Stetkevych: Muhammed an the Golden Bough

[Tiassa]

Stetkevych: Muhammad and the Golden Bough

I'm starting through Jaroslav Stetkevych's Muhammmad and the Golden Bough: Reconstructing Arabian Myth.

I intend to take a couple of weeks at least with this book; it's slim, about 170 pages including index. Published by Indiana University Press, I had only heard of the book through Amazon's "also bought" lists.

However, from the Preface:

Myth as a constituent of Arab-islamic culture has long been ignored or even denied. Prodded, indeed, irked, by this stance exhibited by scholarship on the one hand and by a dogmatic theology or ideology on the other, I attempt in this study, first of all, to demonstrate the existence of a culture-specific, coherent pre-Islamic Arabian myth--which deserves to be qualified as autochthonous--and, further, to engage that Arabian myth in the dynamism of subsequent Islamic myth-building and mythopoesis. The study first identifies as an autochthonous Arab-Islamic myth Muhammad's unearthing of a olden bough from the grave of the last survivor of the divine scourge that destroyed the ancient race of the Thamud. It then proceeds to establish a ground of comparison between this myth and the literary and religous traditions contained in kindred structures and symbolic systems that range from Gilgamesh and the Hebrew Bible to Homer and Vergil. On its concrete, traceable level, this study thus intends to introduce the corpus of largely-unrecognized Arabian myth into the purview of a much broader comparative world of myth and symbol. (Stetkevych, ix)

Obviously, more to come in time.

 

[outlandish]

tiassa, have you heard of khalil Gibran ?

 

[Tiassa]

Don't know what to think of Gibran

Love Gibran, but I have no idea how to classify it on those occasions I'm trying to describe it to people who've never heard of him. I have an 800-page (or so) collected works of his.

And for anyone who wants it: http://leb.net/gibran/

A good Gibran website, including biography, written works, and even some of his paintings.

 

[Hemlock]

I'd love to get into stuff like that: I am looking forward to reading the Old Testament, the Qua'ran, and the Torah too, but I find it hard to read unless I have some weed. I only drink because I have no weed.

 

[outlandish]

indeed. Much respect to tiassa for his truly inspired reading list with regards to Islam/sufism/Arab mythology.
I have made the list, alas I have yet to act upon it.

- Idries Shah

- Khalil Gibran

-Stetkavych.

Keep 'em coming t

 

[Medicine*Woman]

Originally posted by Hemlock
I'd love to get into stuff like that: I am looking forward to reading the Old Testament, the Qua'ran, and the Torah too, but I find it hard to read unless I have some weed. I only drink because I have no weed.

----------
M*W: I found it helpful to join web sites on Judaism with Rabbis available to answer specific questions or explain the Torah. That is the only way I feel I am getting the true and correct meanings. Regarding it being hard to read unless you have some weed or brew, I would advise you to continue to read as much as possible, no less than several times a day, and it's always more educational to read these wonderful, inspiring books with your closest friends. It is even more awe-inspiring to follow the religious traditions of these religions like burning inscense and candles while reading.

 

[Tiassa]

Stetkevych and Sufism

Stetkevych's book is one of the reasons I've never put my two cents in on the Sufism topic that hasn't drawn much response. I'm still following the idea that Sufism is descended from what existed in Arabia and elsewhere before Islam. My knowledge suffers a vacuum when it comes to pre-Islamic Arabia, and I'm hoping this can fill in the gaps or, more realistically, point me in a direction to do so.

I figure here's a great place to make a couple of notes on Gibran:

• One of the proudest pronouncements of dignified American politics (from a Kennedy, no less) actually comes from Gibran: "Are you a politician asking what your country can do for you, or a zealous one asking what you can do for your country? If you are the first, you are a parasite; if the second, then you are an oasis in the desert."°

• An excerpt from one of my favorite Gibran poems:

Have mercy on me, my Soul.
You have laden me with Love until
I cannot carry my burden. You and
Love are inseparable might; Subhstance
And I are inseparable weakness.
Will e'er the struggle cease
Between the strong and the weak?

Have mercy on me, my Soul.
You have shown me Fortune beyond
My grasp. You and Fortune abide on
The mountain top; Misery and I are
Abandoned together in the pit of
The valley. Will e'er the mountain
And the valley unite?

Have mercy on me, my Soul.
You have shown me Beauty, but then
Concealed her. You and Beauty live
In the light; Ignorance and I are
Bound together in teh dark. Will
E'er the light invade darkness?

Your delight comes with the Ending,
And you revel now in anticipation;
But htis body suffers with life
While in life.
This, my Soul, is perplexing . . . .°

____________________

Notes:

• Gibran, Kahlil. "Ask Not What Your Country Can Do For You." The Treasured Writings of Kahlil Gibran. Castle Press, 1985. pp. 774 - 779.

• Gibran, Kahlil. "Have Mercy on Me, My Soul!" ibid. pp. 5 - 8.

 

[Tiassa]

Something about scope of vision

Something belongs here about scope of vision.

I came across this in Karen Armstrong's Islam:

During the month of Ramadan . . . Muhammad ibn Abdallah used to retire to a cave on the summit of Mount Hira, just outside Mecca, where he prayed, fasted and gave alms to the poor. He had long been worried by what he perceived to be a crisis in Arab society. In recent decades his tribe, the Quraysh, had become rich by trading in the surrounding countries. Mecca had become a thriving mercantile city, but in the aggressive stamped for wealth some of the old tribal values had been lost. Instead of looking after the weaker members of the tribe, as the nomadic code prescribed, the Quraysh were now intent on making money at the expense of some of the tribe's poorer family groupings . . . . (Armstrong, 3)

In consideration of "nomadic codes" and "old tribal values," we might look for a moment to Christianity. In the West, many if not most are familiar with the "cultural underpinnings" of Christianity: a Judaic tradition mingled with a Greco-Roman tradition and a smattering of middle-eastern and north-African trible cultures. It is easy enough, in Western cultural history, to point out the "classics," from ancient Greece (e.g. Plato's cave) to modern France (e.g. Camus' Sisyphus). And in discussing thematically influential works of thought in the history of Western civilization, we frequently nitpick slivers of information known of a more cohesive informational body that few acquaint themselves with. With Christianity, some critics go so far as to charge that Jesus is in fact merely a literary archetype, and point to cultural influences known to have contacted Judaic society by the advent of the Christian era. Toward a more practical end, Elaine Pagels, in The Origin of Satan explores cultural, philosophical, and practical factors possibly affecting the development of the Christian gospels; we know more, for instance, about how Celsus affected the development of Christinity vis-a-vis Origen than we do about Celsus himself.

And it appears that such influences from the Arab world within Islam are exactly what Jaroslav Stetkevych seeks to illuminate with his own volume. One of the things that makes Western understanding of Islam difficult in the context wherein the political and spiritual come together is that we do not understand of Islam, or of Arabic or almost any other culture where Islam flowers, the same things we understand about our own Western culture. This is why I'm taking forever with this book; each time I read one of its rich (in the sense of nickel, dime, and quarter words) paragraphs another time, my understanding of each sentence changes. This book is incredibly intentional, sincerely and carefully calculated word by word. Because it's intended to be a crash-course in at least how to seek those ideological influnces in the Islamic world.

And I also believe Stetkevych is painfully aware of a certain idea that you'll find regularly among what part of Islam's academia filters through to the West, and frequently in Sufi essays that have occasion to consider such issues, the idea that Western objectivity is ill-suited for any direct assimilation and accommodation of the Islamic perspective. That is, direct translation is nearly, if not completely impossible. This is a heavy burden, because it implies that even if Stetkevych himself "understands" the essential point, the form of communication he has chosen necessarily condemns a direct relation of that understanding to failure. He cannot stand on the streetcorner like a proverbial hypocrite and shout, "Look at me, I get it!" And certainly he does not. An important note about Muhammad and the Golden Bough is that it seems at the outset to be progressively- and well-written, which in fact makes it boring unless you're paying attention. I cannot stress enough how dangerous it is to invoke the Incredible Hulk in such a work, but in his discussion of jahl and hilm as applies to al-jahiliyah you can tell that the Hulk is an issue of restraint; he is most likely just itching to ask, "What if one day, and just work with me here, the Klingons decided, 'Hey, let's be Vulcans.' Can you imagine the trouble that would cause?"

And besides, it does not read like a fair question. It is, though, insofar as Stetkevych would be required to trust the reader to make the finer distinctions of a rare but generalized witticism, and if they can't make such distinctions, they shouldn't be reading the book in the first place.

In a more "storied," genre-determined understanding of myth and legend, other than that of "the myth behind the word" which we have pursued so far, the Arabian memory of the past proved not to have been wholly subdued by the new canon after all--especially not by its co-optation into the new canon. Some mythic material escaped that new canon's rigor at least vestigially. It was still given to speak of portentious things gone by, things that had remained afloat in the collective Arabian memory, not always differentiated in their communal proprietorship and provenance. Such was the narrative mythic debris associated with the Hebrew Bible, or even with the vaguer sources that imaginatively and narratively had fed into the Hebrew Bible: the story of the Flood, the story of Joseph, the Solomonic mythic florilegium and sprouting mythopoeia of the Bilqis legend, and other, less evolved, or merely alluded-to mythical narrative residues and incipiencies. These, however, precisely through their narrative stinginess, if not altogether inadequacy, took care to remind us that in its recesses, outside its "text," the Arabian collective memory must have retained much more than it cared, or was allowed, to retell. In the "text" itself, Arabian myth lived mostly in echoes and off echoes. (Stetkevych, 10)

I'm sitting here with a curious grin on my face because I'm unsure what goes in this space. I want to say this book should be required reading; I want to say that I might have paid attention in high school if I had to digest this kind of information, but that last, especially, is unfair to ask of a Catholic high school. And in that slight is a hint of a point. I get to re-read what I've read of Stetkevych because I have also started on Armstrong's Islam in the last twenty-four hours, and, well . . . there's something about not isolating certain ideas in a vacuum. All of a sudden, Stetkevych is coming in much more clearly.

So in the end, it's not fair to demand of people what I wouldn't have gotten when I was them. Er ... um ... something approximately like that. I cannot, however, stress nearly enough the vitality of the information Stetkevych is attempting to convey in Muhammad and the Golden Bough.

This will be a period in which the mind flowers. Whether it bears any real fruit, of course, remains to be seen. But ... endorsements around for Stetkevych and Armstrong.
____________________

Works Cited

• Armstrong, Karen. Islam: A Short History. New York: MLC, 2000. (pg. 3)

• Stetkevych, Jaroslov. Muhammad and the Golden Bough: Reconstructing Arabian Myth. Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1996. (pg. 10)

See Also

• Robinson, B. A. "Life events shared by Yeshua and the 'Mythic Hero Archetype'." See http://www.religioustolerance.org/chr_jcpa4.htm
• Pearse, Roger. "Celsus, Origen, and Hoffman." See http://www.tertullian.org/rpearse/celsus/celsus.htm