Original Projects - Isn't It Islamic?

Everyone knows there’s a deep chasm between the Muslim world and the West. It's been argued by Samuel Huntington (Clash of Civilizations), Bernard Lewis (What Went Wrong?), and almost every pundit on cable news. After all, it’s an easy argument to make. You only need to look at the horror of September 11, suicide bombers in Israel, and the situation in Afghanistan and Iraq for demonstrable proof. While we often hear about how American culture (read: film, television, sports) is “exported” overseas and is both loved and hated in the Muslim world, we never hear about what culture America has “imported” from the Muslim world. As a result, the common opinion of most Westerners in general and Americans in particular is that Islam and the Arab world are completely antithetical to everything the West stands for and is completely foreign to our culture and way of life.

But would such opinions change if people were better educated and recognized that many of the institutions, practices, and cultural markers we hold most dear are, in fact, of Islamic or Arab origin? Would such opinions change if people understood the many debts owed by Western and American culture to the Arab and Muslim world? Would such opinions change if we no longer talked about the major differences between two separate civilizations, but the minor differences within one universal civilization?

I don’t know. "Isn’t It Islamic? From Algebra, Kebabs & Universities
to Beetlejuice, Harry Potter & Starbucks" won’t answer those questions. But what the project (and, one day, book) will do is demonstrate that, indeed, America is much more “Islamic” than the average person might think and, in turn, make people realize that when we as Westerners talk about “them,” we are also—to some degree—talking about “us.”

Images

Thumbnail_harry_potter_and_the_philosophers_stone_book_j_k_rowling

by Kurt Djemal on 01-10-2010 @ 12:22 PM EST

Essay 1: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's (Philosopher's) Stone

HARRY POTTER and THE SORCERER’S (PHILOSOPHER’S) STONE In November 2001, Harry Potter & the Sorcerer’s Stone took in more than $90 million at the U.S. box office in its opening weekend. This shattered the previous record held by Jurassic Park: The Lost World, beating it by $17 million. Nearly half a year later, the film was still playing in select theatres nationwide, and the final domestic box office take would be a whopping $317,557,891. But strangely, if you asked a child in any other part of the English-speaking world what he or she thought of Sorcerer’s Stone, you’d be met with a funny stare. Interestingly, only Americans saw Harry Potter & the Sorcerer’s Stone. The rest of the world saw Harry Potter & the Philosopher’s Stone. For that matter, no one outside the United States read Sorcerer’s Stone either. The Harry Potter phenomenon dates back to July 1997, the month J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter & the Philosopher’s Stone was released in the United Kingdom by Bloomsbury (London). An instant sensation, the book won award after award, and it wasn’t long before—as with the Beatles two and a half decades earlier—the United States would be invaded by another British export—albeit renamed. Apparently Scholastic, the book’s American publisher, feared that the U.S. market might be put off by the esoteric title Philosopher’s Stone, and decided to change the name to something American children (and perhaps adults) could better understand. Thus, Sorcerer’s Stone was born, and every reference in the book to the “philosopher’s stone” was changed to reflect the new title. In putting together the movie, director Chris Columbus took similar steps, shooting two versions of each scene where the stone is mentioned. So in the American version Harry, freckle-faced Ron, and brainy Hermione must stop the evil Voldemort from obtaining the sorcerer’s stone—a legendary substance, we learn, that will transmute any metal into gold and will produce the elixir of life, thereby granting countless riches and immortality to whoever possesses it. In the non-U.S. version, though, it’s the philosopher’s stone which the trio must stop Voldemort from obtaining. Now, why is this significant? After all, famed director Alfred Hitchcock, were he alive today, would no doubt point out that the stone, whatever it’s called, is merely a MacGuffin, a term he coined to describe a plot device with no significant meaning other than to advance a film’s story. Thus, the stone in the book could just as easily have been, say, the Ark of the Covenant (Raiders of the Lost Ark), a mystical stolen stone (Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom), or the Holy Grail (Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade). Another example of a famous MacGuffin from children’s literature would be the wardrobe in C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia. But could you imagine a 1950s publisher releasing C.S. Lewis’ children’s classic as The Lion, the Witch & the Closet, arguing American children wouldn’t know the meaning of wardrobe? Such a thought is laughable. The most troubling aspect of the change to Rowling’s book is that the philosopher’s stone isn’t simply an object of her imagination. While the story is pure fantasy, the philospher’s stone actually is a mythical substance claimed to transmute any metal into gold and produce the elixir of life, and it has deep roots in the English language. Use of the term is found as far back as Chaucer, “The Philosopher’s stoon, Elixir clept, we sechen faste echoon” (Canon’s Yeoman Tale, lines 862-3). Shakespeare, Marlow, Milton, Balzac, and even P.G. Wodehouse have all referenced the stone in their writings. The stone’s significance resonates beyond English as well. The French know it as pierre philosophale, the German’s refer to it as der Stein der Weisen, and earlier, the stone was known by the Latin, lapis philosophorum, or lapis philosophicus. Perhaps part of the reason a decision was made to change the title stems from perceived confusion over the word “philosopher.” While today it refers strictly to someone who loves or pursues wisdom through intellectual means, in earlier years it also referred to an adept in occult science, such as alchemy. The two senses of the word were conflated. But to dismiss the historical significance of this legendary object by giving it a sexier name, or one that will be more readily understood today, is to take one more step toward the lowest-common-denominator homogenization of American culture and one step away from the world’s collective heritage. After all, there was no centuries-long search for the sorcerer’s stone, a term meaningless historically. But the belief in and search for the philosopher’s stone through the ancient practice of alchemy led to the acquisition of significant chemical knowledge and laid the foundation for modern-day chemistry. Though of obscure beginnings, the concept of the philosopher’s stone is believed to have originated in either Alexandria (in present-day Egypt), perhaps in the third or fourth century BCE, or China. Irrespective of its exact provenance, early alchemy in Alexandria was a craft infused with two Aristotelian beliefs: 1) all things strive toward perfection, just as, for example, all acorns strive to be an oak and 2) all matter is fashioned from the four elements of air, earth, fire, and water, which were formed by a prima materia, or prime matter. All substances, in turn, consist of this prime matter and a specific “form,” a primitive DNA-like imprint that determines the substance’s elemental proportions, and thus its characteristics. One of the first individuals on record to apply these beliefs to metalworking is Bolos-Democritus, a man from the Nile delta region who lived in the second century BCE. He believed that by changing the ratios of the four base elements in lead, the lesser metal could be “taught” to be gold. Given the nature of their efforts, early alchemists were reluctant to reveal the secrets of their craft, using symbols and codes in their writings to refer to the materials with which they worked. Looking now at the “recipes” published in these early texts, we can see in many cases that what these artisans were really doing was either making imitations of gold or silver, or preparing metal alloys. For example, four parts gold might have been melted and mixed together with three parts copper and one part asemos (a silver-like metal). Though from a strictly quantitative standpoint this did produce “more” gold, the gold’s quality would have dropped from 24-carats to 10-carats. By the third and fourth century CE, alchemy became a stagnant and dying art. This was in part a function of the growing influence of Christianity in the region, which was antagonistic to all manner of pagan learning and thought, and the Roman belief that the transformation of lead into gold might destroy the empire. In particular, Emperor Diocletian feared that the artificial creation of gold would ruin the Roman economic system and allow alchemists to amass large fortunes with which they could gain power. This led him to issue an edict in 290 CE ordering the destruction of all alchemical texts. Only with the Arab conquest of Alexandria in 641 CE, and later Persia, was alchemy rejuvenated and the search for the philosopher’s stone revived in the region, as the Arabs became heirs to the surviving texts and the accumulation of nearly all Hellenistic-Egyptian learning. The father of Arab alchemy is Jabir ibn-Hayyan, a man said to have lived in the eighth century. He modified the Aristotelian idea of four bases, theorizing that metals were composed of two pure elements, mercury and sulfur, and he searched for a catalyst that could change the proportions of these elements in a metal, thereby transmuting it. This al-iksir, as he called it, is the source of the word elixir, and a synonym for the philosopher’s stone. Hundreds of alchemical texts have been attributed to him, including The Hundred and Twelve Books and The Seventy Books, but he is a difficult figure to study. Recent research suggests that many if not all of these texts were written in the tenth and eleventh centuries by later Arab alchemists. Some suggest that Jabir may not have actually been a historical figure at all. Rather, he was created as a symbol by a collective adapting Hermetic texts into Arabic. Regardless, the corpus of the “Jabir writings,” as they are often referred, do present significant advances in the theory and practice of alchemy. In his (or their) search for a universal catalyst that could transform metals and offer immortality, “Jabir” improved methods for distillation, evaporation, filtration, sublimation, melting, and crystallization and was the first to describe the preparation of many chemical substances, including cinnabar (mercury sulfide), alum, arsenious oxide, and lead acetate. Further, a number of technical terms of Arabic origin known to this day are traceable to “Jabir” and early Arabic alchemical texts. These include realgar (arsenic sulphide, often used in fireworks and tanning), alkali (soluble mineral matter), antimony (a metallic element), alembic (formerly used distillation apparatus), and aludel (pear-shaped pot used in sublimation). Interestingly, the most significant chemical discovery of the Middle Ages, sulfuric acid, is often attributed to “Jabir.” However, it was made by an unknown alchemist in the early fourteenth century. Writing under the pseudonym of Geber, the Latinized form of Jabir, he was most likely a Spaniard who used the name of the famed Arab alchemist either to hide his own identity for some undetermined reason or to give authority to his own work. He is often referred to as the False- or Pseudo-Geber. Two other influential Muslim alchemists were Abu Bekr Muhammad ibn Zakariya al-Razi (Rhazes in Latin) and Abu Ali al-Husain ibn Abdullah ibn Sina (Avicenna in Latin). Not coincidentally, both of these men are considered the greatest of the Arab physicians. Much of their contributions to alchemical study stems from the empirical approach they also brought to medicine. Razi (850-925), a Persian born just south of the Caspian Sea, was among the first to systematically observe and verify facts related to chemical substances, and composed a classification of all substances: animal, vegetable, and mineral. Though scientifically obsolete (five kingdoms of nature are now recognized: monera, protoctista, pungi, plants, animals), this general classification informed the early Linnaean system and still resonates today, such as in the popular children’s guessing game, “20 questions.” Further, in his Book of the Secret of Secrets, Razi documented the equipment and chemicals needed for a fully functioning alchemy laboratory. This text guided Christian alchemists throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Later, Ibn Sina (980-1037), born to a Turkic mother and Persian father near Bukhara in Central Asia, proposed that chemicals maintain their identity even if they become part of a compound, a sharp departure from Aristotle’s belief that substances become homogenized when reacting with one another. Perhaps more importantly, Ibn Sina eyed both transmutation and alchemy with a healthy degree of skepticism, placing himself far ahead of his time: I do not deny that such a degree of accuracy in imitation may be reached as to deceive even the shrewdest, but the possibility of transmutation has never been clear to me. Indeed, I regard it as impossible... Those properties that are perceived by the senses are probably not the differences which distinguish one metallic species from another, but rather accidents or consequences, the essential specific differences being unknown. And if a thing is unknown, how is it possible for any one endeavor to produce it or destroy it? Though Ibn Sina found little support for his opinions, such an objective approach to the practice of alchemy was a first step in the eventual maturation of science. By the twelfth century, major Arab contributions to chemical knowledge had ceased, but the works and writings of these and other Arab alchemists began to enter Western Europe through Moorish Spain, as Christiandom inherited the body of knowledge that had been assimilated and augmented by the Arab and Muslim world. In introducing one of his earliest translations of an Arabic alchemical text, Robert of Chester wrote in 1144, “Since what Alchymia is, and what its composition is, your Latin world does not yet know, I will explain in the present work.” This legacy, in turn, was carried and built upon by such notable alchemists as Roger Bacon, Albertus Magnus, Villa Nova, and even Nicholas Flamel, the late-fourteenth-century Parisian scribe who was deeply influenced by Razi’s description of alchemical processes and is said to have possessed the secret to the stone. (This legend was not lost on Rowling, as Flamel is named as the maker of the stone Harry and the others must keep from Voldemort.) Their work, in turn, informed the future studies of such scientific innovators as Paracelsus, Robert Black, Robert Boyle, Joseph Priestley, and Antoine Laurent Lavoisier, whose Traité élémentaire de Chemie, published in 1789, introduced chemistry to the world as an exact science and marked the death knell of the pseudo-scientific alchemy. The fact that both the words alchemy and chemistry derive from the Arabic al-kimiya is a testament to the centrality of Arab and Muslim contributions to this scientific evolution. Today, the transmutation of elements is known to occur naturally through radioactive processes, and it can be brought about artificially by changing the number of protons in the atomic nucleus through particle acceleration. Research into stem cells, meanwhile, raises significant implications for the future of health-care and life expectancy. Embryonic stem cells, indeed, have the ability to “learn” to become any type of cell in the body. Consider the parallels between this phenomenon and the Aristotelian conception of prima materia. Further, some scientists no doubt reacted to President George W. Bush’s August 2001 decision to prohibit federal funding for research on new stem cell lines the same way some alchemists reacted to Diocletian’s third century edict. Though heavily mixed with mysticism and superstition, perhaps the practitioners of this ancient art were not so misguided after all in their quest or belief in something that could perfect all imperfections, whether physically or spiritually. Even today, science has a new “philosopher’s stone” to drive them as theoretical physicists seek a “theory of everything” which will unlock, it is believed, the mysteries of the universe. In the 1980s, Stephen Hawking offered even odds that this reconciliation of Einstein’s theory of general relativity and quantum theory would occur within twenty years. Without a completed theory in hand, he has since said it will take another twenty years, giving the same 50-50 odds. While certainly there are significant differences between the work of Hawking et al and the search for the stone, one wonders whether “Jabir” or Razi would have offered similar odds in their time. When stepping back and looking at the centuries-long search for the philosopher’s stone, and its twin the elixir of life, we can see that Hitchcock’s definition of a MacGuffin applies just as equally to real life as it does to literature and film. The philosopher’s stone was, in the end, little more than a device that provided the motivation and engine for nearly forty generations of scientific action and growth, a significant portion of which occurred in Islam’s Golden Age. This is a sentiment that has been uttered in other times and in other ways. Consider the words of Francis Bacon, writing in the early seventeenth century when alchemical thought still had a firm hold on European scientific inquiry: Alchemy may be compared to the man who told his sons that he had left them gold buried somewhere in the vineyard; where they by digging found no gold, but by turning up the mold about the roots of the vines, procured a plentiful vintage. Continuing with this analogy, we can say, in essence, that the search for the philosopher’s stone did nothing less than “dig up” modern chemistry. As a final note, it’s worth noting that changing a foreign work’s title for the American market is nothing new, so it’s not as though Scholastic was re-inventing the wheel with Sorcerer’s Stone. Consider these examples from film: In 1990, Nikita, Luc Besson’s movie about a strung-out sociopath turned government assassin, was a smash hit in France. The following year, the movie was released in the United States as La Femme Nikita. The reason for the change? Presumably the U.S. distributor didn’t want Americans to be “confused” and show up thinking they were about to watch an English-language film. A couple years later, the British film The Madness of King George III was picked up for American theatrical distribution. But when Sir Nigel Hawthorne received his Oscar nomination for his performance as the oddly-behaving king, it was for The Madness of King George, less the III. Apparently the distributor thought audiences might think they had already missed the first two installments of the film, and would skip the third. But don’t think this rebranding of films to make them more palatable to a specific market doesn’t go both ways. Empire magazine recently compiled a list of English-language films whose titles have been significantly altered in the non-English speaking world. The best of the crop: I’m Rich But I Like Cheap Prostitutes, the 1990s break-out hit in Germany starring Julia Roberts and Richard Gere; His Powerful Device Makes Him Famous, a film released in China that traces the rise and fall of a well-endowed porn star starring Mark Wahlberg; and Wretch! Let Me Chop Off Your Finger, also a Chinese release starring Holly Hunter in her Oscar-winning role as a deaf-mute.

Please Signin or Signup to Comment.

Kurt Djemal: This is the type of stuff I'm planning on writing -- and perhaps looking for if others wanted to contribute.

01-10-2010 @ 12:25 PM EST

by Kurt Djemal on 01-14-2010 @ 2:20 PM EST

Isn't It Islamic?

Welcome to Isn't It Islamic?

Please Signin or Signup to Comment.

Nathan Wieler: Kurt - are you writing all of the essays yourself? Are there in particular ways others can contribute to your project?

01-10-2010 @ 11:55 AM EST
Kurt Djemal: I'm definitely open to this turning into an "edited" project if others wanted to contribute essays -- but barring that, I guess I'd be looking for ideas, feedback on essays, and then longer terms perhaps assistance on the publishing, marketing fronts.

01-10-2010 @ 12:17 PM EST
Kurt Djemal: No that I think about it, maybe this could be more about inviting people to contribute ideas, facts, essays, etc. -- anything related to Muslim and Arab contributions to the West -- with a much longer term goal of publishing the project's "findings" and essays as a book.

01-10-2010 @ 12:33 PM EST
Nathan Wieler: Can you post that list of ways people can contribute to the resources section of your project?

01-10-2010 @ 1:14 PM EST