The current Israel-Hamas war has dominated the news for the past few months. As reports of military machinations and diplomatic efforts have gained attention, the art world has struggled with responses to the horrors of this war.

For example, controversy and calls for transparency and accountability followed the departure of Anishinaabe-kwe curator Wanda Nanibush from the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO). The departure was apparently related to her expressed opinions on the war.

After the Royal Ontario Museum tried to change a Palestinian American artist’s work, Jenin Yaseen staged a sit-in and others protested.

I have been teaching and writing about the “art world” — what sociologist Howard Becker calls the network of artists, art institutions, funders, patrons and audiences — for years, and researching how artists navigate their thorny relationship with contentious political moments.

Policies and regulations can serve artists, but can also engender a lack of trust and create administrative burdens that impact the healthy functioning of artists and organizations.

Endeavouring to speak truthfully, meaningfully

The Globe and Mail reported some Canadians “active in a support group of the Israel Museum in Jerusalem” expressed concern to the AGO, and that one signatory to a letter said the letter didn’t call for Nanibush’s departure but rather for “antisemitism training and for the AGO to make use of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance working definition of antisemitism.”

If the gallery did try to silence Nanibush, critics have reason to be concerned about how they reacted as the curator and others in the art world endeavoured to speak truthfully and meaningfully in a time of crisis.

In a statement, the AGO’s director and CEO Stephan Jost expressed the gallery’s support for Indigenous artists and a need to “reflect on our commitments to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report …”

Refugees in their Own Homeland, by Mohammad ElMetmari; Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License

He acknowledged cultural institutions are “being asked to better define the rights and limits of political and artistic expression in a locally diverse but globally complex environment” and that “intense discussion” also raises questions about good governance.

Rights, limits, regulation and the purpose of artists’ work are what is at stake in this discussion. An investigation is underway to see how the gallery’s policies may have impacted the board’s decision-making.

People trying to create and speak truth

How people assess the value of policies and regulation affecting the art world depends on how much they feel the art world should, or should not, reflect political realities.

Some might suggest that artists should entertain and enlighten us but stay away from contentious issues.

I believe artists have a unique role, different than that of journalists, political leaders or even documentary filmmakers. Beyond parsing the facts of a situation or deliberating and brokering political solutions, artists work to bring human richness and complexity to experiences like conflict and strife.

Art and our lives

Thinking about “art worlds” as “patterns of collective activity,” as Becker does, helps us to think about art in relationship to our social and political lives, and the conditions under which artists create.

Art schools, professional organizations, galleries and performance spaces all play a part in enabling some artists and their messages to shine, whether through financial support, attention or time — while constraining or even silencing others.

Museum and gallery spaces, frequently dependent on government and philanthropic funding, curate and elevate certain artworks and in so doing mediate relationships and foster cultural dialogue between governments and pluralistic communities of citizens. At the same time, they prescribe behaviours and actions that constrain both artists and the public perception of their work.

In this way, the support systems around artistic work have political implications, just as much as the art itself may have.

Discipline via funding

As I examined in my doctoral research, the Summerworks Theatre Festival briefly lost funding from Canadian Heritage in 2011 after staging playwright Catherine Frid’s controversial play Homegrown.

The play critiqued the reach of the Anti-Terrorism Act and the use of solitary confinement as it examined the story of one man convicted of participating in a terrorist group. This was after a high-profile 2006 RCMP investigation saw 18 Muslim individuals accused of terrorism. (Charges against seven people were stayed or dropped, while four people were convicted). Some accused the play of being pro-terrorist.

Artists responded to this institutional censure by staging readings of the play to support the festival.

The art world will find pathways to speak its own truth in the face of such pressures.

For instance, as the Globe and Mail reported, the Belfry Theatre in Victoria made a recent decision to cancel its run of the Israel-set play The Runner. But Vancouver’s PuSh Festival is sticking by plans to run the play as a part of its program along with other works, including the immersive installation Dear Laila that depicts a model of one artist’s former home in the Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp.

When political pressure closes one door, the art world will often seek to open another, though we have yet to see how this might play out in the case of the AGO and Nanibush.

What do we want from our artists?

In the face of numerous wars, the climate emergency, housing and food insecurity, this is a challenging time. People around the world face what some scholars and activists have called a “polycrisis.”

Artists represent and reflect this social and political upheaval. Banksy scrawls murals on the blasted Ukrainian cityscape. Theatres across the world stage performances or screenings — like The Gaza Monologues — to try to represent Palestinian voices.

Especially in a time when trust in our political leaders and institutions continues to wane, artists, arts leaders and policymakers face daunting but critical questions about making ethically sound decisions.

If the public trusts the art world to do their work with rigour and honesty, artists and arts institutions can be a community of voices expressing diverse perspectives on our collective humanity, reflecting suffering and the power of resistance to violence in this polarizing conflict.

We must critically assess the value of the arts and of artists to perform this important work. And we should be mindful of desires to discipline the art world at a time when its voices are so deeply needed.

Lowell Gasoi, Instructor in communication studies at Carleton University and the University of Ottawa, Carleton University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam

When New Year’s rainclouds wash the tulip’s face,
get up and to red wine your will entrust.
Since this green lawn that now delights your eye
Tomorrow will be growing from your dust.

(In Mohammad ibn Bahr Jājarmī, Mo’nes al-Ahrār, dated 1340, in E. Denison Ross, “’Omar Khayyam,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental Studies 4, 3 (1927), pp. 433-439.)

Now that the bloom is on the rose of bliss,
Don’t hesitate to raise a wine glass high.
Drink up, for your determined foe is time:
You won’t again come by a day like this.

Whinfield 71

Wine server, rise and bring shame to my name.
The old and young have often seen our like.
Musician, my physician, sing a song,
then grab a wine decanter: a chord strike!

“Kholāsat al-ash`ār fi al-Robā`īyat,” Safīneh-‘e Tabrīz.

Into the garden flew a drunken nightingale,
delighting in the cup of wine that was its rose.
It whispered with its mystic voice into my ear:
“Grab hold, for life is gone when once it goes.

Whinfield 81

Tonight, who brought you from behind the veil;
who brought you, tipsy, to me, drawing near?
–to one on fire because you had been gone–
one like an arid wind; who brought you here?

Whinfield 2

The dawn has broken: rise, you hopeless flirt,
and gently – gently -— sip some wine and strum.
For those who dwell here will not be here long.
Of those who left, not one again will come.

– Mo’nes al-Ahrar

“Now Ruz on Sunset,” by Juan Cole, Digital, Dream/ Dreamland v. 3/ Lunapic, 2023

What’s being, then, if death is the reality?
What is the road to our impossible desires?
No layover will offer any benefit.
And when the journey’s done, what kind of rest transpires?

Whinfield 88

Wine is an essence that takes many forms:
It animates all life and waters roots.
Do not imagine that it ever dies.
Its essence lives, if not its attributes.

Whinfield 75

Since I translated the poetry into a contemporary idiom, I thought I’d try my hand at a digital image that pays homage to the Bravo show, “The Shahs of Sunset,” instead of the Victorian, pre-Raphaelite sort of painting that has typically accompanied the The Rubaiyat in Western publishing.

These poems are not in my translation of the Yerbudaki manuscript, which is available as below:

Juan Cole, The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam: A New Translation from the Persian (London: IB Tauris/ Bloomsbury, 2020). Click here.

Reviews:

“’To read Juan Cole’s deft, plain-spoken translation of the Rubáiyát
is to find companionship, to rejoin a thousand-year human
conversation about how to endure, enjoy, and find a fleeting beauty
in everlastingly dire times. The lucid, cogent and mind-opening
Epilogue is a kind of grace, a gift freely given, from one of our
most astonishing and generous intellects.’”
– Michael Chabon, Pulitzer Prize winner and author of Moonglow (2017)

“’Omar Khayyam is a Persian treasure and Juan Cole’s new
translation brings him anew to Western audiences who
for centuries have been both delighted and educated by this
medieval sage! Reading The Rubáiyát is a thrill – you feel the
echoes of the 12th century seamlessly into our 21st, as this is
a holy book of wisdom and magic. In another perilous era for
Iranians, it’s wonderful to see this enchanting volume make
its way through the world yet again!’”
– Porochista Khakpour, novelist, essayist and author of Brown Album (2020)

Two Scenes from The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (2022) ~ Trio for Bb Clarinet, Violin & Piano Performed by Alan Sun, Alex Vershinin and Emma Fu Video and Audio by Nelson Walker

“The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam is a Persian poetry collection first put together in 1460 in Shiraz. It consists of quatrains, four-line poems, with a set of unconventional themes. The poetry is irreligious and questions the afterlife and God’s providence. It shows keen awareness of the shortness of life and the finality of death. It advises therefore that every fleeting moment of every day should be savored, with wine, lovers and song. The combination of a serious philosophy of life and a carefree attitude has made the poetry popular for centuries. In 1859, Edward FitzGerald brought out a loose English translation that took the world by storm. It became the most beloved and widely known poem in the English language for decades until its popularity finally faded in the late twentieth century. Although they were attributed to the great mathematician and astronomer, Omar Khayyam (d. 1131), the poems were by many anonymous hands, and he was just a frame author, akin to Scheherezade in the Arabian Nights.” – Dr. Juan Cole, Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan

About the Composition of Adam Lenhart: “Two Scenes from The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám” explores and embodies two of the main themes that carry throughout the quatrains of the poem collection. In FitzGerald’s translation, the quatrains follow a day to night cycle. The two movements reflect this by starting off with an abrupt “wake up” section and ending the piece with a nocturne. The first movement, “Wine”, celebrates the camaraderie, joy and chaos that comes through the physical joy of being with friends. The clarinet, violin and piano interact in a conversational way, talking, laughing, and insulting one another in their own independent lines.

The second movement is entitled “Intimacy” and explores the emotional joy of connecting with one another. The movement is set in a waltz style dance and draws influence from Chopin, Liszt and other romantic era composers. This is juxtaposed by youthful and energetic phrases so that the piece embodies all forms of love: young love, years of marriage and even friendship. Each movement has a sense of urgency and density which is present in the rubá’iyát as well, expressing to the reader that our time on Earth is so short and to make the most of each day.

Purchase this score at: https://www.sheetmusicdirect.com/en-U… Watch the score follower video at:    • Two Scenes from T…   Movement I, “Wine”: 0:00 Movement II, “Intimacy”: 3:52

For the Cole translation:

For the earliest collection of verse attributed to Omar Khayyam see
my The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam: A New Translation from the Persian

Order from

Bloomsbury (IB Tauris)

or Schuler Books in Ann Arbor.

or Literati Bookstore in Ann Arbor.

or Barnes and Noble.

or Amazon

Reviews:
“’To read Juan Cole’s deft, plain-spoken translation of the Rubáiyát
is to find companionship, to rejoin a thousand-year human
conversation about how to endure, enjoy, and find a fleeting beauty
in everlastingly dire times. The lucid, cogent and mind-opening
Epilogue is a kind of grace, a gift freely given, from one of our
most astonishing and generous intellects.’”
– Michael Chabon, Pulitzer Prize winner and author of Moonglow (2017)

“’Omar Khayyam is a Persian treasure and Juan Cole’s new
translation brings him anew to Western audiences who
for centuries have been both delighted and educated by this
medieval sage! Reading The Rubáiyát is a thrill – you feel the
echoes of the 12th century seamlessly into our 21st, as this is
a holy book of wisdom and magic. In another perilous era for
Iranians, it’s wonderful to see this enchanting volume make
its way through the world yet again!’”
– Porochista Khakpour, novelist, essayist and author of Brown Album (2020)

Although the Khomeinists depicted their ideal society as based on premodern norms, in fact clerical puritanism was always a sectorial phenomenon that often had limited reach. Kings ruled as they pleased, and in many eras the clerics had to grin and bear it as society went in directions of which they disapproved.

Evidence for premodern anticlericalism and opposition to puritan moral strictures is plentiful in the grand tradition of Persian lyric poetry.

I have argued that the work entitled “The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam” is an anthology of quatrains (the meaning of Rubaiyat) by many hands, some of it originating in the working class, which was attributed to the astronomer Omar Khayyam (d. 1131) as its frame author, in the same way that the various tales of the Thousand and One Nights, produced over centuries in several different cities, were all attributed to the princess Scheherazade.

The “Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam” was loosely translated into Victorian English by the gentleman poet Edward FitzGerald in 1859, and went viral. Especially in the United States, there was a craze for it that caused bookstores to be mobbed. By 1900 a new edition was being published every day. It is a little mysterious why people kept wanting new printings of the same book. Publishers began omitting the date of publication so that their edition didn’t come to be viewed as superannuated. The publisher Houghton Mifflin made its initial fortune on the back of the Rubaiyat, and was the first to include artwork in a Pre-Raphaelite style. American publishers arbitrarily declared FitzGerald’s translation out of copyright. The enthusiasm for the Rubaiyat lasted into the 1960s. It influenced everyone who was anyone in British and American letters, from T.S. Elliott to Jack Kerouac. The vogue for it surely had something to do with secularization, with moderns seeking a worldly form of enchantment or what scholars have called “secular transcendence” as Darwinism and modern geology pulled the rug from beneath the feet of the traditional theologians.

Today’s protests in Iran were kicked off by public revulsion at the death in the custody of the morals police of Mahsa “Zhina” Amini, who had been arrested for being unsatisfactorily veiled in public. She was visiting the capital of Tehran from her small town in Iranian Kurdistan.

The Rubaiyat also contains a stanza showing regret for the senseless deaths of beautiful women:

Not even a drunk would try to sunder
the graceful stem and bowl of a wine glass.
As for the shapely hands and feet of a temptress, for
whom are they crafted? And whose hatred in the end shatters them?

There was one mystical trend in Iran and Central Asia that frowned on the pride that is engendered by puritan conflict, seeing boastfulness and ostentation about one’s piety as Satan’s traps. These mystics were called “Self-Blamers” (Malamati) and they sometimes deliberately flaunted religious strictures in public to make sure no one thought well of them so that, in turn, they would not be tempted to take pride in their own religiosity. This poem comes from that tradition, and seems especially appropriate to the anti-veiling protests:

In taprooms, you wash up for prayers with wine.
For never can a tarnished name be cleared.
Rejoice! We’ve torn this secret veil of ours
so badly there is no hope of repair.

This poem is an implicit critique of the Creator, wondering at the cruelty of the death imposed on mortals.

The poetry, like the Iranian youth engaging in provocative public displays of affection, celebrates wine and love as essential fonts of meaning:

Get up quick and bring me some wine—this is no time for
talk!
Tonight, your lush lips are my daily bread.
Pour me some Shiraz as red as your blushing cheeks.
My past repentance is as tangled as your curls.

Romantic love, a great theme in Persian poetry, is seen as the sine qua non of a meaningful life:

Too bad if your heart isn’t scorched, if there’s
no one you’re pining for, who makes it leap.
That day on which love does not ache in you
is the most wasted day of your whole life.

Discontent with conventional religion is also apparent in the anthology. Spirituality, it asserts, should well up from within rather than being imposed by the doctrine of heaven and hell:

In monasteries, temples and retreats
they fear hellfire and look for paradise.
But those who know the mysteries of God
don’t let those seeds be planted in their hearts

Secular transcendence in this poetry often centers on wine. Although some have wanted to see it as symbolic of spiritual ecstasy, in the poetry attributed to Khayyam it is clearly just wine. Drinking parties are often associated in this poetry with youth and with springtime, when the young people could sneak out to the savannah away from town:

Since today is the season of my youth,
I want some wine, since that’s what makes me happy.
Don’t scorn me —- although it is harsh, it is good.
It is bitter because it is my life.

My point is not that the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam coincides with the values of Iran’s Gen Z but that it demonstrates that an alternative set of non-puritan, anticlerical and often critical values was not only present in premodern Iran but was widely celebrated. Poets from various social classes went on contributing to the corpus of the Rubaiyat for centuries. A Persian lithograph brought out in Lucknow in the 1860s contained a thousand such poems, many of them clearly composed in India, where Persian had been the lingua franca before English assumed tht role. The poems added by later hands contained the same skepticism about conventional, clerical religion and the same search for secular transcendence in love and wine.

For the earliest collection of verse attributed to Omar Khayyam see
my The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam: A New Translation from the Persian

Order from

Bloomsbury (IB Tauris)

or Schuler Books in Ann Arbor, who will ship it to you

or Literati Bookstore in Ann Arbor, who will ship it to you

or Barnes and Noble, who will ship or do curbside delivery.

or Amazon

Reviews:
“’To read Juan Cole’s deft, plain-spoken translation of the Rubáiyát
is to find companionship, to rejoin a thousand-year human
conversation about how to endure, enjoy, and find a fleeting beauty
in everlastingly dire times. The lucid, cogent and mind-opening
Epilogue is a kind of grace, a gift freely given, from one of our
most astonishing and generous intellects.’”
– Michael Chabon, Pulitzer Prize winner and author of Moonglow (2017)

“’Omar Khayyam is a Persian treasure and Juan Cole’s new
translation brings him anew to Western audiences who
for centuries have been both delighted and educated by this
medieval sage! Reading The Rubáiyát is a thrill – you feel the
echoes of the 12th century seamlessly into our 21st, as this is
a holy book of wisdom and magic. In another perilous era for
Iranians, it’s wonderful to see this enchanting volume make
its way through the world yet again!’”
– Porochista Khakpour, novelist, essayist and author of Brown Album (2020)

In keeping with this Easter theme of joy, today I am sharing my translation of Poem 4 in the Persian Divan of Hafez of Shiraz (d. 1390 A.D.), who invokes the image of a Christ ascended into the heavens who breaks into an ecstatic dance. The amazing and cryptic verse goes this way

It’s no surprise that in the sky Hafez’s verse
set Venus singing, at which Christ broke into dance.

There are other Easter-like themes in Persian poetry. Muslims believe in Jesus and his miracles, such as raising Lazarus from the dead. In a celebration of the coming of spring, a poem attributed to the astronomer Omar Khayyam says,

Now that the world verges on being happy,
the high-spirited plan to make merry outside.
Each branch is putting out shoots as white as the hand of Moses,
and every breeze wafts the life-giving breath of Jesus.

Rising from the dead is obviously relevant to the holy day.

(For my book of translated poems from the Rubaiyat, see this link.)

But let us turn to Hafez.

Hafez lived in turbulent times, with the gradual fall of the Mongol dynasty and the rise of regional rulers. He sometimes had a high position at court, but for most of the last twenty years of his life he had fallen out of favor. His forte was the lyric poem (ghazal). Some of his verse is touched by mystical Sufi themes, but much of it is secular love poetry or explores themes in what Hamid Dabashi has called Persian humanism. He is a severe critic of the hypocrisy of the Establishment, including the Muslim clerics. To tweak the latter, he praises wine-drinking (frowned on by puritan Muslims) and rascals, as well as wandering Sufi holy men (qalandars).

The poem I’m presenting today is a love poem. It has some stock images. In Persian poetry, the nightingale is the lover of the rose and sings its song for its benefit. Parrots love lumps of sugar (qand) and so are beloved by sugar merchants. Beautiful lovers are graceful and compared to gazelles, so the lover is on a sort of desert hunt. This kind of poetry also has some stock themes, such as the cruel indifference of the beloved to the lover’s advances.

This ghazal ends, however, with an original image, of a Jesus who dances across the heavens.

Soft morning breeze, please tell that elegant gazelle
that she has led us through your deserts and high hills

It is not strange that the poor sugar merchant would
be full of yearning for the parrot who loves sweets.

My rose, did beauty’s vanity prohibit you
from seeking out this love-enraptured nightingale?

You hunt the wise with virtue and benevolence;
you cannot snare the canny bird with nets and traps.

I don’t know why she gives no sign of knowing me–
that tall moon-faced girl with the smoldering black eyes.

When you are seated with your darling sipping wine
Recall to mind the lovers braving stormy gales.

Your beauty is quite flawless save that there is no
fidelity or kindness in your lovely face.

It’s no surprise that in the sky Hafez’s verse
set Venus singing, at which Christ broke into dance.

در آسمان نه عجب گر به گفتهٔ حافظ

سرود زُهره به رقص آورد مسیحا را

The poem is about a cruel beloved, who is cold and heartless and rejects the advances of Hafez. The poet, instead of being broken by this rejection, insists on the cosmic power of his heart’s poetry, which inspires the music of the planet Venus, which in turn sets Jesus to dancing.

Jesus dancing is a symbol of the unity of the lover with the divine beloved, and of the victory of true, spiritual love. With this symbol, Hafez celebrates love beyond love.

In his own wonderful translation of Hafez’s poetry, the great Persian scholar Dick Davis made a stab at explaining these last two lines. He wrote,

” The planet/deity Venus is associated with music (her attribute is a harp or lute) and sensuality, Jesus with asceticism and spirituality; Venus is feminine, Jesus masculine; Venus as a deity belongs to the pre-Islamic, pagan world, Jesus represents a religion recognized by Islam as legitimate. Their dance, which Hafez implies his poetry brings about, is a uniting of the physical and the spiritual, the feminine and the masculine, the pagan and the religiously legitimate; it also represents the cosmic “dance” of the turning of the heavens. Presenting the “lesser” of two figures (here the pagan, the feminine, the sensual) as the guide of the one who is apparently the “superior” is common in Sufi anecdotes. Together with the association of Jesus with Venus, which would be somewhat shocking to the religiously orthodox, this gives a Sufi feeling to the end of the poem.”

Davis has forgotten more about Persian poetry than I will ever know, and I think these insights are very valuable.

I wonder, though, whether Hafez would have associated Venus (here called Zohreh) with paganism. I think the reference is just to the planet. Venus was also a level of heaven, the third, which Muslim spirituality associated with Jesus. This music could be the music of the spheres, the Pythagorean idea that the movement of the celestial bodies creates a heavenly symphony.

In the hyperbole of this poem, Hafez’s poetry inspires the music that the planet Venus makes, setting Christ to dancing. The Mevlevi Sufi order of Jalal al-Din Rumi, who lived a century before Hafez, used a whirling dance to achieve ecstasy, and Hafez may well have imagined Jesus as a whirling dervish here, the ultimate symbol of spiritual ecstasy that contrasts with the petty games human lovers play here below.

Muslims believe in Jesus, but see him as a prophet rather than as the son of God, and many do not believe he died on the cross. They do accept that God took him up to Himself, however, so that is one overlap between Christian and Muslim belief. (I think the Qur’an accepts the crucifixion, but that is a story for another day.)

So in Hafez the ascended Christ becomes a symbol of the bliss of unity with the beloved. The joyous dancing Christ in heaven, for all its strangeness from a Christian point of view, is nevertheless a powerful Easter image.

As for the very different poetry of the Rubaiyat, which nevertheless shares some Persian poetic concerns, see

See my just-published The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam: A New Translation from the Persian

Order from

Bloomsbury (IB Tauris)

or Nicola’s Books in Ann Arbor, who will ship it to you

or Literati Bookstore in Ann Arbor, who will ship it to you

or Barnes and Noble, who will ship or do curbside delivery.

or Amazon

Reviews:
“’To read Juan Cole’s deft, plain-spoken translation of the Rubáiyát
is to find companionship, to rejoin a thousand-year human
conversation about how to endure, enjoy, and find a fleeting beauty
in everlastingly dire times. The lucid, cogent and mind-opening
Epilogue is a kind of grace, a gift freely given, from one of our
most astonishing and generous intellects.’”
– Michael Chabon, Pulitzer Prize winner and author of Moonglow (2017)

“’Omar Khayyam is a Persian treasure and Juan Cole’s new
translation brings him anew to Western audiences who
for centuries have been both delighted and educated by this
medieval sage! Reading The Rubáiyát is a thrill – you feel the
echoes of the 12th century seamlessly into our 21st, as this is
a holy book of wisdom and magic. In another perilous era for
Iranians, it’s wonderful to see this enchanting volume make
its way through the world yet again!’”
– Porochista Khakpour, novelist, essayist and author of Brown Album (2020)

I am rewriting a previous essay here, quoting some extra poems different from the ones I used last year, but my big points remain the same. After the dark year of 2021, I thought it might be nice to talk about poetry and rebirth today. The quatrains or Rubaiyat attributed to the medieval astronomer Omar Khayyam (d. 1131), four-line Persian poems, are often about renewal, and some make special mention of New Year’s Day (Now-Ruz in Persian).

Here’s the thing: in ancient, Zoroastrian, Iran, New Year’s Day was celebrated on the vernal equinox (21 or 20 March). So although in all cultures, New Year’s is a time of renewal and rebirth, in Iran it coincides with the beginning of spring and not just, as in Christian culture, the beginning of the end of winter.

In April of 2020, I brought out a new translation of the Rubaiyat, which has been called “aggressively modern.” The poetry had been made famous by the rendering of the Victorian translator, Edward FitzGerald. Alas, the pandemic deprived me of any opportunity for readings in bookstores. So this blog is the next best thing.

In the first poem, below, I substituted “spring” for Now Ruz, since the spring references with regard to the New Year would have been confusing for Anglophone audiences. But it is in the original a “New Year’s breeze.”

The spring breeze on a rose’s cheek spreads joy.
The face you glimpse beyond the blooms grants bliss.
No words about last winter can bring cheer;
don’t speak of yesterday —- rejoice today.

h/t ganjoor.net.

People have always partied on the New Year, and medieval Iran was no exception. This poetry is the opposite of the puritanical ideology we often hear from the Middle East, but anyone who has actually lived there knows that the stereotype of sober religiousness is just that. This poetry urges people to have a good time while they still can:

Deep in my dream, I heard a sage cry out:
“What joy has slumber ever caused to bloom?
Why do a thing that looks so much like death?
Go drinking! Lifetimes soon will pass in sleep!”

The passing of the old year is an occasion for teary nostalgia, and the prospect of a new year is an occasion for trepidation. The Rubaiyat’s message to us at moments like this is, “Chill!”

Like cascading waters, or a desert squall,
another day of my life has fled.
But I never feel regret for two days:
The one that hasn’t yet arrived and the one that long since passed.

Another poem with overtones of New Year is this:

     Now that the world verges on being happy,
the high-spirited plan to make merry outside.
     Each branch is putting out shoots as white as the
   hand of Moses,
  and every breeze wafts the life-giving breath of Jesus.

Trees with white blooms like our magnolias or elderberries are being compared here to the miraculous white hand of Moses. Turning his hand white was one of his divine signs that God instructed the Hebrew prophet to use when he confronted Pharaoh:

Exodus 4:1,6-7

Then Moses answered, “But suppose they do not believe me or listen to me, but say, ‘The Lord did not appear to you.’… Again, the Lord said to him, “Put your hand inside your cloak.” He put his hand into his cloak; and when he took it out, his hand was leprous,[a] as white as snow. Then God said, “Put your hand back into your cloak”—so he put his hand back into his cloak, and when he took it out, it was restored like the rest of his body—

This miracle is also mentioned in the Qur’an, and Persian poetry refers to it as a sign of renewal, since Moses can reverse the condition at will.

The other reference is to Jesus’ ability to raise the dead.

We were reminded last year of how fleeting life is, how unpredictable fate. The poetry, however, urges against dwelling on our own ephemerality. Awareness of it should instead impell us to become joyous and make every moment count.

     Since we can’t trust tomorrow,
 find a way to fill this lovelorn heart with joy:
Drink up in the light of the moon– a moon that someday
   will look for us …and not find us.

The moon won’t find so many of us after the grim last year, but those of us it can still descry must find a way to fill our lovelorn hearts with joy in the new year.

Reviews:
“’To read Juan Cole’s deft, plain-spoken translation of the Rubáiyát
is to find companionship, to rejoin a thousand-year human
conversation about how to endure, enjoy, and find a fleeting beauty
in everlastingly dire times. The lucid, cogent and mind-opening
Epilogue is a kind of grace, a gift freely given, from one of our
most astonishing and generous intellects.’”
– Michael Chabon, Pulitzer Prize winner and author of Moonglow (2017)

“’Omar Khayyam is a Persian treasure and Juan Cole’s new
translation brings him anew to Western audiences who
for centuries have been both delighted and educated by this
medieval sage! Reading The Rubáiyát is a thrill – you feel the
echoes of the 12th century seamlessly into our 21st, as this is
a holy book of wisdom and magic. In another perilous era for
Iranians, it’s wonderful to see this enchanting volume make
its way through the world yet again!’”
– Porochista Khakpour, novelist, essayist and author of Brown Album (2020)

Featured Illustration: screenshot from a work of Abdur Rahman Chughtai.

I was introduced to the work of bell hooks for the first time when I was 14 years old, sitting on my Nana’s porch, complaining about the mosquitoes and the heat.

My Nana, who was probably frustrated by my endless complaints about being bored, stuck a copy of “Ain’t I A Woman” in my hand and told me just to “shut up and read.” I remember that summer because after I read that book, all we talked about was bell hooks and who she was and who I wanted to be. I said then that I wanted to be a writer, like bell hooks, and change the world with my words.

I took her words with me when I went off to college, and by then, I had my own dog-eared copies of some of her books. I went to her work whenever I needed to be reminded of my strength. The world felt much safer when bell hooks and Toni Morrison and Maya Angelou were on the front line, carving out a path to freedom and modeling what a Black woman’s resistance to a system hellbent on trying to make them small looked like. bell hooks’ words went with me everywhere, even while they kept taking me back to myself.

I, like countless others over the past 40 years, was inspired by bell hooks, who died on Dec. 15, 2021, at 69. As a leading Black intellectual, hooks pushed the feminist movement beyond the preserve of the white and middle-class, encouraging Black and working class perspectives on gender inequality. She taught us about white supremacist capitalist patriarchal values – giving both the words to define it and the methods to dismantle it. And unlike previous generations, she prompted Black women like myself to see ourselves, claim ourselves and love ourselves with an unapologetic fierceness.

“No Black woman writer in this culture can write ‘too much,’” bell hooks once wrote, “Indeed, no woman writer can write ‘too much’… No woman has ever written enough.”

I used to read her words to my sons when I was holding them in my arms, determined to practice “liberative parenting” and raise my Black sons as Black feminists.

I met bell hooks in person several times in my capacity as an activist, an officer of the National Women’s Studies Association and as a scholar of African American studies. I have heard her lecture and have spoken with her, and every time, I was speechless. In her presence, I was once again the 14-year-old, sitting on the porch, diving into her words and finding myself on the other side.

Her words, like my Nana’s hugs, always bought me back to myself, telling me, coaxing me, pushing me to become who I was meant to be in this world.

I remember speaking her words to the wind, hoping that if I ever forgot who I was, the wind would remind me. Whenever I am hungry for truth, I turn to her work. When I need support or encouragement, I turn to her work. When I need to be reminded of how to love and fight, I turn to her work.

So when I heard, read, realized and finally accepted that bell hooks – genius, scholar, cultural critic, truth speaker, one who had the strength to call out and challenge white supremacy and racism time and time again – had run on ahead to see how the end is going to be, all I could do was sit and breathe.

I am not OK.

None of us – feminists, scholars, activists, truth seekers, survivors – who have ever been touched by her work and her words are OK. Not today. Not at this moment, and not for a minute.

It is not enough to say she saved me from cutting off my tongue, because unless you know her genius, you will think that this is just about violence and not about salvation.

It is not enough to say that she saved me from burning it all down, because unless you know her brilliance, you will never understand how her words taught me how to come through the fire and be better and stronger on the other side.

Because she wrote and published extensively, “bell hooks” the writer – a pen name that she borrowed from her maternal great-grandmother, Bell Blair Hooks – will never leave us, but Gloria Jean Watkins, did. The sun is not shining as bright as when she was still with us.

My son called to mourn with me and wanted to know which books I would recommend to someone who did not know who bell hooks was and did not understand why we were in mourning. I told him that they should start with these three, and once they have recovered from the truth of her words, they should then read her other 30-plus books and scholarly articles.

Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (1981)

In perhaps one of her most provocative works, hooks provides a true and clear analysis of what it means to live and be a Black woman in a racist, misogynist world. If you want to understand what it means to be Black and a woman, you start here and then keep going.

“It is obvious that many women have appropriated feminism to serve their own ends, especially those white women who have been at the forefront of the movement; but rather than resigning myself to this appropriation I choose to re-appropriate the term ‘feminism’, to focus on the fact that to be ‘feminist’ in any authentic sense of the term is to want for all people, female and male, liberation from sexist role patterns, domination, and oppression.” – Ain’t I a Woman

Feminist Theory: from margin to center (1984)

When I was in college and struggling with understanding and defining what it meant to be a feminist, my professor Jane Bond Moore gave me her copy of “Feminist Theory” and told me to use it as a blueprint and a guide. This book is bell hooks at her best, wielding her pen as a weapon and using it to call out and critique white feminism and white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy.

“Our emphasis must be on cultural transformation: destroying dualism, eradicating systems of domination. Our feminist revolution here can be aided by the example of liberation struggles led by oppressed peoples globally who resist formidable powers. The formation of an oppositional world view is necessary for feminist struggle.” – Feminist Theory

Teaching to Transgress (1994)

As a former middle school teacher and current professor, my goal was to learn how to teach students how to transgress and why they should transgress against racial, sexual and class boundaries.

“Teaching to Transgress” lights the way for anyone who wants to use the classroom as a starting place to help our students claim agency over their own learning.

“We must continually claim theory as necessary practice within a holistic framework of liberatory activism.” – Teaching to Transgress

Karsonya Wise Whitehead, Executive Director, Karson Institute for Race, Peace, & Social Justice, Loyola University Maryland

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

( Middle East Monitor ) – Mahmoud Darwish is the most internationally-renowned Palestinian poet and writer, although still little-known in Brazil. He is the author of 30 poetry books and eight prose books, translated into more than 40 languages, and winner of the Cultural Freedom Prize, the Lannan Foundation (US), the Lenin Peace Prize (former the Soviet Union) and was appointed a Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters by France. His works in the 1960s and 1970s reflect his opposition to the occupation of his homeland.

“He was the prince of words, and his name was Mahmoud Darwish,” said Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury. Darwish was a poet of enormous sensitivity with a fighting spirit who used poetic phrases such as: “How can a handwrite if it’s not creative when making coffee.”

In addition to writing the resounding Declaration of Independence for Palestine, proclaimed by the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) Yasser Arafat, on 15 November 1988, in Algiers, Algeria, he has always taken a firm stance in defending the liberation of Palestine. Therefore, he withdrew from the organisation after the Oslo Accords, signed in 1993, which he called “a give-and-take” between the PLO and Israel. Darwish considered the Oslo Accords to be “the greatest recklessness ever committed by a leader [Arafat] to their people.”

Darwish was born in the Palestinian village of Al-Birwa, Galilee, in 1941, to a Sunni family of small farmers. He was the second of eight siblings. The village where he was born was occupied and razed to the ground by the Zionist occupation forces in the Nakba process in 1948. This led the Darwishes to take refuge in Lebanon for a year, where they began to live as “foreigners”. Upon returning, the poet found that his Al-Birwa home had been replaced by a Jewish colony with the new name of “Ahihud”.

He was arrested several times between 1961 and 1967 for reciting poetry and travelling between villages in occupied Palestine “without authorisation” by the forces of the “Jewish state”. His poem “Identity Card”, which was turned into a protest song, resulted in his house arrest order. After these persecutions and arrests, Darwish was forced into exile, which took him to places like Cairo, Tunis, Moscow, Beirut, and Paris, returning only in 1996, when he was authorised by the occupation to attend a funeral.

The expulsion of Palestinians is a recurrent theme in Darwish’s work. He portrays the trajectory of anguish, pain, and suffering due to deaths and expulsions since the creation of the “State of Israel” and calls Palestine the “lost paradise” and the “land of divine messages revealed to humanity”, as described in Palestine’s Declaration of Independence. His work reveals the unbroken and unaltered organic relationship between the Palestinian people, their land, and their history . . .

[His Memory for Forgetfulness] recounts personal memories of 6 August 1982, coincidently, the anniversary of the US terrorist attack on Hiroshima. This was one of 88 days of the siege in which Zionist state jets dropped bombs on Beirut, killing people – a reality Darwish experienced closely during his exile in Lebanon. The book reminisces on the meaning of exile – and not the diaspora – and on the role of a writer in times of crisis and war. His work expresses his love for Palestine and its people, who “have existed and resisted” for over 73 years . . .

Sayid Marcos Tenório is a historian and specialist in international relations. He is vice president of the Brazil-Palestine Institute (Ibraspal) and author of the book Palestina: do mito da terra prometida à terra da resistência (Palestine: the myth of the promised land to the land of resistance) (Anita Garibaldi/Ibraspal, 2019).

Via Middle East Monitor

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor or informed Comment.

This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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Bonus Video:

Al Jazeera English: “Mahmoud Darwish remembered – 14 Aug 08 – Part 1”

“’To read Juan Cole’s deft, plain-spoken translation of the Rubáiyát
is to find companionship, to rejoin a thousand-year human
conversation about how to endure, enjoy, and find a fleeting beauty
in everlastingly dire times. The lucid, cogent and mind-opening
Epilogue is a kind of grace, a gift freely given, from one of our
most astonishing and generous intellects.’” ―Michael Chabon, Pulitzer Prize winner and author of Moonglow (2017)

Buy The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.

A repository of subversive, joyous and existentialist themes and ideas, the rubaiyat (quatrains) that make up the collected poems attributed to the 12th century Persian astronomer Omar Khayyam have enchanted readers for centuries. In this modern translation, complete with critical introduction and epilogue, Juan Cole elegantly renders the verse for contemporary readers. Exploring such universal questions as the meaning of life, fate and how to live a good life in the face of human mortality, this translation reveals anew why this singular collection of poems has struck a chord with such a temporally and culturally diverse audience, from the wine houses of medieval Iran to the poets of Western twentieth century modernism.

Ta’seel Commons: Conversation with Juan Cole on The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam – A New Translation from the Persian

Omar Khayyam (1048 – 1131) was a Persian astronomer and mathematician born in Nishapur in northeastern Iran who lived and worked at the courts of the Seljuk dynasty. Modern scholars agree that there is very little (if any) of the collected work of poetry know as the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam that can be certainly attributed to the historical figure. A tradition of attribution grew up in the centuries after Khayyam’s death which culminated in Edward Fitzgerald’s translation in the 19th Century.

Juan Cole is a public intellectual, prominent blogger and essayist, and the Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan, USA. He is the translator of Broken Wings and The Vision by Khalil Gibran.

Ta’seel: Watch our previous podcast with Prof. Cole on his book ‘Muhammad: Prophet of Peace Amid the Clash of Empires’