The other day I found this little book, published by City Lights, and I had to buy it.
These poems, written somewhere between the Xth and the XIIIth century, are truly fascinating. They are all very different from each other and show us a very diverse, advanced and cosmopolitan society….
Ultrasilent: Poems of Arab Andalusia
Link: Ultrasilent: Poems of Arab Andalusia
raised by wolves: At 5 am I’m fast a sleep. Wael starts drawing on my face with his...
Link: raised by wolves: At 5 am I’m fast a sleep. Wael starts drawing on my face with his...
At 5 am I’m fast a sleep.
Wael starts drawing on my face with his little fingers.
He softly touches my forehead, my mouth.
Then he starts whispering in my ear.
“I’m talking softly in your ear because I don’t want to wake you up,” he says.
“What did you say? I didn’t hear you.”
“The…
Currently...
at Princeton University, these kids really are the subjects of Bret Easton Ellis’ novels.
Breakbot Valentine’s Day Mixtape for Dazed Digital. If it’s made by Breakbot, it’ll make move it, shake it, cross the dance floor.
Two step.
Via: Raketa
I first heard this song three years ago, and I can never get sick of it.
Set The Fire To The Third Bar | Snow Patrol feat. Martha Wainwright
Today is Unfollow Thursday
Ha, this is awesome
Why? Because Unfollow Friday is full of whiny sissies.
Unfollowed:
- the self-aggrandizing jock/graphic designer/social media guru with an elitest artistic perspective and no talent to show for it
- the whiny emo kid with 0% self-esteem
- yet ANOTHER LOLcats blog
- some stupid old guy
- a bitchy queen
- another bitchy queen
- some blog about weird white people in love with one another
- some pissy, transgressive liberal who just hates every single person who doesn’t agree with his uninformed agenda
- a blog about obese Asian guys
- the graphic designer with a tragic life, addiction to prescription painkillers and a terribly banal sense of color and form
- some stupid art blog
- a “let’s-laugh-at-fat-people” blog
- a stupid workout journal no one else was linked to
- yet another “let’s-get-your-body-into-shape” blog that was really all about “let’s-just-talk-about-how-i’m-going-to-humiliate-you” blog
- a blog about hating on chubbies
- a person who was on the follow list of said blog
- some dude with great pecs but no personality
I’m in the above somewhere :D But don’t worry mejoe, I still follow you! There’s a lot of entertainment in watching someone continue to lie and pretend to be something he’s not even while trying to call others out :)
Bahman Dadkhah - Illustration for Poems for Children (Iran, 1972)
[via trixietreats: via A Journey Round My Skull]
Discovered Iraqi painter Ayad Alkadhi whose main focus is the war in Iraq. His series “I am Baghdad” treats each painting as an interview with a citizen of Baghdad.
Via: Heeba Mag
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Dear Thieves Like Us, I like your music because it’s a representation of my life, but it makes me sad sometimes, you know?
Imperialism
clingtomymouth:
“People are ignorant. They think of Israel as part of Middle Eastern culture: dark, medieval, and intolerant,” Lucas explained.Heeb: HQ : Porn Star Michael Lucas to Lead Tour of Israel
god forbid israel get lumped in with the dark and primitive middle eastern people. remember they are white and modern war criminals.
Rabia of Basra
"Religion is a field unplanted except by those who accomplish an interest from it - return. If it were not from fear of hell, none would worship any god; And if not for the expected rewards, they would deny God." - Khalil Gibran
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Fortunately, and occasionally, some come to live another religious reality.
Rabia al-Adawiyya, a woman and a mystic from Basra of the late 8th century, is one such person. Her early and formative life was most difficult. She was orphaned as a child, kidnapped by slave traders, sold for six silver pieces and only freed her when her master was astounded by her saintly conduct.
Over time, and to free herself from all enslavement, Rabia pursued the most difficult of roads: the freedom to worship the Divine without temptation, distraction or ulterior motive.”I will not serve God like a labourer in expectation of wages,” she said, and went on to transform herself from a suffering child of Basra to an ascetic, and then to most ardently seek her freedom through the Sufi way.
Asceticism is not encouraged in Islam, a religion that puts much more emphasis on being a normal member of society, and providing service to the development of humans. Yet,Rabia shirked the regular life. She had few belongings, carried a stick and wore an old patched mantle and worn sandals. She would spend the night praying on the rootops of her city, and denied herself motherhood and love for a man.
Even though she thwarted the normal life and embraced a more radical road, it may be that “the imbalance of the thoughtful is much better than the conservatism of one who takes no thought.” (1)
Indeed, her extremism came from a noble and intense source: a wish to worship out of complete freedom, and out of her own (and not any other) choice.
What little we know of her life comes to us by way of Farid al-Din Attar, a major Muslim luminary who lived in the 12th and 13th centuries. He devotes a chapter to Rabia in hisTadhkirat al-Auliya (Memorial of the Saints) - a compilation of biographical anecdotes from the lives of Islamic mystics.
Ever since her death, Rabia has been revered among her own kind as one of the most realized of beings. She has come down through history as a beacon to all who suspect, or know, that there is a greater reality than the ironclad materialism and seductive ideologies that we often embrace. Rabia was also an exemplar to people, both now and at the time, that the path of knowledge was not just something restricted to men.
Today, she is most well known for her saying, that was sure to have inspired Gibran to his:
"My Lord, if I am worshiping you from fear of fire, burn me in the fires of hell; and if I am worshiping you from desire for paradise, deny me paradise. But, if I am worshiping you for yourself alone, then do not deny me the sight of your magnanimous face."
(1) Much of the material for this entry is drawn from the book, ¨First Among Sufis - The Life and Thought of Rabia al-Adawiyya¨, by Widad El Sakkakini, 1982
Via: Al-BAB