the close of business Nathan bought back everything he could get his hands on. By nightfall word arrived that the English had won, and Napoleon had retreated in defeat, but not before the house of Rothschild had made a staggering profit at the country's expense.

The implicit association between sodomy and fraud was not an original one by Pound, for he was thoroughly familiar with Dante's Divina Commedia. It, of course, was the earlier poet who cast Sodomites and Usurers, those that commit fraud by cheating through interest-taking or any manipulation to the value of money, into the same circle of hell for their acts against nature. Dante, in turn, drew his reference from the Canon Law of the Church that prohibited both acts and condemned those who practised them.

anks payout "say" four percent on

cash deposits

then automatically double their holdings

counting them twice

as both cash on hand

And capital to rent

Making it ex nihil by law

So many times over actual deposits from

all John Thrifty's.

Legal privilege of

BANKERS ONLY

passed into LAW by your representatives.

Any bank offers a certain annual percentage rate to those who deposit money with them. It may be four point something or five point this or that. The key point is the little understood mechanism known as the 'fractional-reserve system.'

Furthermore, the banks double their holdings precisely by those laws that allow private banks to record all savings deposited with them as both monies available to be lent out, with interest of course, while at the same time saying it was all there in the bank, if and when people wanted it back. Therefore, it is doubled, something out of nothing, created ex nihil, from the Latin, found in the codex of early Roman law. One such law in the US was the National Banking Act of 1864-65, which firmly established the control of issuing credit and currency in the hands of private banks. Mr. Lincoln was dead set against the Act and by more accurate accounts was the reason why he never saw the final one. Latter developments such as the Federal Reserve System, established in 1913, and the Bretton Woods of 1944 were other dramatic milestones. This wresting of control and power to create was firmly established by laws all passed through both "houses", the legislature and congress, allowing the private interests of bankers to do what no other business or individual or the nation itself, for what matter can: multiply their assets by some magical number (at times as much as ten) then lend again credit on that exaggerated amount, issued on worthless paper at interest rates of 13, 14, 15% or more! This ain't taught in school and no modern course in economics ever touches it.

Orgotten Jefferson said: "You can

Set up in the occupation of lender

If you have it to lend."

T.J. read a book or two

and damn well knew of William Patterson,

Founder of B of E in 1693' or four

who wrote to prospective shareholder:

The bank hath benefit of all monies

which it creates out of nothing."

Crime of the centuries and case

still unheard.

Return to school book arithmetic

Add bank's deficit of lent money

to your government gets posted in their books

not as debit but an asset (damn blasted)

which, again is multiplied by: times X and

paid for in more taxes

handed back to bank with

Guaranty written on your backsides.

(Culpability not erasable).

Imagine a plain classroom with an earnest schoolmaster equipped with a long pointer that taps persistently at a simple math equation written on the blackboard. The point is that when a bank lends money to the government, they (banks) don't record it as a debit from their available funds, but are allowed by law to record it as an asset. What this boils down to is that an asset is something you have. A debit s something recorded on the debt side of an account book-something you haven't. The fact that banks are allowed to record a minus as a plus and then multiply it to be yet even more is criminal. The interest payments alone owed to private banks on any nations' National Debt are mathematically impossible to put in the black. This is as true for the U.S as it is for Nigeria and Mexico, while the significant difference will be that as Americans or Frenchmen experience high interest rates, higher taxes, rising unemployment and increased crime, the world to the south is experiencing famine and civil war! The tax-paying public stand as guarantors while spuriously created "wealth" is used by the banks. This simple math is damn easy to understand, yet remains obfuscated to nearly everyone. Further leverage is added by the bank's ability to raise or lower interest rates: increasing or decreasing the amount of capital in circulation. (The Federal Reserve Bank, privately owned and controlled and not to be confused with Fed. Government, sets the prime interest rate that all other major lenders follow)

alking back from Bloomsbury

along Great Russell Street

past Cavendish Square's old Georgians

through London's prime real estate

City boast highest repo rate in Europe.

Each hour a home lost:

"To kill a man

with a club or sword?"

"No difference."

"With a club or system of government,"

asked Mang Tsze?

"No difference," said King Hwuy.

Economics! Says Ezra, and

tantamount to murder wrote Cato,

a century B.C. drove the s.o.b.'s

out of the temple: first pogrom

before the Church lost her will.

Bloomsbury is that wonderful old section of London where the British Museum library is located. Many scholars have done their research under that laurelled dome, sat in the local cafes, frequented the now famous bookshops and taken rooms in nearby rooming- houses. Unequivocally an area imbued with tradition.

Great Russell Street runs past the museum and on across the Tottenham Court Road. Further along, by a bit of zig-zagging through 16^th and 17^th century mews and alley ways you come upon Cavendish Square, built during the Georgian are. (The four dubious Georges ruled Great Britain from 1714-1830.) The square remains one of London's elegant residences. While standing in sharp contrast to rotten brickwork in city slums, the variance to the old world elegance here is made with reference to recently disclosed statistics from BBC-TV special report on the catastrophic number of middle income families that lost their homes through foreclosures during the past year. The rate being a horrific one every hour for the entire year (1992) in the U.K.

The rhetorical dialogue from "To kill a man" is from the Book of Menicus (Mang Tsze), the ancient sage who lived a hundred years after Confucius and continued in the great master's tradition. Cato, the younger, roman statesman and scholar, 94-45 B.C., opposed Julius Caesar and was known for his incorruptible honesty. His view was that usury (that word to stand for not only the taking of interest on money but all manipulative cheating that arises from its abuse) was tantamount to murder and should be punished accordingly. Cato wrote that a hundred years before Christ drove the moneylenders out of the temple where he taught.

(A pogrom: forceable ejection or persecution of an undesirable group within a society.) Numerous pogroms were conducted, often by official decrees, throughout the history of Europe. Some of the most famous often involved Jews, though certainly not all.

One could insist that it was a Jewish temple where Jesus taught, while the important point inferred was that if there was a persecution (of the moneylenders) it was, I pray, for a reason. Not wanting to read more than what is implicit by first pogrom one simply is aware that there were others. This can become sticky, for some of the more well known pogroms, particularly in England, involved Jews. That for these too there very well were reasons and that they can be connected to the infamous practises of money lending at shocking rates (see Shakespeare's Shylock) compounds the problem. Popular history tells us that as the Jews were denied access to other more honourable areas of trade and craft, the only job available to these poor wandering immigrants from the Russian steppes was to become bankers and stockbrokers. (The law of usury, forbidden the Christians by their Canon Law, conceded some ground towards removing the barrier (or at least push it back) by Calvin (1509-64). Of course, it is vehemently prohibited by the Law of Moses and appears as the vile word neschek in the Hebrew scripture.) If by consensus it was true that no other opportunities other than money lending and pushing junk bonds were available in the past, it certainly is not the case today.

utting across to Hyde Park, walk quietly

in dark afternoon.

London sundown by half four

Statuesque chestnuts stand shrouded in

Night air as warm friends in a cold January

Coming all this way to live her tragedy.

Beauty not lost in battle.

A rendezvous at the Cafe Flo

a door opens with a warm glow bursting

against a cold face recovering

an hours walk from B.M. to Kensington cafe

Guardian's HEADLINE spells no relief

from late Robber Max Smell's buggering British public

"Waal.... I'id sug-jest

"a commemorative...yurinal

eerected in iz memree."

Instead a shrine

on top of Mt. Zion

where already fetid flesh was flown

within hours of being dredged up like a sunk'n sow

(off the Canary Isles)

now (questionable) remains in Sepulchre of gold

guarded by Geryon,

three-headed beast previously employed

In Dante's 8^th circle of Hell, London WC1,

Watchtower over Sodom, overlooking the Thames-

Usurers, sodomites, committers of fraud and

Defilers of Art and Religion

Contra Naturam: against natural increase

and the abundance of nature.

In the Name of God the Most Merciful the Compassionate

"Attacking false systems merely harms ya"

Spoke Kung-fu-Tzse,

As he made his way

On a well trodden path

By the light of a prophet which preceded him

Yet who would be born after.

The Guardian, a well known London rag, provides an obvious pun on 'spells' as does Pound by frequently misspelling the Rothschild' name. On such choice spelling was Stinkschuld in Canto LII. Schuld in Deutch denotes debt, something the odious Rothschild's were aptly to make. From Goethe's Faust we have the line Ich heiβe die Schuld, "I am called guilt", revealing a dual meaning with curious connotations. This gives rise to my Max Smell from Maxwell, the nefarious financier that had just left the British public poorer than all previous crimes of theft combined by defrauding the pension-fund accounts of thousands of workers (for companies he owned or controlled). Big Bob's body (weighing in excess 300lbs) was found floating near his yacht, anchored off the Canarie Islands. It was indeed swooped down upon and air-lifted to where it was buried in an impressive mausoleum on top of Mount Zion, one of Israel's holiest sites. Geryon, a three-headed beast found in Greek mythology was used by Dante in his Divine Comedy to guard the eighth circle of hell in which he gathers those condemned for unnatural acts. This brings to a close a often vituperative panoply.

Kung-fu-Tzse, the non-Latinized pronunciation of Confucius joins to Muhammad, the Seal of the Prophets, showing two ends of the same tally-stick, (one of Ezra's well liked metaphor's) that indicated that great men of knowledge, however separated by continents or cultures, would be in accord with one another.

he master Kung collected the odes

And put them in order.

He gave the words "order" and

"prefer your brother."

Respect ole folks and bring the youngns near.

100 years later Menicus proclaims: "ditto, I'll have the same"

And the granaries were maintained.

The channels of distribution un-clogged

From the fat of hoggers:

Moneyswine that suck off all healthy trade.

The toa/way is clear

Toa as intransitive verb is (to) process

Which is how Uncle Ez, neo-Kung-fu-Tzsian used it.

Muhammad, peace be upon him, brought

A live transaction دين

NOT STATIC religion as State

"It's getten late, boys

"lets not sit around

"thinking about the hereafter

"there is a heck-of-a lot of work to do"

"This hella-hole," seza Danny, "ainta noa place...."

to show

make clear

manifest

The market is like the mosque

Keep it clean from impurity, i.e., usury

No special privilege in opportunity to trade.

Given whole earth to pray on

No need to pay rent on a bank note

He, God bless him, gave folks a free market place

That they could seek their provision without impediment.

Again, no need to pay rent for space to buy and sell

for purchasing power

all of which gets added on to the cost!

Which is more damn-it then folks earn

So debt is, sprout you bumpkin, made incumbent when the former (fortemente)

Is abandoned for latter

"Gosh paw this surn heck don't sound like ree'ligin"

"Hygiene son. It's about keepn clean"

"I have brought the great ball of crystal:

Who can lift it?

Can you enter the great acorn of light?"

Questions, ladies and gents, that still need answers. Needs a people with a prayer and the gall to do it.

hen let the knot untie and wash ashore

pearls scattered upon staried sands,

that we might read the ideogram's

ancient story written in flesh blades of sea-grass

bent like bird's feet gone past.

A hundred dinghies drift into the bay with

Red lanterns lit to Adonis

from the altar of a grain goddess.

The old women of winter draped in Demeter's shawl

Stand in doorways looking out to sea

Where long-ago husbands lay buried

beneath the ocean bed.

French farmer's crops left to rot, while

unsold Spanish potatoes are

banned from the poor in Plaza Mayor

To protect the price of subsidized imports

dumped in supermarkets:

"Monopolists, obstructers of knowledge

obstructers of distribution,"

Getting fat during lean years.

So I'll coil this rope 'round my forearm

And take leave to Genoa Bay

To find work and the woman

with Circe's hair 'n emerald eyes

Not go home to die

in frost bitten New England pond

no not by a long shot,

I've got plenty more work 'n' days.

Only trouble is the money's no good

Not worth the paper and taxed before your sweat dries.

If I could find that grotto

where the hearty women serve mellow wine

in honour of Odysseus

and workmen throw down their silver

for their evening libation

before tak'n on home to rest

in the soft nest of night planting deep

the shoot of tomorrow's harvest.

Awake! Awake! from the dark grape grey

of sea-cliff waves capped in ocean foam

bursting in suspended sunlight like falling stars

upon the sand.

Go back weary traveller to Ithaca or Providence,

back to your native birches bent beneath

the weight of freshly fallen snow.

As the first gold thread of dawn was drawn

across the horizon

He awoke upon the beach, naked, alone. She

Pallas Athene appeared

Out of sea-mist, white with a pilgrim's tunic edged

in indigo, she presented to him.

Scented he, the sailor, prepared for prayer

The rush of blood brought back his colour

And as his pallor vanished so did she, Pallas Athene

He stood

and bowed

then prostrated

Before the Majesty and Beauty of All Existence

peace peace peace

until the rising sun shone high above the horizon.

Our friend makes his way towards the town to find his son, Telemachus, and raise an army.

POSTSCRIPT

The crime of usury is not and has never been one based on race.

"beyond race and against race"

From Addendum for C, written in 1941

From the Cantos of Ezra Pound

This is not an apology (by Pound or myself) for not having subjected ones work to the procrustean bed of political correctness. The Rothschild and Sassons were who they were, as were the JP Morgans and Metevskys. Maxwell, Milken and Soros, all thieves of one sordid sort or another, who were willing to turn a profit at any cost. Today the people of Chile, Iraq or Poland - share the all too common fate of dangerously being in a land made safe for democracy and capitalist investment.

And it certainly is not - my intention to see this serious matter further obfuscated by emotionally charged attitudes towards race. Nor, if it is after all necessary to be so damn Wilfred S. BLUNT, is it acceptable that the crime remains protected behind the highly charged web of racial-slur.

Ideogram: Fidelity to the given word.

The man here standing by his word.

First appeared 1996, London, Newport

For Hasan

Ses Ailes de geant l'empechent de marcher.

From L'Albertos by Charles Baudelaire

Leaving America

2009-02-26T15:38:00.003+02:00

It’s just over a month since I’ve returned from a trip to the States, my first in about four years. There have been occasions where I have crossed the Pond more frequently, but more or less, for the past forty years, I have managed it at least every four or five years.

I don’t think anyone who knows me is ever in doubt as to my origins, but if it is that my own active imagination causes me to forget, the instant my flight touches down on the tarmac I am fully cognisant of my having returned to the land of my birth. Having spent much of these past years between England, Spain and then later Scotland, it is most recently South Africa that for eight years has been my new home. This said, there was an extended period from the mid ‘80s up to ‘91 that I stayed more or less put; living in northern California and raising my family. Alongside the restoration of old houses, something I’ve occupied myself with off and on during most of my adult life, I started writing again, produced an essay, Undercurrents of the Gulf War, and re-discovering, through Hugh Kenner’s magisterial work The Pound Era, Ezra Pound, whom I had first encountered way back in ‘67 sitting on the stoop of the Grolier Poetry Book Shop in Harvard Square. That northern California period was for me a watershed and I left America, yet again, returning to Europe.

A second much shorter period of only a few years was spent in Newport Rhode Island, located just over an hour’s drive from where I had grown up outside of Boston, and, so it happens, where it is presumed by some that I have lived most of my life. In Newport there is the old colonial quarter called The Point that consists of carefully restored eighteenth century ‘post and beam’ timber houses that became a favourite area of the town for me to spend time. Then there are the very famous Newport Mansions, built during the closing years of the nineteenth and first years of the twentieth century by some of America’s notorious ‘robber barons’. However short a time it was, Newport marked a significant shift from a wood to a word chisel. With bags packed and a few cases of books shipped, it was off to the Scottish Highlands.

This recent visit to the States all came down to the last day, 20 November, sitting in the JFK Marriott, where I met with a friend from Brooklyn who came out to see me off back to South Africa. He is one of our foremost Islamic scholars versed in The Muwatta of Imam Malik and the Madinan School. He speaks four languages, starting with Mandingo; then French (he grew up in French speaking Guinea); Arabic (his father was a respected faqi in their West African village); then his adopted English. For close to twenty years he has been what is officially called the ‘Muslim Chaplin of Rikers Island’, performing an invaluable if exceedingly demanding service to those men who pass through that infamous prison. In all this he remains a man of ineluctable wit and good humour, generous of spirit and an aficionado of Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane, as well as a few of the Greenwich Village poets of the 1960s. We were by all accounts both living in The Village at the same time, as I had spent one sultry summer there, possibly the same year he would have arrived from Africa, but we only met and became friends many years later. He once said we were a couple of guineas, he from Africa me from Boston.

In every hotel room, as well as the lobby, lounges and dining areas, there were TVs tuned in to the Inauguration Spectacle, which was also simultaneously bouncing off satellites to be seen all around the world. Therefore, when my friend Imam Salihu walked through the hotel lobby in his distinguished Mac and black fez, greeting me as we approached one another, there was a ubiquitous circus atmosphere beaming in from the surfeit of television screens. And yet the staged excitement was somehow needing too much effort. But surely change had come? A black man (not withstanding he is the son of a white woman) had been elected President of the United States. He was a senator from the state of Illinois, the same state where Lincoln was a senator before he became the American President who would abolish slavery during the American Civil War. I always thought it most adroit of Mr Lincoln not to have abolished slavery in those states loyal to the Union during the war, as he did in the secessionist states, but rather only after it ended. This innocuous and little known fact about Lincoln aside, America’s new President was proof that the American Dream was still alive. The lease on ‘the world’s leading Democracy’ had been extended.

Recalling Lincoln, I am reminded of an anecdote concerning his famous Gettysburg Address where he ends with “– that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom – and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” The story goes that the young and precocious grandson of TP Gore, who had been the first senator of the newly formed state of Oklahoma, asked what his grandfather thought of this emotive final passage to a speech that in my early education during the 1950s was memorised by school children across the country. Senator Gore, who was legally blind, turned towards his young charge, the boy who would soon after take grandpa Gore’s surname as his adopted first name, and said: “Ain’t no such thing. Wouldn’t work anyways.” The myth of Democracy continues to endure in the face of overwhelming evidence that what it purports to be and what indeed it truly is, have been and remain irreconcilable.

The naked facts of the American political class are nowhere more aptly portrayed than in the hard-hitting novels of Theodore Dreiser, who, in 1900, started out as a hard-working investigative journalist in Chicago, then St. Louis and lastly New York. He broke free from the newspaper business soon after the appearance of his novel The Financier. While the novel’s protagonist is a maleficent financier, it is the congenital malfeasances of the lowly political class that allows the movement of wealth to pass into the financier’s hands. The story of Frank Algernon Cowperwood is completed in Dreiser’s The Titan, which was followed by his best-known novel, the classic An American Tragedy.

Dreiser certainly invokes George Orwell, who, born in India and educated at Eton, became ‘the conscience of his generation.’ Yet there is another hugely important American writer, William Faulkner, who held the very soul of his country and was tasked by his own Destiny to write its obituary. His social conscience portrayed the fatal rupture of a nation that enslaved one of its peoples and then actively slaughtered, through a protracted genocide, another. This was the milieu in which the crude and vulgar Snopes family rose in wealth by means of unmitigated greed, envy, bestiality and murder to become politicians, slum-lords and at least one, Flem Snopes, a prominent banker, all in the mythological setting of Yoknapatawpha County, which not only corresponds geographically to the actual Lafayette County in Mississippi, but is the locus of the damaged soul of a nation. This most powerful theme of politics and money stands alongside Faulkner’s daring and devastating study of that worst of all sins, miscegenation, the shameful sexual intercourse between races, that he reveals at the end of Absalom, Absalom to be the only means of survival for America and the inevitable future for the human race.

The truth is that America has never been able to read Faulkner. Of course he is an acknowledged literary giant who took the form of the novel to new and greater heights. He went well beyond Joyce’s Ulysses, mastering not only an innovative style but extraordinary content. He, more than any other writer, advanced the vanguard of twentieth century literary modernism in regards to the novel. It is this towering pedestal that has allowed his social and economic vision to be brushed aside and lost in the closet of academic literary criticism. The immitigable sentence against Faulkner is on account of his great literary stature, and contribution to the world of letters, that his otherwise uncomfortable vision of a doomed nation should be set aside. This egregious anomaly has remained unchallenged. What his modern biographers are so eager to tell us is that he drank too much.

Just before setting off from Cape Town on my Delta flight to New York I had read the brilliant January web-site article by Shaykh Dr. Abdalqadir as-Sufi, ‘The End of Democracy’, where he quotes from Visconti’s film masterpiece of Lampedusa’s novel, ‘The Leopard’. The story’s protagonist proves the lie of modern politics: “For things to remain the same, everything must change.” Now that everything in America has changed the status quo can continue. Or will it? The democratically elected political leader must now stand before the people and somehow explain how it is that while for more than 150 years the political class has been bought and paid for by the financial elite – the titans of both commodities and financial services – now that same elite who by shameless and recalcitrant greed has bankrupted the nation, with the knock-on effect crashing markets around the world, must be bailed out – by the people, for the people – so that they and their children’s children shall be able to pursue that ever-elusive American Dream.

The adherents of the world religion of usury capitalism stand and stare aghast at the ruins of their collapsed idolatry, with its underlying sustaining doctrine of liberal democracy powerless to save them. We can see how all the world’s economies are tied together. There is the fate of communist China, which had set itself up as the factory workshop to supply the capitalist consumers of America, which presently looks precariously unstable. And what of the wholesale surrender of the Arabs from the oil-rich Gulf States who have obsequiously bowed to the religion of Mammon, devouring the poisoned fruit fed from the root of riba? The pseudo kings of Arabia, put in place by the British some seventy-five years ago, are seen eagerly helping to bail out the banks of their former masters.

It was so refreshing to be sitting in the hotel lobby with my friend. We had last been together about two years ago when he was in Cape Town for an international gathering hosted by the community I am part of. “Well at least Bush is out. The people need one day to feel there is some hope for better times.” But tomorrow everyone will wake up with that inevitable hang-over as they realise that while the ‘change has come’ everything remains the same. George Bush, led by his obdurate gang boss Don Rumsfeld, rode roughshod over everyone, from the US Congress to the Pentagon. Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, Scooter Libby, Connie, and all ‘them Snopes’ turned the US Treasury into their personal ATM and no one stopped them. Everyone who worked in the Bush White House was a consummate career opportunist who in the private sector wouldn’t give George a job on account of him not being qualified to do any other reasonable day’s work that folks would pay him for on a Friday pay-week – other than his holding the public office of the President of the United States. For eight years they had a free reign and I don’t think that any of them are filing for bankruptcy.

It was time to go. The hotel limousine was waiting outside to take the guests to the airport. I received a warm farewell from my learned friend and would carry his greetings back to Cape Town. It had been a short but very good visit, though I was now anxious to be on my way, leaving America.

A Rent Party

2009-01-27T09:02:00.001+02:00

Last night I had a rent party at my home in Newlands. Those of you that have visited me know that I am very fortunate indeed to have one the very coolest townhouse apartments that can be had anywhere. Its three bedrooms on a split-level four floors, from lower ground to upper loft master bedroom. My entire library stacked full of books, paintings, prints, original watercolours and even an oil. There are oriental carpets and an Ivory Coast mask of an African prince. There are photos of my Shaykh and also his Shaykh, as well as three men who have been my closest brothers and, you could say, were dear friends except it would be presumptuous on my part to say so. Two have already gone on ahead and left this world, and the third will, I pray, out-live me by many a year. In the 1950s and early 60s it was a practice among the bohemian artists and poets of New York’s Greenwich Village, who took it from the earlier generation of Paris in the 20s, to invite all their friends and friends of friends over for a rent party. This occurred when the person was about to be evicted from their apartment and they needed to raise some money to pay the rent. Folks would bring some cheap wine, maybe some beer, food and whatever they could spare to put into the hat towards the overdue rent. Sometimes they may have all ended up a bit hung over and still short on the rent, but among these artists and friends there were always a few who had some money. Last night we had nine people over for dinner. It was a night in part for one of our people whose sister is visiting from Europe and is interested in the Deen. Also it was the birthday of Hajj Ikramudin’s lovely wife, and as most of you know Ikramudin had stayed with me for a few years, off – to complete his degree – then on again until his marriage. Some people think I looked after him, but, of course, he looked after me. We know from the famous Hadith that each guest brings with them 70,000 angels and that they remain (for a time) after your guests depart. It may be that Allah has another place for me to live. That is, I may be moving (quite soon) from my Newlands home. I am not worried so much about the money, and I do put in motion a plan, and trust in Allah that He will continue to look after me. Therefore, this is not a passing of the hat. This is to say that my home this morning is full of light. My heart is at ease and I am for the moment still here. Hajj Abdal’Razak had been looking after the house while I went overseas to visit my family (now 2 grandchildren) and has accepted to stay on a bit to give me some company. Sometimes people will say with a derogatory connotation that something is just poetry. We know what they mean when they say that. Also, there is the poetry of the one who says a thing in a way that rings true, that expresses something so beautiful, hits the nail on the head, captures the very soul of the thing being said, even while it is not exact prose in the way people normally talk. That 70,000 angels arrive with each of your guests is not just poetry. It is from a Hadith from the Rasool, may Allah bless him and grant him peace. That I attempt to write it, pass it on in a way that can move an understanding between us, is, you could say, my poetry. Abdullah Luongo

The Last Straw

2008-11-25T06:23:00.003+02:00

In 1812 Sultan Mahmut II sent an order from Topkapi that the wahhabis should be removed from the cities of Makkah, Madinah and Jeddah. It must be noted that the period of Mahmut’s rule, 1839-76, known as the Tanzimat, was, according to the confirmed Islamic perspective (differentiated from an Orientalist reading of events) the point of irreversible decline and fall of the Osmani Dawlah, otherwise known as the Ottoman Empire. This period was the one of disastrous ‘reforms’ from which the Muslim world has yet to recover. The modalities of Islamic governance, law and civic practice that had propelled a civilisation previously unequalled in its capacity to protect and assure the prosperity and freedom of its members, were traded in for a corruption-riddled French bureaucracy, and with it the most destructive of all alien innovations, an interest-bearing bank debt now payable in fiat money to the banks in France, and soon afterwards to those of England. On the back of the success of the Napoleonic Wars that saw the Russians defeated at Austerlitz, the Tanzimat government, having entered into ‘compromise’ with the French, found itself thrust into the Russo-Turkish war (1806-1812). The continual loss of territory as well as the rapidly eroding political prestige of the once powerful Muslim world had begun. It would not be until the heroic rise of the last authentic Sultan and Khalif, Sultan Abdulhamid II, that the banner of Islam would be raised again. For a short but glorious thirty-three years the light of the 7^thcentury miracle that had burst out from the city of Madinah on the Arabian Peninsula would shine again. In 1908 Sultan Abdulhamid would be deposed, and with that tragic event began 100 years of immitigable failure.

Returning to 1812, in the back-drop to Mehmut II’s order to dispel the wahhabi menace from the holy cities, we can recognise the inevitable ‘bad weather’ that was appearing throughout the entire Muslim world. There was then, as there is now in the 21^st century, no doubt to the pusillanimity and the maleficent behaviour of the deviant anti-Islamic sect commonly referred to in today’s media as ‘orthodox’ or ‘conservative’ Islam. With the collapse of the unifying core of knowledge that had lent power and strength to the Muslim world, the low pressure zones could not but bring about all the terrible storms and disasters that continue to this day to heap humiliation and contempt upon a people who sold away their religion.

The Khedive of Egypt, Muhammad Ali, received his instruction from Istanbul and discharged an expeditionary force to drive out and subdue these rebels. Abdullah ibn Sa’ud, tribal leader and warlord, who was the head of this movement, was captured and, we are told, subdued, and thereupon reaffirmed his allegiance to the Sultan. For the next few years the Hijaz remained relatively free of the wahhabi menace, while their activities continued in the hinterland of the Arabian Peninsula.

It should be noted that all the losses of territories in the Balkans and Eastern Europe were racing ahead, as was the mounting foreign debt owed to the banks. Any rapprochement between the Tanzimat government in Istanbul and their new ‘friends’ involved a further plunging into the abyss. The only time they would loose more and gain less would be when Mustapha Kamel, in his feeble attempt to appease the English at the time of WW I, would surrender the broken remains of what had been a most magnificent civilisation. Within a short period Abdullah ibn Sa’ud was once again sending out raiding parties from the wahhabi stronghold of Dhar’iyya and terrorizing the Muslim inhabitants of tented settlements and small towns. Consequently, in 1818, a second expedition was led by the Khedive’s son, Ibrahim Pasha, crossing from the Red Sea coast along 600 miles of desert to the coast of Dhar’iyya, and there laid siege to and defeated the Saudis. The wahhabi leader was taken prisoner and sent to Istanbul to appear before a court of law.

As a rebel against the Khalif, Sa’ud would simply be executed for high treason; an acknowledged punishment that has existed in nearly all society throughout history, and, moreover, has its precedent within Islamic Law. The rebel would be permitted to perform two raka’ts (a pair of ritual prostrations), as befits a Muslim before facing his death. Nevertheless, upon the insistence of the not yet impotent ulema, they argued that first Sa’ud’s Islam must be verified. This led Sa’ud to stand before the Shaykh al-Islam and be questioned by a body of highly respected scholars. The great Hanafi ulema found Sa’ud to be completely out of Islam, an extreme heretic (zindiq) by admission of his own beliefs, and thereby sentenced him without the privilege of performing two raka’ts. The Amir of the people of Najd was publicly beheaded at Topkapi.

Within time the leadership of the wahhhabi movement devolved to the notorious and equally nefarious Abdal’ Azziz ibn Sa’ud, who based himself in their historical homeland, the region known as Najd, from where they continued their war against Islam. Meanwhile, Britain, who was by then well ensconced in Egypt, having established a permanent presence from the mid nineteenth century, with Lord Cromer, of the Baring banking family, as Governor General, were now, at the opening of the twentieth century, actively perusing new alliances on the Arabian Peninsula. They had no trouble ingratiating themselves to their soon to be vassals. The flattering financial support of the British to Ibn Sa’ud added further impetus to their expansionist plans to control the entire peninsula. Fortified with British guns and a steady flow of money the Sa’udis were using the emblazoned and enraged wahhabi missionaries, named the Mutawwas, to force the remaining Bedouin Arabs into submission and allegiance to the House of Sa’ud. The newly settled Bedouins were placed in fixed colonies or camps called Ikhwans, which can be seen as the prototype for the Israeli nationalist kibbutz.

The Ikhwan colonies, the first of which was established around 1912 at Artawiyya, banded together peoples from the multifarious tribes that had previously travelled freely throughout the land, each one with their unique cultural and linguistic heritage that was expressed through a rich and variegated poetry and oral tradition. Forged into settled camps of zealots and fed on a daily diet of wahhabi doctrines, they found themselves cut off from their past, the roots of their memory of historical Islam severed, and their bonds of loyalty and brotherhood replaced by a new binding force of an extremist ideology.

A second colony was then established at Ghutghut, and as they had done at Artawiyya, the Sa’udis appointed a governor to run it. At its height the Ikhwan movement was comprised of some 200 settlements, and it was with this army of men Ibn Sa’ud was able to establish his hegemony over the Hijaz. By 1929 the two most powerful wahhabi governors, Faizal ad-Dawwish and Sultan ibn Bijad, had come to realize that the Sa’udis were themselves driven by an rapacious lust for wealth along with an obsessive ambition for their own tribal homogeneity – something that had been ripped away from all other tribal groupings. Together they rose up in rebellion. Faizel ad-Dawwish was captured and taken prisoner, but upon recanting was forgiven and set free, only to resume his insurrection against the tribe he had helped put in power. Ibn Bijad was also captured and subsequently imprisoned in Riyadh. Dawwish fled to Iraq but was shortly thereafter picked up by the British and handed back over to their Sa’udi friends. The Ikhwan settlements were razed to the dust, Artawiyya and Ghutghut blown into oblivion, while the doctrinal seeds of sedition against historical Islam had survived, lodged in the breasts of dispossessed and disenfranchised zealots. There you have the progenitors of the 21^st century suicide bombers.

The wahhabis, who had put a rebel zindiq into power, became an embarrassment to their English friends who had made them kings. Many will recall the more famous and glamorous Lawrence, immortalised by Hollywood, but in real life abandoned by his Government, as England dropped their support for T.E. Lawrence’s friend, Sharif Hussein of Makkah, to put their full force behind Sa’ud. On January 8, 1926 the rebel Najdi declared himself ‘king’ having been formally appointed by Britain and then officially recognized by them in 1927. When Winston Churchill, sitting on a barge on the Nile, broke the good news to Ibn Sa’ud that he was now recognized as the King of Arabia, Ibn Sa’ud said : “Sa’udi Arabia!” In 1932 the country’s name was officially recorded. The Saudis would in time prove equally embarrassing to their soon to be American friends, but not before the enormously lucrative ARAMCO (Arab American Oil Company) would bring unprecedented wealth to first the Americans then the Kingdom.

An overland trade route was opened from the Red Sea to the Persian Gulf named the Darb an-Nasara or the Christian’s Road. Isolated airports and walled compounds that eventually developed into entire cities were constructed by the Bechtel Group. Inside these duty free zones all the societal and religious rules were removed. Likewise, in the gaudy Las Vegas styled palaces of the ruling family, the whisky could flow. Today Bechtel has moved aside for Halliburton, and the Saudi royal family are again attempting to distance themselves from the ‘strict wahhabi doctrines’ that have become synonymous with the perpetrators of the famous attack in New York on two sky-scrapers.

Between the heady days of Sir Percy Cox and Gertrude Bell (not Lawrence) in Arabia and today, many moves in this compelling ‘great game’ have been made. Jordan also got an English appointed king, so did Iraq, Syria and Egypt. Kuwait was later carved out of Iraq and it too was given its own a king, related to the ones in Saudi Arabia. By the mid 20^th century many of those then decrepit and decayed pseudo monarchies were replaced with modern secular governments that this time had been hatched by the Americans, as US hegemony had come to replace the faded British Empire. The invasion of Kuwait for their having engaged in ‘slant drilling’ into Iraqi oil fields, and the subsequent Desert Storm that ensued, and then the toppling of the criminal Saddam Hussein a decade later in Operation Iraqi Freedom, can been seen within a deeper historical background.

As the Global Economy remains in the throws of un-diminishing aftershocks, a most extraordinary development has occurred with one of the largest and most prestigious banks, one which is based in the UK. As it has been unequivocally determined that by the unrestrained and unconscionable greed of bankers and other related persons in the financial markets, a most foul and un-natural disaster befell the world. The fall-out continues as the great financial houses of America and Europe continue to collapse, spreading into other related industries dependant on the limitless expansion of credit. The collapse of the US housing market did not ‘start it all’, but rather the utterly irresponsible lending practices that were (while it lasted) wildly lucrative, and completely legal! Now Detroit’s Big 3, actually rather small and they have been for quite some time, are partitioning the US Government to bail them, as they did with Fanny Mae, Freddie Mac, Bear Stearns, and on and on. Of course, this is State interference in the Free Market Economy, an absolute mortal sin within the sanctity of liberal Democracy, and in case everyone has forgotten, why the Cold War was fought, or why we were told it was fought. The introducing of parastatals to prevent the rampant theft of a country’s natural resources was why Achmed Sukano in Indonesia and later Salvadorian President Allende, both democratically elected, were overthrown by CIA backed coups. It is what was removed from the table when the ANC were handed political power at the end of the apartheid government in South Africa. It is thrown in the face of Putin by die-hard Reaganomics Republicans.

The politicians had been well paid to keep their noses out of The Market. Now they are being blamed for not having seen it coming. Quite frankly they have served their constituencies well, if you understand that the ones they have so ignominiously served were those that paid them, not (and we can not be so naive) those that vote for them.

The above mentioned prestigious UK bank, unlike the majority of their counterparts on both sides of the Atlantic, have gone to the oil rich Arabs, some of the very ones whose families were made kings by order of the British Crown at the hand of an exceedingly witty and most particularly inebriated Government Minister. And is it not fitting that this great institution of 19^th century global imperialism and 20^th century usury capitalism (that has orchestrated devastating wars against ordinary, albeit unfortunate, Muslim peoples) should now be propped up by those very same Arabs? Can this be the last straw?