Hadji Murat

I recently completed Leo Tolstoy's Hadji Murat. At face value an apparently awesome feat bearing in mind the length of Tolstoy's other works. Fortunately, Hadji Murat is a fraction of the size of 'War & Peace' or 'Anna Karenina' but despite the brevity it propels Tolstoy to the foreground of my literary perspective.

Hadji Murat chronicles the life of the eponymous hero who came to personify the resistance of the Caucasus to Russian imperialism. The work was published posthumously and reflects an anger and disillusionment with Czarism that perhaps explains why Tolstoy chose not to make the manuscript public.

Tolstoy outlines his inspiration in a foreword to the piece:

I gathered myself a large nosegay and was going home when I noticed in a ditch, in full bloom, a beautiful thistle plant of the crimson variety, which in our neighborhood they call 'Tartar' and carefully avoid when mowing -- or, if they do happen to cut it down, throw out from among the grass for fear of pricking their hands. Thinking to pick this thistle and put it in the center of my nosegay, I climbed down into the ditch, and after driving away a velvety bumble-bee that had penetrated deep into one of the flowers and had there fallen sweetly asleep, I set to work to pluck the flower. But this proved a very difficult task. Not only did the stalk prick on every side -- even through the handkerchief I wrapped round my hand -- but it was so tough that I had to struggle with it for nearly five minutes, breaking the fibers one by one; and when I had at last plucked it, the stalk was all frayed and the flower itself no longer seemed so fresh and beautiful. Moreover, owing to a coarseness and stiffness, it did not seem in place among the delicate blossoms of my nosegay. I threw it away feeling sorry to have vainly destroyed a flower that looked beautiful in its proper place.

'But what energy and tenacity! With what determination it defended itself, and how dearly it sold its life!' thought I, remembering the effort it had cost me to pluck the flower. The way home led across black-earth fields that had just been ploughed up. I ascended the dusty path. The ploughed field belonged to a landed proprietor and was so large that on both sides and before me to the top of the hill nothing was visible but evenly furrowed and moist earth. The land was well tilled and nowhere was there a blade of grass or any kind of plant to be seen, it was all black. 'Ah, what a destructive creature is man....How many different plant-lives he destroys to support his own existence!' thought I, involuntarily looking around for some living thing in this lifeless black field.

In front of me to the right of the road I saw some kind of little clump, and drawing nearer I found it was the same kind of thistle as that which I had vainly plucked and thrown away. This 'Tartar' plant had three branches. One was broken and stuck out like the stump of a mutilated arm. Each of the other two bore a flower, once red but now blackened. One stalk was broken, and half of it hung down with a soiled flower at its tip. The other, though also soiled with black mud, still stood erect. Evidently a cartwheel had passed over the plant but it had risen again, and that was why, though erect, it stood twisted to one side, as if a piece of its body had been torn from it, its bowels drawn out, an arm torn off, and one of its eyes plucked out. Yet it stood firm and did not surrender to man who had destroyed all its brothers around it....

'What vitality!' I thought. 'Man has conquered everything and destroyed millions of plants, yet this one won't submit.' And I remembered a Caucasian episode of years ago, which I had partly seen myself, partly heard of from eye-witnesses, and in part imagined.

The episode, as it has taken shape in my memory and imagination, was as follows.

What follows is an intense portrait of the period as well as the rival peoples. The narrative is gripping from the very onset and Tolstoy exhibits an unrivalled skill in creating wholly absorbing atmospheres and surroundings. He maintains a degree of conciseness that never borders on reductionist and in fact manages to take the reader on a circuitous moral tour of the characters - you cannot help but root for Hadji Murat and yet sympathise with the Russian infantrymen.

A powerful and provocative novel.

I'm back!

The Datai Beach, Lankgawi, Malaysia. ©Tauseef Mehrali 2005


Federal Mosque, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. ©Tauseef Mehrali 2005


KLCC Towers, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. ©Tauseef Mehrali 2005

You'll never walk alone

Another New (Testament) Diet

It was only a matter of time.

Five loaves, two fish and a goblet of red wine could be on the menu for Americans if a new diet takes off.

Don Colbert, a Florida doctor, believes asking yourself "What would Jesus eat?" is the best way to stay fit, slim and trim.

In his book, which gets its title from this question, he explores some of the Old Testament dietary laws and looks at foods mentioned in the Bible.

Click here for the full story.

Mr Lings & Mr Picot

1. The Independent remembers the late Martin Lings.


2. Robert Fisk, in the same paper, manages to make François Georges Picot (of the Sykes-Picot Agreement infamy) an even less likable character.

Now to return to my espresso-fuelled Sudoku...

Masjid-e-Imam, Isfahan

Masjid-e-Imam, Isfahan. ©Tauseef Mehrali 2001 

Kingdom of Hell

Fate conspired to make me see 'Kingdom of Heaven' yesterday. I went to the cinema with the intention of catching 'The hitchhikers guide to the galaxy' so my conscience can breathe with an uneasy guiltlessness.

If you've seen Kingdom of Heaven and enjoyed it you're either a) a pitiful decerebrate Hollywood junky or b) the lady sitting next to me in the cinema who was compelled to cry during the CGI-driven siege of Jerusalem. Very rarely have I ignored Peter Bradshaw's advice and will think long and hard before doing so again. In fact, he must have been in a most generous of moods to confer two stars upon this Old Testament-like plague of a film.

My reservations may arise chiefly from the shocking 'cultural reference' mismanagement but I think these merely served to emphasise the vacuousness of the whole affair. For instance, in one scene as the Crusaders prepare to depart some innominate European shores to head for the Levant, we catch glimpse of some 'Saracens' praying on a beach. But this is no ordinary prayer. They are scattered along the shore, perhaps 20 yards from each other. Peppered like sandcastles at Blackpool along the expanse, bowing and prostrating, out of synch, with the adhan (call to prayer) blaring in the background. Now I'm no religious scholar but it doesn't take one to point out the ludicrity of the situation. As my friend pointedly remarked, 'perhaps there was a special dispensation at the time of war for people to finish praying before the call to prayer had even ended!' The ensuing merriment amongst us was a source of great consternation to the cinemaphile sitting alongside us who promptly turned around and shouted 'If you're going to laugh and talk you might as well leave. It's so frustrating.' You're not wrong there.

Later on as the comically Oriental looking Salahaddin overlooks the burial of his soldiers lost during the attempt to regain Jerusalem, he holds his hands in the air and in a sombre tone begins to recite the Fatiha (opening chapter of the Qur'an). Midway through the recitation though, for reasons best known to Ridley Scott (and probably Salahaddin's bladder), the surah is curtailed (it's only 7 lines long anyway) and the statement of conclusion (sadaqAllahul adheem - Allah the Great has spoken the truth) is rapidly uttered by Salahaddin. Now that's a warrior in a hurry. He incidentally is shown going to war surrounded by the most ridiculous banners and standards I have ever seen. They seem to be without any historical precedent and wouldn't be out of place in an anti-war rally in Trafalgar square.

The hiring of the improbably wooden Orlando Bloom must have placed severe restrictions on the coffers and meant employing a half-baked (but post 9/11 approved) islamic scholar. That's the only reason I can think of for these amazing oversights.

In kneading the script into an unpalatable mish mash of humanistic drivel, Ridley Scott avoids stepping on Christian and Muslim toes but with the awful lack of attention to detail it's as if he came into my house with muddy shoes, asked for a beer and regaled everyone about how he voted for Roger Godsiff.

Hari Kunzru on 'Do the Arts matter?'

A response to the soon-to-be-released work entitled 'What Good Are the Arts?' by John Carey, emeritus professor of English Literature at Oxford university.

After the performances of Bach in Birkenau it's hard to argue that the arts are automatically humanising. We know it's simultaneously possible to be a sadistic murderer and art-lover. The point is that the arts 'can' make us better people, not that they manage it every time. Art offers tools for living - to console or delight or enrage or challenge or revitalise dulled perception. Art, above all, is a collaboration between artist and audience. It demands work to create meaning, or even to extract pleasure. To me the Nazi commandant crying at the Cello Suites while sending other human beings to the gas chamber is both terrifying and intriguing. Is he just a snob, a more extreme version of the kind of person who buys opera tickets to confirm his sense of himself as a superior person? Or does he have a genuine sense of beauty? Or both? It seems to me that the answer lies in the idea of 'high art', which I hate. To me 'high art' is just art + power: art that is for whatever reason associated with social privilege, or which is valued by a dominant class or group. Your appreciation of Bach confirms you as a member of the master race. The others are lesser, in part because they don't appreciate Bach. So you can kill them.

There is only good and bad art, and I agree with Carey that the difference lies in the response of the receiver. If I just hear a sawing noise, to me the Cello Suites are not art. If I cry and kill Jews, they are 'high art'. If I cry and feel some kind of connection with the rest of humanity, perhaps based on my wonder that it is possible to order sound in such a way as to produce this profound response in me, then I have experienced art - and am capable, maybe, of being an artist. Listen to Yo-Yo Ma playing the Six Unaccompanied Cello Suites and consider these things. I don't have a 'favourite work of art' in the 'My Funny Valentine' sense, but that will do very well as a starting point.

'Windows is shutting down' by Clive James

Windows is shutting down, and grammar are
On their last leg. So what am we to do?
A letter of complaint go just so far,
Proving the only one in step are you.

Better, perhaps, to simply let it goes.
A sentence have to be screwed pretty bad
Before they gets to where you doesnt knows
The meaning what it must of meant to had.

The meteor have hit. Extinction spread,
But evolution do not stop for that.
A mutant languages rise from the dead
And all them rules is suddenly old hat.

Too bad for we, us what has had so long
The best seat from the only game in town.
But there it am, and whom can say its wrong?
Those are the break. Windows is shutting down.

The Guardian Review, 30 April 2005, 36

Liberation Theology

No, not the showdown between the South American Communistas and the Papacy, but my very own bid for freedom. Two more nights to go and I finish my week of nights and emerge from the abyss.

The Lizard

Tariq Ali, the devout Pakistani atheist, seems to still be reeling from the beatings meted out by his over-zealous religious tutors as a youngster. His article in today's Guardian Review about 'Islamic cinema', plods along the same well trodden, yet fatally flawed, intellectual path - conflating and confusing Islam with Muslims. Yet his observations on Iranian cinema and the likes of Kiarostami, Makhmalbaf and Panahi are astute. In particular he highlights a film I've been trying to get hold of for a while - Marmoulak (The Lizard).

A convict (known as "the Lizard") escapes from a prison hospital disguised as a mullah. He takes the train to a border town where they are expecting a new mullah. The Lizard has watched enough Iranian television to pick up the clerical style, but he becomes an ultra-humanist cleric, encouraging doubt, analysing Tarantino movies, both surprising and delighting his audience.

London Palestine Film Festival

The annual London Palestine Film Festival is organized by the Palestine
Film Foundation, a project of the Palestine Society at London University's
School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS).

The Festival kicks off on the 22nd of April (until the 6th of May) at the Barbican and SOAS itself. Click here for more details.

The Guardian had this to say about the festival:

This festival was created in 1999 to assist the development of Palestinian cinema and create an audience for it. And it certainly seems to be working. Not only are there more films this year, they've also expanded to take over the Barbican. There are documentaries aplenty but the dramas here are mostly drawn from personal, real-life experiences, making them just as relevant - with appearances from many of the film-makers to clear things up. Arna's Children has ex-pupils reminiscing about an important theatre school, acclaimed thriller Private sums up the Palestinian situation in one occupied house. Epic documentary Don't Touch My Holocaust tries to find method in cruel madness, Rana's Wedding redefines speed-dating and 2,000 Terrorists looks at a fear- induced genocide.

Time wasting

Waste your time properly with these short films commisioned by BMW and directed by the likes of Ang Lee and Guy Ritchie.

Saturday is Guardian Review day

Yesterday's Guardian Review happened to serendipitously coincide with the launch of Chaikhana, a new cyber literary group that I was invited to join with the endearing

You've passed a rigorous selection process and been specially selected to join Chaikhana! Umm, well I mean at some point you happen to have read a book I've also read... and this has resulted in this dubious honour...Inspired partly by the chaikhane in the Si o Seh Bridge in Esfahan, Iran, this tea house could equally be anywhere else between the Bosphorus and the Ganges ... When I read a good book, I wish that life were three thousand years long ~ courtesy Waterstones bookmarks

So by way of inauguration, this week's Review features a glance at the second installment, The Hall of a Thousand Columns, of Tim Mackintosh-Smith's wonderful series following in the footnotes (and literal footsteps) of Ibn Batuttah the great medieval Tangerine traveler; Samir El-youssef, co-author of Gaza Blues, muses on attempts to explain what turns people into suicide bombers; Kamila Shamsie's Broken Verses is placed under the electron microscope AND most intriguingly, Tarquin Hall (a self-confessed public schoolboy coming from a family with middle-class habits) has his Salaam Brick Lane: A Year in the New East End feted as 'charming, brilliant, affectionate and quietly impassioned'. Here's an apertif:

Mr Ali, however, is the star turn; an anti-hero who shovels himself full of halal fried chicken while Inland Revenue envelopes pile up unopened in his shambolic office, he is the ultimate cockney Muslim, announcing the message of his faith: "The Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon 'im, yeah, 'e said, 'Be a worker; don't sit around on your arse, innit.'"

Luna(r)cy

With the imminent advent of moonfighting committees to diffuse the havoc caused by moonsighting committees, and the launch of the new Conservative manifesto, perhaps it's time to borrow a Tory phrase and get 'back to basics'. The perennial drive to standardise the Islamic calendar may well be blinkering us from the actual ethos behind the act of moonsighting - regaining a sense of perspective.

Hamza Yusuf touches on the issue in his commentary on Sachiko Murata and William Chittick's 'Vision of Islam' by quoting an unnamed Scottish phenomenologist:

There are efforts to standardise the Islamic calendar so that Ramadhan can be started on the same day in different communities. But the relationship of the celestial bodies to the earth is a living thing and every location has its own sky. So why shouldn't religious festivals begin on dates peculiar to different places? The modern mind, however, wishes to generalise and abstract the situation so the phenomena are bypassed. As with the length of the day, the average is calculated and becomes the accepted truth to accommodate the limits of circular wheels in clocks, yet none of the celestial bodies moves in circles.

You can listen to the relevant extract (in mp3 format) from Hamza Yusuf's commentary here.

Is this some kind of joke?

It's time to start thinking about exams once again! The next set will be Part 1 of the Membership of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health exam. It wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't for the £270 examination fee. Surely paying to sit for an exam must be classed as a form of masochism?

Marburg Virus

Here's a mugshot of the villain responsible for the recent outbreak in Angola. They say you can develop an impression of someone by knowing their friends and family; Marburg virus is a cousin of Ebola!

An electron micrograph of the Marburg Virus (courtesy of I Love Science)

An A-Z of English (without the X)

Reading through this article on one of England's great literary figures, Dr Johnson, I couldn't help but smile in appreciation and admiration of his wit and undeniable talent.

Here's a selection of entries from his dictionary of the english language:

Cough A convulsion of the lungs, vellicated by some sharp serosity. It is pronounced coff

Dunce A dullard; a dolt; a thickskull; a stupid indocile animal

Excise A hateful tax levied upon commodities, and adjudged not by the common judges of property, but wretches hired by those to whom excise is paid

Fart Wind from behind

Strut To walk with affected dignity; to swell with stateliness

Trance An ecstasy; a state in which the soul is rapt into visions

Uxorious Submissively fond of a wife; infected with connubial dotage

Vaticide A murderer of poets

Witticism A mean attempt at wit

Yawn To gape; to oscitate; to have the mouth opened involuntarily, as in sleepiness

Zealot One passionately ardent in any cause. Generally used in dispraise

"You can send me to college, but you cannot make me think."

Sarfraz Manzoor, columnist for The Guardian, cites the above (his favourite T-shirt slogan) in response to the Australian policy of compulsory voting.

I used to feel the Australians had the right idea when they made voting compulsory. Now I am convinced that in the end all the media and the parties can do is put the facts, issues and information out there - what you cannot do is make people think.

With the election date confirmed, the media (apologies for the totally non-Saidian use of the generic category) has focussed its attention on voter apathy. Only 59% of those eligible to vote did so last time round.

Manzoor distinguishes the apathetic from the strategic non-voters:

For those voters who are resigned to an inevitable Labour victory, or who want to give Tony Blair a kicking but cannot bring themselves to vote Liberal Democrat, or who find all three parties unpalatable, not voting is a wholly understandable and justified action...For them, withdrawing from the electoral process does not imply that they do not care about politics; instead they are choosing to express their priorities and concerns in other ways. These voters may decide that there are more effective ways to get their voice heard than through the ballot box: they might join a pressure group, get involved in local politics or, if they really want to make a difference, watch Jamie's School Dinners.

Timothy Garton-Ash in the same paper, goes further in suggesting that it's not due to the palatability of the main parties' policies (or lack thereof) but the actual lack of any significant difference between them:

In this post-ideological age, mainstream politics is not about systemic alternatives. It's about minor variations in the management of democratic capitalism - a system which, for the time being at least, faces no major ideological challenge in Europe. Unlike, let us remind ourselves, for most of the 20th century.

The voters' choice is now more like that of shareholders (or is it stakeholders?) deciding which of two or three competing management teams seems more competent to run the company. Or, to adjust the metaphor slightly, it's about management teams pragmatically and opportunistically assembling rainbow coalitions of voters, by calculated appeals to specific interest groups, generations and so on.

As for Sarfraz Manzoor's other group of voters,

...there is another section of apathetic voters - the ones who are just not interested, and not interested in becoming interested. It's this group who the politicians and the media are most desperate to reach. The argument is that these non-voters reflect the extent of public disenchantment with politicians and politics. The media and politicians, it is argued, need to do more to help connect politics with people's experiences.

All of which brings us neatly to an analysis of liberal western democracy by none other than Winston Churchill:

The best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter.

Or in Sarfraz Manzoor's dystopian view:

For those not bothering to vote, meanwhile, and who are dreading the saturation media coverage because they yearn for an election that has charismatic candidates, where their votes can make a real difference and which genuinely speaks to their hopes and fears, they can always look forward to this: three weeks after election day sees the return of Big Brother.

Read Sarfraz Manzoor's article here.
Read Timothy Garton-Ash's article here.

Star Struck

I sent the following email to the Shahenshah of modern travel writers, William Dalrymple, early last month:

Dear Mr Dalrymple

I hope this doesn’t come across as too stalker-like but now that I’ve read and re-read your existing books I think I’m beginning to develop withdrawal symptoms. Rumour has it you’re working on a new work focusing on Delhi’s twilight era looking at the likes of Bahadur Shah Zafar and Mirza Asadullah Ghalib.

Is there any truth behind these rumours and if so when are they likely to materialise?

Best regards

Tauseef

I didn't hear from him throughout March and was beginning to draw parallels between the reliability of email delivery and the Royal Mail (or entertain the possibility that I may have actually frightened the poor man) when lo and behold on checking my emails today:

Hello there Tauseef- and thanks so much for your note. Yes I am working away on Zafar and have just returned from a trip to Rangoon to see the place of his final exile (I loved Rangoon but can understand why he wouldn't share my feelings!) Please find attached an academic article I have just written on the British in 19th C Delhi which will show you the direction the book is heading... The book should be out the Autumn of next year- 2006.

Khuda hafez and thanks for writing,

William Dalrymple

Now I just need to work my way through the 35-page article. Should keep me busy til Autumn 2006!