Poetic Thought
Chidi Anthony Opara, FIIM
From his high podium
The haughty Poet
Screams
"Obi-tuary".
The enraged mob
Hollers
"Death"! "death"! "death"!
The moderates explain
"Metaphor".
"Meta what?"
The enraged mob
Demand,
And continues to holler.
(C) Chidi Anthony Opara
#2022poeticthought
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Chidi Anthony Opara is a Poet, IIM Professional Fellow, MIT Chief Data Officer Ambassador and Founder/Publisher of, www.publicinformationprojects.org)
Chidi Anthony Opara, FIIM
Olasupo Laosebikan
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Chidi Anthony Opara, FIIM
Harrow, Kenneth
kenneth harrow
professor emeritus
dept of english
michigan state university
Sent: Sunday, August 14, 2022 3:51 AM
To: USA African Dialogue Series <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Poetic Thought
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Cornelius Hamelberg
On this people’s planet, Julius Caesar was stabbed 23 times and died on the spot, in a pool of blood on the Senate floor. Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie, no stranger to death threats, was stabbed 15 times and survived.
Israel National News and The Jerusalem Post were among the first to commiserate with the author of the accursed Verses of Satan who narrowly escaped death. It could be unreasonable to expect that the Ayatollahs and Revolutionary Guards should be shedding any crocodile tears, rather it would have been more reasonable and appropriate to believe that if Rushdie had perished in the attack there would have been some open celebrations and much rejoicing in those quarters in the name of loving and hating for the sake of Allah!
In trying to catch up with the conversation about the latest atrocity, namely the reprehensible butchering of Salman Rushdie in an attempted assassination which was ably perpetrated on American soil, perhaps, due to a lapse in security, some questions have to be answered and a few background matters have to be clarified, to grasp the bigger picture.
Some actions - good or bad - are to be judged by the fallout. In this case, at this precipitous moment, all eyes are back on the Islamic Republic of Iran from where the original fatwa was issued. Today, it’s worth repeating that this one thing’s for sure: you’ll not find any crocodile tears pouring or falling out of the eyes of the Ayatollahs.
In the meantime, Chidi and poetry are at liberty to conspire and coincide with reality or divert from the Ayatollahs’ emotional realities, instability, and, given all the freedom of speech and the uncertainties that the Hereafter can offer them, Chidi and poetry, PEN member Kenneth Harrow and Tony Adepoju the cosmologist who would like to distribute free copies of Rushdie’s Verses so that the readers as judges eventually know what the hell they are talking about, these three gentlemen are also at liberty to subjectively or objectively represent or misrepresent, to their heart's content, the meaning of the whole bloody scene over there in New York and the forces of the long since rescinded death-penalty fatwa, the Islamic Republic of Iran having withdrawn the forces of opprobrium and the bounty money that was supposed to reward the he, she or transgender, whoever it be who would fulfil the command-ment, “death to Rush-die”
I had read and enjoyed some of the linguistic frequencies in “ Midnight’s Children” and what I then regarded as an iconoclastic phantasmagoria entitled “The Satanic Verses”, at least a full year before the fatwa was issued. It was during a very intense, hectic period during which I was a student of Dr. Javad Nurbakhsh and a frequent visitor to him in London - I visited him seven times in 1988 and once in Cologne when he opened a new Khanqah there and was privileged to meet Annemarie Schimmel there that same year. I can only guess how Dr. Nurbakhsh or Seyyed Hossein Nasr - another visitor I met in London that year or his beloved son Dr. Alireza Nurbakhsh - the current Pir - who back then presented me with some precious recordings of classical Iranian music, I wonder - back then, what fellow travellers Lenny Lewishon and Terry Graham thought about the fatwa on Rushdie’s authorship attempting to portray the battle between good and evil. Especially Terry who was very vocally scornful of what he often referred to as “ legalisms”...
It looks like Hadi Matar is a lone lunatic still nursing a grudge based on a fatwa that will surely be attributed as a motive, even if the fatwas was issued a few decades before he was born and the fervour had died down since; but since Mr Matar is of Lebanese ancestry, the fertile imagination of conspiracy theorists will probably want to link him up with a chain of command stretching back to Sheikh Nasrallah of Hezbollah that is currently foaming at the mouth about “obliterating” the holy Land. Probably time for Sheikh Nasrallah to go back into hiding….
Since in the public imagination, the crime is associated with what was once the contract on Rushdie’s head, the main question here is, is there any reason why Iran should be anxious to draw such negative attention to itself in the present circumstances - in the context of all the other uncertainties - the failure to achieve an agreeable nuclear deal with The Great Satan - the possibility of more punitive sanctions on an already cash strapped economy- like sanctions still being imposed on Russia, the Abraham Accords - brokered by Trump, the standoff between Iran and their main regional enemies namely the Saudis plus the Gulf States, and not least of all, the current ( 2022) precarious Israel - Iran relations and the volatile Hezbollah - Israel tensions which can flare into an all-out war at any time - mainly due to - despite Lebanon's devastated economy which is presently on life support, Hezbollah’s overconfidence and their underestimating their adversary…
Today, what can, could, would, should, Iran benefit by drawing this kind of hostile attention to itself? To tell you the honest truth, at first, I thought that it was some underhand machinations directed at Rishi Sunak - to throw him into the limelight - another British Indian featuring so prominently in International relations…
Rushdie’s claim to fame, The Satanic Verses was published at a time when tensions were still running high between the The Revolutionary Islamic Republic of Iran and the Wild West - in the aftermath of the eight-year-long Iraq - Iran War which was kick-started by Saddam when he invaded Iran, occupied and destroyed much of Iran’s oil refineries in Abadan in the Siege of Abadan - it took the stalwart Iranian’s a whole year to kick Saddam’s devils out of that town, - and don’t forget that during the whole of that war, Saddam was supported by the aforementioned Wild West in league with the major Sunni Arab nations, with the exception of Gaddafi's Libya. During that war, Kuwait which also has a sizable Shia minority population was ostensibly paying “protection money” to Saddam - ironically, to shield them from their good friend Iran - and after the war, Kuwait’s refusal or reluctance or inability to pay the outstanding “protection money” resulted in Saddam invading and occupying Kuwait. In the meantime, according to a conservative estimate, by the end of the war, Saddam himself was owing more than $800 billion to Uncle Sam and allies who had bankrolled Saddam’s war effort - in fact, the war came to an end at the point where Iran could not buy or obtain much-needed weapons from anywhere, not even China or Brazil; some guys in the know were already dancing in anticipation of Iran's Impending “defeat”, a full year earlier; now we know that Iran, having learned that lesson is in no hurry to allow that to happen again. As fate would have it, the Ayatollahs prayed to Heaven, Uncle Sam invaded Iraq, and eventually, Saddam of Halabja infamy was hanged. Of course, if Saddam had indeed been in possession of any weapons of mass destruction, Baby Bush would not have invaded Iraq or engaged in other wars at the exorbitant cost detailed here - just as Mr Biden would think more than twice before invading North Korea, or China, or a nuclear-armed Iran.
What has all this got to do with the attempt on Rushdie’s life? Maybe, absolutely nothing, if we think that Rushdie represents the freedom of speech that some people so despise…
Chidi Anthony Opara, FIIM
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Harrow, Kenneth
kenneth harrow
professor emeritus
dept of english
michigan state university
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Poetic Thought
Harrow, Kenneth
"The fatwa remains active, and although Iran's government has distanced itself from Mr Khomeini's decree, a quasi-official Iranian religious foundation added a further $500,000 to the reward in 2012."
kenneth harrow
professor emeritus
dept of english
michigan state university
Sent: Monday, August 15, 2022 5:21 AM
Oluwatoyin Adepoju
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Chidi Anthony Opara is a Poet, IIM Professional Fellow, MIT Chief Data Officer Ambassador and Founder/Publisher of, www.publicinformationprojects.org)
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Cornelius Hamelberg
Chidi,
As you may have heard, Iran has issued a statement dementing any suggestion that they are in any way connected to the attack on Salman Rushdie
About the fatwa - suppose the fatwa had not been issued and they had sent a commando unit to liquidate Rushdie instead - then the unsuspecting Rushdie would have been done and gone a long time ago with an R. I.P. after his name and out of sympathy, would have probably been awarded the Nobel Prize for Services rendered to Literature, posthumously., just to further irritate the Ayatollahs.
Incidentally, Rushdie has the same name as one of the more favoured Sahaba in the history books of Shia Islam, namely, Salman al-Farsi ( Salman the Persian) - and should you eventually read Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses - bearing in mind the historical role played by the Salman al Farsi, you should understand that the unflattering role assigned to him by his namesake would have proved to be quite annoying to the average, pious, Shia Mumin.
I gathered that much and much more on a first reading and on a more careful second reading after the fatwa had been passed on his head and on the heads of the publishers and distributors.
On my first day at work at the library at Banérgatan, I was given a pile of books, with The Satanic Verses at the top: I suppose that my boss wanted to see whether I was going to set fire to it - as my own chosen form of literary criticism: I did not light it up. At noon, I asked if there was a place where I could pray and one of the muzungus working there said yes, and took me to the toilet, opened the door and told me that I could pray there. Now, if I had daggered the God-forsaken son of a bitch, Baba Kadiri would have read in the Swedish tabloids that even practising Sufis are violent people…
But you are right, even after the fatwa was recalled, the stigma from that fatwa still stuck on Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie.
Take the case of the late Lars Vilks, did anyone put out a contract on him?
To the silver-tongued Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju: Dr Javad Nurbakhsh told me - and also wrote somewhere - I think “ In the Paradise of the Sufis” , that after the Prophet of Islam, salallahu alaihi wa salaam blessed the Hereafter, the nascent Islamic community split into three: The Arab nationalists became the Sunnis, the partisans of Ali ibn Talib - alaihi salaam became the Shia, and the custodians of the esoteric aspect of Islam are still known as the Sufis….and of course, Ali was the leader of that caravan.
Dr Nurbakhsh often spoke about Shams i Tabrizi
I sometimes think of Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju in connection with Mevlana’s first meeting with Shams and on a more mundane level in connection with some of the book-people among us, of “The Tables Turned “
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