White Robes Research Articles

The Dynastic Deity of the Liao Imperial Family -The White-robed Guanyin Statue from the Heavenly Palace of the Qingzhou White Pagoda

The Liao shi and the Qidan guo zhi contain intriguing records about the Liao imperial family’s faith in the White-robed Guanyin. One is that Emperor Taizong enshrined a statue of the White-robed Guanyin at Xingwang Temple in Mt. Muye and honored the bodhisattva as a dynastic deity who guarded over the imperial family. The other is that Emperor Xingzong had the statue worshipped before others during Ji shan yi, the most prestigious sacrificial ritual to Mt. Muye. This study linked these written records with the White-robed Guanyin Statue excavated from the Heavenly Palace of the Qingzhou White Pagoda, commissioned by the imperial family during the reign of Emperor Xingzong, and examined the overall development of the faith in the Liao imperial family and the statue’s style and historical and religious background. Consequently, this examination revealed that Taizong introduced the faith of the White-robed Guanyin to pacify the discontented Han Chinese population within the empire. Xingzong, in turn, elevated the deity to the supreme position. This move profoundly impacted the faith of the people and the imperial family in the late Liao. The statue from the Qingzhou White Pagoda, in particular, with its white robe, low crown, and lotus bud, does not stop at embodying the Buddhist teachings but also represents the intricate union between the Liao imperial family’s lineage, unique ritual customs, distinct faiths, and enshrinement rituals that originated from Yanjing area, present-day Beijing. Among the surviving examples, this statue is one that most closely follows the shape of the dynastic deity of the Liao imperial family, showing that it was likely created under careful considerations of the Great Master Xuanyan Yungui, who was well-versed in the particular faith of the Liao imperial family.

Iconography of Buddhism: The Tradition of Depicting the Old White Man

The Old White Man is a local deity revered by Buddhists in Russia. His image, based on textual traditions and Buddhist iconography, prompted the name — the Old White Man, now widely accepted. In the written sources he is also known as the “Conqueror and subduer of the [master spirits] of earth and water”. The early images appeared in Mongolia under the influence of the Chinese traditional pictures of Tú Dì, ancient deities associated with localities, while later they were influenced by traditional images of Shòuxing, the deity of longevity. At an early stage of the iconographic tradition, the Old White Man is depicted as a priest or a high official; his functions are rendered via the characters of his companions, the host spirits of mountains (sabdaks) that have the features of man and animal or animals, such as a pair of deer, chained leopard (wolf), as well as ritual objects, including a carved staff or a dragon head staff. At a later stage, there may be symbols associated with the giver of longevity and fertility (bald phallic head, cave, and peach). The text of the “Sutra of the Old White Man” includes the description of his appearance (a white-bearded, bare-headed old man in a white robe), attributes (a dragon head staff) and an allegorical landscape of a mountain and fruit trees. Neither early nor recent Mongolian and Buryat pictures fully correspond to the description. Much closer to it is the Kalmyk iconographic tradition. The Old White Man’s image of the Kalmyk nomads goes back to the ancient mythological idea of the deity as the keeper of domestic animals. Due to transformations in the religious sphere, the keeper of domestic animals becomes the Old White Man, the lord of all living beings and all earthly space. Traditionally, he is presented as a standing old man, bare-headed and his long gray hair gathered in the form of a triratna. He is dressed in a belted robe, with another swinging robe thrown on it. In his right hand, he holds a staff with a dragon’s head and a rosary in his left. There are no companions or animals. The symbolic landscape serves to enhance the grandiose figure of the old man. The details of the attire and the landscape refer to the former Chinese influence.

KULINER JADUL EMPAT NEGERI: THE MANIFESTATION OF GUSJIGANG PHILOSOPHY IN BUKA LUWUR SUNAN KUDUS 1444 H

The background of this article is the preservation of the local tradition of Kudus which is the focus of attention. Buka Luwur is the tradition of uncovering the white robe of Sunan Kudus’s Tomb. Gusjigang that stands for ngaji (studying-learning), bagus (kind-good) pinter dagang (smart in business-trading) means good in reciting Quran and clever in trading. The culinary of Jadul Empat Negeri symbolizes myriad of values. This study aims to define the meaning of Gusjigang, and, to describe the relevance of “Kuliner Jadul Empat Negeri” in Buka Luwur Sunan Kudus ceremony to the Gusjigang philosophy.” The descriptive qualitative research method was applied in this article with the type of literature. Researcher answered the question formulation with data and content analysis obtained from library sources, including scientific and non-scientific journals. However, the researcher also conducted direct observations during the “Kuliner Jadul Empat Negeri” event. The results of the study indicate the meaning of Gusjigang serves as guidance for Kudus citizens in trading and studying learning on religious and secular matters. Furthermore, the meaning of “Kuliner Jadul Empat Negeri” is a manifestation of Sunan Kudus’ Gusjigang teachings. The relevance of the three is to interrelate the values contained in each focus. Work ethic, togetherness, brotherhood, and Islamic education are among these values. In conclusion, the event of culinary of Jadul Empat Negeri” symbolizes Gusjigang philosophical points in the Buka Luwur Sunan Kudus ceremony 1444 H.

Embracing and denouncing the ‘Mecca uniform’ in Nigerian mass media, 1950s–1970s

AbstractNigerian Muslims have undertaken the hajj for centuries. As Nigeria approached independence in the 1950s, Muslims began to discuss and debate this practice on a national scale, through Islamic associations and political committees and in the Nigerian press. At the same time, Muslim politicians began to publicly don the ‘Mecca uniform’, the white robe (thawb) and black cord (‘iqāl) common to Saudi Arabia. While Nigerian pilgrims had worn these garments for decades, their conspicuous adoption by the political elite was novel. This sartorial link between politicians and the East was amplified by photographs and commentary circulating nationally in the press, and generated a mix of admiration and concern. Christians (and some Muslims) questioned whether a secular state ought to oversee the hajj. Within roughly a decade, politicians ceased their official use of the Mecca uniform as the press became saturated with exaggerated stories of ‘corrupt’ pilgrims engaged in smuggling and other crimes. The proliferation of other mass media, such as radio and novels, contributed to this critique. This was not the end of the Mecca uniform’s public life, however, as others – such as Yoruba women in the south-west – continued to employ it in self-fashioned public images, including obituary notices. The transformation of the Mecca uniform into an object of national discourse engaging a range of Muslims and also Christians speaks to the complex dynamics shaping Islam in modern Nigeria.

We matched on Tinder and they seemed alright so we met in a bar and after a couple of hours I said are you God?

we matched on Tinder and they seemed alright so we met in a bar and after a couple of hours I said are you God? Paula Harris (bio) and they said hahaha, no, why would you say that? and I said you seem a bit translucent and your feet don't touch the ground—nice shoes by the way—so you're either God or a ghost and they looked awkward and said haha, God! whoever heard of such a thing?! and I said every time you swirl your drink there's a tsunami warning and every time you move in your chair there's an earthquake and when you scratch your scalp there's thunder and also the white robes and the angels trying to blend into the crowd is all a bit OTT and they squirmed a little and the building rocked and I said see! and they sighed in concession and I said I bet you're a tap and gap kinda god and they looked offended and said no way, I'm looking for long term, baby doll and I said what would Mary have to say about that and they said haha and I said do you even take human form very often? at least Zeus is used to fucking humans; you seem super awkward in this body and I suspect you might be bad in bed and do you even go down? and God said ahh. ha. [End Page 320] Paula Harris Paula Harris lives in Aotearoa/New Zealand, where she writes and sleeps in a lot, because that's what depression makes you do. She won the 2018 Janet B. McCabe Poetry Prize and the 2017 Lilian Ida Smith Award. Her writing has been published in various journals, including The Sun, Gulf Coast, Passages North, New Ohio Review and Aotearotica. She is extremely fond of dark chocolate, shoes and hoarding fabric. website: www.paulaharris.co.nz | Twitter: @paulaoffkilter | Instagram: @paulaharris_ poet | Facebook: @paulaharrispoet. Copyright © 2022-2023 Pleiades and Pleiades Press

PEMBERANGKATAN PENGANTIN YANG MEMAKAI PAKAIAN HAJI MENURUT HUKUM ISLAM

This research is motivated by the customs of the Mandailing Natal community regarding the departure of the bride to the groom's house, in this case, the departing bride and groom always wear hajj clothes. This study is also to find out how the perception of the Mandailing Natal community about the departure of the bride and groom who wears hajj clothes according to Islamic law. This research is classified as field research, which uses a number of data collection models, including observation, in-depth interviews, and documentation methods. Seeing from some of the perceptions of the Mandailing Natal community about the Hajj clothes worn by the bride and groom as a prayer for the good of the bride and groom in their marriage, one of the perceptions expressed by the Mandailing Natal community is as follows: Baitullah (Mecca) to perform the Hajj. 2. In addition, the community also uses this dress as a prayer for the formation of the sakinah mawaddah warohmah family. The bride and groom who are sent to wear this hajj dress will forever embrace and hold fast to the religion of Islam, and have common sense even though there will be many trials in the household. 3. The white robe worn by the bride is as holiness, cleanliness and purity, this marriage which symbolizes purity and purity will be a good start for the bride and groom who will build a sakinah mawaddah warahmah family filled with pure, clean and pure love and the turban worn by the bride and groom man is the one symbolizing modesty. 4. The hajj dress is a symbol of the unity of the Muslim ummah. And this signifies their marriage is fortified with symbols of Islamic belief and faith. In the author's opinion, this perception builds benefit for the Mandailing Natal community and does not violate Islamic law at all, nor is it to erode bridal customs in Mandailing but to promote Islamic values within the community itself.

Religion and Myth in the Marvel Cinematic Universe

Religion and Myth in the Marvel Cinematic Universe

STUDENTS' RESISTANCE TO TENGKU DAYAH'S AUTHORITY

This paper discusses the resistance of students against authority of Tengku Dayah in Aceh. The scholarship on Dayah education in contemporary Aceh shows the resistance of santri (students) to the regulations that apply in the Dayah. But so far, studies that address the theme of resistance have not received adequate attention. Based on qualitative data collected through in-depth interviews, observation, and documentation studies, using Michel Foucault's theory. This article argues that the resistance carried out by the santri in the Dayah occurred because of their discourse on the rules and regulations that had been set, and the authorities of the Tengku occurred because of two dominating things, science, and epistemology. In line with that, this article emphasizes that the resistance of santri to the authorities of the Tengku includes various forms, namely: often being late during ablution, students sleeping during tahajjud, buying iftar outside the Dayah complex and eating during breaks, not attending privately for reasons sick, leaving the complex by climbing the fence, not wearing a white robe during Friday prayers

Kate Fullagar. The Warrior, the Voyager, and the Artist: Three Lives in an Age of Empire.

Kate Fullagar. <i>The Warrior, the Voyager, and the Artist: Three Lives in an Age of Empire</i>.

DERADIKALISASI ANAK-ANAK MANTAN TERORIS MELALUI PENDIDIKAN BERBASIS MULTIKULTURALISME

The spread of social conflicts that have occurred is clear evidence, such as the development of terrorist groups in various parts of the world in various forms. Victims of terrorism are not only those who died due to acts of terrorism, but including victims are families and children of terrorism perpetrators who do not know the activities carried out by their husbands or fathers. Coupled with the negative stigma and bullying behavior towards them sometimes leads to what is called "social reproduction". Khairul Ghazali, a former terrorist who carried out a robbery in CIMB Niaga, is well aware of the importance of education for children of former terrorists and families of terrorists. This qualitative research concludes that the Islamic Education Curriculum at the Daarusy Syifa Islamic Boarding School, Sei Mencirim Village, Kutalimbaru District, Deli Serdang North Sumatra uses a religious education approach taught in schools in a non-professional position as a social science. The religious education system aims solely to study religion as science and knowledge of society (learning to know about religion), not to instill belief and shape humans to obey their religion (learning to be religious persons). The implementation of multiculturalism-based Islamic education at the Daarusy Syifa Islamic Boarding School Darusy Syifaa Islamic Boarding School uses the concept of a natural school. The students in white robes and study turbans in a gazebo about 3x3 meters in size are deliberately placed under trees on the edge of rice fields and fish ponds. The view of the children of former terrorist actors and terrorist families towards the homogeneous and multicultural NKRI is actually no problem, it's just that the negative stigma and people's views of their fathers cause them to follow in the footsteps of their parents, because it is important for society to remove the stigma and abuse against them. most of whom are not involved such as children and families.&#x0D; Keyword: Deradicalization, Terrorism, Multiculturalism

Questioning Minds: The Letters of Guy Davenport and Hugh Kenner ed. by Edward M. Burns

Reviewed by: Questioning Minds: The Letters of Guy Davenport and Hugh Kenner ed. by Edward M. Burns Tim Conley (bio) QUESTIONING MINDS: THE LETTERS OF GUY DAVENPORT AND HUGH KENNER, edited by Edward M. Burns. Berkeley: Counterpoint Publishers, 2018. Vol. 1: xix + 868 pp., Vol 2: 1871 pp. $95.00 cloth. The correspondence of Guy Davenport and Hugh Kenner is a feast, though anyone familiar with either or (magis etiam felix) both would guess as much and hardly need a reviewer to convince that person to seek it out. On the other hand, those who have not read The Geography of the Imagination: Forty Essays and The Pound Era should cease reading this review at once and proceed with all haste to a decent library.1 Having thus perhaps dispelled my entire audience, I will nonetheless proceed for the sake of curious lingerers, for curiosity is not just the abiding but the insatiable quality in these two fat volumes. A scan of a random page of the index—which finds multiple references to Heinrich Schliemann, Arnold Schoenberg, Walter Scott, Ronald Searle, the Second Vatican Council, Seneca the Younger, and Dr. Seuss—confirms that the reader will want to have a notebook at the ready (1:xciv, 2:lxvi). The correspondents' shared enthusiasms are, as this index sample might suggest, arrestingly diverse (for example, Marianne Moore, Charles Babbage, Edward Gorey, Jean Cocteau, Samuel Beckett, Richard Buckminster Fuller, Sappho, Buster Keaton, Alan Turing, and Louis Zukofsky). Davenport and Kenner trade publishing news, academic and literary gossip, notes on Greek and Latin, diagrams and drawings, complaints about reviews, and various news items, from the hunt for the elusive Waste Land manuscript to the death of Marilyn Monroe (1:38, 1:478). Davenport exhorts Kenner to watch Stan Brakhage's films and read J. R. R. Tolkien; Kenner recommends Flann O'Brien and Douglas R. Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid.2 Even long-time readers of these writers will find surprises, such as the fact that Tolkien so impressed Kenner that at one point he considered using a passage from the Lord of the Rings as an unattributed epigraph to The Pound Era (1: 428).3 (Upon reading this, my imagination, unbidden, cast Sir Ian McKellen in white robes declaiming: Usura, you shall not pass!) There are more casually tossed-off insights and penetrating questions in a few given letters between them than are found in entire monographs. I submit as examples of such sparks Davenport's characterization of Sigmund Freud as "the Cotton Mather of psychology" (2:1531) and his musing about how it "would be interesting to know the first poet who wanted to be a bird" (followed by a tracing of [End Page 433] themes between Percy Bysshe Shelley, William Butler Yeats, Bernart de Ventadorn, and Archilochos (1:813, 813-14), and, from Kenner, this aphorism: "To translate is not different in principle from the imitation of human actions by playing upon the flute. The latter is, by equivalency theories, impossible, but Aristotle opens the Poetics by assuming it can be done" (1:693). As a constant touchstone—or a lingua franca—Joyce is second here only to Ezra Pound, and those interested in the history of Joyce criticism will find many choice morsels. Of the 1971 Joyce Symposium in Trieste, Kenner reports that locals "were tolerant of the fact that many conferees seemed hooked on [Italo] Svevo's friend the visiting Irishman" (2:1356). His 1988 assessment of the Joyce Wars and attendant furors is as decisive as it is wry: John Kidd is "mad," full stop, and "the press always has the complaints [about the Hans Walter Gabler edition] coming from 'scholars,' leaving the naïve to suppose that the work was done by truck-drivers, the lot (1) German, (2) male, (3) using (shudder) computers" (2:1791). In the same letter, he doubts Stephen Joyce's assertion at the recent Venice Symposium that he had burned all letters between himself and Lucia: "It would be like shooting one's hostage" (2:1791). Kenner esteems Fritz Senn and Adaline Glasheen but calls A. Walton Litz "an honest kind of bungler" (1:93) and says...

From Protestant Temple to Ancestral Ox Park

This article proposes to question the movements and the practices of groups of lay exorcists (mpiandry) of the Malagasy Protestant movement of Revival (fifohazana). These groups of a decade of exorcists dressed in white pastoral robes walk through urban neighborhoodsn from the treatment and prayer rooms located in the reception centers of the movement, and the hamlets or rural villages, to the patient's home to take care of. The performance of exorcists fits not only outside the institutional space, but also outside of temporality usually reserved for hunting demons. At the time of exorcism and the burning of magical-religious protection charms, religious takes center stage, and the residential area of the patient's family is temporaly infiltrate by mpiandry. Therefore, the emotions engendered take a more complex dimension that support or rejection of exorcists practices. Exorcists move and surround the hamlet, and religious interferes in the houses of the ancestral village, the court, cultivated land and the ox park (family representations of the Betsileo region and also the economic resources). The neighborhood (sometimes distant) approaches. The exorcists are moving away from their reasons for coming (the illness of a family member) to impose practices on religious territory of ancestor worship. Through this ethnographic case, we will seize religious events in the public space, and the confrontation of secular Protestantism practiced outside institution and ancestor worship. Lutheran Protestantism then come into the ancestral religious territoriality, to its deterritorialization.

Feeding Children, Communities, and Souls

Feeding Children, Communities, and Souls

Fortunate Son: Stevens, Frost, and My Introduction to American Poetry

Fortunate Son: Stevens, Frost, and My Introduction to American Poetry Kareem Tayyar WHENEVER MY FATHER would sing one of the endless number of Persian folk songs he knew by heart, his tone-deafness was such that I would immediately slip a Prince cassette into the tape deck to drown out his voice. But during the times when he would forgo his forays into apartment karaoke in favor of impromptu recitations of the poems of Hafez, Saadi, and Rumi (which often occurred while he was weightlifting in the middle of our living room), I could not have been more rapt an audience were I to have been at the Six Gallery the night Allen Ginsberg first performed “Howl.” There is an easy answer for why my father’s spoken-word performances happened as often as they did: those poems had sustained him in the years after he had fled Iran and begun to create a new life in America. In other words, my introduction to poetry was through a man who believed it was capable of keeping alive a world that had been otherwise completely lost to him. Hafez, Saadi, and Rumi (or, as my father liked to say, the other Holy Trinity) were the keepers of a joyous, imaginative, free-spirited Middle Eastern flame that neither the SAVAK nor, later, the Ayatollah could douse with their devastating mixtures of autocratic brutality, intellectual fascism, and spiritual cruelty. Poetry had, not to put too fine a point on it, been instrumental in maintaining my father’s optimism during some of the most difficult years of his life. Fast forward fifteen years to the bookstore at UC Santa Barbara, where, in between classes one afternoon, I read a selection of Wallace Stevens’ and Robert Frost’s poetry while thumbing through a literary anthology whose title I can no longer recall. In the time it took me to finish the bottle of water I had purchased a few minutes earlier, I had experienced my Beatles-on-The-Ed-Sullivan-Show moment. I was, in short, converted. While my father’s love of his favorite Middle Eastern poets first gave me the sense that poetry was capable of sustaining a relationship to a no-longer-accessible landscape, what I found in Stevens and Frost gave me something else. They were the first poets whose work helped me make sense of the world I was actively inhabiting. Their work enabled me to critically navigate an America whose mystery, beauty, terror, pathology, [End Page 123] and mythos often seemed much too complex to even grapple with, and more importantly, gave me a profound sense of what it meant to be an inheritor of and a participant in the national experience. All of which is a long way of explaining why two of the handful of poems I have ever committed to memory are “Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock” and “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” They represent, as far as I’m concerned, the Alpha and Omega of the American Psyche. Perhaps only The Great Gatsby is “Disillusionment’s” equal in warning one away from the materialistic siren’s call that is the American Dream, as the housewives in the poem, their sterile nightgowns mimicking the white robes worn by patients in a hospital or an asylum, are trapped in the presumably large houses they have long dreamed of residing within. Stevens’ listing of the stylistic variations these women have chosen to reject in favor of the plain white nightgowns—“green / Or purple with green rings, / Or green with yellow rings, / Or yellow with blue rings”—reinforce the overall sense of imaginative lack so often present in a culture forever succumbing to its homogenizing impulse (CPP 52). Indeed, lack is the overriding quality of the America described in the poem: these houses lack husbands, children, love, food, conversation, sex, warmth. Even Betty Draper thinks the world these women inhabit is an awfully dispiriting place. However, for all my avowed love of “Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock,” it is a poem that represents the direction I did not want to take in my own poetry. There are other, better writers who have successfully devoted their careers to...

A Study of the Costumes and Make-up in the Movie "Anna Karenina"

The purpose of this study is to establish how main characters' mental states are expressed through costumes and makeup by understanding and analyzing the relationship between the costumes and the makeup in the movie "Anna Karenina" and to compare the 19th century Russian costumes. The study methods are a literature review and an empirical case study. The results are as follows. First, the costumes in "Anna Karenina" are a mixture of late crinoline and early bustle style in general. However, the costumes were altered after the actress's movements and acting were considered. Regarding colors, Anna wears a lavender robe as the virtuous wife, a wine-colored robe for love and death, and a white robe for innocence, thus reflecting her mental states; through the colors, her changes of mental state are expressed. Second, the costumes of Alexei Vronsky, are similar in style and colors to those of mid-late 19th century Russian military uniforms. White, blue and black costume colors are used to describe his situations and emotional changes. Third, Alexei Karenin wears 19th century costumes of dark and achromatic colors without decorations, representing his conservative, authoritative character. However, he showshis rage with a wine and red-colored costume at the end of the movie. Fourth, regarding the makeup in the movie, Anna wears makeup of a soft pink-gold color influenced by 19th century naturalism. Male characters express their characteristics with their beards and hair styles. Vronsky's Hollywood mustaches and wavy blonde hair show his charm, and Karenin's chin curtain beard and bald head reveal his conservative character. The costumes of the three main characters in the movie are not very different from 19th century style in general, but mental states and situations are expressed through accessories, and colors maximize all of the effects. Through this research, it is illustrated that the costumes and makeup in a movie can not only express characters' emotional changes but also show the relationships between the characters in different scenes.

The Turban as Metonymy: Reading Orientalism in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette

The Turban as Metonymy:Reading Orientalism in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette Jeffrey Cass Students frequently cannot interpret texts because they cannot see the stultifying cultural preconceptions they bring with them, nor can they easily perceive how their own biases, mutatis mutandis, match up with those of the writers they must confront in the reading process. This problem is particularly true for students grappling with British Victorian novels, whose at-times windy rhetoric must be endured, sifted, digested, and recontextualized, without which they can never hope to appreciate the critical incisiveness of Charles Dickens, the witty dialogue of Elizabeth Gaskell, the astuteness of Benjamin Disraeli, the self-indulgent Gothic humor of Wilkie Collins, or the overpowering technical mastery of George Eliot. Add to this problem our world of instant communication, and we teachers have a real challenge on our hands. Stripping away preconceptions about cultural others is an apt exercise for students because Victorian writers incorporate many of the same stereotypes that students will not only recognize, but that the students themselves actually “know” and embrace in their own beliefs. Sometimes intentionally, often not, Victorians make us of figural tropes that, if properly read and explained, become not only the gateways for productively interpreting the longish works of the period students are asked to read, but they become as well the mirrors through which they perceive their own cultural biases. This essay centers on one type of cultural prejudice, namely, that circumscribed by Orientalism, and I focus the discussion on the many Orientalist signatures that Charlotte Brontë embeds in her novel Villette, her last published work and the one where an understanding of Orientalism becomes essential in interpreting what is an astonishingly well-written novel, but not one frequently used in classrooms because of its dense prose, pervasive use of French, trenchant critique of Catholicism, and Gothicized strangeness that hovers over the narrative. Before introducing a novel like Villette, one that contains a rich tapestry of Orientalist themes and imagery, I conduct the following exercise. I write various countries of the Middle East and South Asia on the board (Egypt, Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, India, Syria) and ask students to write down what they know about each country through the varying impressions and immediate thoughts that occur to them as think about each of the countries. Usually, students can remember some current or historical information about these countries, but not as much as might be expected, even with the [End Page 189] deluge of media reports, images, and stories that are available, particularly after two Gulf wars in Iraq and one in Afghanistan. Indeed, the thesis of Edward Said’s book Covering Islam is that the persistence of cultural stereotypes about Muslims remains even with the availability of appropriate and accurate news about the Middle East. And even if students do have some of the “facts” that comprise a vague idea of the country, these facts are often intermixed or interpolated with other images and stereotypes, which as Edward Said predicted in Orientalism and other works, flattens understanding of any country in particular or this region of the world in general. When students review their work in class discussion, they uncover a dirty little secret: Their understanding of the Orient is mediated by metonymies—flying carpets, turbans, desert sands, white robes, magical entities and objects, primitive and violent behaviors with swords and scimitars— all of which contribute to a cultural bias that robs the region of its cultural difference and, also as Said asserted, freezes these Oriental Others in time. These others are forever locked in our imaginations as inferiors, requiring assistance and intervention, always subaltern, always ripe for colonization. In short, they need our help. This is sobering news indeed, and a lesson that must be learned before students can unpack the hidden cultural biases of texts they are required to interrogate. To push the point home, however, I demonstrate that complex fictive narratives contain the same “pre-knowledge” (Said’s term) of Middle Eastern culture that students themselves unwittingly harbor and pass on. Instructors must shape classroom discussion in contextual terms that reveal cultural bias both in our own contemporaneous productions, as well as those that one finds in...

A New Approach to the Knighting Ritual

The Ordene de chevalerie, a didactic poem composed in northern France by an anonymous author, perhaps around 1220, details an elaborate and richly symbolic procedure designed to make a man a knight. The Crusades provide its setting. Hugh, count of Tiberias, having been captured in battle by Saladin, is given a choice between two ways of ransoming himself: paying an exorbitant sum of money or demonstrating how knights are made after the Christian fashion. Opting for the latter, Hugh proceeds to take Saladin himself through the necessary motions, explaining the significance of each step along the way: taking a bath to wash away sin, lying on a bed signifying the heavenly rest to be earned by a knight's “chivalry,” then donning a white robe for bodily cleanliness, a scarlet cloak for the blood to be shed defending the Church, brown stockings for the earth to which every knight must return, and a white belt for chastity. Golden spurs follow, as tokens for the eagerness with which a knight is to obey God's commands, and then Saladin is girded with a two-edged sword evoking the inseparability of justice and loyalty, and the knight's duty to protect the defenseless from oppression. Hugh skips the final touch, the colée, a light blow to the neck, being unwilling to strike Saladin, his captor; but he does impress upon the sultan four knightly commandments, to wit, a prohibition against false judgments and treason, and the obligations to honor and protect women and damsels, to hear a Mass every day, if possible, and to fast every Friday.

The Atonement

WORLDLITERATURETODAY.ORG 17 photo : takahiro yamamoto TO QUESTION THE WILL OF PASSION is to question life itself, and how not to respond to a stimulus, an impulse, a desire? Does not the lower self need as much appeasement as the higher self, and who is to say if any one self is to be sacrificed at the expense of the other? Is it not our duty to harmonize the various selves within our self? The way we integrate mind and body, thought and action, personal life and working life and social life. The many lives we lead must eventually lead to a single ocean of understanding. For in that ocean we can float, we can give up the striving. Five fingers make a hand, that which is effective, that which propels us in our daily rigors. And we never pass judgment on these fingers, never distinguish one as being weak or being strong, one as more important than the other. So also with our desires: what they crave is unanimous acceptance. And there is no reason why we can’t explore our passions and enjoy them with a love for all things alive and breathing. To the enactments of nature we don’t raise condemning eyes; we see the acts for what they are: changing rhythms of the universe. The movement of the tides; the rise and ebb of the sun; the lofty, murky passage of the moon; the shift of seasons; the changing hues of a landscape; the various blushes of a tree, a plant, a flower, a lake, a river, a pond: none of this The Atonement by Murzban F. Shroff fiction 18 WLT JANUARY/ FEBRUARY 2015 appears unnatural or suspicious; rather, we see it as the unfolding of a vast and complex spiritual design, the reliable appearance of cosmic truths. And yet we do an immense disservice to our body, which is nothing but an embodiment of nature. So we bring to it the shallow weights of our opinion. And we deny it its natural rhythms. And we bind it to a moral code not its own. And we give words to its actions where words are entirely unnecessary. Words like “base” and “immoral” and “obscene” and “perverse.” But in the prison cells of our mind we play out these words anyway. Daily we act out our indelicate absorptions, and then step out into the sunlight, all dressed and smiling. The writer writes this sitting on a chair in the principal ’s office. The principal is a short man, bald, vulpine, paunchy, wearing a white robe that hangs off his waist like a tent. Under the robe he wears black socks, under his breath he smiles. The writer is a young man, thirty-four, thirty-five, at the most. His hair is long, he is unshaven, no mustache , but you can tell that his facial growth is light, his complexion clean and youthful. Next to him is his wife—quiet, pensive, and self-contained. She is dressed in tight-fitting clothes: a short-sleeve blouse with stripes of pastel pink and green; white trousers; sandals . She wears no makeup, no lipstick, and clutches a handbag that rests on her lap. The principal’s office is at the end of a long, wooden corridor, lined with wooden benches. The flooring, too, is of wood—dark, ancient wood—and it would pick up the sound of footsteps easily. The writer and his wife have been called to school on a serious matter. It couldn’t have been any more serious than what it was at home. But this: this was about their eight-year-old daughter, Denise. There had been a gangup against her: a mass ragging and humiliation. Why? Why? How could they have done that to her? Other children like her, who had visited their home, been fed and entertained, been taken for a movie, and, thereafter, to a mall. And to think he had thought them so innocent that, looking in their eyes, he had mourned the death of his own innocence, brooded over the corruption of his soul. How had that corruption started? He wanted to look at his wife, throw an apologetic glance at...

White robes and burning crosses: a history of the Ku Klux Klan from 1866

White robes and burning crosses: a history of the Ku Klux Klan from 1866

REMEMBERING TO FORGET

Once upon a time, not so long ago, I guess, I lived in a ramshackle house perched perilously on a bank of the Malang River. By day, I trekked to the city's outskirts to interview members of Laskar Jihad, the earliest and most notorious of the Islamic militias that burgeoned like wildflowers after the fall of Suharto. The young men wore white robes and cultivated patchy beards and waved their machetes to shrieks of jihad. Malang nights, by contrast, were quiet, and I would slip out to the local internet cafe, which stayed open as long as there were glassy-eyed customers to patronize it. So I often found myself in the wee hours of the morning, tracing a potted path home along the accordion shutters of the city's Chinese shop-fronts. I would pick my way over the sleeping sex workers and rickshaw [becak] drivers and street children, whose tender bodies curled in slumber like the green tips of budding ferns. Then it would be a short dash across a bridge swallowed in darkness before I found my ragged purple door and darted in.