weighing of the heart scene (spell 30b)
Perhaps the best known scene from the Book of the Dead (which isn’t really a book, just a long papyrus.. see this website) is the weighing of the heart. The deceased and his wife are dressed in white on the left. In the center Anubis is working the scales, which hold on one side the heart of the deceased and on the other the feather representing maat (truth, order). Thoth with his ibis head stands ready to record the proceedings on his tablet and behind him is the scary creature Ammit, clearly hoping the deceased fails the test so that it can have at him. Running along the top of the scene is a convocation of gods who affirm the verdict and pronounce the reward.
The scene might seem to speak for itself: one’s deeds need to be characterized by maat. The scale is as clear an image as possible that the judgment is a form of what the New Testament might call “works righteousness.” But the text related to the weighing of the heart points a different direction:
O my heart which I had from my mother! O my heart which I had from my mother! O my heart of my different ages! Do not stand up as a witness against me, do not be opposed to me in the tribunal, do not be hostile to me in the presence of the Keeper of the Balance, for you are my Ka which was in my body, the protector who made my members hale. Go forth to the happy place whereto we speed; do not make my name stink to the Entourage who make men. Do not tell lies about me in the presence of the god; it is indeed well that you should hear!
This is a spell in the book of the dead. The same spell would also be inscribed on the back of a heart amulet and inserted into the mummy wrappings. It’s difficult to know how to take this. Is this an instance of using magic to keep the heart from testifying about one’s various misdeeds? Or is it just a way to make sure that the heart doesn’t panic and say untruths? In the balance here, so to speak, is the nature of salvation in ancient Egypt.
By the New Kingdom the deceased had to make it through this “weighing of the heart” to claim the afterlife. At the successful conclusion of this event the deceased is led before Osiris, and we read: “Let there be given to him the offerings which are issued in the presence of Osiris, and may a grant of land be established in the Field of Offerings” (spell 30b). So getting through this is the key to the rest of one’s afterlife, but what was it that got you through?
Another point that becomes evident reading through these spells is that there was no place for sin. The image of “weighing” might cause one to believe that life must be “on balance” characterized by maat, and that perfection is not required. But perfection is definitely claimed! Again from spell 30b we read Thoth’s announcement: “I have judged the heart of the deceased, and his soul stands as witness for him. His deeds are righteous in the great balance, and no sin has been found in him.” Or just a little later the convocation of gods announces: “…he has no sin, there is no accusation against him before us.” If we look to the related spell 125 we find the deceased making this claim: “I am pure, pure, pure, pure! My purity is the purity of the great Benu-bird…”
This all points to a rather radical version of afterlife justification. There’s nothing here about being “good enough,” only full confidence in one’s absolute personal purity. And it’s not like there are no ethical standards. Spell 125 is the famous negative confession, containing 42 “I have not” statements. These cover the general sins of the ten commandments (leaving aside “no other gods” and the Sabbath) and add a number of sins that we would think of more as character traits (impatience, hot-temperedness). But there’s no doubt there was a sense of an ethical imperative. The trick is to understand how they get from this imperative to their claim of absolute purity.
My suggestion is that in ancient Egypt we see develop something parallel to the New Testament (Pauline) notion of grace. This might be the most helpful way to think of magic.. as a kind of grace. Human beings would fail the weighing of the heart—their own hearts calling out their misdeeds!—if it were not for the cover of magic. Just as the New Testament attempts to get one clear of the dangerous scale that balances works against absolute goodness, the Egyptians were similarly interested in getting around the scale.. and wound up sending each of their dead to the afterworld with an absolute confidence that they would be pronounced pure! pure! pure! pure!
from Ornamental Hairpin by Hiroshi Shimizu
Ornamental Hairpin by Japanese director Hiroshi Shimizu is an understated film with a haunting quality. The tone comes through in the opening scene as a band of kimono dressed women walk through a deep forest, the bright sun through the trees giving a hazy ethereal glow to the group. Considering that it was made in 1941, the year of Pearl Harbor and aggressive Japanese expansion in the Pacific, the opening feels like a decisive step away from the events that must have been on everyone’s mind. The remainder of the film takes place at a spa amidst natural scenes, the war never explicitly figuring into discussion. It could be compared to Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but without the magical events.. and with realism understood as the guiding aesthetic principle.
The central event occurs when a young man (Nanmura, a young Chishu Ryu) steps on an ornamental hairpin in the natural spring. The hairpin does grievous injury to his foot, and he spends the rest of the film limping around with crutches. The ornamental hairpin turns out to belong to a geisha (Emi), who when learning about the injury caused by her pin comes back to the spa to apologize to Nanmura (apparently a soldier sent to the spa to convalesce). We learn that she is unhappy with her life back in Tokyo, and so she stays at the spa and a relationship of some kind develops between her and the young man. Then as quickly as it began, it’s over.. everyone leaves. The film consists entirely of this shimmeringly vague period at the spa.. and viewers are given no very explicit advice as to how it is to be interpreted.
The text on the box for the new Criterion edition is a great example of one easy misreading:
Nanmura tracks down the owner of the lost object, Emi, and, believing that his injury was some form of divine romantic intervention (“It’s like the sole of my foot has been pierced by poetry!”), falls for her. Though it begins with the makings of a perfect comic “meet-cute,” Ornamental Hairpin goes on to pragmatically deconstruct Nanmura’s and Emi’s desires: for him, all is poetic, and therefore illusory; for her: life with a cruel patron has become unbearable, and she doesn’t want to return to the city.
By this interpretation the relationship at the spa is a brief romantic moment that inevitably falls apart. Since this film has been unavailable in the US until this box set was released (can’t even be gotten from Netflix yet!), there’s not a lot of reviews out there to read. This interpretation, although I suspect a common one, misunderstands the nature of the film, beginning with the initial import of the line “It’s like the sole of my foot has been pierced with poetry!”
from Ornamental Hairpin by Hiroshi Shimizu
This comes from the mouth of Nanmura, but it is immediately amplified and interpreted by the older scholar sitting next to him. We see a young man who is aware of the poetic and beautiful moments of his life, and expresses them through a line like this, but that poetic moment is transformed into a narrative by the older scholar, who decides that the young man is love-sick and dreaming of a beautiful young woman connected to the hairpin. As one watches the film, it’s evident that Nanmura is completely passive in the construction of this narrative around himself, while the older scholar is busy at work selling the narrative. This leads to absurd scenes such as the one below in which one of the men at the spa tries to warn Nanmura not to be too “disappointed” with the woman, who might not be beautiful:
from Ornamental Hairpin by Hiroshi Shimizu
When Emi arrives to reclaim her ornamental hairpin, she is inducted into the poetic narrative by the scholar. At no point does Nanmura give evidence that he is “in love” with Emi.. and we only see them in group settings, so there’s no real intimacy. But Emi is little by little sucked into the larger narrative peddled by the scholar:
from Ornamental Hairpin by Hiroshi Shimizu
The film can be seen as a warning of the use of narrative to interpret people and their motivations. In this case a romantic narrative is conjured out of the slimmest of things (a hairpin!) and made into an accepted fact for the people at the spa. Even Emi accepts it and begins to see in it a basis for leaving her old life in Tokyo.
Throughout Nanmura is a cipher. What motivates him? What is he after? We never know. He clearly has a poetic sensibility, but it is one that isn’t connected to any particular narrative, either personal or national. His philosophy is something like: live in the moment. The most eloquent version of this is when the two young boys at the spa are discussing with him what to write about, and they point out how their days are all the same. Nanmura tells them to focus on the unique events they have overlooked in their catalogue of sameness:
from Ornamental Hairpin by Hiroshi Shimizu
This is the true context for understanding his earlier statement: “It’s like the sole of my foot has been pierced with poetry!” By poetry he hardly meant romantic love, but rather attention to small events that give life meaning. Each event is a one-off, to be understood in itself. We always find Nanmura engaged in inconsequential actions, but which are somehow infused by him with fun and meaning. When the scholar goes on a lengthy diatribe about the quality of the food at the spa (another example of narrative construction), Nanmura simply notes that he can’t complain because he gets a steep discount. This puncturing quality gives Nanmura a negative quality (making him hard to interpret), but he clearly represents a non-judgmental, non-constructive approach to living.
Now what to do with Emi? She’s a sympathetic character, and although we aren’t sure about the details of her past, we root for her to leave it behind. During her time at the spa she is finding herself, and tells a friend that she wants more “meaning” in life:
from Ornamental Hairpin by Hiroshi Shimizu
That makes the ending of the film tragic, since she’s shown walking one last time through the natural scenes where she spent time with Nanmura and others. She has to go back to Tokyo and we have no evidence that a brighter life awaits her there. The meaningful life has fled, and the romantic narrative turned out to be an illusion. Ironically the scholar earlier in the film was building up the romantic narrative out of hopes of avoiding a “tragedy” if Nanmura should be disappointed. But in reality the tragedy is caused by the narrative itself, and the buy-in of Emi.
The scholar is a humorous figure, even if we naturally dislike such an overbearing person. He is constantly at work verbally crafting and enforcing the way people should see the world. There are hints too that he is a cultural hardliner.. and I would assume friendly to the Japanese war effort. Here is his line as he first processes the “It’s like the sole of my foot has been pierced by poetry!” line:
from Ornamental Hairpin by Hiroshi Shimizu
We can assume the scholar is the man mentioned at the start of the film who objects to the recitation of Chinese poetry at the spa. This character who stands for nationalism is also the one strongly pushing the romantic narrative. Here I see a (subtle) critique of Japanese nationalism, engaged in its own ideal story-making on the national level. The character who provides a real counter-philosophy to the scholar is Nanmura, whose easy-going poetics of everyday life presents another path of getting through life. Certainly one that is more open to others (and to ornamental hairpins and Chinese poetry!).
MS
I study Cairo and teach a class on the history and structure of the city. One issue I try to explain is the importance of understanding this particular city. I usually proceed down the lines of “Cairo is important to study because it’s the only place where you can see so many remnants of diverse periods of Islamic history.” A city like Baghdad was important as the capital of the Abbasids, but visiting it now would not help you a lot since nothing remains from that time except some local place names.
Islam and the Secular State: Negotiating the Future of Shari’a by Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im supplies another way to argue for the study of Cairo. His larger argument is about the necessity of a secular state for the flourishing of Islam. The only true Islam is the one chosen voluntarily, so the enforcing of Islamic practices by the state does nothing but undermine true faith. The ideal of merging religious authority with the authority of the state is illusory, since the basis of these two forms of authority are antithetical.
One problem with this view, as developed by An-Na’im, is that it’s popular to characterize the political history of Islam as marked by the compression of religious and political authority. One reads a lot that Islamic states lacked a separation between church and state. An-Na’im spends a chapter arguing that this is not a simple issue, and that counter to what one might have heard, there has always been a tension between religious and political authority within Islam.
To make this point he concentrates on two quite different Islamic states: the Fatimids and the Mamluks. It happens that Cairo was the capital of both states.. and this leads An-Na’im to defend this seemingly narrow range of examples:
Although this region is not representative of the generality of the Muslim world, it has been particularly influential in shaping political thinking and social institutions, especially during the first few centuries of Islam. Consequently Muslim elites in other regions have tended to identify the experiences of Middle Eastern societies as the only legitimate or authoritative framework of Islamic discourse. [48-9]
So despite the fact that there have been Islamic states from Morocco to Indonesia, the states that took root in what one might call the “heartland” of Islam have a weight and importance out of proportion to their more objective place in history. The solutions arrived at by a state centered in Cairo (and perhaps controlling the Levant and Mecca/Medina) will always mean more than the solutions arrived at by, say, the Mughal state in India.
An-Na’im isn’t arguing that other states should be ignored. The remainder of this book will be about Shari’a and its place in states such as India and Indonesia. But in setting up any theory of the state and religion, historical examples drawn from the Middle East.. and Cairo in particular.. must be deployed in the construction of any argument. To have an opinion in this argument will mean getting some level of familiarity with the history of Cairo.
I associate the digital humanities with the group of people connected (via podcast, twitter, or THAT camp) to the Center for Media and New History at George Mason University. I make a good candidate for digital humanist since I integrate lots of technology into my courses. A student who follows my courses from intro level on up will engage in blogging, a Google Earth project, and a Wikipedia entry.. in addition to self-designed multi-media projects that I encourage for upper level classes. Add to that my personal blogging and online translation project, and I think I could make a case for being a digital humanist. But that title doesn’t sit well with me, and for the past few days I’ve been trying to think about why. My thinking was jump-started by this tweet:
typing up my “Twitter lecture” for my online course: any suggestions about what I should say?
I see there in that tweet a high level of interest in technology itself, and that’s one side of digital humanities with which I have trouble connecting. I have no idea what I would say about Twitter itself in a lecture! But I have lots to say when it comes to talking about Twitter and other platforms as useful means of learning something about the outside world. I just came across the following tweet from someone I follow:
very funny and true cartoon by Al Rabea. This is exactly how I found the ministry of education women’s office http://bit.ly/drOgXT
Click on the link and you are taken to this picture:
The tweet works as a surprising entrance to someone else’s experience. It’s not just seeing a cartoon from an Arabic newspaper, but having someone say: yes, this is what it was like to experience a certain office. What I enjoy about Twitter is the opportunity to peer into these different windows and see a world that otherwise would be out of reach. Here I could have a lot to say: how can Twitter be used to understand parts of the world better?
As I reflect, I see that my engagement with other platforms is similar. It’s not the thing itself, but the use of the thing for a particular end that draws me. Maybe I should characterize myself as a digital globalist? That better expresses priorities with technology. A definition might be “someone who uses technology as a means of encountering the world.”
Playing music works as a parallel. Music is music—who wants to read magazines about the music business? That defines my distaste for the Chronicle of Higher Education. I admit to an interest in some articles, but I try not to read it on a regular basis. I don’t want my mental space filled with discussion about what I do. I’m more interested in what I do. My frustration with digital humanities is that it often sounds to me more like discussion about what we do and not a trading of “what I saw today relating to my field of study.” But there are surprisingly few places where academics can talk about the books and subjects they care about with others.
from The Paperboy by Dav Pilkey
As I read through picture books with my daughter I stumble across images and concepts that are part of past worlds. Sometimes these are attitudes about family or women. Some of these I need to put down or gently “disappear” because their world is so far from my world. More interesting are the ones that portray an aspect of material or social culture that’s gone.. or on the way to being gone. I was a paperboy through much of the 80s, so it was fun to find the picture book entitled The Paperboy (1996).
When I see the above picture lots of memories come back.. though I never had a dog to hold the bag for me! But I read this with my daughter, and I have no idea how to talk to her about a paperboy. I tell her that I used to be a paperboy, like this boy.. and that strikes some interest. But who is this person? What’s a newspaper? There’s nobody that corresponds to this position, and I don’t buy a newspaper as I get my news online. I can hardly tell her that someday she can deliver newspapers, yet when I was growing up this was one of the best ways for a kid to get some spending money. It was such a visible and widely noted position that there was an arcade game about the travails of being a paperboy.
Other books run into the same issue, though perhaps in a more fruitful way. I read Corduroy (1968) by Dan Freeman several times each week. I am in the process of getting attached to the little bear who’s “always wanted” to do so many things. While this book is a classic, the world it portrays is leaving us. Remember how Corduroy steps on the escalator and is taken upstairs until he arrives here:
scene from Corduroy by Don Freeman
Corduroy is impressed: “This must be a palace” he says. In fact it’s not a palace, but a department store. I remember the tail end of the era of department stores. They still exist to some degree in Macys and other stores, but they are no longer the cultural touchstones that everyone knows and that children will remember so clearly. This older experience of shopping has been replaced by WalMarts and more specialized discount stores. Even the large department stores that remain feature a very different version of shopping than is evident throughout Corduroy, such as the following scene with the pertly dressed woman offering a box for the bear:
scene from Corduroy by Don Freeman
Literature of all kinds can be thought of like amber.. beautiful in itself, but important to us for perfectly preserving the social values that fell within the representational purview of an author. Sometimes the world captured by a book completely disappears, and in that case the book falls by the wayside. I like The Paperboy, but I probably wouldn’t buy it for my daughter. A book like Corduroy might actually have the imaginative strength to form our views of shopping. By which I mean that if one really looks at Corduroy, it’s quite strange.. but it nevertheless comes to define our current experience. That ability to define the present is perhaps the very definition of “classic.”
Just to expand a little on the idea of the picture book, it gives an aesthetic experience that is unlike most anything else in contemporary America. There’s too few things in American culture that we sit through twice. Plot drives most of our movies and books.. not to mention sporting events. It’s always the roller coaster ride of narrative that carries us through a work.. and when we finish we climb aboard the next ride. And we like long rides. With a picture book the narrative is aimed at a child, and so it is structured and aims at a certain timelessness. The interest is carried along by the beauty of the art itself, and the art is so often gorgeous. These are books that are wonderful to come back to.
What would it mean to make adult books that function like a picture book? The product itself would be a pleasure to hold and feel. The words would not strive for maximum tension on first read, but rather aim for some kind of wisdom. The images would command interest by their beauty. It would be a book that grown ups could re-read for pleasure.. coming back to as often as a storybook for a child. They would differ from picture books for children in their willingness to meditate on life’s contradictions and uncertainties. They would be a constant reminder of our humanity and that of others beyond our own cultural sphere. That’s the kind of book I would love to buy and sit with before I turn in to bed..
MS
The Fatimid Caliph al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah ruled from his beautiful palace in Cairo from 996-1021 A.D. Fatimid caliphs were not just counter caliphs to the Abbasids (a political claim). They understood themselves to be heirs of the spiritual leadership passed from Muhammad to ‘Ali. For the Isma’ili branch of Shi’i Islam, of which the Fatimid dynasty was the an expression, al-Hakim was absolute ruler and inspired spiritual authority. The empire ruled by al-Hakim ranged from Morocco across North Africa, including all of Egypt, and then stretched to the Hijaz in Arabia and the eastern Mediterranean coast that now includes Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon. We should even throw in the island of Sicily.
The biography by Paul E. Walker is easily the most complete and thoughtful account of the life of al-Hakim.. and it needs just such a treatment because his life was anything but ordinary and expected. In fact, you just don’t get much more eccentric than al-Hakim.. or perhaps crazy. He left a wonderful image of his eccentricity embedded in the cityscape of Cairo. The photo at the start of this post is of one of the two minarets standing at corners of the mosque that bears his name. The minarets are lovely, but at some point al-Hakim ordered that they be covered up with a square battlement. The minarets can be examined underneath their coverings, but it remains a mystery why he ordered these two minarets walled up.
Walker follows the chronicle of al-Maqrizi through the years of his reign, and this account by by al-Maqrizi pushes to the front the various rules implemented by al-Hakim: he banned several popular foods from being consumed, banned the consumption of alcoholic drinks, put in place tight restrictions on the public movement of women (banming the sale of women’s footwear!), inaugurated a program of tearing down churches and synogogues (including destruction of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem), and was flippant in his use of capital punishment against those who disappointed him. Matching these rules are the seemingly random repeals of his rules. One year he’s instituting the cursing of the successors to Muhammad (revered by Sunnis).. and the next year he’s punishing anyone who carries out this cursing. One year churches are being torn down, the next he’s giving permission to build them. Walker’s decision early in the biography to present the chronicle with its year by year changes lets us see just how contradictory and mercurial al-Hakim can appear.
This chronicle of his eccentric deeds is the essential foil for this biography. Much of our information about al-Hakim comes from this chronicle by 15th century historian al-Maqrizi, who in turn preserved sections from an earlier source compiled by al-Musabbihi (which reached 26,000 pages!). This vast source is now mostly lost, but thanks to al-Maqrizi and his industrious itemizing of the events into a chronological flow, we have a decent portrait of the events in the reign of al-Hakim. It becomes evident, however, that the chonological arrangement of the material does no favors to al-Hakim. A bald list of his actions, one after another, is bound to make him look crazy. There is nothing like “thick description” in the list of the chronicle, and if ever anyone was in need to that, it is al-Hakim. Walker’s work as a biographer is to try to understand what might be driving these by turns contradictory and senseless actions. Is there an ordering logic behind them? There’s enough evidence of rationality in al-Hakim (his lifelong support of the sciences and learning) and from his personal popularity among the people (renowned to be generous) that it’s not out of the question that he was pursuing a deeper game than appears at first read.
From the beginning there was a group of apologists for al-Hakim, both committed Isma’ilis and another group that became the Druze. These voices are lost in the chronicle format, and in the hostility to the Fatimids that is present throughout later historical works. Yet for these believers, the actions of al-Hakim evidently made some sense.. or at least pointed to something important. The value of this biography is that Walker makes vivid this spiritual interpretation of al-Hakim’s actions. The idea is to ask, “how can we understand these actions not as the works of a crazy ruler, but as the actions of someone motivated by an idealistic vision of his own role in history and the spiritual world.” This is exactly what we might hope for from Walker, who has written extensively on the philosophical of various Isma’ili thinkers.
By the end of the biography al-Hakim hasn’t been vindicated, but we understand how he was a magnetic ruler. The very eccentricity of his actions cemented for some a belief in his representation of the divine. Walker reviews an argument about the imamate by the Isma’ili writer al-Naysaburi:
Therefore to judge him and his actions by the standard of other human beings, even the most exalted among them, is bound, he says, to lead to confusion. One possible reaction would be to reject his authority. But those who see what he does in a true light will understand, he continues, that al-Hakim’s commands and prohibitions, his giving and his taking away, ought to be compared with the acts of God. He is thus not human in any ordinary sense. [180]
This makes a certain level of sense if we think about the acts of God in the natural world, which on their face are inscrutable and violent. Al-Hakim, it’s argued, deserves some of the same latitude for mysterious action as God. That’s clearly a rationalized response to the actions of al-Hakim. Yet his inscrutable actions were so effective that some became convinced of the literal divinity of al-Hakim. More orthodox Isma’ilis denied this talk of divinity, but their exalted view of the office of Imam made them susceptible to similar views about al-Hakim’s perfect representation of the divine will. Walker does marvels with finding in Fatimid theological discussions of the Imamate intimations of the lively questions that abounded during the reign of al-Hakim. (I’m curious whether there’s evidence from other historic regimes with a strong ideology of the ruler that eccentric actions actually confirm his reputation.)
The Fatimids deserve more attention, if for no other reason than that they present a lively example as to how the development of Islam could have gone in any number of different directions. The foundation of Cairo in 969 A.D. by the Fatimids, and their construction of a grand palace compound there, points to a cityscape oriented around a living religious authority.. closer to the Vatican City than the more fragmented city of Cairo under the Mamluks. When the Isma’ili pilgrim Nasir-i Khusraw visits Cairo in the course of the 11th century, he enters a sacred city. He looks up at the lofty palace of the Fatimid Caliph and remarks that it stands like a mountain. Al-Hakim is perhaps the grandest representation of the spiritual authority vested in the Imam by the Isma’ilis. His mysterious disappearance.. and the belief that perhaps he just dropped everything and walked away from his rule.. points to a remarkable personal presence. Ultimately he is a figure who we might say is not so much crazy, as someone who has truly drunk the Kool-Aid of a religious ideology.
