Robert Irwin (1)Reseñas

Biography of one of the greatest Arab intellectuals. The life, times, and ideas of a leading intellectual historian that supplies an interesting contribution to Middle Eastern history.

On Palm Sunday, 1461, the Wars of the Roses descend on Towton, where a bloody, decisive battle literally crowns the Yorkist rebellion against Lancastrian King Henry VI. Anthony Woodville, Lord Scales, numbers among the Lancastrian dead, or so it seems.

Yet he revives, having dreamed during his resurrection the most impossible events, including a ceremony involving the Holy Grail. Almost as miraculously, the new monarch presumptive, Edward, accepts his oath of loyalty.

Anthony is neither the first nor the last great noble to change allegiances during the Wars of the Roses, but suspicion naturally clings to him. His rise — in all senses of the word — attracts enemies whose smiles must not be taken on trust. That’s true even, if not especially, after his sister, Elizabeth, marries Edward and becomes queen. The king’s brother-in-law stands to gain great wealth, power, and fame, which provokes jealousy among rivals and also means he is constantly at the crown’s beck and call.

Wonders Will Never Cease conveys the terror and chaos of England plagued by civil strife, yet this is no standard, ordinary historical tale, even though events follow the facts, and every character actually existed. If you’re looking for, say, The Kingmaker (Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick), he’s here, and so are Richard, Duke of Gloucester, and a host of others familiar from song and story.

Rather, it’s how Irwin presents these people and their actions that seems original. As an astute reviewer for the Guardian noted, the narrative reads like a Terry Pratchett fantasy, and a marvelously rich one it is. At times very funny but also deadly serious, the novel explores the uses and misuses of storytelling; whether heroes deserve admiration; and how inflated reputations entrap living legends.

In other words, Irwin’s writing about spin, and what’s left when you delve through it to the truth underneath. Do you find a hero, or a man on the make who’s too quick to avenge a slight or enrich himself? In the process, some famous figures take a drubbing. Sir Thomas Malory, author of Le Morte d’Arthur, attaches himself to Anthony, who, after listening to the legends, frankly wonders whether these Knights of the Round Table were such paragons after all.

But the most elaborate fun arrives through George Ripley, the king’s alchemist, who delights in making myths of real men. When Anthony first meets Ripley, he’s skeptical of having any use for a dabbler in metals, a prejudice that Ripley vigorously contests.

What results, however, has far-reaching consequences. Ripley embellishes Anthony’s history to include battles with imaginary demons and ascribes acts of chastity and piety that even the son of a fifteenth-century English earl would hesitate to claim.

Ripley knows that not everyone will believe everything, but that everybody will believe something, which makes him a sort of Abraham Lincoln before his time. And lest you think, as I did, that Ripley is too coincidental a name for a fabricator par excellence, let me repeat: He’s a historical figure.

But he probably didn’t spin tales like these, and I doubt very much whether he actually devised a Talking Head to tell the future. I love that touch, which sounds like a satire on today’s pundits, the only difference being that Edward IV’s version is always right. You can spin what you like, but you can’t outrun your fate.

To enjoy Wonders Will Never Cease, you have to like long interruptions to the forward narrative in which the characters tell stories and comment on them. But these tales have a purpose beyond the telling. They lead Anthony, who starts out as less than the deepest thinker, to consider the purpose of his life and what his fame actually means. And if we, the readers, ponder these issues too, I think Irwin has accomplished his purpose.

Good little book on the history, art, and culture of camels. Worthwhile. I need to look at other animals in this series.

I did not understand why this book is so highly regarded. I enjoy fantasy books. They take you into unexpected worlds and can delight you if managed well.
This book did not. It takes the hero, Balian, into waking and dream worlds and you are never sure which aspect of the tale takes place in his dreams, and which does not.
Does the book conclude in the temporal world, or does it end in the dreamworld?
Is it an allegory on perceptions and dreams? Or just a romp on the wild side of fantasy?
I don't know. Many people seem to have enjoyed it, so give it a go.

In 1967 a sociology student and acidhead gets involved with a satanic cult. Very much a love letter to the 60's and 60's occultism. If names like Crowley, Wheatley or films like Rosemary's Baby, don't mean anything to you, your probably not going to get the most out of this. Actually maybe some Kerouac, William S.Burroughs etc. wouldn't hurt either.
Some knowledge of 60's music (which i don't have) would also help. This book should really come with a playlist.

The whole thing is done as diary entries which can be a bit limiting. Still, i thought it would be an easy 4 stars, however it starts to come apart around the 3/4 mark. People change personality too abruptly, there's a big information dump at one point and some 'Story of O' type stuff which didn't do anything for me.
However it manages to pull itself together and keep the 4th star, if only just.

I don't think the story takes itself too seriously either, which is a good choice, there's a twinkle in the eye which keeps it from being too, pretentious? for want of a better term.

At times funny, interesting, sexy, disturbing, creepy and vile, but rarely boring.

On the whole I think that I'm impressed with with this study, and if that sounds like damning with faint praise, it's that, at some points, this work felt a bit labored. In particular, I almost set this book aside before finishing the first chapter, wherein Irwin tries to reconstruct his subject's efforts to process the social collapse around him, and basically traps himself in his own 'City of Brass'; prolix is the word that comes to mind. However, things rapidly improve as the author gets into the meat of study, which is to situate Ibn Khaldun in his time and place as a Muslim man of letters, a courtier, a judge, and a devout believer in Orthodox Islam.

The question for Irwin, in the end, is why did so many Western thinkers feel the need to make over Ibn Khaldun as a proto-social scientist (I was introduced to this figure by Ernest Gellner), instead of recognizing that he was mostly an odd intellectual dead end. My thought there is that the late medieval Muslim world is not the most understandable reality for the typical Western intellectual and that Ibn Khaldun received mistaken understanding and acceptance as "one of us." An all-around fascinating story (once you get over the clunky beginning) of how incomprehension is no bar to cultural appropriation.

I knew nothing of Arabic literature before I read this book, and now I feel pretty good about how much I know. Inasmuch as it's more than nothing.

This isn't really an 'anthology' at all. Yes, it contains small snippets of texts, and a couple of longer pieces (from the 1001 Nights). But really it's a sampler, with a few paragraphs from dozens of works spanning 10 centuries. In between, we get Irwin's own history of Arabic literature, which is tremendously helpful. He has an eye for good anecdotes, and chooses his texts well too.

We start with the qasida, or, more precisely, mockery of the qasida, a poem that requires its author to pay tribute to ruins, his lady, and his horse or camel, "in many poems one feels that the excellence of the camel more than compensates for the lost lady love." Often a qasida ends with a thunderstorm. But the qasida he includes does have some wonderful lines; a poet makes his escape from danger thanks to a quick thinking woman--

Out I brought her, and as she stepped she trailed behind us
to cover our footprints the skirt of an embroidered gown.

Earlier he'd admired the virgins tossing about the "hacked flesh" of his camel, "and the frilly fat like fringes of twisted silk." This is not the western love poem tradition, and all the better for it.

There were many subcultures of poet. The Sa'alik poets were highwaymen; the futtak were *specialist killers* and poets. One rough sa'alik poet famously said that he loved the world for three things: "to eat flesh, to ride flesh, and to rub against flesh."

Then came the qur'an, for better or worse (just kidding: definitely better. I would not have made a good sa'alik), but the anecdotes continue. Ibn al-Rumi admitted to writing insincere panegyric, but defended himself thus: "God has reproached poets for saying what they do not do, but they are not guilty of this alone, for they say what princes do not do." Poets in the 7th and 8th centuries sat at the feet of 'authentic' arabic poets, who still rode camels and herded animals, finding obscure words like "bahlasa" which means "to arrive suddenly from another country without any luggage." Someone's leg is obviously being pulled here.

The ghazal separated from the qasida in this period, and I grew bored. Love poetry isn't the same without the flayed camel meat.

But the love of obscurity and rhymed prose continued into the tenth century. "Marcasite" is a stone which, if you see it, will make you laugh yourself to death. It can be found in China. But this was also an age of 'adab,' which is a kind of intellectual, literary chivalry or culture. One of its propagators was Jahiz, who sounds like a glorious fellow. He was crushed to death by falling books.

The development of culture continued with the zarif, a kind of connoisseur. Many of these men wrote cookbooks and poems about food; al-Mahdi "compared the turnip to the moon, the stars and to silver coins; the aubergine was another subject of poetic passion." Irwin also includes a poem about asparagus. Surprisingly contemporary! One court poet brought the eggplant to his Sultan, rhapsodizing about it at length. The Sultan tried it, and found it inedible, "whereupon the nadim launched into a lengthy diatribe about the awfulness of the aubergine. 'Just a moment ao you were praising the thing to the skies,' the Sultan expostulated. 'But, sire, I am your nadim, not htat of hte aubergine,' the assiduous courtier replied." Others wrote poems about visiting monasteries and drinking the wine.

Irwin describes the next period, 900-1175, as a great century for poetry and prose, which flourished under Persian influence. Tawhidi was particularly fascinating: "Tawhidi had a conservative temperament and he believed that novelties were for women and children only. He made a habit of consorting with criminals and other low-life types in an age when it was fashionable to study the techniques and argot of such folk." Yes, just like conservatives of *our* age, except way more fun. He wrote a book so "venomous... that there was supposed to be a curse on anyone owning it." But he was also very intelligent: "Nature consequently needs art because it attains its perfection through the rational soul by means of skilful art, which takes by dictation what it lacks, dictating what advenes to it, seeking perfection through what it receives, bestowing perfection to what it bestows." And a pessimist, who wrote about the fsad al-zaman, the rottenness of the age. Tawhidi was associated with the Banu Sasan, litterateurs on the borders of respectable life. Another of them, Hamadhani, wrote hilarious satire, and described his home city, Hamadan: "In ugliness its children are like its old men, and, in reason, its old men are like its children." I feel the same way about Los Angeles.

Many of these chaps wrote in rhyming prose, and one translator in this volume tried to replicate it. It's surprisingly fun: "I went from Irak to Damascus with its green watercourses, in the day when I had troops of fine-bred horses and was the owner of coveted wealth and resources..." They were also very sensitive, and many became vegetarians. Al-Marzuban wrote a book on "The superiority of Dogs over many who wear clothes," which topic really doesn't need a book, since it's so self-evident.

My favorite discovery here, though, is Ma'Ari, who "despised poets in general, for they wrote lies about things like deserted campsites, passionate love affairs, and heroic battle, whereas he was only really interested in telling everybody the truth about how awful life was." His poems are in a difficult form, and are marvellous:

And where the Prince commanded, now the shriek
Of wind is flying through the court of state:
'Here,' it proclaims, 'there dwelt a potentate
Who could not hear the sobbing of the weak.'

He wrote about the afterlife, reportedly believing that it existed only for animals, who "suffered so much in this life that there must be recompense for them elsewhere." Nonetheless, there are people in his report of the afterlife (which may have influenced Dante). Everyone sits around discussing philology and poetry, though hell is also full of poets and philologists. A good Jinn mocks human poetry, which we understand only as cattle understand astronomy, for we "have only fifteen kinds of metre... we have thousands that your litterateur never heard of." Irwin includes a non-arabic tidbit here: St Ephraem wrote that vine stocks in heaven mate with monks who stayed chaste on earth. In the Arabic tradition, "adventurous travelers were delighted to discover, sex grew on trees."

The section on Andalusia was a little less exciting, although the poet-king al-Mu'tadid apparently kept a collection of his enemy's skulls, which he would often look at and weep with compassion. Also, one of the few women in the collection, Wallada, was from Andalusia. One of its best known poets, Ibrahim Ibn Khafaia, used to "walk out of his village of Shuqr until he reached the solitude of a ravine. There he would stand and shout repeatedly at hte top of his voice 'Ibrahim, you will die!' until he fell unconscious.

The final chapter deals with literature from the Seljuk period. Here we find many of the best known Arabic texts: 1001 Nights, writings from the Crusades and so on. These pale, however, next to the book of Usamah, "a keen rhabdophilist," who wrote "The Book of the Stick." He included Moses and Solomon's sticks, as well as those of his friends and himself. This is not a euphemism.

Ibn Daniyal is famous for scurrilous plays, and they do actually sound scurrilous: one "recounts the attempts of a disreputable hunchbacked soldier called Wisal (the name means 'sexual congress') to find a bride. He is assisted by a dishonest marriage-broker... he ends up with a hideous bride, who wants to beat her husband and who farts a lot; but she dies, in time for Wisal to repent his dissolute ways."

And finally, in "The Delectable War between Mutton and the Refreshments of the Market Place," King Mutton puts down a revolt by the poor people's foods, Honey and so on. Sugar, syrup and rendered fat betray Honey to side with Mutton.

Love live Honey.

Irwin considers the intellectual and political milieu that shaped the work of the 14th c. Arab scholar Abū Zayd 'Abd ar-Raḥmān ibn Muḥammad ibn Khaldūn al-Ḥaḍramī, and discusses the variety of interpretations and meanings given to that work by European and Arab scholars into the present.

Khaldūn is best known for the Muqaddimah (“Prolegomenon”), the first section of his Kitāb al-ʻibar wa-dīwān al-mubtadaʼ wa’l-khabar ("The Book of Warnings and Collection of New Things and Historical Information"), which runs to 3,000 pages in the standard Arabic edition. According to Irwin, Khaldūn had only a meager influence on his contemporaries and immediate successors, and his work was all but forgotten in the Arab world. Leo Africanus, after converting to Christianity and relocating to Italy, tried but failed to introduce Khaldūn to the West; Khaldūn's earliest serious admirers were found among the Ottoman Turks in the 17th and 18th centuries. The Muqaddimah was discovered and publicized in the West at the beginning of the 19th c. (with Khaldūn regarded as ‘an Arab Montesquieu’), and appeared in a French edition in 1858—soon to be ‘looted’ by French colonialists for ethnographic information on the Arabs and Berbers of North Africa. 20th c. Arab scholars and commentators eventually recovered Khaldūn through the works of Europeans.

Irwin’s chapter on “The Strange Afterlife of the Muqaddimah” is a fascinating review of the wildly diverse interpretations given to Khaldūn’s work. The Europeans were mostly unequipped to receive and comment upon Khaldūn’s work before the 19th c., suggests Irwin, and even then (and ever since) they tended to create Khaldūn in their own image. The medieval Arab scholar was/is seen as an historian, a philosopher, a sociologist, rationalist, positivist, materialist—a follower of Aristotle, a precursor to Machiavelli, Vico, Hegel, Smith, Darwin, Spengler, Marx, Herder, Comte or Durkheim, inspiration for Engels, Strauss, Toynbee, on and on. In general, says Irwin, accounts of Khaldūn’s life and work have misrepresented him as a more systematic, more secular, more rational thinker than he really was.

Khaldūn lived most of his life in North Africa, as a teacher, scholar and occasional jurist, reliant upon the patronage of a shifting jumble of sultans, viziers, caliphs, emirs, kings and sheikhs. Rulers surrounded themselves with distinguished scholars as a form of conspicuous royal display; in an atmosphere of constant political turbulence, scholars contesting for political appointments were subject to betrayal, exile, imprisonment and murder. Irwin suggests that Khaldūn the Arab celebrated the ancestry and achievements of Berbers as a way of securing greater scholarly recognition and with it a political promotion (and protection). He won acclaim as an historian, but the Muqaddimah also includes discussions of secretarial skills, dreams, mystical experiences, the occult, and the principles of pedagogy—subjects useful as self-promotion in a superstitious world, if not strictly relevant to the understanding of historical processes. Khaldūn, like other Arab historians, had no belief in the progress of humanity; he was aware that the golden age of Arab civilization was in the past, and he regarded the ruins all around him as symbols of the inevitable desolation that follows from mankind’s moral failings. Irwin doubts that Khaldūn intended his theories to be universally applicable. The historical themes presented by Khaldūn—the vitality of nomads and his enthusiasm for tribal ‘asabiyya, the degeneracy resulting from affluent urban life, the cycle of creation and destruction—were inspired by the mythology of the austere ascetic warriors who founded Islam. Khaldūn’s methodology was not a newly invented sociology but rather a kind of moralizing, says Irwin: the course of history is what it is because mankind—by the sin of pride, the sin of luxury, the sin of greed—has not followed Shari’a.

According to Irwin, piety and the need to deliver religious warnings were the primary motivation behind what Khaldūn wrote. Khaldūn’s readiness to analyze, theorize and derive generalizations based on the evidence gives his writing the appearance of modernity, but he had little praise for anything except conformity to the religious law. He had greater affinity with the anti-philosophic arguments of al-Ghazali than with the philosophers al-Farabi and Ibn Rushd. Khaldūn wrote that reason and philosophical speculation are useless when contemplating the Oneness of God, the world of the unseen, the nature of prophecy, divine attributes, or other similarly holy matters. He defined theology (kalam) as the science ‘that involves arguing with logical proofs in defense of the articles of faith and refuting innovators who deviate in their dogmas from the early Muslims and Muslim orthodoxy.’ Khaldūn was an Ash’arite (things only appear to have continuous existences over time because at every instant God wills their continued existence) and belonged to the Maliki school of Islamic jurisprudence, which takes into account istislah (regard for the public interest) when interpreting Shari’a, and which Khaldūn thought was closest to the simplicity of the (idealized) Arabian desert dwellers. Evidence also indicates that Khaldūn was a Sufi, which he described in chapter six of the Muqaddimah as an approach ‘based upon constant application to divine worship, complete devotion to God, aversion to the false splendor of the world, abstinence from the pleasure and property to which the great mass aspire, and retirement from the world into solitude for divine worship.’ Irwin writes that Khaldūn presented the mystical lessons of Sufism in the manner of a religious lawyer, rejecting the monism and emanationism he encountered among heterodox mystics and charlatans in Egypt.

The best bits here are Irwin’s discussion of the irrational elements that crop up in Khaldūn’s work. Khaldūn credulously repeats without comment the Qur’anic report that ‘Ad, the ancient Arab ancestor whose people came after the deluge, had lived for 1200 years and fathered 5000 children. In the course of discounting alchemy and the possibility of transforming base metal into gold, Khaldūn nevertheless conceded that the spontaneous generation of scorpions, bees and snakes did occur. He accepted the reality of the monstrous races of Gog and Magog. He said that he had heard that Egyptians had actually succeeded in teaching donkeys and other quadrupeds to speak. He believed that eating too much food caused excessive moisture to circulate in the body, which creates ‘putrid humors, pallor, ugliness and stupidity.’ Khaldūn inhabited a world that took for granted the reality of the supernatural: djinns, sorcerers, “rippers” who could tear apart the stomach of an animal or a garment just by pointing at it, talismans, magic letters, the divinatory power of dreams. (Khaldūn was careful to distinguish the occult sciences from the pseudo-sciences of astrology and alchemy). He believed in the stories told about the two most famous pre-Islamic soothsayers, one of whom ‘used to fold up like a garment, as he had no bones except for his skull;’ when inspired to prophecy he would inflate himself and thus be able to stand. The Muqaddimah also features geomancy, catoptromancy (divination from reflections) and ornithomancy (the drawing of auguries from the chance sighting of animals).

Irwin reminds us that Khaldūn’s world had more in common with that of the Qur’an and The Thousand and One Nights than it does with modern historiography or sociology. Though he thought deeply about big questions and tried to approach them logically, this did not make Khaldūn a philosopher. According to Irwin, much of what makes the Muqaddimah so fascinating is that its author, starting from medieval premises and working on medieval data, went on to create a powerful theoretical model to explain how things worked in the world he lived in. To modernize Khaldūn and to disregard the strangeness of his thinking is to ‘denature’ him. It is precisely Khaldūn’s irrelevance to the modern world that makes him so interesting and important. We do well to remember that there have been other ways of looking at the world than the one we mostly take for granted today. The works of Khaldūn allow us to dive deep into the strange, and resurface with fresh eyes.

The hero and guiding force of this epic fantasy is an insomniac young man who, unable to sleep, guides the reader through the narrow streets of Cairo-a mysterious city full of deceit and trickery. He narrates a complex tangle of dreams and imaginings that describe an atmosphere constantly shifting between sumptuously learned orientalism, erotic adventure, and dry humor. The result is a thought-provoking puzzle box of sex, philosophy, and theology.

Bizarre

Not a translation of the Arabian Nights, but a discussion of their history and their influence. Author Robert Irwin notes that there is no definitive version of the Thousand Nights and a Night (which is more or less how they were known in the Arabic-speaking world). Traces go back to the ninth century, but stories continued to be added until the nineteenth. Irwin notes the Arab intellectual world doesn’t think much of the Nights, which are seen as naïve and vulgar; it can be argued that they are more part of the European literary tradition than the Arabic – especially since some of the most famous stories (for example, Aladdin and Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves) seem to have been invented by European translators in the 1600s and don’t exist in original Arabic versions. (There are two Arabic manuscripts of Aladdin, one from Oxford and one from Baghdad, but both turn out to be reverse translations from French versions).


The most famous version is Richard Burton’s; Irwin notes that a lot of the Burton “translation” is more of a Burton “invention”; for example, in the original Arabic, King Shahriyar embarks on his virgin-a-night project after finding his wife with “a black slave”; in Burton’s translation she’s with “a big slobbering blackamoor with rolling eyes which showed the whites, a truly hideous sight”. Burton also exaggerates much of the obscenity and vulgarity in the stories – to be fair, though, the originals are definitely not Disney material. However, Jorge Luis Borges preferred Burton’s version to more authentic translations, arguing that “neutral” versions were no contribution to literature.


The Nights probably influenced many European writers – even, paradoxically, some who never actually read any of it but just heard about the stories. Irwin notes some were influenced by the storytelling technique – for example, the Heptameron and Decameron – while others picked up on the exotic settings – Vathek and The Saragossa Manuscript. Certainly many expressions and ideas from the stories have made their way into popular Western culture; how many times have we heard that “the genie is out of the bottle” with regard to some technological advance of controversial import?

This is an erudite but readable and fascinating book. I have an abridged copy of Burton’s version (the full one is sixteen volumes); I’ll have to read it in the light of some of Irwin’s insights.½

The story is unconventional but interesting. The narrator, Caspar, is a painter in the Surrealist movement in London in the 1930's. He is part of a group of artists called the Serapion Brotherhood. One day, as an exercise in enhancing one sense by losing another, he is being led around London blindfolded by his friend Mackellar. In a pub Mackellar abandons him but leaves a note with a young woman asking her to help Caspar. This woman, Caroline, becomes the love of Caspar's life. However, they never become lovers even though they travel together to London and share a bed. Caspar becomes convinced that he must mesmerize Caroline in order to get her to bed so he starts training himself in hypnotism techniques. Sadly, this drives Caroline further away and she almost never agrees to meet with him. In fact she talks to him about another man she has met. Finally she comes around to his studio and tells him she thinks she might be pregnant (obviously not by him). Caspar does not know how to react and she leaves. Caspar then goes to Germany for two months and returns with a plan to recapture Caroline even if it means accepting her other lover. However, Caroline has disappeared. In this pre-war period, Surrealism is faltering. The final blow to the movement is when the head of the Serapion Brotherhood kills himself. So Caspar has lost his love and most of his best friends. During the war Caspar works as a war artist and sees many horrifying things including the concentration camp at Belsen. His dreams and even his days are haunted by what he has seen. He believes that if he could just meet Caroline again his life would improve. I don't want to reveal the ending but, suffice it to say, it is surreal.

Robert Irwin's most recent novel Wonders Will Never Cease is in many ways a return to the form of his first The Arabian Nightmare. The setting is different: this one takes place in fifteenth-century England, and all of the principal characters are drawn from the history of the period. The elaborate narrative structure supports further stories within it, including Arthurian romance, Celtic myth, the Niebelung saga, prophecies, propaganda, dreams, and visions. As in The Arabian Nightmare, the boundaries between the imaginary and the "real" become very porous, and the reader is ultimately left with no defense against the fact that the contents of the book are all a story, but such a manifold and self-devouring story as to make one question the "reality" of the reader as well.

The narrative follows the adventures of Anthony Woodville, Lord Scales, who is slain in a battle at the beginning of the novel, but returned to life in a manner never fully explained. A nearly comparable amount of attention is devoted to the adventures of Woodville's fictional alter-egos, in the rumors about him manufactured by George Ripley (alchemist and spymaster to Edward IV), and in the legends and fairy-tales told by his mother, who is evidently no mean sorceress. Anthony himself learns a bit of magic from the scholar John Tiptoft. But this book is very far from the sort of modern fantasy re-visioning of the War of the Roses found in G.R.R. Martin's Game of Thrones books.

The idea of decapitation looms large in this book, although it has faded somewhat in public discourse over the last decade or so. I certainly took note early on when Irwin explained that it was customary for a medieval executioner to present the severed head first toward its former body, so that any trace awareness in the head could register its doom. As a reader of this intensely metafictional book, already-dead with Anthony Woodville, I felt more like a body regarding in fascination and horror the workings of my isolated head.

It’s infrequently I regret I read a book, but I think I do in this case. Because I’ve admired Robert Irwin: I hugely enjoyed his Penguin Anthology of Classical Arabic Literature, I read one of his novels (an Orientalist fantasy; it was fine) and a Mamluk history; he’s been deeply involved in Dedalus’s decadent collection. I admired his range and I liked his style.

But this one is a tirade. And as another reviewer says, he misses the point. He thinks Said says quite other things than what Said said. If you like scholarship as combat you might enjoy this bout. But he excuses himself that Said got personal first, and at least in Orientalism, Said didn’t. Irwin sees no virtue whatsoever in Said's book, which he regards as a polemic (it isn't. On the other hand...) In brief, defensive.

I can’t star this one, I’m afraid. It wouldn’t be pretty.

Zolang het lot van Orkhan nog een mysterie is, krijgt Irwin nog wat krediet. De hoofdstukken zijn kort, de bladspiegel is ruim. Ik weet dat ik in dat geval wel eens wat te voortvarend lees, en hier en daar een afslag mis. Maar met iedere sluier, iedere deur, ieder hoofdstuk wordt het mysterie minder en krijgt het verhaal minder ‘body’, tot het uiteindelijk uitmondt in een vrijblijvend theaterstukje waarin de personages, net zoals de acteurs in bovengenoemd filmpje, hopeloos ten onder gaan. Het is een tussendoortje, – dat met een paar duizend woorden meer verder had kunnen reiken½

A wonderfully irritable monograph, which is motivated primarily by Robert Irwin's annoyance over how other writers of poetry, fiction and guidebooks have treated the Alhambra: as a grand Romantic symbol, the pretext for a lot of ubi sunt wistfulness, and the setting of innumerable historical factoids whose veracity is questionable. Irwin brushes away ninety percent of Alhambra writers as

intellectually lazy, romantic hacks, who were so bound up by cliché and possessed by the picturesque that they were blind to the realities of the land they pretended to write about.

This is quite some put-down coming from the author of [book:Prayer-Cushions of the Flesh|1254880], which is pure Orientalist fantasy! The furthest Irwin will concede, when retailing some guidebook explanation of the site, is to say, ‘Well, it is possible, I suppose,’ or some variant thereof. Instead, he is at pains to stress our near-total lack of knowledge on almost every aspect of the place, from its function to its inhabitants.

We are dealing not so much with a body of knowledge as with a body of wild guesses.

The Alhambra was the seat of a Muslim dynasty called the Nasrids, who ruled the kingdom of Granada. Most of it, as it exists today, was built in the mid-to-late fourteenth century, i.e. about a century before the final sultan, known in the west as Boabdil, sighed his famous ‘Moor's last sigh’ and handed the place over to Ferdinand and Isabella.

By this stage, the Reconquista had already long since won back surrounding parts of Spain to Christianity. Muslim Granada had been a tenuous construct for centuries, beset on all sides by its enemies; the Alhambra was never some kind of luxurious European Baghdad. Pretty as it is, it was built on the cheap: instead of marble or even much stone, most of its effects are faked up from tilework and stucco (though to quite stupendous effect).

Beyond this, though, virtually nothing is known for sure. Most of the names with which the various parts of the Alhambra are now labelled are modern inventions, and the stories associated with them tend to be fanciful when they are not outright fictional. Studying the buildings for clues is made difficult by previous restoration work, a lot of which was rather destructive. One restorer added Persian domes to some of the buildings (since removed), while another, or perhaps it was the same one, understood no Arabic and rearranged the sculpted verses on some walls according to his own aesthetic ideals, so that it's now impossible to work out what they should have said.

My Arabic is not what it was (and it was rubbish), but I understand the script well enough, and it does add a layer of interest to have so much reading material available on every surface. The calligraphy – mostly in the style known as Kufic – is extremely beautiful, and when I was there the walls often held my interest more than the wider vistas of courtyards and pools, which were generally obstructed by shuffling tour groups clutching colour-coded umbrellas or huge blocky audioguides.

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The phrase above is found throughout the complex, interspersed with Koranic verses and poetry. It says wa laa ghalib ila Allah, or ‘There is no ghalib except Allah’ – though I had no idea until later what a ghalib was (it means ‘victor’, and the phrase was evidently the dynastic slogan of the Nasrids). Irwin is very good on the cultural disconnect symbolized by all this writing, which nowadays is pure ornamentation:

For the modern European or American visitor, the undeciphered squiggles of Arabic calligraphy add pleasing touches of decorative exoticism to the oriental palace. But in the Middle Ages the palaces were inhabited by people who could read the squiggles. Wherever they walked or sat they were instructed by inscriptions to fear God and cringe before the magnificence of their ruler.

Particularly valuable for me was the discussion of the mathematical principles behind the Alhambra's construction and decoration. Architecture and geometry were not, at the time, distinct disciplines, and Irwin examines research suggesting that ‘the grand design, as well as the detail of the court, was based on rectangles generated by square roots and surds’. In scientific as well as religious ways, the palace was ‘a machine for thinking in’.

Correctly viewed, the Alhambra, like many other Islamic monuments, is as much a masterpiece of mathematics as it is of art.

Though Irwin is sniffy about how the Alhambra has been culturally appropriated, it's a pretty fascinating story. In English it all began with Washington Irving's [book:Tales of the Alhambra|403733], while a parallel lineage in French literature goes back to Chateaubriand and to Victor Hugo's L'Alhambra ! L'Alhambra ! palais que les Génies / Ont doré comme un rêve etc. (though Irwin incorrectly gives the source of these lines as being ‘Les Djinns’; they're actually from another piece in Les Orientales called ‘Grenade’).

Visual artists have been equally inspired, mostly in the Orientalist mode which has since become unfashionable. But others took inspiration directly from the design. MC Escher, who visited twice, loved the tessellation effects but regretted the lack of figural elements; his own art would go on to combine the two strands in a fascinating way, and I'll find it impossible not to see his work in the light of the Alhambra now.

For most of these artists and writers, as for many tourists now, the Alhambra is more than its visual appeal. It's been and remains a kind of emblem of something that Europe has lost (wisdom, decadence, religious insight, high romance – it all depends on the eye of the beholder), and that is why it's been such a potent source of Gothic folklore, though this apparently makes things difficult for the historian. Irwin's tart and very readable overview is an excellent place to start getting to grips with it all, whatever your area of interest, and the notes on further reading should keep you busy for months. Take it along if you're visiting – odds are you'll want something to read in the queue.½

This is much more than a coffee table book. This book serves not only as a view of what the Hajj is, what it means to pilgrims, but also is a history of the holy city of Mecca, and what the inside of Islam looks like. The authros are certainly noteworthy and known scholars. Of special interest to me with my transportation interest is a look a the abandoned Hijaz Railway, which made it only as far as Medina, and much of it sits now in ruin. T.E. Lawrence is part of this story.½

Brilliant spoof medieval account of how an alien mind virus gets to Earth via the Moslem Embassy on the Moon. Neat twist as well!

5 Moon religion, ac, history

In Dangerous Knowledge Robert Irwin provides a very full history of an intellectual discipline: the study of Arabic and Islam in Western scholarship, which has customarily gone under the name of "Orientalism." In some measure, Irwin's book is a response and rebuttal to Edward Said's Orientalism, which indicts the entire Orientalist effort as having been an instrument of imperialist ambitions to degrade and dominate the Muslim East. Working largely through a host of thumbnail biographies of individual scholars, Irwin shows the motives and affections of the researchers to have been very diverse, and while geopolitical ambitions may have resulted in a (particularly 20th-century) relative surge of funding for Orientalist research, the researchers and the funders do not seem to have had any reliable overlap in sentiment. Amidst this diversity, Irwin observes the various chains of scholarly transmission, comparing them appropriately to the Sufi concept of silsila.

While Irwin (far from the first to do so) criticizes Said's Orientalism for lacking or contradicting the actual facts about Orientalist academics and their work, Dangerous Knowledge suffers in some respects from a complementary difficulty. It is decidedly more trees than forest, and by emphasizing the many and admittedly interestingly various individuals and details, it may leave the reader groping for a "big picture." The effect is somewhat paradoxical: Irwin is obviously opinionated, and clearly loyal to what he sees as the valuable elements of the Orientalist tradition, but the stress on objective, heterogeneous fact almost conveys a sense of dispassion. The prose style is accessible, and not encumbered with academicisms; anyone with an interest in the subject matter should find the book enjoyable and worthwhile.

Let’s concede at the outset that Robert Irwin’s account of his own life is nowhere near as compelling as is his slam-bang historical tour of Orientalist scholarship, For Lust of Knowing. Still, though this is by far the lesser book, it brings its own insights into the attraction of such studies for a Western scholar.

Irwin is admirably frank about his own privileged status that allowed him to study at Oxford, and draws those experiences with a certain clarity about his own state at the time: “In the sixties I was young, fit and lean, with everything before me… I was also lonely, unconfident, sex-starved and somewhat mad… When was life going to start? God knows why but, as I have already mentioned, I had an ambition. I wanted to become a saint.”

Though he is unable to identify a moment when that ambition first emerged, he provides a diverting account of his largely-unsuccessful road to that goal, spiked with amusing and insightful observations about sixties culture, e.g. “The affectation of poverty was an important strain in the hippy style”; “We were against war, sexual prudery, censorship, bourgeois values, but above all against parents.”

I was excited to come upon his account of being a student of John Wansbrough, whom he calls “one of the most remarkable men I have ever met.” His short sketch might be as much of a biography as we ever get of this pivotal figure in the history of Qur’anic scholarship. Irwin does leave me wanting more here—he confidently asserts that “though some thoroughly deconstructive ideas about the origins of Islam and the compilation of the Qur’an were put forward by Wansbrough and a few other scholars in the seventies, the best and latest evidence is that the Qur’an was written down quite soon after the Prophet’s death and written down, moreover, in a form very close to the one we now have.” The only such evidence that he cites are the famous Sana’a fragments, but he does not tell us exactly how they make this case—Wansbrough’s own reasoning was founded on our lack of a complete early manuscript. There is clearly a more complex argument to be made than can or should be presented in the context of a memoir, so I am left to suppose that this case is not as closed as Irwin makes it sound.

His experiences in the Sufi tariqa in Algeria are fascinating, as there are aspects of the mystical path that seem to come completely naturally to him, while others evade him. Toward the end of his memoir Irwin gives an account of his continuing Muslim faith, as well the aspects of Muslim belief that he cannot agree with (he finds “depressing” the “petty ritualism” and the “chilly legalism of the Muslim religious establishment”).

In Terry Eagleton’s review of For Lust of Knowing he says that “Irwin comes across as a genial, rather unworldly, upper-class English scholar, struggling to preserve his public-school values of fairness and decency in the face of what he sees as Said's barbarous slur on oriental studies.” While Irwin’s memoir doesn’t change this image that much, it does somewhat put the lie to the “unworldly” part—we come away realizing that, privilege notwithstanding (or rather partly as an advantage of that privilege), Irwin has seen more of the world than many do.

“Until I was well into my thirties I needed gurus,” Irwin concludes, without ever having quite figured out why. “It is no part of this memoir, but, in the long run, I felt the vast gravitational pull of the everyday, of work and of marriage. I fell to earth.” Indeed, and if this account of a misfiring attempt to reach sainthood never truly soars, it still has much to offer.

This is the sort of slim, unserious novella that a charitable critic might call a jeu d'esprit and a less charitable one a complete waste of time. The style has been aptly summarised by a previous reviewer as ‘Orientalist porn’, and sure enough the whole thing feels like an extended riff on a Jean-Léon Gérôme painting, perhaps The Grand Bath at Bursa (1885).

The setting is the closed world of the imperial harem in Ottoman İstanbul. Orkhan, a relative of the sultan, has spent his life locked away in a cage: finally one day he is released, and hailed by the harem girls as their new ruler. But he quickly realises that there is something more sinister going on behind all the sensuous luxury on display, and there's every chance he might not make it out alive.

The approach is episodic and hallucinogenic, with poor Orkhan stumbling tumescently from one steam-room to the next, desperately trying to assert his authority over a series of horny concubines, bored laundry girls and mystic priestesses, who always seem to know a lot more than he does. There is a dwarf, there is crocodile sex, there is a voluptuous fortune-teller who practises ‘phallomancy’ and ‘vulvascopy’. There are Arabian Nights-style anecdotes, such as when the harem develops an infestation of those Persian fairies known as peris:

They would clamber into the stocking tops of the concubines and ride about in this manner. They used to tiptoe into the girls' knickers and snuggle there for warmth and soft comfort…and, of course, the girls liked them being there for they would receive feathery tickles from the little creatures nestling in their underwear.

Like sexy crabs.

Irwin is probably the world's foremost expert on the Thousand and One Nights and has written several scholarly works on it; there are doubtless more references here that I'm picking up on, although I spotted quite a few. The scene where Orkhan is instructed on what to call the parts of a woman's body (culminating in ‘the Tavern of the Perfume-Makers’) is unmistakably modelled on the well-known Tale of the Porter and the Young Girls (where if I remember rightly the same anatomical area is called ‘the khan of Abu Mansur’).

It's all quite playful and tongue-in-cheek, but you have to wonder what exactly the purpose is. (‘No purpose at all,’ one character says tellingly, ‘save my pleasure in the stringing of words together and in the telling of it. Must everything have a purpose?’) If there is a message, it has something to do with turning away from so-called higher concerns and concentrating on more accessible, earthly pleasures:

Foolish people think that the ultimate mystery of life resides in the spirit. The wise know that it is found nowhere save in the flesh.

This doesn't put me off Irwin: he's a very interesting and rather neglected writer with some clever ideas. However, this is definitely a minor work – though diverting enough for the few hours it takes to read it.

JUST AS STRANGE, BUT MUCH NASTIER

A really odd novel, which reads as though Alistair Horne's history of the Algerian War had been rewritten as pulp fiction. It contains the admirable phrase ‘the aesthetics of fascist philately’ – to which the rest of this review can be no more than a footnote.

I previously knew Robert Irwin only from the excellent anthology of classical Arabic literature he edited, Night and Horses and the Desert, and to discover that the academic behind that sober collection was also responsible for this insane and violent jaunt through wartime Algeria made the shock even greater. I'm going to try and sum it up, but bear in mind that's it's twice as weird as it sounds.

The setting is Algiers in 1959-60, with the French army several years into their nasty war with the nationalist FLN. The protagonist – ‘antihero’ is too weak a word for the monster at the centre of this book – is a French intelligence officer, a devotee of ‘enhanced interrogation’ techniques who is deeply involved with the shadowy world of double and triple agents. The plot consists of one cliffhanger after another, taking in prison breaks, desert sandstorms, femmes fatales, a man with no nose, a killer called ‘Teddybear’, the aforementioned right-wing stamp-collecting, scenes of sexual gunplay, and a production of Wagner's Ring cycle.

Our narrator, Captain Philippe Roussel, is a terrifying, patrickbatemanesque creation, who explains the most unpleasant scenes with a detached dry wit. The effect teeters on the line between funny and appalling, depending on how recently you ate and what kind of mood you're in. It is shockingly violent in places, which is not inappropriate given the setting – but the tone is very strange. It isn't presented entirely earnestly, but nor does it feel gratuitous – the historical detail is too rich and accurate. The whole thing starts to take on

the quality of a nightmare, where at any moment something just as strange, but much nastier might happen.

Irony, of a particularly dark and dare-I-say British kind, is ramped up to eleven throughout. Here is Philippe lost and alone in the vastness of the Sahara, thinking about the proclaimed unity of France, ‘whole and indivisible from Dunkirk to Tamanrasset’:

It is truly wonderful to me as I walk over and round these rolling and curving dunes, bleached of all colour by the noonday sun, that I am taking a walk in Metropolitan France. Over there to the left, one might see the mairie, a tabac, some cafés and a few old men playing pétanque during the lunch hour – only there is a very large sand dune in the way. And just ahead where I am walking now there is doubtless a vineyard, and a team of labourers clearing out a ditch. Oh! But there is an only slightly smaller sand dune in the way! Everywhere I look, everywhere I turn, there is glorious, beautiful, prosperous, bustling France. One cannot see it, because of all the sand that is in the way, but it is there. Our legislators and map drawers tell us it is there, so it must be so.

It's a short book but it has a strangely oppressive atmosphere. I read the final couple of pages this afternoon on a plane as we came in to land at Algiers airport, and the novel had freaked me out so much that part of me didn't want to get off! But I think I'd recommend it, all the same. As long as you bring a strong stomach and a well-honed sense of irony, you should have plenty of tasteless fun.½

Irwin's usual convoluted plotting, where the twists and turns can be as baffling to the reader as to the characters. But in a good way: the thwarting of expectation and undermining of motives is usually surprising and leaves you slightly dizzy, not quite knowing what is real, what fabricated or hallucinatory.

The problem with this one, though, is that I had no emotional attachment to any of the characters, none of whom I particularly liked, and consequently I didn't really care what happened to them. However, still worth a read because Irwin is a good writer.½

"In the autumn of 1966 it seemed to me that I had no destiny, for my future was blank. Now, as I write, it seems to me that my destiny is already mostly in the past" (122).

Robert Irwin is one of my favorite novelists, the author of such wonderful works as The Arabian Nightmare (his first), The Limits of Vision, and Satan Wants Me, and that would have been enough to interest me in his memoir. And indeed, this book discloses to a reader of Irwin's fiction many of the crypto-autobiographical vectors in his writing. But the the promise of accounts of his experiences in the emergence of the English counterculture in the 1960s and of his own involvement in Algerian Sufism made the memoir irresistable.

Irwin expresses nostalgia for his experience of the hippy sixties, while powerfully deglamorizing the counterculture. He is disenchanted and strikingly contemptuous of his younger self. In addition to drugs, mysticism, music, and romantic love, he recounts his academic odyssey and encounters with intellectuals such as R.C. Zaehner, Bernard Lewis, and the Perennialist school of religious scholarship.

Irwin professes his abiding faith in the message of Islam and the value of Sufi praxis, despite the horror with which he regards conspicuous portions of the global Muslim community. His respect for the 'Alawi tariqa in which he was initiated has not been effaced. But the book almost reads as though it might have been entitled "Memoirs of a Failed Dervish," because he confesses his own lack of attainment and inability to derive consequence from his mystical strivings. Still, he provides details of the perplexing effects of his aspiration. "Like body odours, ecstasy is something that nice people don't talk about, but the hell with that" (78).

There is certainly a significant dose of melancholy in Irwin's retrospection. "I cannot think of anything useful I have learned from dreams, or any instance in which a dream has served as valuable inspiration," he writes (215). In a highly enjoyable reflection on his youthful interest in science fiction, Irwin remarks: "I have lost the capacity to be astounded and I am sad about that" (19). For me, his memoir was like summer sunshine filtered through browning autumn leaves.

As the memoirs are collected the tone becomes darker, materialising into a reflection that seems painful for Mister Irwin to behold.

Nuggets of interest are scattered through out but ultimately this work, besides the brilliantly embossed cover, pales in the shadow of Robert's fiction and academic writings....