Ian Whiteman

Rumi, Rihlas and Other Considerations

Posted on August 11, 2013 by Ian Whiteman

If you are Turkish, Afghan or Iranian, most likely you would consider your ‘bard’ to be Jalaluddin Muhammad Rumi the great poet and Imam who is buried in Konya, the capital of central Anatolia, Turkey. He was born in Balkh, Afghanistan but after migrating to Turkey where he settled and taught he wrote his twenty seven thousand couplet poetic masterpiece, the Mathnawi which was written in Persian. He died in 1273 CE and is buried in Konya in the most beautiful of maqams (pictured above) In recent times translations of this work have been made into every language of the world and which has seen Rumi become, in the case of North America, its best selling poet. (a manuscript from 1479 in Persian pictured below)

So, when given the opportunity to attend the well known Deen Intensive Rihla in Konya this past July, my wife and I jumped at the opportunity as there had to be something special waiting for us there. To most people who read this blog the words Rihla and Deen Intensive are probably well known but for those who just happen to have dropped in and don’t know, let me give you a brief explanation.

The Rihla was conceived back in 1995 in the USA by the well known teacher and translator, Hamza Yusuf (amongst others) as an opportunity for anyone who wanted to study, intensively in a residential situation, a selection of the traditional Islamic sciences with prominent scholars, over a three to four week period in the summer break and in an interesting venue. The scholars would teach in English and could give the students the best of their knowledge over a short time which would traditionally have entailed the student traveling over many years to different countries and gathering such knowledge, having first mastered Arabic of course, and enduring all the rigours that this would have demanded.

So it was designed for those whom a life devoted to scholarship would be impossible, but who were able shell out a fairly hefty sum to attend for this brief period. It has over these last 18 years proved a remarkable success and continues to attract 150-200 students of all ages every year from all over the world. The subjects covered every year would find their place in the curriculum of any self respecting seminary or university in the muslim universe and include Aqida, Qalam, Logic, Fiqh, Sira, Tajweed, Tasawwuf etc., * (see below for translation) and much more, but all embraced by the broad and luminous shariah. Shariah being a very much abused and misunderstood term in the Western universe who have confined it to amputations and similar cherry picked distortions. Appropriately its accurate translation is “the wide road that leads to an everlasting spring of water”, a special meaning for a desert dweller and also for the dweller in the modern desert of the western world desperate for the essential water of divine knowledge.

In the 1970s we used to go yearly to Morocco to attend great moussems and mawlids of singing, hadras and visiting living and dead saints and benefitting greatly but with little or no real study of what it all meant and why. Not that we could have sustained such study at the time. I have seen a common phenomenon in nascent muslim cultures in the west over the last 40 years or so of the tariqas or sufi brotherhoods and how they became the necessary starting points in countries where no Islam existed which was the case in point in London in 1970 when I opted in to this particular religion. It was like survival Islam and the brotherhoods (which was also a sisterhood in fact) helped concentrate study, practice and create a kind of social nexus in a town or city location (in London in my case). And for a few years we became Moroccans both in dress, culture and religious practice. But despite its outreach it remained quite insular and eventually fell foul of the usual problems of such communities: group think, mismanagement, economic collapse and after an exodus to Norfolk, complete disintegration into rancorous civil war.

I mention this because looking back I think it was a lack of a certain fundamental education that left no real foundation for any future growth although it sufficed for a time. Tasawwuf (sufism) was always one of the traditional sciences embedded in the shariah studied in Muslim seminaries going back over a thousand years to the time of Junayd who consolidated this knowledge and who is considered the Imam of this science. But our early education subsumed all other sciences under the rubric ‘tasawwuf‘ which is clearly incorrect. We were to be sufis more than anything else. The term tasawwuf has many translations but rectification and purification of the heart is the most useful. But it is only part of a spectrum of essential knowledge for the traveller on a spiritual journey. It deals with unravelling and cleansing the human heart of all its vices like envy, lying, idolatry, backbiting, arrogance and so on and in these times probably the most important initial medicine for people who enter Islam from the dominant culture.

But even a few hundred years ago the value of tariqas was called into question by such scholars and authentic teachers as Sidi Ahmad Zarruq who had in his lifetime seen tariqas become corrupted in different ways. In the late 1970s and early 1980s we saw the same thing happening in the UK. What was needed was a new sound basis for all of the Islamic sciences in which tasawwuf could take its proper place so that sincere seekers could be protected from charlatans and the latent cultishness and corruption of ‘groups’ of this kind – but still benefit from its core function.

Since the 1980s quite a few young men and women from the west have ventured into the traditional muslim world and have returned with authorised knowledges which they have set about teaching. This is where we come back to the notion of the Rihla which means essentially “traveling for divine knowledge”. This is where the overview of knowledge so much needed can be established in a kind of roving university that the Rihla is. In the past it has tempted gifted students to take this kind of study much further and who have become qualified teachers themselves.

Much as I know that tariqas have fulfilled a vital service in conserving this teaching down the centuries, something I have benefitted from personally, I can see how some have become unfit for purpose and have trapped their devotees in cults which deny them the bigger picture in which both men and women can advance in the acquisition of sacred knowledge and spiritual growth. In traditional societies there were many scholars, muftis, qadis and faqihs in circulation to keep the balance and to counsel sufi shaykhs if they got out of line…and in fact to counsel anyone from kings to the common man — something lacking in western cultures till recently. Remember that the great lights of muslim history, Imams Al-Ghazali and Jalaluddin Rumi and in my own time the great Moroccan teacher and poet Muhammad ibn Al- Habib who passed away in 1971 at a great age (shortly after we met him), were first and foremost great ulema, masters and teachers of outward formal knowledge. It’s worth reflecting that Ibn al-Habib was teaching these sciences in the Karoueen Mosque in Fes in 1900!

So this Rihla in Konya for us was very beneficial, albeit for a week, and was as illuminating as weeks of singing and dancing in Morocco 40 years ago. It was filling all the big gaps that my initial introduction to Islam and Sufism had left me with. The content of Rihlas from this year and last year can be viewed online at DeenIntensive.com so you can ascertain yourself what it was all about. Viewing on-line is not the same as being physically present but nonetheless is very beneficial. Its strong web presence is a symbol of its relevance in the digital universe but with its feet firmly in the ground of person to person teaching. Receiving knowledge from teachers authorised to teach from an isnad of authorised teachers is very different from instruction from auto-didacts who have constructed what they teach from books and knowledge gleaned from unauthorised sources and who make false claims as to their authority. What is most refreshing at these Rihlas is being in the company of people who sought no identity or distinction in the group, in their name, their clothes or what sat on their heads other than being muslims and sincere seekers of knowledge. And how after only a week you can closely bond with people you have never met before and how your whole interior perspective can be changed and refreshed. It really puts the holy back into holiday.

“Travel, that ye may gain advantage” (Rumi)

* Approximate translations of the terms above of a sample of Sharia sciences:
Aqida: belief; what we can believe and cannot believe about God. (Imams ‘Ashari and Maturidi)
Qalam: literally speech; theology, deeper knowledge of Aqida
Fiqh: jurisprudence / sacred law. (Imams Malik, Shafi’i, Hanafi & ibn Hanbal)
Tasawwuf: sufism; spiritual purification and illumination of the heart. (Imam Junaid)
Mantiq: logic
Sira: life of the Prophet
Tajweed: correct Qur’anic recitation and pronounciation

Posted in language, miscellaneous, religion, sacred knowledge, tassawuf, Uncategorized | 3 Comments

Translation, Lost and Found

Posted on May 2, 2013 by Ian Whiteman

Above: A page from an as yet unpublished edition of the Shama’il of Tirmidhi.

Part One
Although my work is principally typesetting books, something previously done by men in inky overalls composing metal type, I do actually read some of them and it might explain why when I write on this blog about what I hope might be of some practical typographical value I cannot but help slip into philosophy, religion and metaphysics and all that comes with it, as many of those books I have worked on are often translations of important and famous texts on these subjects – mostly from Arabic with the Arabic and English running in parallel. And quite an education it has been. Studying the texts has really rammed home to me the crushing responsibility of the translator’s job. Not only must he or her deeply understand the foreign language concerned and the subject matter, but also have a profound grasp of English and all its subtle nuances and get it right. Their word choice can have life-changing impact and lead people in all kinds of right or wrong directions. Especially such texts as the source books of Islam like the Qur’an itself and the many collections of Prophetic traditions that surround it. Which is why commentaries and explanatory footnotes are so important to flesh out the translation.

In the last 40 years there has been a huge unstoppable convergence of different cultures all over the world especially in Britain and it has been very visible for me in setting these translations mentioned above, as two languages on the same page, one in roman text ranging right to left and the other in arabic script from left to right makes particular demands. In the same way the translator has had to refine his words to excellently express meanings, the task of a designer is to reflect that as clearly and as beautifully as possible with type. It is a wonderful metaphor for how cultures should merge. When the cultures clash it is often because they haven’t been juxtaposed in a beautiful way and the scripts coming from opposite directions collide rather than blend harmoniously. There is a parallel in human behaviour and how good manners can facilitate so much in life, the elixir for just about everything in fact. Is there not good manners in the way a page of text is designed? The designer of course needs to know deeply the roots of western design and calligraphy as much as that of Arabic or Persian if he is going to succeed. The exact parallel of the translator in his or her work. And in a different realm the same could be said of the way a mosque might integrate into an English urban landscape.

Recently I was a consultant on the Cambridge mosque competition for an English architect who asked me some quite reasonable questions, one which was how to reconcile a mosque facing Mecca with a road frontage which is not, and more generally how do you design a mosque that integrates harmoniously into say a northern English town. Safe to say that too often mosques are like a two finger salute to the local vernacular and built environment with the oh-so-predictable dome and minaret. Now to me this is the height of bad manners. But it is an an honest metaphor for what is going on socially and politically.

The new Cambridge mosque project has, to its credit, taken a much more considered route with a lot of local consultation and an interesting mosque design concept by architect David Marks of Marks Barfield who were responsible for the London Eye opposite the Houses of Parliament. Now when I first heard they had won the competition I had visions of a funfair mosque with a helter skelter minaret down which the muezzin helter-skeltered after calling the prayer. But after going through various evolutions the final design has matured and I actually quite like it now, as it has done its utmost to blend in with the surrounding landscape and is a serious attempt to blend various traditional motifs with what is in fact a hi-tech eco-building. Quite a leap from the brief I was given some years ago for a sketch design for this mosque which requested an Anglo Ottoman style of architecture. (I might reexamine this idea in a future post).

Because the proposed mosque has full approval from Cambridge City Council and is of a high architectural quality the locals generally accept it. It is thought it might even raise surrounding property values. It doesn’t have a minaret and the small token green dome will be barely visible from the road I think. Some might say it doesn’t look a mosque. Which in many ways is in its favour I believe. It is doing its best to dodge the cliche and all the baggage that goes with that cliche. Personally I think the dome could have been dispensed with but I presume some people like the link with tradition even though the idea of a dome for a large space predates Islam by thousands of years. I suppose its symbolism prevents it been mistaken for an upmarket industrial shed or a telephone exchange.

The architect I was consultant to in the mosque competition asked me where in the Qur’an the rules were for building a mosque. The answer of course is nowhere. The first mosque was just an open area defined by a low wall and what became a famous palm tree. In other words anywhere within reason (like not in a road) if it is clean and where you could put your head on the ground. How it was organised was entirely up to those concerned in building it. There were times in history when Muslims and Christians shared the same prayer space as in Cordoba and earlier in Jerusalem – a pragmatic solution with no fuss about the style of architecture. But on the whole if you ask most muslims what a mosque space should be you would get a very wide range of answers. Most actually don’t know or are confused or regrettably the dome and minaret idea.

It all comes down to translation and the challenge of bringing something of a seemingly alien nature: beliefs, ideas, culture, the printed word or buildings into a new environment. Much has been lost in translation to date but in time things will improve as it all takes on new hybrid forms.

The Mill Road aspect of the proposed new Cambridge mosque.

Part Two
The subject of mosque design has occupied me a lot in the last thirty years, and at one point a couple of years back I was invited to speak at a small symposium put on by the Arts Council (and others) in London on this very subject: Spiritual Spaces in an Urban Environment. Up to that point I had considered that a mosque space needed to be traditional because the religion itself was based on tradition and anyway I could not abide all the nouveau trends in mosque architecture which exploited every kind of fashionable technology. I didn’t understand Zaha Hadid type buildings and neither did the audience at the symposium we were participating in. Necessity created the minaret as a means of the call to prayer reaching people from a high point and domes or columnated spaces were arrived at as a way of creating large spaces and were not created out of some religious dogma. However to depart too much from such conventions in the modern context causes consternation and not without cause. After all the human form is a traditional thing, on the form of the first man, It is what gives things meaning. We are looking back down the long corridor of time and it is possible to draw on all that experience.

Modernity has, however thrown a spanner in the works as suddenly creating interior space was not restricted by what could be built by hand and human scale was the first casualty. Technology given birth by the industrial revolution, disconnected architecture from craft and allowed builders, architects and engineers to run riot and create new ways of construction. Tradition was still a powerful influence though and the Victorians created some remarkable structures with strong historical references in wrought iron and glass covering previously unattainable expanses of interior space: the great glasshouses at Kew, the famous dome in Buxton covered in slate which is bigger than St Peters Rome, and many of Britain’s great railway stations.

The amassing of capital and the profit motive was instrumental in the industrialisation of building and remains as the motivator of modernity and what leaves us with all this debate about just what is a spiritual space. Much as I love the beautiful traditional mosques that you will find from Beijing to Fez, attempting such ideas in a western urban environment is extremely difficult. The Paris mosque is maybe the one exception that worked as it conveniently fits a whole block and is more a collection of interior spaces than a building very much as it would integrate into a traditional north African city. And it was utterly north African, built by craftsmen from Morocco and was a model of local cooperation with the opening prayer conducted by Shaykh al-Alawi of Mustaghanem and the then French premier. The Woking mosque worked well being the first in the UK but it was standing on its own in a small park. In general the cliché of minaret and dome mosque that has sprouted up all over the UK and Europe reflects how awkwardly the new communities have attempted to blend into their host communities. To me it’s “in your face” architecture and in many ways understandably provokes the local community. I realise that many people came into the UK who weren’t educated in the fineries of architecture or town planning but even where immigrants were educated as in the USA the results were the same, an awkward blend.

Of late I have been thinking that one possible urban solution is to create a space for retreat off the street for anyone who is in need of spiritual solace, or just to rest your feet without having to pay for a coffee. It can be like the prayer spaces that have cropped up in airports, football stadiums and even office blocks and factories. When walking through central London recently I was intensely aware of a need of something to counter the horrific commercial pressure everywhere. Non-denominational prayer spaces seemed like an obvious answer paid for by banks. Maybe if people learned the basic good manners of sharing a prayer space they might learn the manners of building a mosque (or a temple, synagogue or whatever) in an unwelcoming environment.

In a remote country situation the hitech modern solution seems inappropriate and a design driven by indigenous building techniques is best and probably cheapest and then you are fairly safe. My own choice is to avoid prestressed concrete, steel and ‘hard’ cement products produced by high firing techniques. A building constructed from say adobe bricks with a wooden or vaulted roof has an unrivalled stillness and beauty that is effortlessly a spiritual space. The actual design, proportions and details can also reflect calm and stillness but these are more conditioned by cultural and artistic factors. The community who will use it can, if at all possible, also help in the construction which helps bind them to it for ever. But importing all that into an urban context is well nigh impossible. Health and Safety stop it dead. And even in a remote situation there will still be legal and cultural hurdles to cross. All the courtesies required in the Cambridge case still apply, but it is just less complex.

Ultimately, any building is like a glove on a hand and is no better or worse than the vision, aspiration and abilities of the community of men and women who build it which is why architecture can tell you so much about history and about our forbears and what they were up to. Architects should of course be the servants of their clients but the intention behind such things as mosques is what produces the final result and when you walk into such a mosque for the first time you meet that intention full on.

Posted in architectural, language, miscellaneous, Publishing, religion, typography / design | 1 Comment

Songs in the Key of Light

Posted on March 15, 2013 by Ian Whiteman

This much anticipated CD arrived on my desk last week. I had sent off the artwork to the USA a few months ago and I was glad to see it at long last. The cover picture aroused my curiosity but I have now figured out that the photo of Hamza Yusuf and Zaid Shakir walking into a room in which Muhammad Bennis is apparently singing (Muhammad Bennis directs the Fes singers on this CD collection) is a way of introducing to a new kind of audience this kind of singing. It is also, I think, intended to introduce it to the Diwan of Muhammad Ibn al Habib, the renowned saint and teacher, who is buried in his zawiyya in Meknes, Morocco, which is pictured on the inside fold of this digipack. Several of his qasidas (poems) are excerpted here on this CD as well as some other famous Moroccan qasidas. Twelve years ago when I first met them, the Fes singers did not know this Diwan and it is interesting for me to hear them lending their talents to singing it as they bring some refreshing new naghmas (tunes) to it. Muhammad Bennis is a fathomless well of these ancient naghmas which all his life he has collected and taught to many others. He also has a gift for arranging them in appropriate sequences which is a science in itself.

Some of the tracks on this album were recorded in 2009 in a recording studio in Toronto but ever since we recorded the Burda in a studio in Fes in 2001 I have been a bit wary of recording studios which in my opinion don’t really lend themselves to this kind of singing as it tends to suck out some of the atmosphere necessary for Andalusian singing to work. I prefer a live acoustic recording as long as a PA system is not employed. To me the ambient noises don’t matter too much, but the spirit of the event does. Nonetheless the Fes singers have still put in a good performance here despite this disadvantage. This CD introduced me to some new unusual naghmas for some qasidas that I know only too well so I have gladly added them to my own armoury of melodies.

With one track on Songs in the Key of Light featuring the imarah or hadra, some eyebrows will doubtless be raised but Sh. Hamza’s liner notes necessarily makes mention of it and explains its purpose. Hadra is a controversial subject but having been familiar with it myself for over 40 years I do think that it is misunderstood and I include in that some of the people who practice it. Muhammad Bennis has told me on several occasions that the hadra is the singing and without the singing it is greatly limited and becomes just a dance. Traditionally there is a gradual sung build-up to the hadra and this can be likened to building a fire. Some qur’an and spiritual discourse always traditionally followed it.

Certainly the singing that accompanies a hadra can make or break it as the human voice is capable of making the heart soar or just distracting it. I am less impressed when hadras degenerate into a kind of folkloric ritual or showing off. It is a science which needs to be taught properly otherwise it becomes something rightly criticised. Whether it is technically some kind of innovation is not within my remit but I do know that many great scholars , shaykhs and ulema, particularly from North Africa, have endorsed it.

• There are no plans to release Songs in the Key of Light outside the USA though it can be purchased direct from http://www.sandala.org or downloaded from Itunes.

Posted in typography / design | 3 Comments

Mapping the Universe

Posted on March 12, 2013 by Ian Whiteman

Flipping through my WordPress account recently I realised how many unpublished draft posts I had written which I had just parked out of sight. Some were on medical subjects, others on eschatology but mostly on subjects in which I was clearly out of my depth. But also on subjects which by their very nature are radically out of line with the status quo of the 21st century world. And here’s one of them for your delectation as I thought, well what have I to lose? Not my usual fare but the kind of thing I often reflect on privately. If I had read these ideas elsewhere I would have no need to write them, but I don’t, which is why I’m publishing these following brief observations on one aspect of modern science.

A group of American astronomers have for the last six years been trying to map the universe. Yes that’s right, map the universe. A rather enormous task by any standards and no surprises when their conclusion was that the universe is in fact infinite and difficult to map as only one sixth of what is out there is actually visible and that it is expanding at a rate of knots.

Historically cartography was intertwined with the colonial impulse, the greed based quest for Eldorado, ‘the Gold’ and it seems, not unreasonably, to suspect that these astronomers aren’t solely motivated by the spirit of pure scientific enquiry. The BBC Horizon programme on this mapping project, aired recently, had the usual smattering of awesome mind boggling graphics but also, oddly, the occasional references to the car parking spaces for Nobel laureates at the Berkeley CA campus of the leading scientist, as if this was one of the most desired spin-offs of scientific research. It was as if the truth was something secondary to getting a Nobel prize (and a parking space),

I get increasingly frustrated by TV scientific pundits who smugly purvey their view of the world as if it was gospel handed down from on high. Anyone who has taken LSD knows that the perceived world is not what it seems and that the condition and state of the viewer is paramount and that scientific rationale is very limited and materialistic in its approach to truth and that by endlessly looking further into deep space and into the sub atomic worlds with expensive technology, they are missing something and looking in the wrong place with the wrong questions. They never seem to ask why. Just how.

Ibn Arabi, the famous Murcian mystic, stated that the universe was the big man and that man was the little universe which in my book means that when you look at anything near or far or within or without, you are looking at a perfect reflection of yourself. This notion holds an infinity of wonders for anyone who bothers to reflect on it. It doesn’t need billions of dollars spent on hadron colliders or deep space probes. It requires nothing more than a pure heart. The human heart IS the telescope, the astrolabe, the hadron collider, the deep space probe and a whole lot more. Map the heart and you have mapped the universe. This is the secret well of knowledge and experience known to man down thousands of years but very much as the priesthood stole the direct access of the human being to his Originator, so the scientific experts have assumed that role and now dictate reality to a brain washed public their version of reality. A new kind of godless priesthood in a new kind of godless religion.

Real religion frees men and women from the notion of expertism. By this I mean that they no longer sit on a sofa watching others explaining, achieving, interpreting, experiencing, mediating, entertaining, but reclaim direct experience, their birthright, for themselves. Now if the words ‘real religion’ bothers you then let me expand. This is not the religion of outward obedience and show devoid of meaning but the discipline which grants the adherent acceptance and admission to a vision of reality as it is. I’m no scholar but expressing this doesn’t require scholarship. But it does require the company of men or women whose example leads to this knowledge and I can say no more than that.

March 5 2013

Posted in miscellaneous, typography / design | Tagged science | 1 Comment

Life is Transistory

Posted on December 20, 2012 by Ian Whiteman

The title of this post, a malapropism by an old buddy of mine many years ago, has now strangely become a reality.

Little switching devices (ie transistors) like the ones on the left, millions of which are embedded in all computer chips, have now flooded the world like the great deluge in the time of Noah. They have changed more of the world more rapidly than any previous man made phenomena ever did in history. The Ark of course, was the sanctuary for humanity, fauna and most likely the flora of the earth at that time, to save them from drowning.

This tiny chip (left) has 51 million transistors in it!

I have long thought that we need a sanctuary from the ill effects of all this deluge of technology that is changing people’s behaviour in the most dramatic ways. So what is this sanctuary?

Despite its plusses, much technology is destructive and one of the most pernicious and invisible technologies is what enables the surveillance society, the all-seeing eye of the state which has left great tranches of the population, knowingly or unknowingly in a state of fear and without computer technology this would not exist. Everyday the NSA in the USA logs billions of email and phone communications for its own nefarious ends, thanks to these trillions of little transistors which have now populated the planet in every electronic device.

A few weeks ago Glen Greenwald, an eloquent anti-surveillance activist blogged in the London Guardian about the misdemeanours of General Pitraeus, the ex- general and CIA director in waiting (no more) and how it was a demonstration of how the surveillance society, if left to get bigger and bigger would finally eat itself. Read his blog and see the video of himself as he unravels the way it all works. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/nov/13/petraeus-surveillance-state-fbi

My interest in this is not as an activist, as Greenwald is doing that pretty well, but in finding a religious perspective, because this is always the missing component in any public discourse like this. Fear is a well understood human emotion and one which has its uses and its pitfalls. Without it we would do the most stupid things like walk off cliffs or stick live electric cables in our mouths putting ourselves in mortal danger. But irrational fear has taken hold of populations at different times and is well known and well documented. My late father-in-law was one of the people who on hearing the radio broadcast in 1938 of Orson Wells’ The War of the Worlds, headed as fast as he could out of New York City in his car. It’s called mass hysteria and it is real.

I know quite a few people whose lives are currently and very topically ruled by fears of the apocalypse due tomorrow (at the time of writing) and there are great tranches of the public as well, some who I know personally, who drone on about it continually. All this seems to fit into a mindset of general conspiracy theories about reptiles who rule the earth and so on. A familiar and well populated territory. It seems to dovetail into a general avoidance of a kind of responsibility for their own lives and a failure to face up to problems that the end of the world or the coming Messiah will conveniently extirpate!

But when confronted directly with this I have a standard response:

When a man asked the noble Prophet of God “when is the Hour?”, he replied, “what have you prepared for it?” Wise words. The Prophet did not speculate about when or how or why. I just wonder if this apocalypse syndrome is a deep attachment to a world which is for each of us slipping away regardless of a coming apocalypse. Each of our lives, after all, has a determined span and we all have our own personal end awaiting us, the end of a transitory and now ever transistory world.

One of the spin-offs of this digital transistorised universe is the all-seeing eye of CCTV which is an interesting metaphor for an all-seeing and cognisant God who has no need of cameras and sees far deeper than peoples’ outward forms. Greenwald’s observations were that even if you have nothing to hide, the mere presence of cameras changes your behaviour and impedes your freedom which I believe is true. But there is another side to this. Forget the cameras, imagine that an unimaginable power has surveillance over your innermost thoughts and impulses. For sure that’s going to change your behaviour. And maybe for the good. Many of course would dismiss this notion but the same people will believe passionately that they are monitored excessively by an all-seeing but unseen government/corporate duopoly.

Interestingly there are several well known and recommended formulae from the Blessed Quran which are generally for protection but which are to do with vision and God’s power to contain all vision. In other words what is seen by human eyes is only what God permits to be seen. As I said before, this vision is more than the physical eye can perceive – it is a perception of all that is known. This kind of response for me is the only sanctuary I know against the technological flood under which humanity is currently drowning and the fears it inevitably creates in the hearts of men.

Seasons Greetings!

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A Worm in Your Ear

Posted on November 10, 2012 by Ian Whiteman

Ear worms crawl in your ear when you least expect and when you suddenly find yourself singing a melody in your head you didn’t really want to, over and over again. Apparently it is worse if you are musical. Worse if it’s a tune you have composed yourself. Mind you I’ve experienced this for many many years and developed a strategy for stopping it. This wormed its way into the news recently because a music researcher had approached the subject scientifically and was seeking a cure, but didn’t suggest anything revolutionary for dealing with it, in my eyes (or rather ears).

There are some useful practices that come from a metaphysical understanding of certain invisible influences that the human heart is exposed to. In Thomas Cleary’s English translation of The Qur’an (Starlatch 2002) his interesting interpretation of the word for Satan is The Obsessor, which is a long way from the traditional notion of the devil and the immediate image most people might have of a fiery horned beastly bogeyman with a tail who wreaks havoc on the earth. Or just not believing he exists at all, yet another devilish ploy. Just to fill you in, the devil, from Muslim tradition, definitely exists but is just one of several enemies to man and by no means the greatest. Without getting into the history of Satan’s refusal to bow down to man out of arrogance, it’s enough to explain that out of vengeance he vowed to lead man to destruction and to lead him away from worship of God till the end of time. But it is by deception, suggestion and whispering in the hearts of men and women (around whom he hovers) that he would accomplish this.

In fact the first gift we have from the Qur’an is protection from any influence of the devil, and it’s all from phrases seeking refuge with God from the devil. If you maintain physical purity and a knowledge of some basic verses of protection these Satanic suggestions are simply dealt with. Other influences like the endless thought impulses (the monkey mind) that beset all people, as well as love of the world are also enemies, but the ego or the self is traditionally considered the worst and most intransigent enemy of all. My own understanding of this is (and I don’t claim to be an expert) is that the evil of creation is something distinct and which it also necessary to seek protection from. There are many ways of protecting ourselves and our families from the many hazards of existence and I plan another blog on this subject in the future as it of primary importance and usefulness and a subject which I don’t think has been grasped by many people or explained in an accesible way by our various teachers and translators.

Back to ear worms. The above being so, any kind of obsessive thoughts like repetitive tunes can be dealt with in various ways either by repeating many times in Arabic “I seek refuge with Allah from the accursed Satan” but in Arabic: audhubillahi mina shaytan ar-rajeem.” Alternatively you can replace the tune in your head with a different tune from a purer spiritual source (eg an Andalusian or Turkish qasida melody or even, for example, a Provencal carol if you know any) – that’s what I usually do. When I used to spend a lot of time in recording studios where it was often necessary to do many takes of a song, that same song would often haunt me at night whilst trying to sleep and was quite horrible. People say the devil has the best tunes. Er…no. I think the devil himself must have suggested that idea to someone. Maybe he makes the best earworms. The devil might well concoct the most commercial tunes, but the best tunes are most certainly angelic, celestial tunes and why they disperse immediately that hellish suffocating feeling of being trapped in some earthly melody. So powerful are these earworms that people physically close to me, like my wife, will start humming or singing the very same tune if it is inhabiting my brain. Infectious ear worms no less.

Recently I found when I was out digging in my garden that I would always find myself singing ‘Hey Bungalow Bill who did you kill…‘ for no apparent reason, a song I really detest – or some other irritating repetitive tune , so I would be forced to take steps (described above) to rid my head of it although it would slip back if I wasn’t careful. It has become a useful kind of meter to gauge just how awake I am. It is as if the tongue is meant to be doing something at any given time and of course if you look hard enough you will find advice from many teachers and scholars who counsel you to keep the tongue repeating at all times the various Qur’anic Arabic formulae well known to the Muslims which have been handed down from a very long time ago. It is what stops the mind (and the body) from wandering and so is of enormous benefit.

There is much on the internet on this subject eg http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17302237

but I felt it necessary to give a religious perspective. If you have a way of dealing with earworms then email:

earwormcures@gmail.com who are constructing a database on this subject.

Posted in miscellaneous, music, religion, tassawuf | 2 Comments

The Quirkylympics 2012

Posted on September 20, 2012 by Ian Whiteman

Readers may be aware I have an ongoing fascination with lettering, fonts, branding, logos etc., and so I followed the recent Olympics with some curiosity as, like many others I suspect,
I was acutely aware of its strange logo and typeface and wondered what it all meant. So I commenced to do a bit of research into the history of the Olympic Games and what has shaped its current form and its ruthless corporate Mac-Cola culture. We are now at a safe distance I hope, to make some cool headed observations.

Reference has been made by several commentators to the 1936 Berlin Games likening aspects to the 2012 version and I have wondered if there was anything in this. If you look far enough you find of course various conspiracy theories linking it to the Illuminati and so on but many aspects of the current Olympics, like its insistence on complete racial and sexual equality and comprehensive national representation would have been detested by the Nazis. What was prototyped in the 1936 games was more to do with the big event which Hitler was already using in his Nuremberg type political rallies in which loud PA systems and huge swastikas dominated the ecstatic militarised crowds and its brainwashing effect on the masses in a time before television and to somehow make Hitlerian politics acceptable.

The Berlin Games were crucially used by the Nazis to embolden themselves on the world stage coming out of a time of terrible depression, isolation and political turbulence. They entered the most athletes in the competition and won the most medals. But Hitler had to also endure the black Jesse Owens winning the 100m. Already concentration camps like Dachau were up and running and gypsies, Jews, homosexuals and non-Aryans were being rounded up and ‘separated’ from the main population.

The Weimar Republic’s worship of the human form (not the first in history by a long shot) happened to coincide with the rise of fascism but wasn’t, it appears, linked initially. But it did blend quite conveniently with Hitler’s desire to create the perfect Aryan human, the defining philosophy of Nazism and the cult of the superman, based primarily on the Darwinian idea of survival of the strong over the weak. No compassion there.

As I see it, any sporting event (like the Olympics) is only ever about the winner. The consequence is of course the egregious triumphalism that we witnessed over the few weeks of the Olympics along with spandex clad athletes punching air and emoting very visibly, but with few being able to string two words together when spoken to. Fastest in the world maybe but not the sharpest knives in the draw – with a few exceptions. Dumbed down but gifted, muscular athletes in other words but at least not discriminated against because of God-given attributes like race or religion or disability. However you only got interviewed if you spoke English. Not much effort made by the BBC to talk to Chinese gymnast gold medallists or Algerian gold medallist sprinters.

But of course at times the Olympic Events are naturally very exciting. You can only admire the dedication of these athletes in their endless years of painful training for the passing glory of the podium. Some events are quite spectacular and exciting I freely admit, but the massive packaging of the event with its underlying commercialism undermines any long lasting value it might have in my view. Is it really going to reduce obesity in the west to have the masses watching it on TV on their sofas? The excuse is that it will get people into sport and exercise….some people. But a games heavily sponsored by Macdonalds (fat) and CocaCola (sugar), the two main pillars of the Obese Society is really a sick joke which exposes the kind of fathomless hypocrisy that modern Olympics has embraced.

There was much that was tested out in the Weimar Republic leading up to the Second World war in 1939. It was a great social, economic and technological laboratory in which much that we take for granted as a norm in the post war world was thought up and put into practice. It was the most advanced scientific and technological society of the time. Film buffs may remember the scene in The Life of Brian when John Cleese says “what did the Romans do for us?” The apologists for Hitler remind us he built motorways and built cars, like the VW, for everyone amongst much else. But Mercedes and VW and the autobahns were inevitably part of the war machine. The whole model of a modern materialistic and socialistic society was being tested out in a grand fashion like a great experiment. This was the third Reich which was to last a thousand years.

If you can ever find a copy of the English language magazine Signal, a German propaganda magazine, which may have come into Britain via the Irish Republic during WW2 anytime between 1940 and 1945, you will be astonished by its similarity to Life magazine of post war America. In full colour filled with ads for Agfa cameras, Mercedes Benz cars intermingled with friendly fireside chats with the Führer explaining why gypsies would be happier somewhere outside Germany. The rare edition I saw had as a centre spread an artist’s impression of the new ideal German city (part of this is in the attached illustration). It could be Milton Keynes with motorways and business parks etc., except for the fact that in the sports stadium on the right, a great Nazi rally was taking place with men marching around with their arms raised in the roman salute with great Swastikas emblazoned everywhere and enormous German eagles on posts overseeing the crowds.

Back to the funny Olympic graphics and the £800,000 logo by Wolf Olins, a big design company in London. Generally disliked but foisted on the public who in the end had to put up with it like some unwelcome wart.

Hidden in the logo was the word London in a font called Headline which has regularly featured in a list of the World’s Worst Fonts. When I first saw it I thought it looked like a reject student concept from a second rate art school. But of course the Olympics does not stand for tradition, permanence or artistic achievement but purely for the quest for the winner, the superman/woman and for that you need an ever shifting stage, a new city, new enthusiasm, new money, new records to be broken, new technology and most importantly a new audience to hypnotise with ever more high definition TV. If the graphic concept is slapdash or ugly it matters not, as it adds to the impermanence of it all like a chocolate wrapper. My personal opinions aside though, I have to admit the TV coverage of Olympics and Paralympics was incredibly slick (close-ups of expectant fingers!) and such a huge event so impeccably organised, but why was there so little dissent by the public, who must have got a bit sick of such a surfeit of limbs, Union Jacks and sweating bodies.

Ian Sinclair, the writer who knows the Lea Valley (the site of the Olympic Park) better than anyone, described the Olympic Park in East London as a giant hallucination, I also know the Lea Valley well, having passed through it on the train into Liverpool Street since I was a boy. Beautiful nature reserves were obliterated to make way for the most ugly Macdonalds imaginable surrounded by a concrete wasteland. Soon to be left empty as the big circus moves on to the next Olympic City. The imprint of the great corporate steamroller as it groans around the world titivating the public with its silly pink graphics, firework displays entertained in London that is, by the poster boy of an illiterate grunting world monoculture: Mr Bean.

No one was allowed to express any criticism of the Olympics whilst they were in motion, and the few that did, like the Mancunian singer, Morrisey were soon silenced and smothered. But how many, I wondered, held secret thoughts like I did, that this was just a celebration of corporatism, nationalism and let’s be candid, rank idolatory on a massive scale which brooked no criticism from anyone. “Put down the Pepsi and no-one will get hurt” was the inspired Private Eye cover of two heavily armed policemen outside the main stadium. Furthermore the idea I mentioned earlier of the Superhuman ideal was further rammed home in the Paralympics, whose contestants must have felt utterly patronised knowing that they could never attain the perfect physical Olympian Grecian ideal. Obviously there were inevitably good things that happened and in no way can I denigrate anyone who overcomes disability or disadvantage to succeed in whatever. But I’m looking at a bigger picture and trying to make sense of it.

The link below is to an interesting development of some of these notions, which the above was not based on but which I just found assembling this post and thought worth pointing you towards.

http://wingsland.podgamer.com/weekend-the-olympic-rallies/ by Scott Minto

Posted in typography / design | 2 Comments

More from Sarajevo 1997

Posted on September 11, 2012 by Ian Whiteman

Bosnian Hafiz Alili recites here (mp3s below) some opening ayats of Sura Rahman which opened the Yusuf Islam concert put on in Sarajevo in 1997 to help promote Bosnian culture in war-wracked Bosnia two years after the war finished. Maybe it was because I was there, but this recital never fails to open that magical door into the Bosnian universe when I hear it. His style is uniquely Bosnian as far as I know and is permeated with the sheer himma (the only word I could come up with in this case) that the Bosnians have in bucket loads. This is a continuation of the post I put up last year entitled Goosepimples in Sarajevo, which gave some background to the visit we made at that time, and I promised I would upload more material. I have recently been digging up other tracks from the concert, some of which is on this post. I also added here an excerpt of Hafiz Alili singing Shaheed which was, in its more pop format, a hit song during the war. I have also added another song I sang in the concert (rather nervously) called Bird in God’s Garden which originally appeared on the Habibiyya LP in 1971.(now available even on Itunes but also on CD from Sunbeam Records in London.)

On future posts I will put up some of the choral and orchestral tracks from the concert which are very moving. Traditional Bosnian music does need some getting used to but has certain unique qualities which I will try and discuss. Some of this material made its way on to Youtube but I find it quite difficult to watch.

Part of Sura Rahman – Hafiz Alili

Hafiz Alili – Shaheed excerpt

Bird in God’s Garden – Sarajevo

Posted in language, miscellaneous, music, religion, tassawuf, Uncategorized | Tagged Bird in Gods Garden, Bosnian culture, Hafiz Alili, Sarajevo Concert, Yusuf Islam | 2 Comments

The Vanishing Sign Writer

Posted on August 27, 2012 by Ian Whiteman

Much as I have championed skilful type design I am also saddened that the type font has virtually wiped out the sign writer’s craft. Hand lettering on shops, vans and on sign posts and name plates has all but disappeared in the west and only in a few places does it persist. I’m not talking just about the professional sign writer who may still get the odd art job here and there and who will be identified by the ball and stick he wields to guide his hand as he deftly applies paint and gold leaf while up a ladder in a busy street – but also I mean the homemade variety of lettering you would see on a butchers’ shop window done in a traditional style with some easily removable white paint – “chump chops today £2 only”. In the ever encroaching standardised branded shop sign conceived in some ad agency, the hand-executed sign nonetheless sticks out a mile. Because it is unique and individual and sticks in your mind.

I always recall from the 1960s, seeing on a butchers shop window in Camden Town, London on the 24 bus route as I passed by everyday, hand-blazoned on the glass with white paint: The Eat Meat for Heat Meat Boutique. The wording would change weekly as the owner poetically came up with another pithy phrase. It was his little blog for the passing population to wonder at. At top down corporate level this could never happen – of course.

Sign writers do still exist but often do commercial vinyl cut or silk screen typeset signs as well, though the purists would never venture into such technology. When you see handsome freshly made gold- leafed lettering the eye is drawn to it as it reflects light in unusual ways especially on black or dark green. And you momentarily look into the artistic soul of the artist. It is an art form which I admire which makes the plasticized variety look very bland. Not that there is no art in the ad agency brand. It just lacks soul.

I’ve done a few shop signs in my time, The Poor Mans Trading Company in Bristol Gardens, Maida Vale, London back in the 1970s….(no pictures, sorry). And The Strangers Wool Shop in Norwich in the late 1970s and a whole raft of section signs for the actor Michael Gough’s antiquarian bookshop in Holt, Norfolk in that period when one did whatever job came through the door. I had to just invent the rules as I went along but a knowledge of roman lettering really helped. The work I did wasn’t that good, as I was aiming high and fell short, but nonetheless it possessed a uniqueness that regular type would not possess no matter how well machine executed.

If you wander around the Cambridge Colleges you will see beautifully small hand lettered name plates in white on black, black on white or even gold on black–on the doors of some professors and also on the sign boards of the more exclusive shops. Down here in Spain you will still see artful hand painted letters on many a white wall advertising a car workshop or a restaurant. In Granada, Spain (my local city) you can still see pre-technological original sign art from 50-100 years ago. On the many family owned businesses (no Starbucks yet) you will see echoes of the old, probably Franco period, of commercial signs. But the mark of the corporation jackboot I’m afraid increases yearly with Zara, H&M, and Apple who have arrived in the last few years in this beautiful old city…oh and Dunkin Donuts which has looked very out of place and unpatronised since it opened. The Spanish prefer churros, did no-one tell them …!

I have a remarkable book about the designer and American artist Oswald Cooper who hailed from Chicago at the beginning of the last century. His way of producing a newspaper ad or some promotional literature was to letter it by hand and where needed draw the product as well (see illustrations below). He was so good that the metal type houses bought his letter designs, one which became a famous typeface to this day: Cooper Bold, which you all know. Easyjet; the credits of Dads Army and so on.

Oswald Cooper

Cooper Bold is a strangely timeless typeface, easily recognisable at any size and slightly comic and chubby but very readable. Part of the great lexicon of western typestyles. He was a commercial artist which was common-speak in those days for a non-artist, an attitude which was prevalent until the 1960s when they (we) became graphic designers. It was a reminder that everything we see printed or projected on our screens was once hand created. The best art for me is something that is unique, un-copied, un-reproduced, a record of the unique moment in time it was created and painted. This is the humanity you see in the hand painted signs that, in the developed corporate world, are getting rare. Go to India or many parts of the third world you will still see that colourful blast of life.

Posted in language, Publishing, typography / design, Uncategorized | Tagged corporate jackboot, Oswald Cooper, sign writing, type design | 5 Comments

Flight from the Actual

Posted on July 20, 2012 by Ian Whiteman

I am one of the many who embraced each new technology as it presented itself over the last 50 years. It included multi-track analogue audio recording and phototypesetting in the 1960s, digital audio recording, digital cameras and mobile phones in the 1980s and finally computers in their total conquest of everything in the 1990s and beyond. I know people, often skilled craftsmen who rejected such innovations to defend their crafts but whose knowledge we have all personally benefitted from nonetheless borrowing from their experience to inspire our own work. But of late I have had time to reflect on where it is going, where it has come from and whether it is all such a good thing.

Whether you examine photography, audio recording or printing in all their many manifestations, there is one fundamental process which is taking place. It’s all to do with reproducing an original in some form…a photograph, a printed book, an audio recording or a film. The original in each case has been borrowed and recreated and in recent years more than likely edited and manipulated on a computer. Students of muslim law often get exercised about photography and whether or not it is legitimate to ‘take’ the image of a person. Our ancestors resisted photography and only capitulated by allowing only very serious portraits in their best clothes, rarely smiling. We know the argument often presented that it is creating an image which the photographer cannot bring to life…the Qur’anic challenge…but defended by photographers as being only a frozen reflection of God’s creation. But like it or not, photography, film and printing almost immediately engendered pornography, alienating people yet further from the actual. No wonder the modern porn-saturated masses have such dysfunctional sex lives.

Although photography of a living person is contentious I would add that copying original calligraphy is equally contentious as the copy appears dead by comparison. The living moment when that calligraphy was written has been removed, aped. Not long ago in Morocco, if you wanted a copy of a book or poem you would have to buy a handwritten manuscript or copy it yourself by hand. (or memorise it) The page of the Burda illustrated here (below) I have often shown to illustrate a hand written copy I can only imagine was made to order by a scribe or carefully copied by someone who wanted it badly enough. Maybe a 150 years ago.

Similarly an audio recording is, in its simplest form, a recording of an original performance or sound for replay later. This was accepted as a wonder unquestioned by those who first heard such things. Why was the recording considered so wonderful over and above the original? My own mother was awed as a child around 1912, a hundred years ago, by the crackling sound of the Moonlight sonata by Beethoven emerging from one of those enormous horns which were attached to the early wax cylinder phonographs. She was quite capable of playing it well on a piano which was to be found in most Victorian or Edwardian homes. But then I was infatuated in the 1960s with stereo, quadrophonic, polyphonic audio and so on until at a certain point in the early 1970s I asked myself why I was trying to recreate something which you can appreciate just sitting in the middle of a field with all your senses wide awake. In the moment – not looking backwards or forwards.

Why are we fascinated and dazzled by something removed from its origin, even more so when it is reproduced many miles away by radio or television. The internet has of course compounded this phenomena in a huge way. I heard speak of an English jazz pianist who was an early Muslim convert, named Ismael Hobson, who played with all the great names in New York in the 1950s but who refused at all times to be recorded believing that it was sacrilege to try and reproduce such live spontaneous music. This is anecdotal but from a trustworthy source and I would be interested in any more information regarding his life. I like the idea.

Mea culpa. As I confessed at the outset I’m guilty of embracing all this reproductive technology and I know all its ins and outs having worked over a lifetime in music, film, photography and printing. But more and more I would like to return to a more live condition where everything can be appreciated in the present tense, not obsessing about recording it or photographing it (or selling it). Nothing can be enforced, quite clearly, but I can envisage a future time when people have more manners and don’t photograph you in that unsolicited fashion when you have a mouthful of couscous or worse when you might be laughing or sleeping. It is a real intrusion and I know I am not alone in thinking this.

So I’m calling for a return to the actual as opposed to the uninhibited flight from the actual which is what has happened exponentially since WW2 . Photograph that view in your heart; remember that face without the need for the dreaded Facebook which has opened the flood gates to a kind of narcisistic virtual society in which no one appears to value privacy or even modesty. Go see the Shakespeare play, not the DVD; learn to play the Moonlight sonata from the sheet music. That is true re-creation. The only way you might stop your own children/grandchildren becoming total couch potato wedges. Better to write that peice of calligraphy badly yourself than to swoon at the master’s work and do nothing yourself.

I used to love writing letters in my best italic hand but now I dash of emails quicker than I can think. I got my first job by virtue of my hand writing with an architect in Cambridge in 1963, who liked my italic script. Now it counts for little and my handwriting has descended into a horrible scrawl. I doubt if I will see in my life time a return to the actual but you never know. Live music is returning as the only way a professional musician can earn a living as recorded music produces so little profit because of pirating. Which begs the question, should the mass production of books, music, films etcetera, be allowed to make huge wealth for people? Especially when popularity can be hyped so easily. Is the volume of sales the only arbiter of virtue left now? I don’t have the answers but the market may decide in the end. Giving it all away may be the only way. Maybe authors should earn their living reading their books live to an audience. That would shak’em up.

Lastly I don’t want to appear like the Luddites, those lace makers from Nottingham who saw that lace making machines were a threat to their living (they were right) so began smashing them up. In the giant plugged in universe we live in I believe it’s unrealistic to un-plug (even if one was to go off-grid) and in truth the internet has many, many uses. It’s just a phenomenon and a weapon of this time and we just have to learn to use it and other techno properly. And have some manners when we take pictures or stick a microphone in someones face.•

Posted in miscellaneous, music, Publishing, religion, typography / design | 1 Comment