3 Sufis 3

Interesting factoid of the day, hopefully accurate.  Yesterday I was hanging out at the village cafe with some small town Marxists, and they told me that the (Arabic) prayer call was in Turkish in Turkey from ca. 1932 to ca. 1949.  [Actually, it was 1950, after Adnan Menderes became PM — he had campaigned on precisely that platform]. I had heard this story before, but had thought that it had lasted only a few weeks or months before Atatürk had to cave in to popular pressure to relent. Rather, he instituted the Turkish prayer call at the height of the dictator period (as Erik Zurcher characterized, ca. 1932-1934 perhaps), and it lasted over a decade beyond his 1938 death. Neat, I had no idea.

Better yet, when the village Marxists recited the prayer call, I was blown away to see that it wasn’t a literal translation of the original at all. Supposedly, in order to make the call fit the same melody, they had to change the translation some — but I’m not so sure.

Here’s the prayer call, with an English translation of the Turkish:

1) Tanrı uludur! Tanrı uludur! Tanrı uludur! Tanrı uludur!

[“God is great!…”] [NB: The original Arabic “Allahu Akbar” has a superlative/comparative aspect to it that the Turkish version doesn’t — God is Greater/Greatest]

2) Yoktur ondan başka tapılacak

[“It is attested to that there is no other”] [The Arabic literal translation: “I bear witness that there is no God but God” — note the passive aspect of the witnessing in Turkish]

3) Muhammad onun kulu ve rasuludur

[“Muhammad is His servant and messenger”][Arabic literal translation “Muhammad is His messenger.” They added the servant bit]

4) Haydi namaza, haydi namaza.

[“Let’s go to prayer…”] [NB: This seems an accurate rendition]

5) Haydi fallaha, haydi fallaha.

[“Let’s go to prosperity…”] [NB: This seems accurate as well]

6) Tanrı uludur! Tanrı uludur! Tanrı uludur! Tanrı uludur!

“God is Great…”

For those who aren’t aware, the Muslim prayer call is always in Arabic, without exception. Putting it in Turkish for 17-18 years was as revolutionary in Turkey as Vatican II’s changing the Latin mass to vernacular languages in the early 1960s…

Update:

According to this link of the Turkish prayer call, the villagers don’t quite remember the call as it seems to have actually been (and, no, I’m not going to try and transcribe the real prayer call, but go ahead and correct it in the comments if you’re up to it).

I just lost hundreds of old emails from my hotmail account, and thought I should share their corporate response for those out there who might someday lose their correspondence as well:

Question Summary

Hundreds of emails disappeared from prior to 2003 — NOT DELETED, DISAPPEARED.

Please provide your impacted Email address :

naltikriti@hotmail.com

Choose one of the following scenarios :

I don’t know how, but my Emails are missing

How long has it been since you lost your Emails ?

I don’t know

Additional Details

I have lost hundreds of emails from prior to 2003 on my hotmail account.  I did not delete them or export them to my knowledge.  They just disappeared.  I first noticed this yesterday, but it could have happened earlier.  How do I recover them?  Is hotmail deleting old emails on under-used accounts?  I have kept this account active for over 10 years, although it is no longer my primary email address.  Please advise.

RESPONSE (from a”Daniel G”):

Hi,

We are not deleting any emails due to privacy reason. Based on our investigation your account has been inactive. If you don’t sign in for more than 270 days or within the first 10 days after signing up for an account. After an account becomes inactive, all messages, folders, and contacts are deleted. Your account name is still reserved. However, if the account stays inactive for an additional 90 days, the account name may be permanently deleted. If you don’t use your Windows Live ID for 365 days, your Windows Live ID may be permanently deleted. We are sorry to inform you that we cannot recover your emails anymore.

Check out this Solution Article on the causes of lost mail and how you can prevent it:

Emails are missing from your Windows Live Hotmail account  (A Useless Article that does not apply to me…)

MY RESPONSE TO THE RESPONSE

Thank you for the reply, however, I never let that account go inactive.  I check in roughly once every 2-3 weeks on average, and have been doing so for several years — if by “active” you mean logging in and deleting junk mail.  In addition, NOT all messages, folders, and contacts have been deleted — only messages older than about 2003. How is it you cannot recover emails that I did not delete, when I did not allow the account to go inactive?  Can you check a little further — those messages are far more important, and deserve far more than a stock response.

If there is any way to recover those emails, I would really appreciate advice, because I DID NOT ALLOW MY ACCOUNT TO GO INACTIVE.

Dear Senators Warner and Webb:

This letter is in support of continuing to fund the U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP), the entire budget of which the House of Representatives voted to eliminate in the past month. I understand that the Senate vote will be this next week, and your stance will be crucial.

In 2007-08 I was awarded a USIP Jennings Randolph Senior Peace Fellowship for research on population displacement in and around Iraq in the wake of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. This fellowship allowed me to take a year off from my teaching duties at the University of Mary Washington (where a 4/4 teaching load tends to dominate one’s schedule) and research a subject of serious policy interest to the United States Government. In the course of that year, I was able to travel to Lebanon, Jordan, and Iraq with USIP funding and conduct field research that informed the Iraq policy debate in Washington not only that year, but the years since. The modest $65,000 or so that this year of field research cost the USIP was clearly worth it, as the research impacted policy discussions on Iraq greatly. Evidence of the policy effect of my fellowship included a 2009 Senate Foreign Affairs committee testimony, ongoing contributions to the USIP affiliated Iraq Crisis Group, several policy publications, and a number of U.S. army panel presentations.

Beyond my own experience, I have seen several examples of how USIP contributes significantly to U.S. government policy initiatives, international peace and reconciliation, and conflict resolution in the field. In the case of Iraq, with which I am most familiar, USIP has maintained a field operation which contributed greatly to tribal and sectarian conflict resolution in three locations in Iraq. Such initiatives saved U.S. soldiers’ lives and contributed greatly to the restoration of stability by 2008 which allowed the drawdown of U.S. troops to begin. In Iraq, USIP has also managed dozens of local NGO grant programs which have been quite effective in stimulating efforts by local media, community centers, and universities to restore stability. I am aware of other USIP programs which contributed to property adjudication and conflict resolution in the Balkans, as well as a whole host of programs contributing to U.S. policy in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and South Asia. Put simply, USIP is an important player in U.S. foreign policy – and costs less than a single USAF bomber.

Please ensure that USIP remains funded well into the future. It is an important adjunct to other institutions involved in U.S. foreign policy, and letting it die on the vine will only further damage the ability of the U.S. government to effect positive change on the ground in several conflict zones.

Yours sincerely,

Nabil Al-Tikriti

Anyone wanting to experience both extremes of Japanese politics as they concern foreign policy and military affairs could hardly learn more than by visiting Hiroshima’s Peace Museum one day and the Yushukan museum on another day.  I just did that this week, and here’s some points that come to mind.

On Thursday morning we went all over the Hiroshima bomb site, including the Peace Park, the flame that will only be extinguished once all nuclear weapons are destroyed, the A-Bomb dome, and the Hypocentre. The museum had two temporary exhibits in the basement consistent with its overall message, one with drawings by survivors of the Black Rain in the wake of the bomb which gave radiation poisoning to tens of thousands, and one featuring certain artifacts (bomb raid hood, US government aid shipments, etc) and the famous “Barefoot Gen” comic book series. This comic book was authored by a Hiroshima survivor, and was bitterly anti-war in outlook. There were translated versions of the series, and in it he took on militaristic teachers, the WWII Japanese leaders, and those who pushed for war in general. It’s a heart-rendering series (and worthwhile reading) which reminded me of “Maus” as much as anything else.  One could do worse than teaching them both side by side, perhaps alongside “Superman” for cultural comparison. The comic book features a kid who stood up for his anti-war father in front of a authoritarian schoolteacher, survives the blast, tries to save his father and brother from the rubble of their house before the flames consume them (he fails),  saves his mother from suicide, and then sees maggot-infested carcasses in all sorts of poses in a tram.

There was also a rotating exhibit of items turned in by survivors’ estates or family members in the past year — an exhibit that apparently gets changed every year. This included drawings, melted artifacts, clothing of blast victims, last letters, etc. The most tragic was perhaps the painting of a baby trying to suckle at its dead mother’s tit (a theme I’ve noticed elsewhere, incidentally).

The museum’s permanent exhibit had a brief introduction to the history of Hiroshima, a discussion of the US deliberations regarding the bomb, the anti-nuclear movement that Hiroshima leads, the effects of the blast, the effects of the radiation long term, and the story of the 1000 crane girl — a 12 year old who died in the 1950s after being diagnosed with leukemia and trying to fold a thousand cranes to get her wish fulfilled (she failed). There’s a monument to her in the park outside the museum.

From this permanent exhibit, a lot can be learned. First of all, and I didn’t know this at all, Hiroshima had quite a militaristic tradition dating back to the 19th century, and had quite a military presence when it was bombed. It had a navy port, an army HQ, an army logistics center, and the HQ of the Western command of the Japanese home defense army. The division (army?) based there (one of six Japanese divisions in total at the time) had served in all of Japan’s post-Meiji wars, and served WWII in New Guinea (where only one in ten Japanese soldiers returned home after the war).

The section on US deliberations was also fascinating, where you could see snapshots of the committee decisions that went into target acquisition. Some points:

1) It was decided early on that Japan would be hit, not Germany (no reason was given, but it’s one of the hotly debated topics beyond the museum).

2) There was discussion of bombing Tokyo and/or Kyoto, but the committees decided that they wanted a fresh target so that they could evaluate the effects of the bomb, and the general in charge decided against targeting Kyoto and/or Tokyo because he did not want American atrocities to make Hitler’s look minimal by comparison, and because they wanted Japan to be an ally after the war, and bombing either city would encourage Japanese to turn to the USSR. So, in a nutshell, they wanted a big city, but not too big a city.

3) Japanese diplomats were trying to negotiate an end to the war, but the US insisted on “unconditional surrender,” meaning the emperor’s status would not be guaranteed. Considering he was a god at the time, it was no small point. After Nagasaki, they agreed to terms — and then MacArthur preserved the emperor’s status after all.  MacArthur was far smarter than Paul Bremer.

4) Following Potsdam, the Soviets were scheduled to enter the war on August 7. Hiroshima was August 6. Although the museum didn’t make a connection explicit, it seems pretty clear that there was one, especially since the main point of Hiroshima was to start the Cold War off right. Incidentally, according to the Yushukan Museum, the Soviets invaded Manchuria, Sakhalin, and the Kuril Islands starting on August 7 — so things definitely looked bad for the Japanese that week.

5) The U.S. committee decided to drop the bomb without warning, which set off a letter of complaint by some 20 or so leading Manhattan Project scientists, who thought the Japanese should have been warned. There was also discussion of a demonstration bomb at Truk or elsewhere, but that wasn’t discussed in depth at the exhibit.

6)  The final list of bombing targets included Hiroshima, Kukura, Nagasaki, and some other place. Kukura was going to be bombed second on August 9, but the crew couldn’t find it due to cloud cover. Instead, they moved on to their second target, and hit Nagasaki instead (actually the northwest suburbs of Nagasaki, which is why the bigger bomb killed fewer people). We passed Kukura on the bullet train after Hiroshima, and there’s not much to love — it’s a depressing looking industrial port with a massive shipbuilding plant. The Japanese apparently have an expression: “to have the luck of Kukura,” in reference to their cloud cover that day.

More items from there. Apparently nobody thought much of the parachuted items that day, which included monitoring equipment for the pending blast (did that technology exist then?).

About one in ten bomb victims were Korean workers, effectively slave laborers working in the Hiroshima area.

I’m not sure the Enola Gay crew was all that good, in that the bomb was about 200-300 meters off of their intended target. I think my grandfather trained to do the bombing in New Mexico, and he’d describe competitions where they’d put a bomb in a space the size of a house.

The hypocenter spot gets a minor plaque about 200 meters from the museum, right outside a car park. In Nagasaki, all there appears to be from the guidebook is a plaque and a church exhibit. Hiroshima stole the show.

By the end of the visit, one can’t help but feel an overwhelming sense of tragedy, loss, and perhaps some anger. It puts America’s “greatest generation” in a new light, and makes one think about U.S. foreign policy yet again. The Japanese perspective is completely anti-war, and full of shame — very self-critical.

For a completely different Japanese perspective, try the Yasakuni Jinja shrine and the Yushukan museum attached to the shrine. The shrine was established in the immediate wake of the Meiji Restoration, and seems to serve the dual purpose of advancing the deification of the emperor’s line and remembering the now-deified dead who preserved the peace of the Japanese people through the ages. In a sense, it’s a bog standard martyrs’ memorial, like those found in many countries. However, there are a few unique twists. One, those memorialized at the shrine are not merely war dead, they’re ancestors who are now deified spirits. That’s no small incentive while fighting. Since all who die preserving the homeland count for inclusion, there are several war criminals included in the list of deified spirits (and yes, there is a list). I don’t know this specific factoid, but I wonder whether those Japanese officers executed after WWII are included in the shrine’s lists.  I suspect they are, if only because so many Asian neighbors get pissed off when a Japanese PM visits the shrine (since Koizumi in 2001?).

The shrine is definitely a contingent piece of history, in that it only dates to the 1870s or so. Although the Shinto practice of venerating ancestors goes back at least 1500 years, this shrine venerating war dead and keeping a list is a much more modern beast, dating back only to the bureaucratic possibilities of this late 19th century Asian empire — and the recently restored imperial family that it serves to elevate and protect.

While it’s clear that the shrine is controversial, and has gone through some tough times since WWII, it is equally clear that it represents a significant segment of Japanese society, as it is well-funded and quite active as an institution.

There is a wonderful gift shop for the Yushukan museum, which reminded me about one of my major beefs about today’s Japan — I can’t afford squat. They have all sorts of WWII mementos, including model ships and planes, 1940s Japanese music CDs, cups, picture books, etc. I was especially upset about the CDs, since I wanted to buy about 6 of them, but at $35 a pop, that simply wasn’t going to happen. The same thing happened at Hiroshima, where I would have loved to get some of the anti-war comic books, but they were $20 each.

The museum is not afraid to present a Japanese view on not only WWII, but also several preceding conflicts. It’s unapologetic about several points (with some of which they’ve got a point), including:

1) there’s a contemporary Japanese drawing of Admiral Perry, where he’s portrayed resembling the devil himself — fantastic piece of art, actually.

2) During the Boxer Rebellion, the Japanese were the largest military contingent to rescue the Peking legates, with 21,000+ troops — and one of their officers was the commander of the Peking troops who defended the legation for 55 days.  In the Hollywood film “55 days in Peking,” filmed as Vietnam was just ratcheting up, there’s no Japanese commander, and I don’t remember there being any Japanese contingent even (although I’m not sure about that last one). Hollywood airbrushing at its level best.

3) The Nanking Incident of 1937 is completely airbrushed, although it is mentioned briefly.

4) The Roosevelt administration’s aggressive diplomacy forced the Japanese government to declare war on December 8, 1941 (note the different day, due to the International Time Line).

5) The U.S. forces in the Pacific were put on a war footing as of late November, 1941 (true, as far as I can tell, and probably the major reason why the U.S. commanders resigned after Pearl Harbor).

6) The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere was not only genuine in intent, it was a spark that led to post-WWII independence movements throughout Asia (also, interestingly, somewhat accurate, as far as I know).

I’ve taken photographs of several of the exhibit items here, even though photography was not allowed. Since the prohibition on photography made no sense in this context (aside from perhaps a sense of sacred spirit to military history), I took several photos, which I hope to post here soon enough.

Before entering the exhibit space, we watched an 80 minute film entitled “Mitama o tsunagu mono,” a film about a shiftless youth who discovers himself after visiting the shrine and museum. While not the most brilliant sample of cinematic drama, and too long by about 20 minutes, this film offered a fascinating glimpse into the current Japanese psyche — from the viewpoint of the backers of the Yushukan museum.

In the film, a useless youth named Takanobu can’t seem to hold onto a job, more because he doesn’t want to than anything else. His grandmother lives in his house with his reasonably successful “salaryman” father Koichi and his classic housewife mother.  The grandmother, who was a nurse during WWII, has an alter in her room (where she lies in an assisted care hospital bed) devoted to her brother who died in New Guinea in WWII and her husband, who died of natural causes much later.

Takanobu’s chick is the straight up Manami, with whom he used to go clubbing until she found meaning working at a home for special care youths. Her uncle is a former student radical who now runs a coffee shop, and her grandfather is a WWII veteran who watched Takanobu’s grandfather die.

So, at some point Koichi (salaryman father) gives Takanobu the money to go to the shrine, where his boring chick Manami’s journey began, and where his now begins. At first he’s bored, but he eventually learns the true meaning of sacrifice, like the sacrifice of those who gave all in WWII so that Japan could be free, prosperous, and independent.

While Takanobu’s on his journey, his father Koichi is desperately trying to get his useless son a corporate job. At some point, he manages this with a client who had screwed up an order. The fix is in, and all Takanobu has to do is go to the interview — the job is his.

The day before the interview, Manami’s uncle and grandfather teach Takanobu how to roast coffee beans while telling him about their ongoing loyalty to the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. Basically, along with looking for remains of WWII dead, the uncle started helping the New Guineans grow coffee while teaching the values of independence, hard work, and thrift (etc.). As they joked, they were the “last believers in the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere…”  While continuing on this rift about the GEACPS, the film cut to a quote by a Thai Prime Minister praising the Japanese sacrifice during WWII for inspiring them to take their independence (from whom? they weren’t colonized, were they?). Along the way, the film — like the museum — claimed credit for all Asian independence movements, including the Indian one.

Anyhow, to make a long story short, the son Takanobu declines the corporate job, his father throws a fit, Takanobu says that he’s inspired by the sacrifice made by his ancestors in WWII to think for himself and not just work for money, his grandmother stands up for him, the father learns a lesson about the value of things beyond money, he becomes like his boring girlfriend Manami, and the film closes with a Peace Corps lookalike of Takanobu in New Guinea helping the savages grow coffee for his chick’s uncle.

I’m verklempt.