February 2014 – Page 3

tahrid: women inciting men to kill other men

Pre-Islamic Arabic poets wrote a genre of poetry called tahrid. In tahrid, a woman incites her male kinsmen to avenge the death of a fallen kinsman. One way to incite men to violence is to assail their masculinity. An Arabic poem attributed to a pre-Islamic woman poet urged violence in that way:

If you will not seek vengeance for your brother,
Take off your weapons
And fling them on the flinty ground.
Take up the eye pencil, don the camisole,
Dress yourself in women’s bodices!
What wretched kin you are to a kinsman oppressed!
You have been diverted from avenging your brother
By a bite of minced meat,
A lick of meager milk. [1]

Shaming men can also incite them to violence. Another women’s tahrid from pre-Islamic poetry declared:

For if you don’t attack those tribesmen
In a morning raid that is the talk
Of all who go to water and return,
And deal the Banū ʻUqayl a blow
After which nothing of them remains,
Then be like slave girls defiled
By every hand. [2]

Sex isn’t socially constructed, but social status is. In culturally elaborate societies, women determine who occupies what position in the social hierarchy ranging from male leaders to the lowest-status slave girls. Women rule through beautiful young women’s sexual allure and mothers’ shaming. Men yearn to hear, “I am pleased with you”:

{Durayd’s mother} said to Durayd, “My son, if you are unable to seek vengeance for your brother, then seek help from your maternal uncle and his band of Zubayd.” This made him ashamed, so he swore not to put on kohl, anoint himself, eat meat, or drink wine until he had his vengeance. Then he carried out the raid, brought her Dhuʼāb ibn Asmāʼ, and slew him in the courtyard, saying, “Have I brought you what you wanted?” “Yes,” she replied, “and I am pleased with you.” [3]

Men are much more likely to be victims of violence than women are. Horrific violence against men is a staple of comedy. U.S. Selective Service registration continues as if men were naturally fit for being killed, while scholars obfuscate deadly discrimination against men rather than condemn it. If you were to listen to men, occasionally you might hear the surprising voice of a self-conscious man:

Then we, no doubt, are meat for the sword
and, doubtless, sometimes
we feed it meat.
By a foe bent on vengeance, we are attacked,
our fall his cure; or we, vengeance-bent,
attack the foe.
Thus have we divided time in two,
between us and our foe,
till not a day goes by but we’re
in one half or the other. [4]

Women’s tahrid is a poetic go-between connecting a community’s times of men killing men and men being killed by men. Women’s tahrid is mirrored poetically in the figure of the hyena. The hyena enters the battlefield after the violence has stopped. The hyena laughs over the slain men, copulates ecstatically with their dead bodies, and feeds on them.[5]

Violence against men has continued from pre-Islamic times to the present. Violence against men will end with new poetry that out-sings women’s tahrid and chases away the hyenas.

scene of battle, from Hamzanama

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Notes:

[1] Umm ʻAmr bint Waqdāh, Hamāsiyyay n. 671, Take up the Eye Pencil!, from Arabic trans. Stetkevych (1993) p. 196. The more general Arabic poetic genre of incitement includes incitement to war (tahmis) and incitement to blood vengeance (taḥrīḍ). In early Arabic poetry, female poets dominate speaking / writing both tahmis and tahrid. Tahrid is properly written as taḥrīḍ. I’ve used the simpler form for accessibility.

[2] Hind bint Hudhayfah ibn Badr al-Fazārī, marthiyah Ever-Attendant Cares, excerpt, trans. id. p. 198.

[3] Anecdote from Kitāb al-Aghānī, transmitted by Ibn al-Kalbī, trans. id. p. 74.

[4] Durayd ibn al-Simmah, Hamāsiyyay n. 272, excerpt, trans. id. p. 63.

[5] Rithāʼ of Taʼabbata Sharran, l. 25, trans. id. p. 60; Maʻshar Has Been Deserted of Its People, l. 11, trans. id. p. 76. In his Kitāb al-Hayawān, al-Jāhiz states:

It used to be claimed that, when a man’s head was cut off, he would fall on his face. Then, when his corpse bloated, his penis would swell and become erect and enlarged so that it would roll him over on his back. Then, when the female hyena came to eat him and saw him in this state and saw his penis in this condition, she would try to have intercourse with him and satisfy her need in this manner. Then she would eat the man after this had gratified her more than coupling with a male hyena. One of the desert Arabs said that he had witnessed {a female hyena} doing this and also coupling with her mate and discovered that in the former state she thrashed about and cried out, whereas with the male hyena she did not.

Trans. id. p. 79. Female hyenas have folded-over, impenetrable labia that resemble a male’s scrotum. They have sex through their elongated clitoris (pseudo-penis). See information about hyenas.

[image] “A veiled youth arrives and slays Marku’ Boar-Tooth,” from Hamzanama, India, Mughal Dynasty, c. 1570, from Seyller & Thackston (2002) p. 137.

References:

Seyller, John William, and W. M. Thackston. 2002. The adventures of Hamza: painting and storytelling in Mughal India. Washington, DC: Freer Gallery of Art.

Stetkevych, Suzanne Pinckney. 1993. The mute immortals speak: pre-Islamic poetry and the poetics of ritual. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

fine lovely chainse: beta knight gets bloody for lady

About two millennia ago, Ovid, the great teacher of love, taught men not to be slaves to the one beloved and not to imagine that women are chaste beings far above men’s immoral plain. But men throughout history have not only chosen ignorance and stupidity, but also have celebrated that as nobility. They called it fin’amor (“fine love”). Jacques de Baisieux’s mid-thirteenth-century courtly nouvelle, Des trois Chevaliers et del Chainse (The Three Knights and the Chainse) marks a high point in the literature of fin’amor, the literature of men’s idiocy.[1]

Three knights arrived for a jousting tournament. All fell in love with a noble lady of the court hosting the tournament. She was married to a young, rich, courtly lord. He was generous to all, well-liked by his household and neighbors, but not a fighting man. Each of the three knights pleaded his love to that man’s wife. She did not take any of them as a lover. She seems to have refused them for the cruel pleasure of sexual refusal rather than for faithful love of her husband.

The lady subsequently proposed an ordeal for her knight-suitors. She instructed one of her squires to present one of her chainses (a long white gown) to a particular knight that she named. She told the squire to tell that knight that if he wanted to show his love for her, he should fight wearing the chainse and no armor other than a helmet. The knight who was the lady’s first choice at first accepted the chainse. But after considering the grave danger of fighting without body armor, he sent the chainse back to the lady. The lady instructed the squire to present the chainse and propose the ordeal to her second choice among her knight-suitors. That knight refused to accept the chainse. The chainse was then presented to the lady’s third choice, a knight who had little money. That knight joyously accepted the chainse and sent thanks to the lady “for the beautiful gift.” It was a gift sent from a rich lady in default to her last choice among the three knights.

The knight with the chainse was ecstatic about the upcoming battles in which he was sure to suffer grievous bodily injuries. He imagined himself with the love of the lady:

The chainse was tightly embraced by the young man. He had kissed it very tenderly more than a thousand times during the night and said that well before the onset of darkness he would give such battle that never would have been a lady for whom such was done. Great his joy and enjoyment. He praised Love for having honored him so. Cowardice, in whom Fear grows, reminded him of the steel blades his flanks would be cut with. “At no time have shoulders and sides received blows such as you will receive, young man. Your prowess will be in vain. For trickery and deception your flesh is dead and your soul lost: you lost both God and the world.” His entire flesh shook and trembled because of what Fear had told him, but his heart took no account of it, for his heart held pain as nothing. … he must have his flesh hacked away so he can receive these many delights {of the lady’s love}.[2]

In the tournament, the knight’s body was sorely wounded, but he continued rushing into fights:

So much was his flesh cut in pieces that the entire chainse was bathed in blood. Each one who saw him spared him, but this was not his will. It caused him to sorrow that he could find no one to exchange blows with because of the torment of his wounds. From adversary to adversary he runs. Always he remembers his lady love who sent him the chainse. He maintained himself well as a lover. So much was he beaten and wounded that much of his strength was lost. … In thirty places he was cruelly cut, but he never admitted defeat.

There is a direct line from this idiocy to international organization’s reports on gender gaps in lifespan. The knight was awarded the prize at the tournament. In reality, he was a total loser. The lady paid for his expenses and took him as a lover. While the story doesn’t specify the love that the lady directed the knight to provide, he wasn’t satisfied with their personal love.

Right before a subsequent feast and tournament at the lady’s court, the wounded knight sent the lady the bloody chainse and requested that she wear it when she served the guests. No one knew that the chainse had come from that lady. Everyone knew the knight who had worn the chainse during the previous tournament and who had been severely wounded. The lady accepted the chainse:

She said that however much it was soaked with the blood of her faithful lover, she considered the chainse a royal garment. For neither refined gold nor precious stones could be so dear as the blood it was stained with. She said she would attire herself with it before serving wine or meat since her sweetheart requested it.

More than the riches of her husband, the lady coveted blood from a man’s wounds. Wearing the bloody chainse, she was a center of attention at the feast:

Each one at the feast spoke of the lady’s attire, most especially those whom she served. They said that she deserved to be dishonored, for she dressed in this way to do honor to a simple knight. They knew very well that her lord {her husband} never engaged in combat. Everybody wept with warm tears, for they thought she had gone mad.[3]

The story ends in the interactive mode with a question: who was braver, the knight who wore the chainse and was grievously injured, or the lady who subsequently wore the bloody chainse and became the center of attention for her attire? The correct answer is neither. Stupidity isn’t bravery. Neither is publicly embarrassing your husband with a big, red sign declaring him to be cuckolded.[4] The husband took this like a perfect beta, incapable of criticizing a woman:

Great was the chagrin of her lord, but he made no sign or semblance of it. No one saw a change in his behavior: he was neither less verbose nor less taciturn.

Men have stolidly accepted living under pernicious, misandristic ideals of manliness and chivalry. Men have to find their true manly voices to move forward to a more humane, more just society.

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Notes:

[1] The dating of Des trois Chevaliers et del Chainse is uncertain. Dunphy (1999), which investigates its literary influence, gives a mid-thirteenth-century date. Jacques de Baisieux also wrote the fabliau Li dis de le vescie a prestre (The Tale of the Priest’s Bladder) and several other works. Fin’amor has also been called since the late nineteenth century amour courtois (courtly love).

[2] Jacques de Baisieux, Des trois Chevaliers et del Chainse (The Three Knights and the Chainse), from Old French trans. Thomas (1976). Id. also provides the Old French text. All subsequent quotes are from id. A translation into English verse in 1796 is available online in Way & Ellis (1815), vol. 2, pp. 119-132, 247-257.

[3] The lady’s actions toward her knight-suitors and her husband characterize her as the belle cruelle in fin’amor. The people’s response to her is characteristically sympathy and excuses, not condemnation.

[4] Thomas (1976), p. 131, declares:

As to which of the lovers was more courageous, the knight who put his life in jeopardy or the lady who risked her good reputation, we will have to leave the resolution of that problem to the discretion of our readers.

That’s not a difficult problem to resolve. More importantly, it’s not a critical problem. Contempt for men’s well-being, in contrast, deserves careful critical attention.

[image] Dead soldier after battle at Petersburg, VA, in 1865 during the U.S. Civil War. From U.S. Library of Congress, Civil War Glass Negatives and Related Prints.

References:

Dunphy, Raymond Graeme. 1999. “Der Ritter mit dem Hemd. Drei Fassungen einer mittelalterlichen Erzählung.” Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift 49, pp. 1-18.

Thomas, P. Aloysius. 1976. “The Three Knights and the Chainse.” Allegorica 1:2, pp. 131-149.

Way, G. L. and George Ellis. 1815. Fabliaux or tales, abridged from French manuscripts of the XIIth and XIIIth centuries by M. Le Grand. London: Printed for J. Rodwell (vol. 1, vol. 2, vol. 3).

Wednesday's flowers

white flower light path

Asclepiodote and Euphemia stones from Athens: obscure Christianity

While Rome became the leading episcopate in the Christian church, Athens was largely forgotten. The Athenian Parthenon was converted into a Christian church some time from the late fifth century to the late sixth century. The uncertainty about the dating reflects the obscure record of early Christians in Athens. Engraved stones from Athens in the early centuries of Christianity more directly indicate the obscurity of Christianity. Early Christians in Athens weaved their faith closely into pre-Christian Greek culture.

Consider the Asclepiodote stone from Athens in the fourth or fifth century. It’s Pentelic marble engraved with a figural design and an epigram in Greek. In English prose translation, the epigram declares:

O friend, have a look at the hallowed beauty of the immortal soul and of the body of Asclepiodote, for nature bestowed pure beauty in both. (Even) if fate snatched her away, it did not overpower her, because when she died, she did not die alone. Neither has she left her husband (for good), even though she did leave him; she now watches him all the more from heaven, rejoicing and keeping watch over him. [1]

The direct address of the stone to the reader (“O friend”) is a Greek epigrammatic convention from nearly a millennium earlier. Asclepiodote is a theophoric name associated with the traditional Greek deity of healing, Asclepius.[2] The immortal soul, nature, pure beauty, and fate are concepts associated with pre-Christian neo-Platonic thought. The subtle insistence on the unity of body and soul hints at Christianity. So too does the reference to heaven, not as the Elysian Fields, but as ouranos, a place in the sky. Most significantly, the Asclepiodote stone features prominently the engraved Greek letter omega. The Christian biblical book Revelation declares:

“I am the Alpha and the Omega,” says the Lord God, who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty. … “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end.” [3]

A fourth-century Roman catacomb mural depicts Jesus with the letters alpha and omega bracketing his haloed head.[4] The Asclepiodote stone, relating death, omega, and eternity, almost surely is Christian. But its Christianity is mixed with pre-Christian Greek culture in subtle and obscure (“she did not die alone”) ways.

The Euphemia stone from Athens, probably from the sixth century, is even more obscure. It’s Hymettian marble engraved with a figural design and an epigram in Greek. The stone has survived broken: some of the figural design and about five Greek letters have been lost. In close prose translation, the Euphemia stone declares:

Archimedes’ wife,
the prudent one,
with lovely children, in her ways
capable,
Euphemia in her hometown
this place conceals;
*** obtained her hopes
** of fate. [5]

Archimedes is a relatively rare name, but it had a distinguished predecessor in a third-century BGC mathematician and inventor from Syracuse. The figural design on the Euphemia stone is elaborately geometric.[6] It might implicitly honor the intellectual legacy of the famous Archimedes. Euphemia was the name of a celebrated fourth-century Christian martyr from Chalcedon. Like the Athenodora stone, the Euphemia stone has distinctive fourfold paratactic characterization of the subject. The fourth paratactic phrase characterizes Euphemia ethically. Jesus described himself as “the way” in the sense of journey. Euphemia “in her ways capable” is directly ethical without an abstract sense of journey. The epigram emphasizes geographic rootedness: “Euphemia in her hometown this place conceals.” The epigram concludes with an obscure relation between “hopes” and “fate.” Fate, a contrasting power in the epigram on the Asclepiodote stone, was a central idea in pre-Christian Greek religion. Hope might be a contrasting Christian value in the epigram on the Euphemia stone. The Euphemia stone might be obscurely Christian.

More certain than specific speculations about early Christian stones from Athens is the obscurity of their meanings. The Asclepiodote stone, the Euphemia stone, and the Athenodora stone are all marble stones with extensive engravings. Hence they represent considerable material investment. All the stones contain epigrams. Epigrams by the early Christian period were a highly subtle, literary art. The figural designs on these stones don’t appear to be conventional and seem to relate subtly to aspects of the epigrams. All these stones may just be funeral stones for the specific individuals. But appreciating their meaning requires honoring their subtlety and considering them imaginatively.

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Notes:

[1] From ancient Greek trans. Sironen (1997) p. 168 (inscription #99). The Asclepiodote stone is in the Greek Epigraphical Museum under inventory number EM 9928+9929. Its epigram is IG. III2 1382. The stone is pictured as Plate 5 (top) in Peek (1938). That photograph was the basis for my sketch above. The omega is carved as an incision in a ovular, raised region. The outer black line is the stone boundary. The molded triangle at the top of the stone is common in classical Attic tombstones. For images of classical Attic tombstones with a molded triangle on top (aetoma), see Clairmont & Conze (1993), Catalog Volume.

[2] A search of the online Lexicon of Greek Personal Names indicates that Asclepiodote wasn’t a rare name. Asclepiodoros / Asclepiodorus, the corresponding male name, was fairly common. Among the tombstones found in Jewish cemeteries in Rome along the Via Labicana and Via Appia Pignattelli is a tombstone to Asclepiodote. Lanciani (1902) Ch. 6.

[3] Revelation 1:8, 21:6.

[4] Bust of Christ from the Catacomb of Comodilla.

[5] The Euphemia stone is described and its epigram transliterated and translated in Sironen (1997) pp. 216-7 (inscription #168bis). In the above text “*” represents a letter on a lost portion of the stone. The above close, literal translation, respecting the lines, is mine, with help from some generous scholars. Whether Euphemia obtained/achieved her hopes isn’t clear given the lost letters.

[6] The image above is based on the photograph in Panagopoulou (1986) p. 147. I’ve flipped the figural design along the Euphemia stone’s central axis to recreate a missing part of the stone (darker portion of the figural design). I’ve also extended inscribed lines symmetrically to recreate the upper missing portion of the figural design. Id. p. 146 provides a more speculative reconstruction of the figural design:

I’ve shaded the surviving portion of the Euphemia stone to emphasize the extent of the reconstruction. The baseline of the inner triangle actually extends to the outer triangle. Thus rather than being part of the figural design, the lowest line is better understood as creating a rectangle dividing the text from the figural design. The double-inscribed outer triangle lines are a distinctive feature that the Euphemia stone shares with the Athenodora stone. The inner triangle is not perfectly symmetric. The bottom two angles are 54 degrees each.

References:

Clairmont, Christoph W., and Alexander Conze. 1993. Classical attic tombstones. Kilchberg, Switzerland: Akanthus.

Lanciani, Rodolfo Amedeo. 1902. New tales of old Rome. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Co.

Panagopoulou, Maria. 1986. “Εύφημία Καλλίπαις {Euphemia with lovely children}. ” Anthoropologika kai archaiologika chronika {Annals of anthropology and archaeology} vol. 1, pp. 145-148.

Peek, W. 1938. “Metrische Inschriften.” Pp. 14-42 in Crome, Johann Friedrich. 1938. Mnemosynon Theodor Wiegand. München: F. Bruckmann Verlag.

Sironen, Erkki. 1997. The late Roman and early Byzantine inscriptions of Athens and Attica: an edition with appendices on scripts, sepulchral formulae and occupations. Helsinki: Hakapaino Oy.

COB-91: how to deal with a fly on your nose

Once upon a time in Basra there was a cadi called ʻAbd Allāh ibn Sawwār. As an outstanding bureaucrat, he was grave, imperturbable, and immobile. He spoke the proper words at the proper time and wasted no movement other than the necessary movements of his lips. But one day a disturbance interrupted his work routine:

with his assessors and the public seated around him and in two rows in front of him, a fly landed on his nose and lingered there a long while. Then it moved towards the inside corner of his eye. He wanted to endure when it got into the corner of his eye and bit it with its piercing proboscis, just as he had endured it when it landed on his nose, without twitching the tip of his nose or wrinkling his face or whisking it away with his finger. [*]

The pain of the fly’s bite finally forced the cadi to blink. He shut and opened his eye to try to dislodge the fly. But the fly kept at him. Finally the cadi moved his hand and attempted to whisk the fly away. The fly kept returning. The cadi tried to wipe the fly away with his sleeve, but he could not. Ultimately the cadi humbled himself and acknowledged his weakness. He addressed the fly out of the proper order of the day’s business.

Conscientious bureaucrats should be aware of even the smallest threats to their bureaucratic order. The Bureaucrat Management Institute for the Next Generation (BMING) has adopted a recommended protocol defining what a bureaucrat should do when a fly lands on her or his nose. While slowing moving only the right lower arm, the bureaucrat should grasp with thumb and forefinger the standard-issue fly swatter aligned vertically to the left of the pencil on the bureaucrat’s desk. With a quick flicking motion of the wrist (keeping the upper arm as motionless as possible), the bureaucrat should vigorous plant the fly swatter onto her or his stolid face. Slowly and solemnly return the fly swatter to its proper position aligned vertically to the left of the pencil on the desk. According to the BMING standard recommended protocol, the bureaucrat should ignore the remains of the smashed fly on her or his nose until the close of the business day.

In other bureaucratic news this month, Jan Banning has done an outstanding series of portraits of bureaucrats from around the world. In our age of pervasive hostility toward bureaucrats, these portraits help everyone to understand that bureaucrats are living, breathing, flesh-and-blood human beings.

Dr. Paul M. Johnson at Auburn University has made freely available online a glossary of political economy terms. The entry for bureaucracy states:

Bureaucratic organizations are typically charcterized by great attention to the precise and stable delineation of authority or jurisdiction among the various subdivisions and among the officials who comprise them, which is done mainly by requiring the organization’s employees to operate strictly according to fixed procedures and detailed rules designed to routinize nearly all decision-making. Some of the most important of these rules and procedures may be specified in laws or decrees enacted by the higher “political” authorities that are empowered to set the official goals and general policies for the organization, but upper-level (and even medium-level) bureaucrats typically are delegated considerable discretionary powers for elaborating their own detailed rules and procedures. Because the incentive structures of bureaucratic organizations largely involve rewarding strict adherence to formal rules and punishing unauthorized departures from standard operating procedures (rather than focusing on measurable individual contributions toward actually attaining the organization’s politically assigned goals), such organizations tend to rely very heavily upon extensive written records and standardized forms, which serve primarily to document the fact that all decisions about individual “cases” were taken in accordance with approved guidelines and procedures rather than merely reflecting the personal preferences or subjective judgment of the individual bureaucrat involved.

The full entry goes on much longer. But even this meager collection of words should leave no doubt about the value of bureaucracy.

UK Prime Minister David Cameron reportedly will tell the Federation of Small Businesses that “by scrapping more than 3,000 rules ‘dreamt up by Whitehall bureaucrats,’ businesses will save over £850m a year.” Misguided destruction of bureaucratic capability caused the decline of the British Empire. The decline continues.

That’s all for this month’s Carnival of Bureaucrats. Enjoy previous bureaucratic carnivals here. Nominations of posts to be considered for inclusion in next month’s carnival should be submitted using Form 376: Application for Bureaucratic Recognition.

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[*] From al-Jāḥiẓ, al-Ḥayawān (Living Beings), from Arabic trans., p. 185 in Gelder, Geert Jan van. 2013. Classical Arabic literature: a library of Arabic literature anthology. New York: New York University Press.