Silencing the Sea follows Palestinian poets' debates about their craft as they traverse multiple and competing realities of secularism and religion, expulsion and occupation, art, politics, immortality, death, fame, and obscurity. Khaled Furani takes his reader down ancient roads and across military checkpoints to join the poets' worlds and engage with the rhythms of their lifelong journeys in Islamic and Arabic history, language, and verse. This excursion offers newfound understandings of how today's secular age goes far beyond doctrine, to inhabit our very senses, imbuing all that we see, hear, feel, and say.
Poetry, the traditional repository of Arab history, has become the preeminent medium of Palestinian memory in exile. In probing poets' writings, this work investigates how struggles over poetic form can host larger struggles over authority, knowledge, language, and freedom. It reveals a very intimate and venerated world, entwining art, intellect, and politics, narrating previously untold stories of a highly stereotyped people.
Silencing the Sea follows Palestinian poets' debates about their craft as they traverse multiple and competing realities of secularism and religion, expulsion and occupation, art, politics, immortality, death, fame, and obscurity. Khaled Furani takes his reader down ancient roads and across military checkpoints to join the poets' worlds and engage with the rhythms of their lifelong journeys in Islamic and Arabic history, language, and verse. This excursion offers newfound understandings of how today's secular age goes far beyond doctrine, to inhabit our very senses, imbuing all that we see, hear, feel, and say.
Poetry, the traditional repository of Arab history, has become the preeminent medium of Palestinian memory in exile. In probing poets' writings, this work investigates how struggles over poetic form can host larger struggles over authority, knowledge, language, and freedom. It reveals a very intimate and venerated world, entwining art, intellect, and politics, narrating previously untold stories of a highly stereotyped people.
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Silencing the Sea follows Palestinian poets' debates about their craft as they traverse multiple and competing realities of secularism and religion, expulsion and occupation, art, politics, immortality, death, fame, and obscurity. Khaled Furani takes his reader down ancient roads and across military checkpoints to join the poets' worlds and engage with the rhythms of their lifelong journeys in Islamic and Arabic history, language, and verse. This excursion offers newfound understandings of how today's secular age goes far beyond doctrine, to inhabit our very senses, imbuing all that we see, hear, feel, and say.
Poetry, the traditional repository of Arab history, has become the preeminent medium of Palestinian memory in exile. In probing poets' writings, this work investigates how struggles over poetic form can host larger struggles over authority, knowledge, language, and freedom. It reveals a very intimate and venerated world, entwining art, intellect, and politics, narrating previously untold stories of a highly stereotyped people.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780804782609 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Stanford University Press |
| Publication date: | 08/15/2012 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 312 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
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Read an Excerpt
SILENCING THE SEA
SECULAR RHYTHMS IN PALESTINIAN POETRYBy KHALED FURANI
STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2012 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior UniversityAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-7646-2
Chapter One
SECULAR BEWILDERMENT
ETHNOGRAPHIC FIELDWORK among poets shaped my interest in secularism. Poets themselves, to be sure, did not repeatedly invoke it, yet secularism was profoundly assumed in the ways they sought to modernize their tradition and make it relevant to their world. The modernizing poets' narratives—their "embedded philosophies"—collected through ethnographic field interviews most immediately resonate with secularism as a political doctrine of separation when the poets express its typical demand for expunging religion from politics. However, the secular as a dominant presence, as a hegemonic mode of knowing and living "the real" of the modern world, also reverberates in what poets say they wanted to do in their poems. It lives among modernizing poets in what Taylor (2007, p. 4) calls "the whole background understanding and feel of the world." Poets assume the secular, a power for distancing themselves from a world they call "religious," when they speak of what is "natural," "obvious," "necessary," and even "inevitable" for modernizing their techniques and conceptions of poetic work. I, in turn, approach the secular as a force that goes far beyond the nonreligious and constitutes particular formations of being and knowing in the modern world. Through poets' narratives, I show how the secular has been vital as well as complex in its working within a modern poetic transformation.
It is exactly in poets assuming the secular that I realized its power during my fieldwork. I have come to consider its "silence" as a paradoxical sign of its dominant presence in the modern world. Its power does not simply lie in its ability to be evoked by poets, to appear as vestments they wear or in pronouncements they make about a literary agency opposing religious authority or tradition in the public realm, although it is there as well. Most profoundly, the secular's ability to operate viscerally and silently as axiomatic and natural, even with regard to sounds poets may or may not versify, attests to the magnitude of its power. It was natural and self-evident for certain poets in this study to posit poetry as distinct from religion, writing as more powerful than reciting, and historical time as sovereign over all others (e.g., a time of eternity). Their narratives make manifest the secularity of such separations and their implications for the secular's claims of self-sufficiency.
The moments when the secular commits itself to silence are no less significant than the moments during which it surfaces in speech. Such moments of silence occur frequently when secular poets write mythically. In fact, poets resort to religious scriptures and ancient myths of the Middle East in distinct ways that are not even possible for traditional poets. In his famous collection of poems, Songs of Mehyar the Damascene, discussed in the conclusion to this book, Adonis (1971, p. 98) confesses, "O Phoenix I prayed ... so madness would lead us." I found it bewildering that poets want to claim for history as opposed to, say, myth, or rationality as opposed to irrationality, an authoritative role in public life. But they prolifically use mythical signs, religious references, and seemingly illogical and nonrealistic constructions in their poetic compositions.
The turn from versified to prose rhythms of poetry; the attendant changes in conceptions of poetic tradition, public, and agency; and a distinct resort to religious signs in poetry constitute a complex of secular shifts, effects, and consequences. They are not secular because poets declare them as such nor only because poets embed them in declarations for a separation between poetry and religion, or politics and religion, or for keeping Islam (and religious authority generally) within a private sphere of personal belief about the supernatural. The secularity of these shifts resides in what poets do with words (and in what they want their words to do), which profoundly resonates with the modern and contingent career of the secular as an ontology and epistemology of distancing from what or whom it anoints as "the religious."
One of the curious things secular poets do with words is evoke the mythical. In transforming poetic concepts and practices, the secular in modern Arabic poetry has not simply banished the religious; it has also come to depend on it. Poets evoke and mostly presume the secular as they conceive boundaries of their tradition and yet resort to its other, the religious, in their rhythmical and figurative practices. Furthermore, while poets advocate a non-sacred language—and accordingly aspire to have ordinary, prosaic roles in society—t hey charge their acts of writing with extraordinarily redemptive capabilities. The act of writing redeems ("liberates") them from the prose and perishability of life. In and of itself, writing becomes an act of salvation to which secular poets aspire in the face of oblivion.
Such aspects of this apparent secular quandary may not be peculiar only to modern poets. Reasons exist to believe it is a quandary of the secular itself. It remains the task of elaboration beyond the scope of this book to show exactly when and where this secular quandary manifests itself in other scientific, intellectual, economic, or political pursuits that owe their legitimacy to the secular. My account modestly aims to point to the possibility that something like this quandary could exist elsewhere and to advocate for the pursuit of other studies on this question. If modernizing poets' quandary is in essence secular, it follows that one would expect other versions of it to appear in other places where the secular, morphed into a modern power, inscribes itself. Here my argument in the form of a narrative points only to the need for a sequel on its quandaries.
My understanding of the secular that enables this argument is different from the all too common view that secularism is that which is outside religion, or even inimical to it. It is also common to think of secularization as a sacredness-s tripping force. I part from these understandings and instead largely work with Talal Asad's (2003) concept of the secular as a modern form of power. According to this concept, the secular is not to be reduced either to a political doctrine that requires the separation of religion and politics (secularism) or to a sociological thesis and a particular historical process (secularization), which has been crucial for creating the self-image of the modern era (rational, intellectual, worldly, disenchanted, and scientific; Casanova, 1994). Rather, the secular lives in the grammar of our modern being and forms, not only beliefs (theistic or otherwise), but also in conditions in which—and this is a crucial point for my argument—experiences of the oneness of human action splinters into autonomous realms.
This useful distinction marks "the secular" as constituting "the real" and is therefore irreducible to a thesis, theory, doctrine, or perspective. It departs from a partisan preoccupation, however variegated, of secularization and secularism with religion in modern society and permits an investigation of poets' modern secularity as something beyond accommodating religiosity to modern forms of life. As an epistemic-ontological category, the secular opens inquiry into how secular poets articulate as natural their particular need for founding the realm of poetry as an autonomous archipelago.
Drawing upon Asad's notion, one can examine the secular as a formative power that generates distinct ways of living and thinking in the modern world, without normatively investing this power with the enduring salvational purposes of Christianity (as in Taylor, 2007). Insofar as it inhabits the senses, concepts, and practices that make up the real in the modern condition, the secular constitutes a presence that requires creation of an absence it names "the religious." In other words, I take as a distinct power of the secular its ability to operate as external to what it defines and even redefines as "the religious." Inasmuch as the modern power of the secular demands through this redefinition the absence of the religious, it acquires its self-recognition through denial and dependency. And so the seemingly sovereign language of the secular and the forms of life it enables must thereby appropriate, substitute, and compensate for the religious.
Typically this differentiating aspect of the secular is studied in theaters of nation-states and their management of religious life. The literariness of the secular remains generally a marginal preoccupation in the field of secularism studies. The question that dominates literary debates is the adequacy of identifying literature, romanticism, or criticism as secular. In this study I move away from a concern with the adequacy (or lack thereof) of the secular/ religious as an identity. Instead, I regard the secular to have evolved in modernity as a truth-subject forming power. Rather than asking whether or not Arabic poetry is genuinely secular, I examine a modern and particular career of the secular in its ability to generate as well as undermine subjectivities and truths within conditions of its modern power. My ethnographic investigation specifically focuses on the complex and contradictory consequences of secular poets seeking to redefine the boundaries of their practice and their purposes and forge new tools and relations to the public. The secular is made manifest in poets' articulations of the aims of their poetic practice, in their attitudes toward the public, in their selections of tropes, and indeed in their composition of rhythms.
I thus pursue Asad's initial and generic formulation of the secular by examining the particular practices and concepts surrounding the techniques with which poets handle sounds in their compositions. Linked to the insight that "a hugely influential variety of secularism is institutionalized under the guise of the literary" (Jager, 2010, p. 184), and without any assumptions about the inherent secularity of literature, this study inquires into the ways the literary (specifically poetry) has evolved as a playing field of the secular.
There is more to the secular than its being a powerful modern formation. Such a view imbues it with a lack of substance throughout its history and permits it no fixed historic identity (Asad, 2003, p. 25; Blumenberg, 1985, pp. 9–10). To limit the secular to the status of an authoritative presence in the world that is external to religious authority is largely to work with its Christian and particularly post-Reformation career, especially after it "crossed over" (Blumenberg, 1985, pp. 5–6) from theology and culminated in claims of self-sufficiency in the modern era. That's when the secular began to be equated with the immanence of the world and to be understood as all there is, denying as illusory the realness of that other world it demeaned as religious and transcendent (Taylor, 2009, pp. 1144–46).
The particularly modern apparition of the secular as a form of power and as external to religion can stand for all its historic apparitions in the world only if its semantic malleability is forgotten and only when its referential ability is sealed. Reviewing a number of rings encircling the semantics of the secular spanning over two millennia can help to forestall consigning the referential abilities of the concept's semantics to its Latin Christian history, and particularly to its history of domination following the Protestant Reformations, or rather following 1492, after which European "man," in the words of Arendt ([1958] 1998, p. 250) or the murmurs of Heidegger, moved toward taking "full possession of his mortal dwellings."
In its Roman beginnings, long before it arose in the service of domination (including domineering forms of "tolerance") in the modern era of nation-states, the secular once marked finitude. In pre-Christian Latin, it announced the transience of time, persons, peoples, and places, as in its first appearance in the Latin saeculum, meaning a period of time, generation, era, or century. For example, cities and civilizations were allotted different saecula, that is, durations. The secular continued to signal finitude in early Christianity through its new locution, seculere, meaning "the world." Yet seculere and the related saeculum negated "time of eternity" or Christ's return, as, for example, when Augustine used seculere in contrast to eschaton (end of days) but not in contrast to religion. The German descendants of Latin have the word irdischen to remind them of this inheritance from an antiquity and especially from the early Christianization of Latin wherein the secular means the worldly and earthly.
Later, in monastic Christianity and its Canon Law, saecularatio became the name of a legal process through which persons and property leave, not irreversibly, the cloister and reside among the laity. In the next semantic ring the secular entered its modern course, following Europe's expansion into the world, the Protestant Reformations, and the Peace of Westphalia. It began to name (through its derivative "secularization") a historic process entailing a massive seizure of church authority and property. This prominent meaning is evoked in Marx's (1843–44) "Critique of Hegel's 'Philosophy of Right' ": "But just as emancipation is not limited to the princes, so the secularization of property will not be limited to the confiscation of church property, which was practiced by hypocritical Prussia" (quoted in Blumenberg, 1985, p. 21). An additional semantic ring encircled the secular when George J. Holyoake, as part of the Freethought Movement, fashionable in Europe, founded the Secular Society and in 1851 coined the term secularism. In so doing, Holyoake wanted to preempt charges of atheism while advocating to replace Christianity with systems of science and reason that absented reference to supernatural and transcendent authority (Asad, 2003, p. 18).
This Freethought Movement cannot be properly understood outside the Enlightenment critique of religion, which attracted both the mundane and the maverick among Europe's intellectuals in search of an "exit from self-incurred immaturity." Among these searchers was Max Weber, who imbued the secular's semantic trunk with another meaning when he developed his theory about the differentiation of societal spheres. In that theory, Weber articulated his thesis of secularization by predicting the decline of religion. In describing and prescribing secularization, this thesis takes intellectualization and rationalization to function almost as synonyms of secularization, so that a particular mode of worldliness came to stand for all modes of worldliness. This particular immanence of the secular—its appearance in the world as a theory of secularization—maintained a paradigmatic presence in the rationality of the academic intellect in the West until its certitudes began to falter, especially in needing to account for religion's refusal to vanish, as religious politics has been revived since the late 1960s on a global scale.
This faltering of foundational secular certitudes, chief among them the secular's claims for self-sufficiency, in a basic way animates my account of the secularizing of poetic forms, compelling me to think through rather than simply denounce or embrace the secular. The secular inhabits the way poets write, what they write, and for whom they write (including both their disposition toward and perceptions of the public). Their being secular does not simply mean that they have chosen not to grow beards and wear headscarves in the Middle Eastern lexicon of religious and secular signs.
Rather, the secular in this story is largely and contingently a dominant fragmentary formation in ways of knowing and being in the modern era. It is a kind of presence in the world that quintessentially compartmentalizes, a worldliness that operates in the modern era in contrast to the otherworldly and presumes to stand for all modes of worldliness and exhaust all ways of residing in the world. As a dominant force of compartmentalizing, the secular thereby involves separating more than religion from politics. It also involves separating the poetic from the nonpoetic as a rubric in which poets also rearrange and redefine their sense of the world's realities and nonrealities.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from SILENCING THE SEA by KHALED FURANI Copyright © 2012 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ix
A Note on Transliteration xi
Introduction 1
Initiations
1 Secular Bewilderment 13
2 Rhythms and Rulers 21
3 The Land of the Poem 39
The Song
4 Memory for Beginnings 53
5 Metrical Discipline and Mastery 67
6 Poets for "the People" 91
The Picture
7 Enough "Screaming" 111
8 Rhythmical Freedom 120
9 Modern Poets and "Conservative" People 154
The Dream
10 Redeeming Prose 175
11 When Meter Melts 199
12 The Laity Outside Poetry's Temple 216
Conclusions: Secular Prayers 237
Notes 251
Bibliography 277
Index 285