Category Archives: Blog

You will be surprised if you find your saint, whom you have been worshipping, playing cards. You will say, “My god, and I used to think that this man is a great saint.” But I don’t see any contradiction. Why can’t a great saint play cards? Yes, he will play cards without cheating, that I understand….But you will not allow your saints to dance.

But I say unto you: unless a saint is able to dance, he knows nothing…

You will never become young if you cannot laugh, if you cannot love, if you cannot dance, if you cannot sing.

— Osho, Reflections on Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet

 

Looking up gives light, although at first it makes you dizzy.

— Rumi

This is the ceiling of one of my favorite Sufi shrines in Sudan. Though there was much to explore inside of the shrine, I kept finding myself looking up…

I have found both freedom and safety in my madness; the freedom of loneliness and the safety from being understood, for those who understand us enslave something in us…

― Khalil Gibran, The Madman

While seeking some fresh air and serenity recently in the mountains of Lebanon at the Monastery of St. Anthony, I visited a cave that has long served as a place of healing for the mentally ill. Because Saint Anthony himself reportedly battled the forces of darkness through prayer and seclusion in a desert tomb, this cave in Qozhaya is considered a sacred shelter for anyone suffering from emotional or mental distress.

When I stepped inside of the cave, the first thing my eyes noticed–after adjusting to the dark–was a number of chains hanging over the stone altar. Until the end of the 19th century, these chains were placed around the necks of the mentally ill who visited the cave in search of a clear mind and cure. On a visitor’s third night in the chains, it was believed that Saint Anthony would appear to cast out any affliction. However, in the absence of a vision, a person might spend months locked in the chains, praying to St. Anthony to be freed from suffering.

Taking the heavy chains in my hands, I tried slipping one of them around my neck–to see how it felt. Though I didn’t have a vision of St. Anthony, I did imagine the “patients” over the centuries who had been placed in those chains in the dark, and I thought of those suffering from mental illness who are being “treated” with chains today (though not in a “sacred” context), in places like Indonesia, Somalia, and Ghana. As I put the chains back down on the altar, I noticed a number of written prayers and passport-size photos in a corner–left behind by recent visitors yearning to be healed. While the modes of treatment in Lebanon have changed over the centuries, the afflictions still remain…

NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts

March 26th – 29th (8 pm)
March 30th (3 pm)

For more information, please click here…

Poetry of Resistance
Date: Thursday, March 20th
Time: 2:00 pm
Place: American University of Beirut (Auditorium A, West Hall)

During the 1960s -1980s the Afro-Asian Writers Association published a journal called Lotus from Beirut and Cairo. As Beirut was to become the home of exile for writers such as Mahmoud Darwish and Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Lotus became a refuge for the rebellious poets of its age. Poets who spoke no common language other than the language of resistance. The writers of Lotus saw the need to fight to reclaim their history and future back from their former and still present colonial masters. A fight which was at once political and cultural and where ‘every poem, story, novel or literary work should echo the alarm, calling people to the struggle and to victory’.

While visiting the Monastery of St. Anthony in the Qozhaya Valley, I stumbled into a dusty room which contained the first printing press in the Middle East. Brought to the monastery in 1584 from England, the press was used to print books in Syriac, instead of the Arabic script. This historic printing press was just one of the many cultural treasures I encountered while exploring the grounds of the monastery–which was declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1998…

The Monastery of Qozhaya is the principal house of the Order of Saint Anthony. From the height of the Monastery, one can enjoy the view of the valley which is well cultivated with wheat, vines, olive trees and, above all, mulberry trees. They bring prosperity and beauty to the mountainsides. The monks divide their time between praying and the cultivation of the land. In the past, this valley was not in its present state of prosperity; it was arid. Its fertility is due to the tireless labor of the monks. Has there ever been a heritage, which has been more legitimately acquired?

Msgr. Jacques Mislin, Sacred Places (1876)

In the wake of the most recent suicide bombing in Hermel, I headed from my home on the sea in Beirut to the mountains of Qadisha Valley for a retreat at the Qozhaya Monastery. Strolling through the quiet grounds of this sacred space, past its hermitages and saintly statues, I felt far removed from the suicide bombings that keep striking close to my home in Beirut. As I entered this beautiful church–cut into the side of the mountain–I took a deep breath, and tried to leave the trauma of the recent violence behind…

Here I sit between my brother the mountain and my sister the sea. We three are one in loneliness,
and the love that binds us together is deep and strong and strange…

— Khalil Gibran

Dancing is not just getting up painlessly,
like a leaf blown on the wind;
dancing is when you tear your heart out
and rise out of your body to hang suspended between the worlds…

— Rumi

A new statistical analysis of the spatial relation between the tombs, temples, and palaces of the Nabataeans at Petra reveals that they were positioned with specific astronomical events in mind…

Freedom of expression is the right of every natural person, even if a person chooses to behave irrationally, to express his or her insanity.

— Qaddafi, The Green Book

While my friends and I were trapped indoors in Beirut last night by some much-needed rain–along with extreme thunder and lightning–we picked up The Green Book, written by Qaddafi in 1975, and began to read. Composed as required reading for the citizens of Libya, The Green Book is thought to have been inspired by Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book. As we huddled together to read The Green Book on the couch, while the storm was making the lights flicker, we all agreed that the chapter on “Women” was our favorite chapter in the book…

The sum total of all the essence of good is to seek knowledge, practice upon it, and teach it to somebody.

— Sheikh Abdul Qadir Jilani

While doing archaeology and research on Islam in Sudan this winter, I photographed a number of Sufi shrines to share with my students back in Beirut…