Category Archives: Blog

This afternoon, while I was volunteering at St. Jude in Beirut, Syrian warplanes were firing rockets on northern Lebanon…

When my Afghan friends and I visited this remote Sufi shrine in Afghanistan, we wanted to spend the afternoon there to soak in its peaceful atmosphere–but we knew it was too dangerous to rest in any one place for too long…

Love is the ark appointed for the righteous,
which annuls the danger and provides a way of escape.
Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.
Cleverness is mere opinion, bewilderment intuition…

— Rumi

Here is another excerpt from the letters written by Khalil Gibran to Gertrude Barry that I stumbled upon this week in Beirut.

Thursday, July 5, 1907

You have said the things which I would have said long ago, my beloved Gertrude. You have given voice to the thought that has been lingering within my soul. You have revealed a sad truth. You are brave and beautiful.

But do not, Gertrude, do not say that we have fallen. Perhaps we have lost our path. Perhaps we have been dragging our feet on thorny roads. Perhaps we have dimmed our eyes with too much light. Say all this if you wish but do not, I beg of you, do not say that we have fallen; for I am able today, as I did yesterday, to stretch my broken wings and fly through the immeasurable blue to the seventh heaven…

Seek the art of loosening knots.
Quick! Before your soul leaves your body.
Leave that nothing that seems like existence.
Seek the existence that seems like nothing…

— Rumi

The Vanquishing of the Witch Baba Yaga
Directed by Jessica Oreck

From generation to generation, centuries-old Slavic folklore carries the legendary tale of Baba Yaga, a ferocious witch who lives in a hut perched on chicken legs in a haunted forest. When their family home is invaded in this version of the tale, the young heroine and her brother escape deep into the woods to seek refuge. In deceptively benevolent fashion, Baba Yaga offers shelter and cruelly tests their spirit and resolve with every impossible challenge she bestows on them. Using a traditional illustration style, director Jessica Oreck retells the unifying narrative of this widely and diversely told tale, interweaving it with a modern, anthropological portrait of present-day life in Eastern Europe. Taking the viewer through the deeply rooted traditions that foster a profound and enduring connection to the forest, this enchanting film is a meditation on the passing down of story and tradition, the confluence of mythology and the subconscious, and the accumulation of collective memory.

Arg-e Karim Khan–the 18th century citadel in Shiraz built by the founder of the Zand Dynasty–is one of my favorite places in Iran. Above the entrance, a dramatic scene from the Shahnameh (Ferdowsi‘s epic masterpiece) depicts Rustam’s victory over the White Demon–whose blood Rustam uses to restore the sight of Kay-Kavus, the captured and tortured king…

Kavus, you’re like a willow, fruitless and afraid.
And you once thought your army could invade
Mazandaran, and that your strength is like
A maddened mammoth’s when you choose to strike!
Since you have occupied the Persian throne,
Wisdom’s deserted you, good sense has flown.
Here is the end of everything you sought,
Here is the punishment for which you fought!

— The White Demon, Shahnameh

Professor Leo Depuydt, with whom I studied Coptic for many years at Brown, has been leading the charge against the purported authenticity of the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife. Today, there was another development in this ongoing and heated debate–the kind that we Coptic nerds tend to love…

Many events were held today for Anzac Day in honor of the men of the Australia-New Zealand Army Corps who died in the World War I battle for Gallipoli in Turkey. Here is a link to some photos taken earlier today at Anzac gatherings in New Zealand and Australia. If you are interested in archaeology or military history, you might enjoy this post on “The Archaeology of Conflict and Remembrance at Gallipoli.”

Today in Lebanon, two missiles struck the Beqaa town of Hermel…

After Chinese class this morning in Beirut, I wandered past a dozen assault rifles carried by Internal Security forces on my stroll to the corner bookstore. The first book I spotted on the shelves was a collection of letters written by Khalil Gibran to the pianist Gertrude Barry. As army helicopters circled above, I opened to this letter:

Are you unhappy, my beloved Gertrude? I, too, am unhappy sometimes. There are days when bitterness mingles itself with life–life the only thing we possess to give as a price for the little wisdom attainable here. There are days when my dreams are dreams of hunger and my songs are sighs, and the things I try to create are sad, so very sad. And there are days when I want to be nothing but a shepherd somewhere on a far away mountain, or an unthought-of brother in an unknown convent, or an outcast in a lovely undiscovered island. And yet, my beloved, such days are beautiful because they reveal to us the truth of love; love the healer, love the only consoler, love the god.

We love, Gertrude, and we must not be unhappy. We are the children of light and let us not think of the shadow…

Ephrem and the Empire: A Syrian Prophet for Christian Rome
A talk with Robert Najdek
Monday, April 28, 2014, 12:00pm
Columbia University
Marshall D. Shulman Seminar Room (1219 IAB)

This talk seeks to relocate Ephrem the Syrian within his time and place through an exploration of his identity as found in his hymns. Through a close reading of his polemical hymns, Ephrem is revealed to be an ardent supporter of Nicene orthodoxy and intensely loyal to the Roman Empire. After being forced out of his hometown of Nisibis, Ephrem received refuge in the Roman city of Edessa and the personal story of his community became wedded to the history of the Roman Empire. His identity as a Christian is otherwise largely defined by his opposition to numerous different social and religious groups that were present in his time and region.

You’re the road of love, and at the end, my home,
One of the crowd, and yet I see you crowned;
I see you in stars, in the sun, in the moon,
Here in the green leaves, and high on the throne…

— Rumi

Last summer, when I was excavating a medieval Islamic bazaar and preserving Sufi shrines in Turkmenistan, my colleagues and I used kite aerial photography to get different angles of the structures and sites we were surveying on the Silk Road…