R and R in Rome

Jim and Sasha say that I need to retrace some ground between the debacle in Newark and subsequent lofty thoughts on how we Americans view the Middle East. So I suppose I could expend a few words on my R and R here in Rome. First of all, I'm one of those fliers who gets the jet lag whack. Secondly, I love Rome. So I've been here in one of my favorite cities in the world, trying to get my circadian rhythms in sync. I'm staying in the Hotel Raphael on Largo Febo, tucked behind one end of the Piazza Navona. I have never stayed here before, and I'm alternately amused, bemused, and enchanted.

Like a lot of hotels now, the Raphael's elegant old exterior belies a completely gutted and Euro-industrial restyled interior upstairs. So the downstairs is quirkily charming, with the original hotelier's eclectic art collection (everything from Miro and Picasso ceramics to absolutely hideous tenth-rate Italian religious painting, from a Russian sleigh in the lobby to a set of exquisite Passover plates and cups--and dare I mention the amusing if confusing John the Baptist baptizing Jesus cabinet?). Upstairs, the eco-industrial takes over. My room is a hermetically-sealed box, all birch wood and chrome, with more wall buttons to push than I have been able to master in two days. The hotel's ecologically-sound air conditioning schema and I have been engaged in a battle of wits and will. Basically, the hotel continually resets all the rooms to a temperature I find too warm, so every few hours I have to get up and re-set from my end. All is forgiven for the rooftop terrace bar and restaurant, however, where the view gives new meaning to breathtaking.

I haven't had time to do much except sleep, read Islamist reformers, and work on my blog. Yesterday, gorgeous day here in Rome, I wandered the medieval cobblestone alleys around here, took in Raphael's Sibyls in the church next door, had a latte at the cafe next to the church and read the International Herald Tribune, and then subjected myself to a medicinal mani/pedi at a men's day spa recommended by the hotel. Clearly, the standards and comforts of nail prep vary from culture to culture.

A German gentleman hovers, waiting politely for the computer. Must go find the bellman and get my bill. It's on to Jordania, as the desk clerks here say. Talk to you from Amman, in sh'allah.

American Readers and the Muslim World

Shortly before my departure, during a dinner shared with an old friend, I talked about the International Women's Conference and what I speculated about its intentions beyond "building bridges--breaking walls." (Like I said earlier, I am a sceptic by nature.) As soon as I began, or so I intended, to pay homage to the deep faith of many Muslims, my friend said dismissively, "Oh. Religious people." Now this old friend is an admirable person, a truly fine human being; but he is deeply secular. He knows little about Christianity or indeed any faith and approaches tidbits of religious knowledge in the way a child afraid of the water will dip a toe in a pool. Like many secularists in America today, my old friend is erudite and accomplished. He has a national reputation in his field; he is a mover and shaker in Democratic party politics and was, in a way, part of the Clinton administration. But he does not respect religious faith as a motivation for human action. Therefore, during our dinner hour, he was not curious about Muslim belief because, in his mind, it is an unpleasant topic. Well, in my mind this attitude is American know-nothingness--ignorant, parochial, and prejudiced. Ironically, because "prejudice" is one of the shibboleths of American culture today, sadly I go out of my way not to name my otherwise exemplary old friend.

I have been thinking about that dinner conversation in the light of my googling the IWF conference participants--an acquisition of knowledge that has made me rethink my own assumptions about the Muslim world, even after making my way through the conference's reading list. It turns out that I had several wrong-headed presumptions about these women with the strange unpronounceable names from the Middle East. First of all (the glory of Google to include pictures), these women dress like American lawyers--well, maybe some of them like your mother's Junior League--but they do not wear long skirts or head scarves. Oh, the silliness of my friend Clare and myself: emailing back and forth about what to wear, buying baggy gauzy trousers, worrying about our nail polish. At one point, I even bought at the Talbots Outlet a long black skirt and matching long-sleeved jacket that makes me look like Gertrude Bell.

More importantly, the Middle Eastern women coming to the conference are political liberals who are holding important positions in their increasingly-liberal countries. But we never hear about liberal Islam, do we? For the first time, I realize how skewed our media coverage in the U.S. is towards negative stories about the Middle East. Mary Ann Tetreault, writing about the democratic elections in Kuwait, puts it well: "Serious news about Kuwait rarely penetrates far beyond the region in the best of times. When the story is about democratization rather than invasion or terrorism, even the most encouraging of news can evaporate without a trace. Is this because, in Kuwait, democratization has been more the product of peaceful politics than violent confrontation? If so, it spells a cavalier attitude toward a wave of progressive political change that Americans and others are presumably in favor of seeing happen across the Middle East."

Therefore, we never hear about reformers such as Rula Dashti, political activist who helped secure the right to vote for women in Kuwait; Rima Khalaf Hunaidi, former deputy Prime Minister of Jordan, graduate of the American University in Beirut, PH.D. from Portland State University, creator of the Arab Human Development Report for the U.N.; Wijdan Talhouni Al-Saket, Jordanian Senator and president of the Jordan Forum for Business and Professional Women; Alees Samaan, first woman to chair a parliament in Bahrain; Farkhonda Hassan, professor of geology at the American University in Cairo and member of the second house of the Egyptian Parliament, who works to get more young women into the sciences in Egypt; Raghida Dergham, a political analyst for NBC, MSNBC and the Arab satellite LBC, as well as senior diplomatic correspondent for Al Hayat, the leading independent Arabic daily. All of these women, among others I have yet to google, will be at IWF Conference.

And yet these Muslim women know about us. Mary Ann Tetreault's observations during the Kuwaiti elections include the enthusiasm of the women to get out and vote in such numbers that the polling places were unprepared for handling the large numbers of illiterate women voters and the niceties of voter identification when the voter is veiled. "Consequently, the lines moved so slowly that some women gave up in disgust and went home without voting, eliciting several dark comments about Ohio in a line I stood in that day."

I am wrong about another assumption, one I stated in an earlier blog. The Middle Eastern women at the conference will not only be Muslims. Alees Samaan, mentioned above, from Bahrain, is a Greek Orthodox Christian Arab.

Note: Mary Ann Tetreault's "Kuwait's Annus Mirabilis" is wonderful reading. You can find her piece at MiddleEastDesk.org. She teaches at Trinity University in San Antonio.

Finally, my dinner companion is now working to raise money for Barack Obama. What a strange and wonderful world.

Sixty Is Not the New Forty

Do journeys ever unfold as planned? If I needed reminding that the answer is in the negative, the beginning of my trip on Friday gave me the nudge. First of all, let me say that I survived, and I'm sitting in the library at The Yale Club in New York writing this for an hour before heading off to Newark and my flight to Rome--the first leg of my journey to Jordan. I had thought to spend this hour pontificating/intoning--whatever--about how the Cold War set so much of the Middle East on a skewed path (journeys, again?)--and my sense generally that wrong choices have consequences far into the future.

On a lighter note--but indeed a story about wrong choices having consequences far into the future--let me begin with some poor decision-making back in 1969. My then boyfriend Stephen Sewell, having toked a few too many, ran a stop sign in his ancient Nash after midnight in Berkeley and collided with an oncoming car. I was in the front passenger seat and not wearing my seatbelt, so I slammed into the dashboard and broke my left collarbone. For years, the only lasting consequence of that evening seemed to be Stephen's confidence in my mother (arriving in Berkeley to care for me) that he was thinking of proposing. Curiously, Stephen never mentioned this to me. And given the on-again off-again nature of our relationship, I was surprised to hear that he had marriage on his mind. And over time I have mulled occasionally over Stephen's confidence in my mom. But the accident had another consequence that did not seem too burdensome at first: I lost complete mobility in my left arm. And now, decades later, because my left shoulder/arm is weaker than my right, and because at the same time I am left-handed, I have a recalcitrant muscle in my left shoulder that sometimes complains. And complains mightily, as it suddenly began to do the evening before my departure for New York, in such a fashion that I got no sleep Thursday night before my 7 A.M. flight on Friday morning. And there my story begins.

Having had no sleep, having taken Advil for my shoulder, I, who absolutely hate to fly (hence the three-step journey to Jordan) was nevertheless doing fine until the plane hit considerable turbulence descending into Newark. Did I mention also that I am prone to motion sickness? No--well, I am. And I got such a case of motion sickness that by the time we landed I felt I was going to pass out. I rang the call button, and a stewardess began to ply me with cold towels. Slowly, the plane empties, except for the patient and long-suffering young couple on the inside seats next to me. With me eyes closed--the better not to barf--I say over and over "if I could just lie down for fifteen minutes." Meanwhile, the (very nurturing) stewardesses, who have already had to deal with a young man having a seizure earlier on the flight, just beyond Denver--these young women tell me that they have called the paramedics. And also meanwhile I manage to move across the aisle so that my seatmates can deplane. Once again I murmur, "if I could just lie down."

Soon I open my eyes to six jolly policemen--"where are the paramedics?" ask the stewardesses--I suppose post 9/11 that airport cops don't have enough to do (thank goodness) and are delighted to be called to any kind of emergency. And what chatty, jolly cops they were. "I'm going to open your purse to get out your driver's license, madam." "Oh! look here! We can arrest her!" Eyes closed, I protest feebly at their joke, for I know that my license doesn't expire for another year. "What medication are you on, madam?" "Oh, Prevacid--when did you last have that GERD test?--naughty, naughty, you need to have that test updated." And on and on. I still have my eyes closed and can barely talk. Eventually, the paramedics do arrive--and you, my sisters, will be interested to hear that it was a team identical to the one who ministered to our dad in the wee hours of the morning in Houston a month ago--complete with all the really cool high tech equipment, which they proceeded to use on me.

Even as the stewardess is trying to tell these men that she thinks I just have motion sickness, they are determined to carry me to the hospital. "Can't you just take me to a quiet room?" I ask. But it turns out, probably for reasons of liability, that airports have no quiet rooms anymore (well, actually, there is one in Terminal 4 at Heathrow, should you intrepid travelers ever need a snooze between flights). So it looks like it's on to the hospital--somewhere in Newark. I protest again--remembering the incidents of run-away staph infections when my dad was just in the hospital in Houston, following his paramedic adventure--and I try to hold my ground. The paramedics confer. "Oh, but look here," one says, "she is sixty." Registering my age, these men are more determined more than ever to cart me off.

At this point, I finally throw up, mostly in my wet cloth, but also on the floor of seat 18D. And, because I haven't had a chance to use the restroom, at the same time I pee all over 18D. A low point in my life. But I feel so badly that I don't realize how low until later.

Finally, after an hour, surrounded by six policemen and four paramedics and three stewardesses, I emerge into the terminal, packed with the passengers awaiting their flight, now considerably delayed. I had insisted on walking out, thinking that would make me feel better--my wheelchair proceeding me--and then disappearing just as I needed to sit down. And with the packed waiting area, there were no seats. A stewardess commands a seat! I collapse, next to a woman eating a plate of fried chicken; I commence to barf all over the floor around the seat. At last, my wheelchair reappears and I am wheeled on Toad's Wild Ride down to the baggage area to get my luggage.

Magically, mysteriously, my retinue has disappeared, and I am left in luggage, where I doze for an hour until I think I can make it into Manhattan. As I wooze my way along the taxi queue, I notice that I am covered with the same stick-ums for electrodes that the paramedics used on my dad. At last, I make it to The Yale Club and proceed to barf twice more. I collapse into bed for almost twenty-four hours until revived by the arrival of my daughters into New York from Princeton.

Let's just say I don't recover from these bouts of air sickness as quickly as I used to. And I plan to be well-dramamined before taking off for Rome this afternoon. It is a very windy spring day in New York.

Questions, Questions

The books I've read for the International Women's Forum Cornerstone Conference in Amman, Jordan have (1) shown me how little I know about Islam; (2) raised more questions than they have answered. For example, Leila Ahmed (conference speaker, Harvard Divinity School professor, Egyptian by birth, author of Women & Gender in Islam) admits in her memoir Border Passage that she never learned to read classical Arabic. Therefore, she cannot read the Q'ran. She says that the Q'ran is an oral text for Muslims. Except for scholars and jurists, the Q'ran is heard, not read. Furthermore, the Arabic dialect spoken in each country in the Middle East is so different that the denizen of one country cannot understand the Arabic spoken in another country. When Ms. Ahmed went to teach in the Emirates, she had to have an interpreter for Gulf Arabic.

Ms. Ahmed's comment makes no sense when I try to puzzle it out. What, then, is modern standard Arabic? Is this what literate people in the Middle East read in their newspapers? If not modern standard Arabic, what is the Arabic of the written press? What is the common denominator Arabic of the American University of Beirut--still, after all these years, an important source of higher education in the Middle East, as I have learned from googling the conference's speakers. What is the Arabic on Al-Jazeera?

Beyond these practical considerations, the oral transmission of the Q'ran has enormous consequences, it seems to me. As we Protestant Christians know, it was the translation of the Bible into the European vernaculars--an act of disobedience against the Church that cost both translators and printers their lives--and the subsequent reading of the Bible among the literate middle classes that led to the Reformation and its attendant consequences for nation-states and human rights. A sixteenth-century European had to read the Bible in secret, upon penalty of death; the reward for such a risk, however, was the freedom to decide for oneself the meaning of the sacred text. The printing press was introduced into the Arabic-speaking world by nineteenth-century American missionaries, brought from Malta to Beirut in 1834. Maybe it's time for Muslims to read the Q'ran in their native languages. Of course, western history here is a cautionary tale, as well, in that it was the internecine warfare among Catholics and Protestants that finally led some people to a surfeit of violence and killing and a subsequent sense of the worth of all individuals, no matter their beliefs. It was not a straight path from the translated Bible to religious freedom. So perhaps we should not expect change in the Muslim world too quickly.

Nevertheless, it does seem to me that a crux of Islamic culture is the oral transmission of the revelations of the Prophet.

Hume Horan, a retired U.S. foreign service Arabist, has this to say on the subject of why the Islamic world has been resistant to translations. "Here is the dilemma: God spoke Arabic. Oh, he may have delivered an earlier, flawed message in Hebrew, in the Old Testament, or in Greek, in the New. but he damn sure got it right the third time. The Koran is not history or biography, like the Bible. It is pure revelation. Arabic is coterminus with God. So, unlike English, which is a compost, a welcoming cathedral, the most catholic of languages, Arabic is a completely closed system, resistant to loanwords, a terrifyingly logical, well-oiled piece of machinery that just clicks, clicks away." (quote from Robert D. Kaplan's The Arabists)

Arabic verb tenses do not delineate among past, present, and future. Surely, this feature of Arabic also contributes to the resistance to Koranic translation.

And one small consequence for westerners is the transliteration of Arabic words. Is it the Koran, Qur'an, Qur'n, or Q'ran? Was he Mohammed, Mohamed, Muhammed, Muhamad, Muhammad? Each of the books I have been reading uses a different spelling. This confusion adds to the tentativeness of any and all western observations of Islam, including mine here on Junehill, Owl and a Green Dog, Too.

Drawing A Bright Line

One of the books I've been reading for the International Women's Forum Building Bridges--Breaking Walls Conference in Amman is Katerina Dalacoura's Islam, Liberalism and Human Rights. Ms. Dalacoura, who teaches at the London School of Economics, tries to make the case that there is no essential incompatibility between Islam and human rights. She defines human rights as "the rights people have by virtue of their humanity," and she traces the concept of humans having inalienable rights qua human beings to the bringing together of the Judaeo-Christian tradition in the West with the European Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. As far as the western view of human rights is concerned, probably no one would disagree. But she goes on to argue that our concept of human rights is grounded equally in the exercise of reasoned inquiry and the exercise of faith, for the secularism that the Enlightenment has bequeathed us cannot alone guarantee human rights, without a sense of a higher moral law. She finds moral law in man's recourse to what has long been called natural law, in which faith and reason are joined, and goes on to say that "whatever interpretation we give to natural law, however--whether we find our point of reference in Christianity, in Islam, in a belief in a higher Being or in a inchoate metaphysical sense of the sacredness of the human being--we cannot, I argue, escape its [natural law's] necessity if we want to be consistent on human rights."

The Dalacoura view of an Islam that could be compatible with such human rights is more problematic. She puts aside sharia (the Abbasid medieval legal codes that dictate much of the practice of Islam) and finds a locus for human rights in the Q'ran. However, she is vague as to which divine revelations in the Q'ran address human rights. And in the end her argument is unconvincing, partly because she does not discuss Mohammedan revelation, partly because the Egyptian and Tunisian attempts to combine human rights and Islam, which she chronicles, have failed.

Therefore, I had tossed this book aside--more fool me--until Ms. Dalacoura's subject came back to haunt me this past week after the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its decision Gonzales v. Carhart. There was so much vituperative back-and-forth in the media about this partial-birth abortion case that I decided I had to read the decision and the background cases for myself. And I was surprised--more, taken aback--even more, appalled--at what a partial-birth abortion actually entails. It is either infanticide or next-to-infanticide--and whatever it is, it abrogates that "higher moral law" to which, according to Ms. Dalacoura, we are all bound. And the ironic thing, from my point of view, as a western woman cautiously embarking on an exploration of Islam, is that infanticide is one subject on which Muslims can take the human rights high ground, for in the seventh century Mohamed outlawed infanticide, at a time when the other Mediterranean cultures practiced it. I wonder if any of the Muslim women at the conference will point this out, if and when they are queried closely about human rights in their countries.

Furthermore, the U.S. Supreme Court decision shows how difficult it is to find that locus of natural law. It is one thing to say "let's combine faith and reason;" it is quite another more difficult thing to do so. The exercise of reason is hard, very hard, and it is a task best-suited for the most intelligent. When reason and faith go hand-in-hand, as they have many times in western culture (the abolition of slavery, child labor laws, encouragement of education and knowledge), they walk in beauty, to quote Byron. But there are times when reason and faith clash. In such instances, the exercise of reason becomes not only difficult to do but difficult to sustain, for one's mind is already jumping past argument to the forgone conclusion that faith a priori embodies. This seems to be the situation with Justice Kennedy's written opinion in Gonzales v. Carhart. His reasoning is disjointed, weak, and doesn't hold up to scrutiny; his conclusions are peremptory--because, I suspect, in his mind (like in my own) from the beginning any and all argument about women's rights this/doctors' opinions that/case law here/precedent there are irrelevant because the prohibition against infanticide or against an act coming close to infanticide trumps everything. Therefore, Justice Kennedy's written opinion is a charade, and it is just the kind of intellectual dishonesty for which Katerina Dalacoura takes many modern Islamic scholars to task when, for example, they try to prove that women in Islamic societies have a panoply of human rights. The fact that a western jurist (one trained in the Jesuit tradition, no less) cannot sustain an argument warns us of the difficulties ahead for many a Muslim jurist trying to do the same, and in cultures less hospitable to reason and more deeply imbued with a sense of divine law. In our own society, moreover, it is not just the jurists and scholars who are intellectually dishonest. Last week few in the media repeated the word "infanticide," even though it appears often in the Supreme Court opinion. If Americans choose euphemism and circumlocution, if we cannot speak our minds, how can we expect people in more closed societies to do otherwise?

"Congress determined that the abortion methods it proscribed had a 'disturbing similarity to the killing of a newborn infant,' ... and thus it was concerned with 'drawing a bright line that clearly distinguishes abortion and infanticide.'" (J. Kennedy, opinion of the U.S. Supreme Court, Gonzales v. Carhart)

My Friend Clare

At the outset, I should confess that, like the proverbial changeling or cuckoo chick, I am going to this conference under false pretenses. I am not a "woman leader"--that would be my friend Clare, who has generously asked me to accompany her. She is a trusts & estates lawyer, philanthropist, and IWF member who, like all the other members convening in Amman, is allowed to bring one guest. So I suppose I will be the Woman Who Came to Dinner. Hopefully, I will not be the only one. Clare's invitation was serendipitous (as such things often are), for she thought I would be in Egypt sometime in May and could hop over to Jordan and join her. Indeed I had planned to be in Egypt with my younger daughter Caroline, who is visiting St. Catherine's Monastery in the Sinai because she hopes to present a paper on two of the monastery's frescoes at a Byzantine art conference next fall. But mother-daughter scheduling didn't work out, and Caro can't get to the Sinai until August and its 120 degree heat. Even as my Egypt sojourn vanished (regrets, regrets--Caro is the absolute best traveler, but that's a story for another day), I jumped at the chance to join Clare. So now I will try to be as good a
traveling companion for Clare as Caro has been for me. Tall order. We'll see how I do.

Having googled some of the California IWF members going to Amman, I'm slightly intimidated by their accomplishments. I'm a bit of an odd bird myself--a somewhat agoraphobic traveler, spending my days at home researching and writing little histories on my mother's family (albeit an interesting one, in that Southern gothic way) when I'm not taking trips here and there. Sometimes, as I hold a letter from the 1880's and struggle to decipher the copperplate, briefly I have the oddest feeling that the writer has stepped out of the shadows to my side. I wonder if a century and more from now our blogs, presuming that they still circle the ethernet, will alight upon spaces yet to be created.

So--returning to the subject at hand--I will be one of many upper middle-class and upper class women, East and West, traveling to Amman. We all seem to be well-educated. My husband supposes that we westerners (mostly Americans?--I'll find out and report) will be secularists, almost to a woman. Of course, I am an exception; and from googling, I know that two of the California IWFers are "staunch Episcopalians," as they say, and one is Jewish. As for our hostesses, I suddenly realize that my presumption that all will be Muslims could be wrong. There are 4 million Arab Christians in the Middle East; a few could be part of the Cornerstone Conference. Somehow--after my reading--I think not. But I will report, and that will be a story for another another day.

Off To See The Queen

Even though I brought out Owl and Green Dog as a political blog--like everybody else and her aunt momma looking ahead to 2008--I will be writing first from the International Women's Forum Cornerstone Conference in Jordan. "Under the patronage of Her Majesty Queen Rania Al-Abdullah, Founder of IWF Jordan, women leaders from around the world are invited to join IWF in this ancient and biblical land for a conversation unlike any other. In unity, with stewardship and trust, come to Amman, May 14-16 and help expand the circle of understanding that lifts prospects for a more sustainable future." So states the program. A born sceptic, I will see.

I should also mention that I am a born (again) Christian who, having worked my way through the conference's reading list on Islam, realizes for the first time the depth of her ignorance about Muslims. So probably I shouldn't be nitpicking, yet--but, after all, this is a blog. Should the conference prospectus begin its description of Jordan with the moniker "biblical land?" Jordan is an Islamic state where, technically, the penalty for apostasy is death. Promulgating the Bible is against the law. Of course, Jordan has a Christian Orthodox community that predates the creation of Jordan itself by a thousand years. And Muslims recognize Christians and Jews as fellow "peoples of the book"--dhimmi, in Arabic. However, our book, the Bible, is not the equal of the Q'ran. Therefore, I wonder if a biblical Jordan is a bit outside the circle of understanding.