Encounters with the Islamic periphery

I came across a quote today from J.M. Coetzee, probably recording a well-known detail:

"The waterskater, that is an insect and dumb, traces the name of God on the surfaces of ponds, or so the Arabians say. None is so deprived that he cannot write."

But it's new to me and brings to mind this famous passage from Coleridge's Biographia Literaria:

Most of my readers will have observed a small water-insect on the surface of rivulets, which throws a cinque-spotted shadow fringed with prismatic colours on the sunny bottom of the brook; and will have noticed, how the little animal wins its way up against the stream, by alternate pulses of active and passive motion, now resisting the current, and now yielding to it in order to gather strength and a momentary fulcrum for a further propulsion. This is no unapt emblem of the mind's self-experience in the act of thinking. There are evidently two powers at work, which relatively to each other are active and passive; and this is not possible without an intermediate faculty, which is at once both active and passive. In philosophical language, we must denominate this intermediate faculty in all its degrees and determinations, the IMAGINATION.

Coleridge, like the Arabians, saw God instanced in nature. In both the natural world and in human nature. But, from what I've seen of the Islamic arts, where I've encountered it in, say, the British Museum, in the extraordinary palaces and interlocking geometrical patterns of Turkish mosques or in the (unfortunately) least celebrated of Israel's pasts, they take humility to God to such an extreme that they barely represent animals in their holy places (as can be quite frequent in Judaic symbolism, mindful of the second commandment) let alone human beings.

Returning to the quote, what is striking about Coetzee's tone is the peculiar mixture of reverence ('None is so deprived...') and loathing ('dumb', which is true by most animals standards, not just humans) in which the waterskater is held. The universality of writing is mythicised in the waterskater; at the same time, in many Arab nations, literacy is low for the lower socio-economic classes so this elevation of literacy disguises the absence of will to create universal literacy in reality (see http://bit.ly/mjNvzU). There's some strange aestheticisation of illiteracy and deprivation as the literacy of divinely-bestowed nature, even when it is couched in reference to the non-human and circumscribed as so beautiful that only the divine could have put it there.

It makes me think of an encounter I had with a hostel-owner called Harry in Selcuk in Turkey. He was a very affable person, often very willing to give any advice and he provided a good breakfast. I later discovered that a friend of mine, Katie Murphy, had been to the same hostel and had wonderful memories of Harry's barbecues. But my lingering memory was what I heard him say to me one morning during Ramadan.  [I had obviously made him aware that I had been at Oxford, not sure what else; certainly I said nothing about wanting to make money]

"So what if you get ten scholarships to study at Oxford, or you make a lot of money and feel so proud because you're rich and successful..."

That was the gist of it, though it's perhaps a poor rendering. I believe he may even have referred to the Devil. It shocked me, what he said, both because I saw a resentful side of his character that I wasn't expecting, but also because the old religious language of pride as a vice seemed so far-out and, at least in English terms, antiquated. At the same time, it made me appreciate how far removed the Western education I have been given is from the old morality, gave me a real shock of alternative attitudes to the world. A lovely thing about the opening quote is that it returns a sense of awe and humbleness to the natural world, even if circumscribed by religion.

The other side of the resentment is, perhaps, that noone likes being underrepresented in world affairs, or others falsely overrepresented as no doubt Europeans and Americans of today are (though what in half a century?). Five centuries ago, Islamic civilisation was dominant in the Indo-European region, and the Islamic empires were as revered for their advancements in understanding and knowledge, in science, as they were abhorred for what was perceived as their decadent, decaying dynasties. 
Now they are written out of most people's understanding of history. Like the insect. 

Or, for those business leaders and prominent men minded towards action and objectivity, the imagination. The 'renaissance', which marked the beginning of the ascendancy of Western power, was fascinated by the 'Turk' - from Tamburlaine, Selimus, Othello...on through Robinson Crusoe, enslaved by the Turks before becoming a slaver himself, and beyond.

Now when we look at regimes like those of Mubarak or Gadaffi, there is nothing from these modern states that most Westerners know of or look up to, because Western media so dominates most of our cultural fields. (I don't claim to know anything about whether Egyptian or Libyan culture is actually any good or not. I also don't claim these are Islamic, though they have predominantly Islamic populations. and are predominantly Arab) What is left is the horror at the creaking dynasties and the brute inhumane ways of these outmoded polities. 

What will replace them is a question thousands of political scholars and journalists are picking apart right now, no doubt. Not what we have certainly, but they'll have some of what we have too - big business will want what slices look good, if indeed things look like stabilising. Along with big business will come the globalised infrastructure - the bankers, accountants, lawyers, etc - which is making the world a safer, if little less unfair, place to take wages home.