Notes From Prison, 1983 -1988, By Alija Izetbegović [Alija Izatbegovic]

Notes From Prison, 1983 -1988 Alija Izetbegović

CONTENTS •

Preface

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Chapter 1 - On Life People and Freedom

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Chapter 2 - On Religion and Morality

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Chapter 3 - Political Notes

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Chapter 4 - Islam Between East and West

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Chapter 5 - Communism and Nazism

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Chapter 6 - Thoughts on Islam - Historical and Other Observations

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Appendix - From My Children's Letters

Note from Taskforce Ezania

Taskforce Ezania scanned the original book with the courtesy of Bakir Izetbegović. After the scanning the text was recomposed using an OCR engine. The plain text that was the result of this process needed to be edited and formatted into a layout, a composition, resembling the original. We truly have done our best. Due to the international character of our Taskforce and circumstances beyond our reach perfection was not possible. You will notice that some "typical OCR characters" have been left over in the text. Maybe some names, using "foreign" characters with "weird" accents, are not completely spelled correctly. As the final editor - at least of this version - has not the actual book to compare the scanned text with, it was not possible to correct this kind of errors. Nevertheless, we are convinced that the thoughts in this book are of tremendous more importance as some more or less irrelevant typos. Without doubt shall any reader, very soon after starting to read, notice the importance of Alija Izetbegović thoughts for the future of our Islamic Movement. Allah gave our brother Alija Izetbegović a sharp mind and a warm hart for those who care for Islam and thus for the well-being of what Allah has entrusted to Man. May we soon meet. Allah promised victory to the ummah of the prophet (saws); Allah's Word is Truth.

Ezania Taskforce 1 11 Rabi-Awal 1427

Courtesy: Bakir Izetbegović © 2006 by Right Holders Fair Use Policy Edited OCR-version: Taskforce Ezania Polity Ezania - The Islamic micro nation http://www.ezania.net/ http://www.ezania.net/library/ Distribution on: http://www.muslimtorrents.net/ Presence on: http://www.muslimspace.com/

On Life, People and Freedom

CHAPTER 1 On Life, People and Freedom When I lose the reasons to live, I shall die. Life has a purpose in itself and on its own. It becomes visible once life has lost all its outer sense: youth, beauty, health, freedom. We then see that the beauty of life is not in these desirable yet impermanent values, but rather in life itself! I have no hatred but I do have bitterness. To despise death, often excessively praised, can be a consequence of the lack of respect for life (or man). Hegel gives a very bad image of the Blacks, the Indians, the Chinese. Thus, for example: "There is nothing in the nature of the Blacks to resemble humanity. . . . Human worthlessness can reach incredible levels; tyranny is not considered to be an injustice, and cannibalism is a widespread permissible activity." Or: "China does not know the sense of honour... . Since there is no honour the prevailing sense is that of servility, which transforms easily into viciousness. Related to this viciousness is the immorality of the Chinese. They are known to cheat wherever they can; a friend cheats on a friend and if found out, it is not held against them.. . . Slyness and wiliness are the main features of the Indian; submissively low and sly is he to the conqueror and the master, and totally ruthless and cruel to the conquered and the submissive" (Hegel, Philosophy of History). My comment: there is clear racism, or at least Eurocentrism, in these statements. If a sense of morality were a privilege of only some races or nations, it would no longer be what it really is. It is an individual who is moral (or immoral), not a people, thus any generalization is unacceptable. Two truths; a poet's and a scientist's. To a poet, stars are either twinkling and sad, or they look at us from the skies and tell us about eternity; the moon is the light of heaven and the lovers' friend; a brook murmurs and tells a story, an old oak hides secrets; the skies smile or thunder with rage, and mountaintops reflect in the big blue sky and tell of the eternity of nature and the transience of all things human, etc. Science sees things quite differently. For science, nature is detached and the universe is blank and everything in it is just a game of blind and impersonal forces. The moon is a plain, cold planet that has been moving in the dark of space for millions of years, with no known or comprehensible purpose. We would learn so much about ourselves if we were able to say with certainty which held more truth to us and which was closer: the untruth of the poet or the truth of the scientist. This is, perhaps, where the answer is to who we are and where we are from, in fact, the answer about our nature and our origin. Funny is a sober man among drunks. For in the company of drunks, the drunks are the majority and they set the standard of normality. In such company a sober man seems abnormal. When we say that the work of any true artist is essentially autobiographical, we certainly do not mean that the adventures he leads his characters through are, in fact, events from the writer's life. We simply mean that descriptions of inner lives, dilemmas, suspicions, sufferings-especially the sufferings-are a description of one's own life. For no one has ever described someone else's suffering, nor is it possible to. The suffering any writer describes is his own, past or future, but his

Alija Izetbegović - Notes From Prison, 1983-1988

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On Life, People and Freedom own, not someone else's. In that sense, every novel is autobiographical in its essential part. Only he who asks shall receive an answer. There is a reason why I am enduring all this. The reason is just one, but sufficient: I must. Fasting has something truly human to it, taking the better sense of the word. It cannot, of course, be analyzed, nor can it be proved, for it is a purely personal experience. When I was in prison, in moments of the kind of depression that can absorb a man in such a situation, I always felt worse if I ate well. Hunger always helped me more than a wonderful parcel from home. For the worst combination is an empty soul and a full stomach. Why is it so? Thoughts on this could contribute to our understanding of the essence of a human being more than deep and learned philosophical discussion on the topic. However paradoxical it may sound, the invention of gunpowder enhanced the rule of the spirit over naked physical force. It provided an opportunity for the physically weak, provided they had the spirit and the courage. Advantages of freedom do not have to be proved by something outside freedom itself. It is its own underwriter. There are signs of upheaval everywhere. It is a turmoil that reaches to the bottom of our world, to its very foundations. Heidegger and his philosophy of death are totally a part of the Christian world of thought and emotion, as much as Marx and his optimistic philosophy of life belong to the Jewish world of the Old Testament. Nominal alignments do not mean much. Marx and Heidegger are like Moses and Jesus, the New and the Old Testament, Judaism and Christianity. Marx's philosophy is shallow and optimistic; Heidegger's is deep and pessimistic. True philosophy is only the one that takes into account the fact of death. Otherwise, the question that always remains is how can one speak truly of life, while avoiding the fact the truth of which is the only one void of any doubt-the fact of death. 294. Two men are gambling on the sinking Titanic. One of them is cheating. Many people resemble these two in real life. 304. When you are in prison, you have but one desire: freedom. If you fall ill in prison, you do not think about freedom, you think about health. Health is, therefore, more important than freedom. 325. I do not know if one can speak of a stupid peasant. Stupidity is far more frequent with so-called intellectual imbeciles. That is the most repelling and the most obvious form of stupidity. False erudition reveals rather than conceals stupidity. In it, stupidity is at its most obvious. I have never found such stupidity with peasants. 326. Excessive reading does not make us smarter. Some people simply "devour" books. They do it without the necessary intervals of thought, which are necessary in order to "digest," to process what has been read, to absorb and comprehend it. When people of that kind speak, pieces of Hegel, Heidegger and Marx come out raw, unprocessed. Reading requires personal contribution as much as a bee requires "inner" work, as well as time, to transform pollen into honey.


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328. Newton, Darwin and Freud introduced determinism into everything they studied: the first into the universe, the second into the living world, and the third into the psyche. All three types of determinism were to be questioned later, and in the same sequence. It all started with Einstein's denial of Newton's universe. 355. In the world, things are in relations of mutual dependence rather than those of cause and effect. Instead of observing them in a cause-and-effect relationship, we should observe them in their correlation. 360. Their entire long story, with an abundance of words, is usually just a clear sign that they have nothing to say. 366. Life is a game where nobody wins. . . except for those who believe and do good deeds. . . (Qur'an, Surah "Al Asr"). 377. Kundera' s Theresa (Unbearable Lightness of Being) felt nakedness as a sign of the compulsory uniformity of a concentration camp, a sign of humiliation. 413. Is the world divided into good and evil, and is man thus halved? I think that that is where lies the difference between a "romantic" and a "realist." Romantics see the world as a battle arena between men, of whom some are good and some are evil. Realists see the same battle, but primarily within man himself. I think that the latter is closer to the truth. 417. In King Lear, Shakespeare shows that only when mad does Lear understand life, and only when blind does Gloucester "see" life. The mind and eyes often do not see. It is the soul that understands and sees. 418. There are places more desolate than cemeteries. People go there with memories and emotions, they cry and lay flowers. So, let us not say: desolate as a cemetery. The comparison is false. 423. If I cannot speak freely with a friend-and I obviously cannot, read my judgment-if all privacy is denied, then it is a concentration camp. It is not just ordinary violence; it is the total elimination of privacy, one of the features of a concentration camp. 426. There is no proof of the existence of the soul, unless some of our questions that have no answers reveal something like that. One of those questions is why poetry tells about the human soul more than all the psychology of our time. Why is it poets rather than psychologists uncover the soul, why Shakespeare, and not Freud or Jung? Another question may be: why is it that the better off we are, the more displeased we are? Or: Why is pessimistic philosophy born in regions of affluence? Why is man negatively affected by comfort? 428. Look at a daring building: true, it is held together by adhesives or by steel built into it, but the real truth is that it is held together by the thought inside its basic balance and ratios. 457. As the case of Voltaire (and not just his case) shows, upbringing may result in the unintended. Voltaire was brought up by Jesuits, and in him they bred their fiercest enemy.


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On Life, People and Freedom 500. There are paradoxes. If there were no night, we would be deprived of the magnificent image of a starry sky. Thus light deprives us of "vision," and darkness helps us "see." 509.

A word uncovers the truth; it can also be used to conceal it.

521.

Imitation is the most obvious form of acceptance.

523. The deepest, most important question the human mind ever asked itself, the most important question ever asked, is: Why does something exist, rather than nothing? Or: why does something exist at all? For me, this is the fundamental question of ontology. 533. Endless lies are possible on one and the same thing. The truth about it is just one. 534. Life is a dangerous thing. Insecurity is the price of living. Only those who died and those who will never be born are absolutely safe. 540. It was Plato who, long ago, found that it was impossible to discuss anything before agreeing on the terminology, that is, on the meaning of notions and names. 562. Existentialism is philosophy in its subject, and art in the means it uses to resolve it. 563. All Heidegger's efforts, supported by incredible perseverance, knowledge and passion, to build a "philosophy of existence," by his own admission, ended in failure. 578. "It is better to deal with an intelligent devil rather than a good-natured fool," says a proverb. This is probably so because an intelligent rascal is guided by interest, thus being, contrary to a good-natured fool, mainly predictable. You know where you stand and what you can expect. 585. In moments of real tragedy, there is no place for acting or complacent grief. 588.

History sometimes makes fun of us and of our best intentions.

591. Ivo Andric was once asked what would have been his most important message, if he had been asked to give just a very short one, and he said: "Do not get drunk." He did believe that there were other evils, most of which would have disappeared, though, if people stopped drinking. Still, the writer emphasized: "When people speak about how damaging alcohol is, they give numerous convincing examples. A doctor speaks about how damaging it is for health, a social worker speaks about problems of alcoholics' families, divorces, unhappy children and devastated homes, public officials speak about economic damages, etc., but one reason, perhaps the most important one, is often left out: human dignity. I would like to say to people: do not drink for your own sake, out of selfrespect, for your own dignity, do not humiliate yourselves." My comment: That is, presumably, the reason how a ban on alcohol came to be the subject of a religious ban. For religion may be indifferent towards this calculation of damages and benefits, but it cannot remain indifferent towards violations of human dignity.


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695.

Between sorrow and indifference, I will choose sorrow.

696.

Falsity is the only thing uglier than an ugly truth.

782.

If I do not kill time, time will kill me.

790. Melancholy is a matter of the soul, not a matter of the psyche, and it was thus always of more interest to philosophers and poets (as well as theologians) rather than psychiatrists. 824. If there is anything that has charisma, it is suffering ("charisma of suffering"). 825. A man can flee the unpleasant present in two directions: into the past or into the future. The choice depends on character and convictions. The so-called dignified withdrawal from reality can be mere cowardice, capitulation in the face of reality or a whining self-deception. It is hard to learn exactly which one of these is valid for a particular case. 847. The matter is not only of dignity of life, but also of dignity of death. The two are connected. Lack of respect for death is a consequence of the lack of respect of life. 853. Our skill of life and our knowledge of life are two completely different things. In a similar way, it is one thing to be an artist, to create, and our knowledge of art, or our ignorance of it is something different, the latter being more frequent and more true. 873.

It is said that mathematics is a synthesis of rationality.

876. I am convinced that there are illnesses that stupid people cannot succumb to. I think that if I tried, I could even list some of them. 878. What is the biggest question of honor? One thing above all: stay true to yourself and your destiny. 879. How big is disappointment? As big as hope was. Big hopes create big disappointments. 880. "Sad is this time of ours, when it is more difficult to break a bias than a atom"-A. Einstein. 898. Prison allows fundamental."

for

realizations

that

can

be

said

to

be

"painfully

929. A true man speaks most harshly with those he loves or of things he cares for the most. 966. Can life have a happy end? How do you imagine it? Doesn't every man suffer losses? (Qur'an, Surah "Al Asr"). 998. "For a man to be able to read a lot, he should be either very rich, or very poor," said a famous film director. I would add: or a prisoner (in my case).


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On Life, People and Freedom 1010. During my time in prison, I never noticed a drop in my will to live, but I often realized that I was finding relief in the fact that I was old enough to know that death was not too far away. This thought brought me comfort. I treasured it like a big secret. 1012. Realists object that what we say or think about man is excessive idealism rather than the truth. Yes, it is possible that we do not speak of men, but rather of our desires, not of what man is, but what he should be. That may be true. But, despite all, this beautiful dream of what man is like is what makes us human. If we ever cast away this idea as an illusion or a folly, in the name of "truth" or "reality," everything that makes our life bearable will disappear and we will become definitively prepared for all the evils and atrocities that humanity is prone to. Unfortunately, many of them, initiated in the name of the "truth" that man does not exist, are already implemented in large parts of our planet. 1049. A happy man does not have a life story. One may say: boring as a biography of a happy man living in peaceful times. At least that is what it looks like. And is it so? Is there a truly happy man? Is an average Swiss or an average Swede truly happy today? Bauer and Ibsen tell us something about that. 1080. There are realizations that we cannot confirm in any other way but to go through them ourselves. It takes hardship (and suffering) to reach that level, to see and be assured. There is no other way. 1094. A man can be as old as an old shoe, or as old as an old town or at least as an old, centennial oak tree. If he wants to, a man can grow old in this second way. It requires spirit. And what is spirit? This question has almost no answer, certainly not a direct one, but Socrates comes to my mind. This tragic Ancient Greek scholar had an ugly face, an ugly face that was loved by all. Despite that, he was a model of dignity and respect for those who knew him best, especially by his students. Perhaps at least some part of the answer to the question: what is human spirit, lies here. 1117. It is the kind of people, too wise and spiritual, who know how to rejoice endlessly and how to suffer endlessly. Extremes are typical of this kind of people. 1122. Even the most profound, the most versatile wisdom a man may "know," feel or "live," once spoken, becomes a thought, is reduced to a thought. And a thought is, by definition, one-sided. Those are the inevitable human limits, or the limits of knowledge, information and human communication. 1123. A true poet, a true artist, is "engaged" even when he does not wish to be. His art-if it is true-is always a testimony against lies. That is where the inevitable engagement of artists lies. 1182. There are situations in a man's life when a mere thought of death can awaken a desire and move the soul out of total numbness. 1187. This is how they praised old age (and I still do not know if they were right): Plato: "Eyes of the spirit become discerning only when the eyes of the body start to decline." Seneca: "The soul is flourishing and it is rejoicing the fact that it has little to do with the body." Zuber: "Those who have long old age are as if purged of the body." Tolstoy: "It is to the old that we owe the moral advancement of the


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On Life, People and Freedom world." Vuando: "As much as the body reclines towards its fall, so much the soul ascends to its peak," etc. 1193. In prison, man has a shortage of space and an excess of time. Unfortunately, space and time cannot compensate here. 1232. Some people are alive merely biologically. Emotionally and psychologically they are dead. To be alive means, first of all, to be alive in spirit. 1233. Despite numerous exaggerations, even nonsense, fashion has a good side to it: it expresses the need of an individual to be individual, to be "different." 1235. In a certain way, a child is more human than an adult: it possesses the most appealing and the most convincing features-spontaneity of will and emotions. So, while growing up, man loses some of his "humanness," some of what he brought with him from Paradise. By living, he moves further from its source and that is why "every man suffers losses" (Qur'an). Is our life, just like the "life" of nature, a continuous increase of entropy? 1257. I always wondered what was the difference between a story and a report of an event. The content of the story is not just the event itself, the reality, but rather the event as I experienced it. The story is not realistic, but it makes sense. A report is just realistic, it makes no sense, it is a mere collection of facts, whereas a story is an organized event. A story with no end is not a story, time in it stops being an endless flow. In a story, time is somehow bordered. A story is not the truth-it can be, but the truth impedes the story more than it helps it in being a story. 1267. Neither is the irrational senseless, nor is the rational always sensible. It is sometimes the other way round. 1275. Suffering cannot be avoided, but it may be complemented by ideas. Everything that lives, suffers. But only men give ideas to suffering. That is the difference. 1276. Any reasonable thinking naturally strives towards a system. It is its good as well as its bad side. 1295. A true man carries out his human task, or exhausts himself trying to fulfill it. That is the beginning and the end of what we call human. The task itself is usually understood in an individual way. Religion and ethics are but attempts to objectify this task, to determine it and make it less subjective. It is always something outside mere biology. For, animals live, too. In order to be human, man must possess something above biological life alone. The question is not how, but why one lives. 1324. I have often boasted (to myself and others) that I am turned toward the future rather than the past, and this has been true. I thought that this was a particular virtue of mine. It was certainly useful, but it was not a virtue. Only much later did I understand that it was an escape from the past and from bad memories. It seemed to me at certain moments that there was nothing beautiful in anything that I had gone through; it all seemed like an inferno that I was able to rescue (have I?) my three children from.


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On Life, People and Freedom 1325. Kant claims that the laws of natural phenomena must a priori correspond to reason and its forms, and its categories prescribe even the laws of phenomena, thus also of the nature as the "synthesis of all phenomena." Reason is therefore of a legislative nature. As there is obviously a correspondence between nature and notions on subjects of experiences. How is this correspondence possible? 1329. (Politicians and thinkers): Whoever still remembers Baron Cedlic- whom Kant addresses as a "humble and most obedient servant" (in the dedication of Critique of Pure Reason)? 1332. It sometimes seems to me that for a man to endure the pressures of life, he must descend to the ninth circle of the inferno. That means enduring the unendurable and accepting the unacceptable. Accepting everything one fears, absolutely everything. And just when it seems that all the troubles of this world have already befallen him, that he has drank all the cups of bitterness except for the most bitter one, it means to take that one and drink it all. There are people who are said to have gone gray overnight. Are they the ones who descended to the very bottom? And when they returned, all that was left of them was something that can face the entire world, heaven and earth, and can look any truth in the eye. Everything that could have happened did happen to them and they have nothing left to fear, there is no fear left. They are the ones who are prepared to live their life, no matter what it may be like, to endure with serenity and dignity all the way to the end. And those who can endure life, can endure death. For life is more difficult and more dangerous than death. 1356. Man is born in blood, pain and scream, the first thing heard is crying, the birth is not exactly a natural act, it is painful, almost cruel. Does this not say something about the very life that has just been created? 1388. It may sound awkward, but evil gives sense to our existence. If there is no evil, there is no good. If there are no good and evil, everything is reduced to mechanics, thus to non-existence (non-sense). 1395. I have sometimes doubted my faith. I wondered if it really existed. But one thing was certain: I was already an old man, but I had no great fear of death. In fact, I never thought I would really die. I was more absorbed by the fear of the responsibility that awaited me. It was then that I understood that my faith was stronger than I thought and that such an emotion could only have originated from and been maintained by faith in God. 1407. I sometimes vividly remember my youth, the early youth when all the illusions were there. Life that was to come would blow like the wind, shatter them all and leave behind a wasteland. Still, not everything is gone, I have my children. I am grateful to God. 1417. What we call good fortune is sometimes just concurrence of our personal task and our historical one, of our biography and our history, our personal aspirations and historical trends. Some find this "good fortune" in foregoing the personal and accepting the historical imperative as one's own. If I look at things that way, most of my life has been in collision with the historical one and harmony began to appear only recently. It is a paradox that such good fortune is happening at such a late stage of my life, the one I am spending here. I may also say: I was born too early to be happy, I should have been born a little later. However, birth is one of many things we do not choose. It is part of our destiny.


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On Life, People and Freedom 1431. I finished reading Herman Hesse's The Glass Bead Game. It is Saturday, June 28, 1986. (My son is exactly 30 years old today and I have almost nine years of prison before me.) The reading was so "dense" that at times it felt like a jungle where I had to cut my way through with a machete. It is one of the best books I have read, and it is certainly one of the closest to my own thoughts and dilemmas. 1452. True love only chooses to reside in a noble heart. Selfish hearts cannot love. 1458. The ninth, the worst circle of the Inferno. Dante intended it for traitors. 1516. In literature, the greatness of a hero is not in his social significance, but in the greatness of the moral dilemma he represents. A character is great if he represents the good and the evil in a novel, irrespective of his social ranking, his title or position. That is why, in a novel or a drama, a king may be an insignificant character and a servant may be a hero. Why is it not so in life? The reason is that in writing the writer introduces us to the soul of a hero, and in real life we get to know people only by their outer side. A man may be in our vicinity for years (at work or in the neighborhood) and we may believe that we know him, and what we know, in fact, are exactly the things that bear no moral value: name, profession, financial situation and social standing, etc. What is truly important and what no one but a writer could tell us about that person usually remains unknown. 1525. There are "mighty" personalities, mighty only because the society or the environment where they act is weak. 1526. You cannot give up your ideals, and you see quite clearly that there is no place for them in reality. That is a tragic situation. 1529. There are people who accumulate knowledge without expanding their views. The latter is achieved only through ideas. 1530. Writers may be well received by society or they may be rejected and misunderstood. In the former case, they are faced with the danger of alienating themselves from life and reality, and in the latter, to disappear. Both have happened. 1551. Contempt toward people can be twofold and can originate from totally opposite emotions. It can be a product of selfishness and insensitivity to people; in that case, contempt is an excuse for one's own emptiness. However, it can also be the other side of love for them, thus a result of continuing love for people and constant disappointment with them. The first is a feature of the selfish and the insensitive, and the latter of generous and noble souls. 1552. What is a star (or sky) for an astronomer and what is it for a poet, and which of the two is right? To an astronomer, the sky is an empty, desolate space that embodies a kind of algebra (or geometry). To a poet, stars are shimmering messages that create melancholy emotions, or symbols of eternity and order above a transient, forever changing world. Again we have two truths. What should one teach a child first: a beautiful poem about the moon or astronomic information about it?


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On Life, People and Freedom 1555. A starry sky is equally interesting to a scientist, a mystic, an ethics scholar and a poet. Looking at the stars, each experiences something different and each sees his own picture. An image (a scene) is endless; it can be compared to itself and nothing else. 1579. I have just finished Dickens's David Coppeifield and I wondered: from the point of view of formal morality, are Mr. Murdstone and his sister, who devised the monstrous system of upbringing, bad people? Perhaps not, but the scenes described by Dickens, where Mr. Murdstone's every word and Mrs. Murdstone's every move spread a deadly coldness, uncovering a kind of cruel order and mercilessness. God, save me from righteous people who possess honesty but have no heart. (God, save me from their heartless honesty.) 1583. Principles alone are insufficient. The second "decisive parameter" is man. The most sublime deeds of kindness and mercy have been done in the name of Christian principles, but stakes have burned too. It depended on the people who were applying the principles. Let alone the hypocrites. 1588. A toothache hurts, stupidity does not. A hollow head does not hurt the way a hollow tooth does. It is just damaging, but one does not die of stupidity. 1596. The political and material circumstances and troubles I have gone through in my life made my children, I believe, think and judge life and its problems much earlier than would normally have been the case. The consequences of this in their lives must have been both good and bad. God grant that there were more of the good ones. 1600. There are people who are not materialists in the philosophical sense, but are by their instincts and behaviour. Most people are, in fact, like that. 1607. Faust sells his soul for the treasures of this world-an old story, very old and often repeated. And true. 1613. "Speaking of history, it is art that flicks through the pages of the book of centuries, questions chronicles, fills in what the chroniclers missed out, reawakens facts, customs and characters, bridges analyses, groups what has been separated, introduces harmony into disharmony"-thus writes Victor Hugo. Still, speaking of history and art, I believe that there is a difference in the subject itself. History describes external events. Historical novels describe life itself. History deals with events, and novels deal with experiences. The subject of history is a people, a society, a community or a group; the subject of a novel is a person (an individual). History written on the basis of a novel or an epic poem would be very bad, but at the same time our complete knowledge of an epoch is not possible without a novel or a poem about it. However inaccurate literature may be in its presentation of historical facts, it is true in terms of local colour, social climate, spirit of the time, emotions and a subjective experience of a historical event recorded truly, albeit only externally, by history. We should therefore leave history to historians and life to poets. The latter will tell us truths about a time gone by, truths of a kind that we can never find in history. There is obviously an outer and an inner history of any era. 1645. It is difficult to help a man without hurting his pride. Everyone wants to be a giver and not a receiver.


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On Life, People and Freedom 1649. Nietzsche's "super-humans" are weak. For it is easy to live only for oneself, follow one's own instincts, which is Nietzsche's advice to his superhuman; it is hard to live for others and against one's own instinct. It is easy to retaliate, it is hard to forgive. It is easy to want the wife of thy neighbour, it is hard to resist the temptation. The first requires less than a man. Only the second requires a super-human. 1652. There is a strange link between good and evil. Were there no evil, would there be good? Is there good but in the struggle for good? Ibsen had nothing against oppression, for-he used to say-what else would awaken inside us the love for freedom? When he learnt that the Italian army had liberated Rome, he was not particularly delighted. He said: "The beautiful yearning for freedom is lost forever. I myself must admit that the struggle for freedom is the only thing about freedom that I like. I am not interested in the exercise of freedom" (Henrik Ibsen, Brand). My comment: these are the thoughts of a man who lives in freedom. I do not know if Brand would think the same way if he were in my situation. 1665. Has it ever happened to you that you actually like a rogue more than a socalled honest citizen? Have you ever wondered why? I believe that this can only be so because a rogue is more original and more his own. He is what he is. An honest citizen often acts according to a law that is not his own, that which was imposed upon him, and a rogue acts true to himself, according to his own law. It does not mean that you like misdemeanours, nor that you approve of crime or sin, it is about the other part of the pair-personality. We like a man who is his own legislator. And conversely, we like the acts of a moral man, we do not like the man himself, since he obeys, and obedience is a form of non-freedom. Actions in accordance with a code that does not arise from the soul can easily be odious. In the end of nineteenth-century poetry, we find certain understanding for rogues and sinners, and the understanding originates from the above. "Be whatever you want to be, but be true to yourself all the way," says Ibsen's Brand. In certain extreme situations, a rogue seems a free man, and a moral man seems a slave to rules. Faced with a choice like this one, our spontaneous sympathies are with the free man. A slave can be pitied, but no one wishes to identify with him. 1674. I often wondered, especially in the first days after the verdict, whether I had the courage that could endure all that was ahead of me. There were days when death was my only hope. I kept it as a secret that only I knew, a secret THEY neither knew nor could take away from me. 1678. Love cannot exist as something general, just as something individual. That is why Jesus speaks of love for a neighbour. Only this specific love has meaning and only this love exists. Love for mankind-what is it? How does one love mankind? There is love for a human being or no love at all. 1679. "Be serious with your work, always and everywhere," says Kierkegaardbearing in mind the Ibsenian (or Nietzschean) law of either-or. You either are the one who is called for and ready to sacrifice unconditionally for an ideal, or you are not, in which case, your seriousness toward work means that you do not accept it at all. There is nothing worse than doing things halfway. It sometimes equals treason and lies. 1680. To have one's own self, to be aware of it, to defend it-irrespective of what else the "I" may mean-is the first condition for being human. That is why we can


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On Life, People and Freedom sometimes feel respect and be interested in the destiny of a negative hero-if he is consistent and ready to draw consequences of his own attitude. 1691. A man and a woman are the basic cell of the world and of life. No revolutions, changes of empires, changes of laws and owners over the goods of the world were ever able to change real life unless they changed the relationship between man and woman. And vice-versa: the smallest shift in this basic element of life leads to an overall upheaval. The first image of Him and Her, this primordial image, is linked to Paradise, to sin, to responsibility and punishment. Everything else that happened later, starting from the epoch-making Descent, is linked to Adam and Eve and their relationship. What happened between them started as metaphysics, and metaphysics it remained. All subsequent history has been determined by this first drama and its main characters, Him and Her. 1717. That was the embrace of the unfortunate, those who could not belong to each other under the laws of this world. And there was but one way out of this embrace reminiscent more of a struggle: death. For "love and death are the same"-I do not know whose words these are, but they are implanted deep in my memory. 1727. It can be said of many people: they wanted to destroy the mechanism, instead they became its victims. 1728. Justice is one of those few things that need no proof. To prove the need for justice and fairness is either superfluous for those who have a heart or useless for those who do not. The very question why there is a need to be just shows that any conversation and any explanation are pointless. 1729. A metropolis has a strange influence on men. A man poisoned by a metropolis loses the immediate sense of life that he had when he came to this world. He starts to hate nature, the sea, the sky, the clouds and becomes an "addict" just as he would with any extensively administered poison. 1735. American writers-contrary to European writers-do not strive to improve the world nor do they believe in such a mission of literature. To them, ideology is one of the grave dangers of this world. I agree with them. 1746. To seek trouble-this is not courage, this is madness. Courage is the willingness of man to sensibly face the troubles he cannot avoid. 1748. Accustomed to darkness, moles cannot tolerate light. To them, darkness is a normal state and light is unnatural and unbearable. Some people are like them. They are accustomed to darkness, they dislike light. 1751. Nietzsche once wrote that he hated "the weak, the moralists and the slaves." For him, these were one and the same kind of people. 1760. In order to build, there must be destruction. Only anger can destroy, love cannot. That is why anger is a necessary and a useful part of life. 1762. We seek freedom, but are we worthy of it? 1763. This one great hardship saved me from hundreds of small ones that would have eaten away at me every day, in bits, yet systematically.


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On Life, People and Freedom 1766. I took revenge on hardship from my earlier life by forgetting it. 1774. I would like to live like a human being but I would like to ail and die quietly, like an animal. 1780. When Prophet Yahweh, God's Emissary, asked Satan about the time when his power over man was the strongest, he replied: "When man has eaten enough and drank enough." 1789a. After seeing a large exhibition of modern painting (in Sarajevo in 1980) it took me some time to re-establish balance and a normal link with the outer world and to start walking through it straight. Upon leaving the exhibition and entering the street, I felt a mild clash between the two worlds, the one from the painting and the real one. It is obvious that laws governing these worlds are not the same. 1790. When you see a painting you do not understand, you may think that the creator is not an artist but rather a charlatan playing with a naive audience. However, you may also think this: How high did the creator have to climb and how low did he have to descend in order to see a scene or a truth he is trying to tell you? If you do this, you will err less. For, think about it, you do not understand an essay on electronics, nor do you understand much of what a scientist may tell you about how he is building a spaceship to go to Saturn and how he plans to direct its flight from Earth. Although what he is telling you is fantastic and hard to understand, the scientist is not a charlatan. So why should a painter whose painting you do not understand be one? 1795. Injustice can be remedied by justice, by punishment. Same for same. Crime and punishment, remedium peccati. But the only way to truly overpower injustice is forgiveness. That is why the Qur'an instructs justice and recommends forgiveness. And yet, how does one know that justice is truly just, and not just a new injustice? And is there the same in human life? Are crime and punishment ever-can they at all be-the same, one at the measure of the other? Is not every justice, for it is pronounced and executed by men, always a new injustice, seeking again justice of its own? Over and over again. 1797. It was in Andric, I think, where I read that surplus imagination and laziness go together. Imaginative people are often lazy. Hard working ones are often dry, rational, calculating. Some people are pushed towards hard work by selfishness, ambition, desire for attention. Yet lazy people are not as disliked as we may expect, since their nonchalance is often accompanied by a total absence of ambition and calculation. In this respect there is a parallel with teetotallers and drunks. While we basically praise teetotalism and condemn drinking, we do not always feel the same towards teetotallers and drunks. The only thing we respect in some teetotallers is their sobriety, wishing them to be as far from us as possible. 1799. It is impossible to go forward, and backward there is nothing to go back to. 1801. Is there anything more beautiful than a rainbow? But the man who is inside it, cannot see it. 1802. It is one thing to do evil unto man, but it is another, though not a very different thing, to not do unto them the good you were able and obliged to do. If you summarize your life from time to time, do not forget the latter.


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On Life, People and Freedom 1804. Philosophy came to be and continues to exist out of man's natural endeavour to conceive or at least to comprehend the world. Of as long as this endeavour lives, so shall philosophy. 1826. All my reasons remained helpless, as if before a wall or a kind of madness. Madness knows no reasons. No comparison with other people and events was of help. For this comparison was based on the typical and the normal, and here everything was atypical and abnormal. 1833. Life is full of paradoxes. Thus, for example, a true man who loves and honours others in principle goes by his conscience and cares very little about criticisms or praise of others. Conversely, a vain man usually despises others but secretly cherishes their opinion, hence cares about the opinion of those he despises. We usually find this in dictators and tyrannical natures. Stalin is said to have despised his surroundings bitterly. He was particularly disparaging towards poets and intellectuals (Osip Mandelstam, a poet, lost his head because of a poem about Stalin written too liberally). The logical question is: Why are they affected by the opinions of those whom they consider beneath them and whom they despise? 1851. Hatred is said to be blind, but so is love, in its own way. I cannot remember truly hating anyone, but I am certain that I have known much better the people I disliked or even could not stand the sight of. The distance I felt towards them helped me to see all their weaknesses, lack of talent and intelligence, basically all their faults that would have remained unknown to me had I liked them. It is a different question whether this "knowledge" of mine (or lack thereof) is a good thing, and should we know all the bad truths about people close to us. 1852. A temptation that lurks at us: We sometimes feel disgust (or even hatred) for a person against whom we have nothing to say and who is no worse than us or those we love and respect. This unfounded antipathy towards people is a frequent and an ugly occurrence. It is one of our temptations. 1855. Reading is, more or less-depending on the reader-a creative act, for the reader provides his own interpretation to what he read. Ten readers-ten different characters of Fyodor Karamazov, and with it numerous unexpected judgments and associations, totally subjective, varying from one reader to the next. That is, to an extent, the difference between reading a story and watching a film. While reading we reconstruct a character (or a landscape), in film it is given and the viewer receives it passively. While reading a novel the image is in the mind of the reader, and while watching a film the image is on the screen. We should therefore read, for film cannot replace that. 1861. I have always found modern painting a little difficult to understand, but it always attracted me, like a secret. I read with curiosity everything on paintings of this style that I could lay my hands on. And here in prison, there have been days when I was "attacked" by a desire to understand a secret, an essence eluding me yet feeling so near. If I had been a painter, I am certain that, feeling the inadequacy of words, I would have painted those incomprehensible images that I used to gaze at with bewilderment and awe. I think that at such times I did understand modern painting, inasmuch as anyone but the creator can understand it at all.


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On Life, People and Freedom 1863. As for the difficult, the ultimate questions, the ones on life and death, especially the latter, some keep asking themselves and some keep avoiding them. But neither is finding any answers. The first because there is no answer, the latter because they are not looking. At first sight, the result is the same. Still, the difference between those two categories of people is immense, just like the difference between wisdom and recklessness. 1864. Is life without desires imaginable? Are not life and desires one and the same thing? Even if you want to (are endeavouring to) overcome a desire, it is nonetheless a desire. Thought and desires cannot be stopped. 1866. I have read writings by Tolstoy, Hugo, Dostoyevsky, Rousseau, and came to a conclusion: none, not even people whom we hold to be geniuses, were free from vices and weaknesses. The only difference is how much people are willing to admit this to themselves and others. To courageously face all the sins and failures of one's life, in a confrontation that poisons and purges the soul at the same time, this is something that only a truly brave, great man is capable of. There are no imperfect human beings, just insincere ones. 1869. Describing his childhood, Tolstoy tells us that the memory of that time fills him with a sensation of something poetic and mysterious and how then, growing up, he lost this true feeling of the depth of life. We all feel something similar. Does not the same happen to mankind and has not mankind, when leaving its childhood, lost that feeling (or that memory) for the mysterious or the suprasensory? Is not the drama (or the entire development) that mankind has gone through repeated in human life? And this time, the development does not just consist of advancement, but also of retrogression or loss? 1870. I do not know much about computers, but I can say with certainty that the intelligence of computers is stupid and that it is at best a simulation of intelligence. This simulation can be endlessly improved but it will never cross that magic line and become spontaneous and authentic. And it is exactly that fact that represents the endlessly great (or, if you prefer, the endlessly small) difference between the animate and the inanimate. No human product can cross this threshold. Only God was capable of that. "God is not reluctant to give you an example of a fly" (Qur'an). However great our knowledge is, do we not overestimate it at times? If all the knowledge of all the libraries of the world were to be concentrated into a single imaginary computer, and if all the greatest scientists of the world were to be gathered into an imaginary institute or laboratory, and if they were to be given all the time and all the resources they may ask for, they would not be able to produce a single swamp mosquito (a fly). That is the message of the Qur'an's ayyah on a fly. 1872. When we try to imagine a good writer, we usually think of the qualities he should possess: imagination, experience, talent, perceptiveness, intellect. But I read somewhere that Turgenev made a list of flaws a man should possess in order to be a writer. Thinking about this unexpected or the "inverted" way of looking at things, I think that one flaw should be very high on this list: vanity. For why does a writer believe in the first place that he should teach us or educate us or that we should know what he thinks? Is this not a form of vanity? 1875. As for the relationship of these two histories (the inner and the outer- see note 1613) the inner may contain the real truth about events, if it were not an excellent field for the writer's arbitrariness, subjectivity, bias and imagination. For


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On Life, People and Freedom what is there that guarantees to us that people were exactly the way the writer describes them in his novels? For example, Ivo Andric is persistently reproached for being biased against Islam and Moslems and that this bias drew all his characters with Moslem names. In his stories, Moslems are always primitive, dishonest, weak and idle, prone to deceit and laziness. The outer history, despite everything, lends itself a lot less to mystification and arbitrariness of this kind. In any case, it is more verifiable. For not all writers are as conscientious when writing so-called inner histories as Leo Tolstoy. For example, while writing his 30page story titled "Why?," he is known to have read a number of books on the history of the 1830-1831 Polish rebellion, in order to be as truthful as possible. He wrote in his diary: "I need to read a lot in order to write five lines scattered throughout the story." The opposite example may be the said Andric, who is said to have totally misrepresented the land expropriation prior to the construction of the bridge on the Dma. According to Andric, it was a ruthless grab with no compensation and no right to complain, accompanied by violence. However, Osman Sokolovic, a historian, found and published court archive documents that showed that one by one the owners went to the Turks' office and how the purchase price was determined for each lot that was taken. Sokolovic quoted literal translations of records that were no different than the modern ones put together on similar occasions. If Andric did not follow historical facts or if he did not confirm them, if he drew everything he wrote on people, their character, beliefs, feelings and relationships from his imagination (and he was undoubtedly very imaginative) then there is in his Bridge on the Drina, The Travnik Chronicle, The Damned Yard and Djerzelez nothing one may learn and understand about time and people that really existed. What can be learnt from Andric' s novels is perhaps something about people in general, about what they may have been like and not what they were really like. But in that case his works have a philosophical value and have no significance for what we call an inner history of an epoch. 1903. Time and use wear out most things, but there are those-like folk songsthat go from mouth to mouth and are shaped and enriched with time, thus becoming shorter and more meaningful. 1915. There is one thing that we want and hate at the same time: old age. 1951. There is no wisdom without experience, one's own, of course. However, if it is true that a clever man uses someone else's rather than his own experience, what arises is that recklessness in youth is the condition of wisdom in old age. What follows is that young smart men never achieve true wisdom and that such wisdom is achieved only by those who were neither very wise nor very thoughtful in their youth. 2018. Water reduced to turbines of a plant is useful. Water that remains free and falls free is not useful, but it is beautiful. 2019. Can something be said of "nothing"? 2076. One of the arguments of the feminist movement is that a woman has been expressing herself as a mother and that it is now time for her to express herself as a personality. In their argumentation, mother and personality are opposed terms. I would like someone to explain this to me. I have always thought that there is nothing more personal or richer in personality than a mother, that a mother is a superb personality. Feminist dialectics is confusing.


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On Life, People and Freedom 2078. Why else do we treasure objects and memories of times long gone, if not because they represent symbols of human continuation and tradition. 2079. If it is sincere, remorse is a moral category of the ultimate kind. In my eyes, a man who sinned and repented is better than those who never sinned (and there are such). I have always had an aversion to so-called sinless men and, despite my great desire to do so, I have never been able to free myself from this mistrust. Perhaps this is because I am neither sinless nor perfect. 2080. It is no wonder that painters paint. The world is full of shapes, colours, light and shadow-therefore made to be painted, and a human being with eyes and soul is made to paint. Thus a painter and his world are at each other's measure. 2109. Real men are not rough. They have emotions and they are not ashamed of them. Homer's famous heroes, whose heroic deeds he described so vividly, do not hide tears. When Patroclus saw his Achaeans killed before Troy, "tears streamed down his cheeks like water down a rocky mountain." Achilles said to him: "Why do you cry, Patroclus, like a little girl running behind her mother and crying until the mother takes her in her arms?" And when Patroclus was killed, Achilles "fell on the ground.. . and cried, with such pain that even his mother Tehida heard him in the depths of the sea." Antioch cried, "shedding bitter tears." Homer and his heroes are no less manly because of their tears. 2135. A "better life" (as a slogan, a motto, a goal) is something a man can work toward but not die for. One may suffer for something above the "standard of living," despite the fact that what is "above" is in some cases an illusion, even a delusion. It is, in fact, something that belongs to the same order of things as death itself: love, honor, freedom, dignity, glory, idea, homeland, etc. To sacrifice life is an irrational act, and something like that can be done only based on emotions, and not based on reason. 2143. Decency is not just a question of good morality, but also a question of good taste. Immoral things are usually also in poor taste. 2144. If Islam is understood correctly, it will become clear that it holds that a true man is above a saint, that a saint is a man who has perhaps tried but failed to become a complete man. Whoever reads Tolstoy's biography, a moving story of "a struggle which continued for 80 years and which was participated by all virtues and all vices, all vices but one-lie" (R. Roland), will understand how any biography of a "sinless" saint (if such exists) would be pale, boring, even fake, compared to the life of this true man. One can appreciate that the great writer's dramatic life was exactly what God wanted and that that was the reason why He ordered sinless angels to bow before a sinful man. 2153. It is interesting that some people constantly request the right to an opinion, and once they win the right, they do not use it. 2167. Fire can keep us warm, but we can also burn in it. 2178. How can I judge people? Edgar Allan Poe, one of the greatest writers in the past 150 years, who wrote unforgettable prose, poems and essays, died at the age of 40, eaten by alcohol and who knows what else, practically homeless. Only Allah can judge people.


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On Life, People and Freedom 2198. A person is not defined by his or her opinions, but by his or her feelings. A man can change his opinion completely and remain the same person. We can talk of a change of a person only once his feelings have changed. It can be said that we adopt opinions with a belief that they will contribute to easier achievement of what we are emotionally committed to or linked with. 2200. One man's death is as valuable as his life has been. 2204. "In Memoriam-Borivoj Niksic "Borivoj Bora Niksic, Justice of the Federal Court, participant of the National Liberation War from its beginning, member of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia since 1939, was buried on Saturday, 18 October, at the New Cemetery in Belgrade. Persecuted for spreading communist ideas, he remained firm and unwavering. A warrior, a partisan, a brave son of his Srem, he fought honourably until the final victory. Awarded several war and peacetime medals, he remained the humble bearer of his communist ideals. Well known to the Yugoslav legal community as a long serving judge of Circuit, Supreme and Federal Courts, he gave full contribution to the development of criminal legislation and legal theory and practice. Gravely ill and aware of his approaching end, he left a message for his family and colleagues that he was to be buried with no speeches, no flowers, no obituaries, in the presence of just his immediate family and closest associates. A quiet departure of this long serving judge of the Federal Court, a warrior and above all a good man, left a huge void among his colleagues, close associates and friends" (Politika, Belgrade, October 28, 1986). My note: Borivoj Niksic was the vice-chair of the Federal Court Chamber that passed the final ruling in my case. Legal qualification was changed (from counterrevolutionary association aimed at destroying constitutional order to socalled verbal offence-Article 133 of the Criminal Code) and the sentence was reduced from twelve to nine years of imprisonment. According to the Criminal Code in effect, the maximum penalty was ten years. 2215. My mind keeps vacillating and wondering, but my heart has always been and is firmly on the side of faith. My moments of true happiness were those when my mind and my heart were in agreement. It is January 1st today. We have just entered 1987. What is ahead of us? 2268. Perhaps sorrow is a natural state of the soul, here, ici-bas, in this world. 2268a. What else is a characteristic of the human soul? It loves fairy tales. Why? 2275. "A man is not what he thinks, but what he does," says Mesa Selimovic (Death and the Dervish). My comment: I am not what I think, even less what I do. Both are clearly conditioned. I am what I want and feel. Thought is "outside of me," my actions are even more "alien," even more "outside." Emotions are closest to the soul, if they are not the soul itself. 2324. When you have lived and survived everything, when you have stumbled a hundred times and then risen again, when you have given up all false hopes and comforts and you have clenched your teeth to look the truth in the eye, only then do you realize that the sole purpose of life is the fight against evil. Little can be


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On Life, People and Freedom done in this fight, but that is the only thing we have left. Outside it, there is disaster and death forever. 2330. People have not sung about wisdom, they have sung about courage. People have dedicated their most beautiful poems to a virtue held in esteem higher than anything else, probably because it is the rarest of all: the virtue of courage, the contempt toward danger and death. This goes equally for folk poems of all times, from Japan, to India and Persia, to England and America. 2341. In prison, a man has to pass a very difficult test. After years of loneliness and deprivation, only a man of strong spirit can leave with no signs of numbness and frailty. This is a sign that, despite all the hardship, his inner life has not been boring, that he amused himself even in solitude with his thoughts and his plays of fantasy. While his body has been behind bars, his spirit was able to be with his loved ones, in his thoughts he could "see" a show at the theatre or even be in a distant country. 2343. Have you noticed that when watching comedy, some people do not find it funny at all? While the politicians usually get upset, some intelligent people find comedies sad. 2354. The soul aches as much as the body. There are days when all the scars, all the old and long forgotten hurts "light up," just- like old injuries awaken before bad weather or bones hurt from blows you have collected in a long life and only forgotten for a short while. In those days you are bad tempered and absorbed in yourself, in your soul whose wounds reopened only to remind you that nothing is lost, nothing vanishes, least of all pains and bad memories. They just whither away for a while, withdraw into an unknown depth, just like they will this time and you will put them behind you. Until the next time. 2355. There is only one way to avoid defeat when you are facing the world. Even that one is not quite safe, but it is the only possible one: It is that you move the ratio of strength between you in your favour. Instead of moving and changing thousands of things, each of which is stronger and heavier than you, you strengthen yourself to be "above" the world. The latter you can do, it is in your power at least to some extent, and the world is huge and unconquerable. You cannot cover all the roads you take with leather, you can make shoes for yourself, you can cover your feet with leather and the result will be the same. That is the only way to rule the world and the circumstances we find ourselves in. Have you ever thought why old people feel cold even when they are dressed warmly? They lack their own warmth. The best way to resist the outer cold is for your blood to work, so that you are warm within. That is the only real solution. 2357. An ornament cannot replace content, just like a spice cannot replace food. When content dissolves into form in a culture, we certainly become witnesses of decadence and disappearance of that culture. 2374. A clever man knows how to speak. A wise man knows how to be silent too. 2376. One can speak of sense or senselessness of suffering, of its role in a man's life and in history, but one is certain, we all feel it: The composition of suffering is noble, it is made of noble matter.


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On Life, People and Freedom 2393. It is February 26, 1987, today, a day of some excitement. I was called to the prison administration this morning. In the visitors' room, I found Lejla and Sabina with happy faces. I guess they wanted to let me know immediately that it was nothing bad. They then told me that Nikola Stojanovic, the president of the Pardons Commission of the RB&H Presidency, had suggested that I should file an application for a pardon and I would be released. The mediator was Zdravko Djuricic, then secretary of the Commission, Lejla's old school classmate. He had put together the text of the application. I read it. I did not sign. The prison continues. 2401. Excessive erudition can sometimes suffocate creative thinking. A man can possess knowledge in many fields, but with no organization, no vision. Many learned men have lived and died without real knowledge, which can be brought to life only by an idea. It is generally accepted that research with a wrong hypothesis is more promising than research with no hypothesis. A pile of good material with no plan remains just a pile. A starting hypothesis may even be a prejudice that we shall be free from once we complete the research, just as we free ourselves of the scaffolding once a building has been built. 2405. Do not kill a mosquito, dry the swamp. 2429. Only freedom cannot be worn out by frequent use. 2518. The "humanity" of a man is not primarily in the fact that he is good and kind, but rather in the possibility that he may or may not be such. Therefore, not because he is not a criminal, but because he is not necessarily, inevitably such. A man has a way out and that is his greatness. 2529. Fasting in prison-for me, that was a confirmation of my human dignity on days and occasions when everything around me violated it. 2547. The fact of death changes all our standards. For no rational order of thoughts and values can cope when faced with this fact. Only strong passionslove, faith, hatred, pride, vengeance-and they are rejected by reason-are capable of that. That perhaps justifies them in the eyes of many. 2557. The question why something is, why is there Something and not Nothing, for me the most far-reaching question a man can ever ask himself. I wonder: How could a man, being in reality as a part of it, ever come across a question like that, how could he think of it? The first time I heard it, I was astounded. 2572. Art is not worthy of that name if it merely describes, follows, copies, or even reveals, unless it all grows in its eyes to the limits of the invisible and the miraculous. 2581. A pure mind embodies the unity of essence and existence: It is at the same time a real existence, and this characteristic of real existence is inherent in the very essence of the mind, that is, it is one, unquestionable and absolute being. The world cannot be compared with the light that expands into infinity and sheds itself onto everything it comes across (Husserl' s views, presented in Ideen). 2703. Man is in conflict with the forces of history. These forces are blind to the life of an individual. An individual, his life, his feelings, are victims of these forces. "Senselessness of history and its unfulfilled promises overcasts the individual


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On Life, People and Freedom human being" (Emile Sioran, History and Utopia). Sioran speaks about evil, violence and barbarism as the main driving forces of history. According to him, morality, goodness and humanist ideals have always been on the verge of defeat in their conflict with the forces of tyranny and evil. 2735. Among poor peoples, slenderness and paleness are not held in high regardthey remind them of hunger and poverty. 2862. Optimism sometimes sounds cynical. 2127. Unlike animals, God made us walk upright. Most people do not use this privilege; most of their lives they bend, even crawl. Should one do that? Is it not blasphemous to reject this great gift from God: walking upright? 2152. A man is not a "social animal." The more he is a man, the more he is a person, the more he strives toward solitude. An ordinary (average) man is sociable not because of his love for other men, but because he is self-insufficient. It is an escape from emptiness, from monotony, from one's own life. A superficial person does not like to be alone and vice versa: a truly spiritual man, a monk, a recluse can be alone all his life. 2156. In Italy, instead of hitting a donkey thus making it move forward, which sometimes has no effect due to the donkey's stubbornness, peasants have thought of a trick: They fasten a stick with a bunch of hay to the donkey's head, so the donkey stares at it and hopes to reach it. Are not many people like these donkeys, and are there not some people who turn others into donkeys like the ones in Italy? 2161. Envy is a misfortune that affects unhappy people. They are envious because they feel unhappy. Envy does not soothe their misfortune, it just worsens it. 2173. Some people consider their arrogance to be a form of self-awareness, but the two are totally different. 2178. Real knowledge is possessed by the people who are belonging to the majority-thus the lower, rougher nature. A better kind of people seem naive and ignorant. I often had a dilemma: Should I respect them for their kindness, or resent them for their naiveté. For ignorance is no virtue. And vice versa: should I resent the experienced kind for their resemblance with the majority (for "the majority is not good"-Qur'an) or should I appreciate them for their knowledge and realism? Of course, I had no real dilemma: Honesty is superior to knowledge, but I must admit that I was never able to truly forgive the naiveté and clumsiness of good and honest people. I have always dreamed of an ideal: a good and honest man, yet experienced and realistic. Can that be united in one person or is it just a lucky coincidence? 2182. Just as we carry the burdens of our own children, in the same way we do not feel our own faults and vices, but rather only those of other people. 2184. We express noisily and passionately the opinions that come from our will, and those that come from our knowledge and conviction, we express calmly and coldly. That is why we always rely more on judgments expressed coldly; we feel that they come from understanding rather than passion.


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On Life, People and Freedom 2185. Interests in general truths and personal truths are in inverted proportion. If we come across a person of great curiosity towards personal matters and lives of their near and not so near dear ones (which is quite frequent, not only in women), in them we will find less interest in the general truths of the world, which are subjects of science and philosophy. With his well-known sting, Schopenhauer observes that ordinary people, who normally do not show particular sharpness, are "excellent algebraists in someone else's personal matters, where they solve the most complicated equations with only one given value." 2193. Nietzsche was a very sensitive man, not at all like his own Ubermensch. At the age of 44 he lost his mind and-according to biographers-the immediate cause was a scene at a Turin square, when the philosopher, upon leaving his flat, saw a carriage driver giving his horse a merciless whipping. He went to the animal, embraced it gently and cried, and then just collapsed. He lived for another 12 years, but he never returned to his senses. We are what we are, not what we think or wish we are. 2228. We cannot achieve perfection. But there is one thing we can do: we can constantly try to be more men, try for every man to be more like a man. 3054. The presence of death gives the picture of life the necessary dark shades, without which it would have been pale and insignificant. A novel and a drama that contain no dying seem incomplete. 3066. To a man who gives me his opinions I would love to say: I am not interested in your ideas, your alleged convictions, nor in your views of the world, nor in whatever you call it. The only thing that matters to me and the only thing that matters at all is: what are you like? Are you a good or a bad person? In fact, all your stories, even your actions, are interesting only as much as they help me find the answer to this question about you: who are you? 3069. Even darkness may be light. Stars are invisible during the day. Their glow is the strongest in the greatest darkness. If there were no dark nights, we would not have known the magic of a starry sky. Even if we knew of it, we would not be able to see this incredible sight. 3078. What is characteristic of a real writer? First of all, perceptiveness. There are people who lived their lives as if they passed through the world with their eyes closed. A real writer is the total opposite: sensitive as a photo-plate. 3085. The world cannot be won by rejection. This can be done only by acceptance. In fact, acceptance of the world is the precondition for changing it or winning it. 3103. The Japanese ideogram for the verb "to think" means "to be sad." A coincidence or hidden logic? 3134. The problem of solitude. Some think that that is the only way for man to confirm or to experience his humanity. Others think the opposite: Man can become and remain man only when surrounded by other men. Patrick Suskind, a new-generation German writer, wrote his story titled "Pigeon" only to show that in solitude, man loses his humanity and that human existence is human only with other humans.


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On Life, People and Freedom 3137. There are rules of the game in everything one does in life. Follow the rules, and in order to follow them, either learn them or establish them yourself. 3140. Why do we always appreciate morality and almost always despise moralizing? Because morale is an action, moralization is a word. Morale is a request from yourself, moralization is a request directed at someone else. That is why morale is always moral, and moralization is often hypocritical, thus immoral. 3179. It seems that conflict is the way life exists. A conflict-free life cannot be imagined. Conflict can be constructive, destructive or futile (redundant). The latter resolves nothing, nor does it serve any purpose. And many cherish only this type of conflict. 3180. At a certain stage of their lives, salmon go upstream, back to their birthplace, crossing huge distances, conquering rapids and waterfalls, even dying in the effort. Why? They know they must. That is all. 3260. One night during a scientific expedition in the Pacific, three crewmembers of the Kon-Tiki are said to have caught a snake-like fish of magic colours, unlike anything else they had ever seen. They took it immediately to the fourth crewmember, a marine zoologist. They woke him up and showed him the fish. He looked at it and said, "There is no such fish," and went back to sleep. Many people behave like this expert. 3333. People who took part in or witnessed one and the same event often see and describe it differently. Everyone is absolutely convinced of his or her own version (the film Rashomon is a story about that). How does one explain that? I think that the only explanation is that our observations are never mechanical and objective. They, as well as our views of an event, are always intermingled with our thoughts, our emotions, desires and passions. This creates numerous views and numerous misunderstandings. 3334. To live or to die, which is the greater problem? Perhaps Thomas Bailey Aldrich, an American writer, had this question in mind when he stated that "we cry when we are born, not when we die." 3340. What is the true meaning of the rational and the irrational-it is hard to say because, among other things, the notion of ratio is not identical in different cultures and different languages. Latin Ratio, English Reason and German Vernunfi do not have the same meaning. 3341. What was or has been done cannot but be, it cannot be erased for that would be contrary to the law of time. It is March 23, 1988 today, five years of prison are over, four remain. 3375a. What should we think of Picasso's paintings, most of us standing before them confused? It is interesting to hear what the painter himself thinks about his art. In a letter to Giovanni Papini from 1952, Picasso wrote: "People of sophisticated taste, rich men, idle men, thinkers, all seek in art something new, extravagant, scandalous. I myself, starting from cubism and onwards, have entertained those connoisseurs and those critics with all the impulsive bizarreness that crossed my mind, and they, the less they understood it, the more they admired it. . . . But when I face myself, I do not have the courage to consider


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On Life, People and Freedom myself an artist in the classical sense of the word. Giotto, Titian, Rembrandt and Goya were artists. I am just a public entertainer who understood his time and used as well as he could the stupidity, vanity and recklessness of his contemporaries." My comment: I do not know how sincere this confession was. How do I put it together with the fact that Picasso prepared over 700 studies and sketches just for his painting Ladies from Avignon, which was, as it is held, a real revolution in Western painting? Perhaps Picasso just played a joke on us with this statement. 3377. A writer may fight against the evil in men, if that is his goal. By describing Macbeth, Shakespeare spoke about good and evil more than a hundred aestheticists. 3391. Most people do evil out of interest (power, wealth, glory, love, etc.). But there is also evil for the sake of evil, evil that is its own purpose. That is real hell. I have unfortunately had the opportunity to get to know such evil and the people who do it. 3439. Suffering and pain play a huge moral role in human life. It is hard to explain but we all feel it. Of course, this is not the quality of the world, but rather of man. With no pain and no suffering, what is lacking is the important thing we call credibility. 3464. I was right at the wrong time. 3501. I, to them: you could hide the past. The present you cannot. 3514. A man I knew died. Reading the obituary, I thought: there are people whom we feared for their strength or strictness, whom we respected for their wisdom or superiority of a different kind, whom we admired for their virtues and finally, those whom we loved for their kindness. When they die, it is only the latter that we remember with true sorrow and with a feeling of irreparable loss. For me, this has always been the proof that only love and kindness are the values that defy time and oblivion more than any other, and which can be questioned by nothing, even death itself. In a sense, love and kindness testify human immortality. 3519. I am aware of my faults, but I live with them. However, if I see them in someone else, then I dislike the person and the fault. This is the measure of my "fairness" and my objectivity. 3527. A tragedian and a poet transform the rough experiences of their lives into an exciting story, like a silk worm that transforms mulberry leaves into silk. Both are equally miraculous. 3528. The closer you are to the stars, the closer you are to their destiny: loneliness, distance and cold. 3540. An average aborigine (savage) from Central Africa knows the stars in the sky better than an average inhabitant of a European or an American city. While a primitive man tells time by the sun and follows the stars when travelling at night, the knowledge of this kind of our average man from the street is zero. We left our knowledge of the sky to astronomers and physicists. But the main problem is not this knowledge or ignorance. The damage is more of a moral nature. The man


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On Life, People and Freedom who never or hardly ever looks up at the sky loses his sense of orientation. Without this picture, he is deprived of the sight that all the wisdom of the world comes from. It is only in this heavenly perspective that man could assess his own greatness and his own insignificance, never forgetting either of the two. 3548. Some complain of human ungratefulness. They are afraid that their love will not be requited, that their kindness will remain unrewarded and unrecognised. This is an obvious misunderstanding. No truly good deed can ever remain unrewarded for the reward is simultaneous. Those who have ever done a truly unselfish, that is, a truly good deed, know this very well. A good deed and its reward cannot be separated, like an object and its shadow. The reward you have in mind would only belittle it. Look at a child looking after a wounded bird or feeding a puppy that followed him in the street. Does the child seek any particular reward or does he feel rewarded already? Look at the joy in his eyes. 3559. Romeo and Juliet, Tristan and Isolde, Omer and Merima, Layla and Marjoun, all love each other. And we love them. We love them because they love each other. We love them although we do not know them. What follows is: We do not love them, in fact, we love love. 3574. Man is fallible. A robot is not. In this case, the fallibility of man is an advantage, and the infallibility of a robot is a fault or "a virtue we are averted from." 3575a. Science should be neither praised not cursed, it should be used. In any case, science is not pure truth, as some see it and claim it to be, but it is one of the roads to truth. 3599. All men, even those who are unaware of it, deep inside their souls admire courage, unselfishness and generosity. Why else would we untiringly continue to invent characters who courageously defy destiny and death? All men are poets, mystics and romantics, at least a little. For where does this weakness for flags, symbols, hymns, romantic heroes who die for their homeland or the loved woman with no regret, come from? Who are these creatures who fill cinemas where they can see heroes who are themselves as much as they are not like us? And if it is true that such people do not exist in real life (that they exist only in literature), the question remains, why has the imagination of all the peoples continued to create them from time immemorial? We do not give our admiration to what we are but to what we are not, and what we would like to or should be. 3661. Language is said to be a writer's homeland. Strange things happen with immigrant writers. Even when they have mastered the language of their new homeland, they still write verse in their mother tongue. Thus, for example, after moving to the West, Joseph Brodsky continued to write prose in English and poetry only in Russian. Deep inside we all understand this, but it is hard to explain. 3676. This time of ours: hard, but endlessly interesting. We may complain that we have had it rough, but not that we have been bored. I can only regret that I will not live long enough to see the outcome. I am talking about death. But perhaps there is no outcome and no death. Perhaps the eyes that have been watching it will just close and life will just continue. New births, new eyes open up like flowers, new stories and so on with no end. God, You are great and so is the world You created!


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On Life, People and Freedom 3677. There have been pain and suffering before, horrific and monstrous, but the sword of repression has never before been so conscientiously pointed against the man inside man, and the intention to humiliate and destroy men has never been conducted with so much satanic skill and perseverance. It was-as Bloch said-"the collapse of the upright walk of mankind."


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On Religion and Morality

CHAPTER 2 On Religion and Morality 20. As a historical phenomenon, every religion has two sides to it. As a science, it is a revelation; as practice, it is the work of men. God reveals faith, and people apply it. All that is in it that is great and sublime is of God; all that is wrong and unworthy is of men. In this compromise to religious learning, man's role is also dual: on one hand, he abuses, does not apply or applies wrongly, the still uncorrupted religious learning. On the other hand, he twists, changes only the learning. History gives us numerous examples of both. Hegel wrote: "History of the highly educated Eastern Roman Empire, where, as one would think, the spirit of Christianity could have been understood in its truth and purity, is presented to us as a thousand year long sequence of continuous crimes, weaknesses, wiliness and shamelessness. . . . Everywhere there were scenes of killings, burning and looting in the name of Christian dogma. In a discussion if Christ is of quality same or similar to that of God, this one letter [in Greek these two adjectives: similar and same, differ in just one letter-my note] had cost thousands of human lives" (Hegel, Philosophy of History). Studying a similar phenomenon in the history of India, we never remain unmoved: One moment we are absorbed in admiration for the depth and the superiority of the thoughts, in the next, disgust for the incredible examples of triviality and senselessness. And all this is mixed into an inextricable ball that wishes to be called one and the same name. In fact, it is a tragic deviation from God's teaching, where grains of the Revelation are clearly discernible and in the background of human darkness they glow with an undying and untainted glow. Still, this is not the real question of history: what evils have been done in the name of history. The real question is: What would the world have looked like if there had been no Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam? What would mankind have looked like if it had not gone through these schools, the preachers of which had not been perfect and where, in addition to sublime truths, some nonsense and absurdity had been taught as well? It would be useful if an impartial, fair historian could try to write "history" for the sake of all of us, of course, if such history could be conceived and written at all. 90. A true man who abides by the law is not necessarily a moral man. Formal correctness of behavior can be the result of habit or fear. Habit is not moral and fear is even less so. Only conscientious actions are truly moral. Just as I must make a conscientious decision to fast or pray, so I must make a conscientious decision to act well and honestly, and in order to make such a decision the other option must be open to me too. A eunuch is not an example of honesty, just as weakness is no virtue. 91. Drama and tragedy, even comedy, sharpen the moral dilemmas of the audience by bringing the question of the good and the evil to full awareness. Since awareness is important, the fact that in a tragedy the good is defeated remains peripheral. The result here is unimportant because essentially the moral cannot lose. In comedies, people laugh or mock themselves. They are a strong means of sharpening the awareness of the evil and the good, faults and virtues. That is why with peoples who do not know drama (or comedy), we find moral awareness of a


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On Religion and Morality lower level, and therefore many distortions in human relations are treated and maintained as normal and natural. For evils to be removed, the first precondition is for them to be understood as evils. 91a. Thoughts on the essence of the tragic are pure metaphysics. For there is no tragedy without God, there are just misfortunate events, incidents. 99. Pagan and all other fake religions are religions of gains. The revealed and all true religions are religions of sacrifice. 203. How to resolve a logical contradiction of God's omnipotence (and universal knowledge) and man's responsibility? How can all power be of God, and all responsibility of man? The reply is: It can, just like the world can be finite and endless at the same time. It is not logical, but it is so. 257a. By its definition religion is personal. 367. Religion is a request for man to behave in a way that would be harmonious with the peace and depth of heaven. But "man is in a hurry" (Qur'an), he is petty, frightened, greedy, selfish. All this is contrary to all that heaven testifies so obviously. 492. Schelling's opinion that there is a correlation between Renaissance painting and Christianity and between Greek plasticism and Greek mythology cannot be accepted. A Greek polytheist saw divinity in a statue, thus an object, so this is pure idolatry. Any reasonably educated Christian believer does not see divinity in the image of the Madonna, but something that spirit is revealed in. Here, the image is a sensory expression of supra-sensory (infiniteness presented in the finite). Despite a dangerous Christian deviation, one can thus not speak of Christian idolatry (the Qur'an also makes this distinction, and it can thus not be ignored). In fact, it is a different inner motivation of creators of Greek and Roman idols and painters who populated the churches across the world with numerous images of saints and God-men. In the latter, it is rather an original religious striving towards image and individuality. Religion testifies over and over again of one world that lives, thinks, feels, sees, contrary to the objective, uniform, single and always self-identical world, as science sees it (or has to see it). By the relentless painting of new images, by these floods of persons streaming from every corner of the temple, religion denies and suppresses a material, objective, dead and impersonal world. The soul (and not the mind) sees this inner empire of images and cannot resist the temptation of revealing it. I would thus interpret the medieval Christian painting. Still, it should be emphasized that, irrespective of the feeling of the painter himself, the consequence could have been the lowest idolatry of the viewer. 495. Someone called, at the same time, Bach's Toccata and Fugue in Dminor the greatest religious composition of all times and the most godless. The latter, I do not know why. Toccata is here a preparation for a religious experience. It removes obstacles between man and God, and Fugue is a realization of the relationship with God, a moment of encounter. 497. Mechanical order seems senseless, like a clock. Only moral notions have true sense. Those are: good, evil, patience, submission, rebellion, shame, pride, dignity, remorse, punishment, reward, fear, loyalty, betrayal. Only a world of these qualities has meaning. The universe is impressive, amazing, horrific, but in


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On Religion and Morality relation to a drama, its endless emptiness and absolute correctness seem senseless. This is a problem of order and sense. A telephone directory or a foreign language dictionary is an example of order rather than sense. Compare their "sense" with a novel by Dostoyevsky or a drama by Shakespeare. Only human life has true sense and its meanings. That is why Man can study the universe (nature) and remain an atheist. Without God, however, it is impossible to understand Man and the meaning of his life. Drama remains the strongest and the most visible trace of the divine in the world. 535. If morality were useful, God would not be necessary to understand the meaning of life. If morality were not useful, what is, then, the meaning of morality? There are only two possible answers: (1) morality is meaningless, (2) God is the guarantee of the meaning of moral behavior. Another meaning is a necessary quality of morality because morality is not purposeful and such meaning presupposes a living God. 552. In nature there is force, time, space, interaction, speed, mutual collision, light, darkness, coldness, warmth, constants, attraction and rejection, movement, mass, etc. In spirit there is guilt, mercy, credit, justice, submission, remorse, fear, anxiety, forgiveness, shame, dignity, humiliation, conceitedness, rebellion. This other world is outside the natural one and it is superior to it. That is why above all and at the end of all there is God and Judgment, and not nature and entropy. 583. Morality is, if real, always linked with sacrifice and suffering. Otherwise, it is mere stupidity and hypocrisy. 586. In a story by a Polish author, a man tortured by the Germans and knowmg that he would be shot betrays his friend because he is afraid to die alone. They meet before the firing squad and the betrayed forgives the one who betrayed. "This forgiveness cannot be justified by any utilitarian ethics," comments Czeslaw Milosz (The Forbidden Mind). 596. All inner commandments that make us human are in essence irrational. 609. The seven so-called Noah's Commandments, in fact, moral rules given to Adam and Noah (they are in the Bible): mutual assistance, establishment of justice, ban on idolatry and blasphemy, ban on theft, ban on murder, ban on sexual sin and ban on cruelty towards animals. 769. Man's dignity lies in the fact that God made him worthy of his commands and his bans, thus made him responsible. 843. Europe is too absorbed by the artistic and religious heritage of the Middle Ages to be able to accept atheistic stories. 864. Must my religion, like all others, rest on the a priori refusal of any question on its truthfulness? From the way the Qur'an assures, from its constant referrals to ayyahs (signs, proofs) I would say that it will not and does not have to. In addition, the Qur'an speaks as if it finds the ultimate reason for me (and for you) in something close to my heart and my mind. - For what purpose would there otherwise be in the sentences that constantly refer to observation of the outer world?


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On Religion and Morality 1004. Feuerbach, the ideologue of atheism, said that the grave was the cradle of religion. He wanted to say that religion fed on the human fear of death. Neither biographies of the most religious men nor any personal experiences of deeply religious ones confirm this statement. 1026. A man should love man, not mankind. The latter is an excuse for the absence of love for a man ("Love thy neighbor"). 1040. God forgive me if I am wrong, but I respect a good Christian more than a bad Muslim. I cannot defend something just because it is Muslim (and not Islamic), nor can I ignore good just because it is someone else's.

1047. Two faces of things: A seemingly proper man may seem to be truly honest, and he can be a fearful Philistine who would not mind breaking many rules, but does not do that out of fear or weakness. Some condemn the tumultuous lives of others out of secret envy, because they are incapable of living that way. A weak person is usually unaware of this envy and considers it to be morality, which it is certainly not. Two men, one weak and one strong but moral, seem to behave the same. Let us say, they do not drink or sin, the first due to either a lack of will or fear of consequences, and the second on principle, out of desire suppressed. It is difficult to tell which one it is, but one is certain: only the latter case is morality. The first is weakness, and weakness is not a virtue. 1053. Abu 'Ali Ibn Sina claims that truth cannot be reached through theoretical thought, that is, the laws of logic, but only through mystic states. 1086. Primitive art: wild exotics, black sculpture, carvings and knits of Australia, masks and idols of the Blacks and victorious expansion of this art to the West. Primitive peoples' idols resemble devils (contrary to ancient Roman and Greek ones, which are examples of beauty). They are a kind of mixture of good and evil, for in the minds of those peoples the good and the evil have not yet fully separated. An unclear difference between God and demons is the cause (or the consequence) of unclear moral notions of the good and the evil. It is related in any case. 1116. At the end of a film I saw a few days ago in the prison cinema, the hero refuses to commit a new crime, to take money and leave, and he is hanged. The audience were mainly criminals. I know for certain that even they cheered for the hero to refuse treason, which practically meant death for him. They all saw his death as his victory. They would have all left with a bitter taste in their mouth, had the hero relented and chosen life. We left with bitterness anyway, but it was a different kind of bitterness, the kind that includes pride to see a man (even if just in a film) capable of doing what we want but cannot do. If we think about this "loser's victory" and draw the right conclusion from it (and the conclusion is a paradox) we have perhaps resolved the most profound question of human life, even the riddle of existence. In fact, it shows that what we strive toward, what we admire, what we respect or consider the highest form of kindness-whatever different people may mean by this-is not life itself, but something above life, a principle that contains a negation of interest, selfishness and time. Faith is just a complete awareness of this, or an attempt to define this incredible knowledge.


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On Religion and Morality 1120. It would be interesting to compare the understanding of God in the Qur'an and in Herman Hesse's writing. In both the Qur'an and in Hesse's works, God is first of all a creator. He is not just an expression of the principle of goodness, for to be God-as Hesse believes-he must encompass the entire reality, thus good and evil as well. How-that is a secret. 1121. Islamic understanding of a man-God relationship: In the Christian elevation of man to God, there is the human vanity that the Qur' an so clearly rejects. 1167. Deep inside their souls, people cherish their human dignity more than health and life. Bruno Bettelheim, who spent a year in Nazi camps in Dachau and Buchenwald and who later described the behavior of prisoners in these extreme situations, states that the prisoners hated much more the guards who humiliated or verbally insulted them than those who hit or even killed prisoners. The same author gives another interesting (and perhaps) unexpected observation regarding the prisoners' views: "Prisoners who died in torture, although tortured for their political beliefs, were not considered martyrs. However, those who died trying to save others were accepted as martyrs." Some other observations: New prisoners (up to one year in the camp) are primarily concerned with their own personality, how to keep it preserved and unharmed, and old prisoners have already gone beyond that and their main concern is how to live in the camp in the least bad way. Most of them start doubting if they will ever return to the "outside world" (B.B., Individual and Mass Behavior in Extreme Situations). My comment: for as long as I look forward to a beautiful letter more than a food parcel, everything is all right. And that is still the case (this is my 38th month in prison). 1326. With his critique of the power of human mind, Kant wanted to show that there could be no reliable science on immortality of the soul, freedom of the will, and existence of God. But Kant did not think that he had thus dismantled these three principles. He just claimed that they could not be subject to scientific findings and theoretical reason, however, that is why he placed them in the practical mind. Kant says: "I, therefore, had to destroy knowledge, in order to create space for faith, for the dogma of metaphysics, i.e., the prejudice that there can be success in it without the critique of pure reason, is the true source of all the non-belief which is against morality and which is always very dogmatic" (Kant, Critique of Pure Reason). 1331. With Kant's Critique, reason assumed the most difficult of all its tasks, namely to know itself, i.e., the powers and limits of reason. 1389. You are a skeptic, you find it hard to believe, but do seek God. Look at a rose and think about it. Is she not God's "ayyah" (sign), even a short-lived trace of heaven on earth? Can you find any other explanation for its beauty of no comparison and no reason? And its seed? Can you imagine a mind that could produce her, even if you gave him a hundred, a thousand, a million years, and all the means he could ask for? 1398. Some views of religion or ethics, when expressed clearly, can be on a par with a geometric axiom. There is but one ethics, just like there is but one geometry. 1412. How to emphasize one's own human dignity without becoming conceited at the same time? The answer is in dedication (submission) to God, who is the model of most sublime goodness and fairness. Dedication is a feeling of dignity


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On Religion and Morality that has not become conceitedness. Submission is left only for the Sublime Lord, it is annulled for everyone else ("Fear no men, fear me"-Qur'an). Serving God is in concord with human dignity. Without this service, human pride would turn into unpredictable and impermissible vanity. 1432. Sometimes the great, ancient truths about God seem to me like huge mountains. Immovable, eternal, silent, they do not care much about general commotion and squabble, nor about an occasional hopeful thinker casting stones at them. Clouds come by from time to time, cover them, lightning and thunder roar, and then everything clears, and these mountains, with their peaks covered in white snow, are even clearer against blue skies. 1444. Two completely different roads to God: through logic and through mysticism. The first is indirect, the second direct. A scholastic lived and believed with his mind, a mystic with his feeling. 1472. In Lessing' s Nathan the Wise, sultan Sullahuddin asks Nathan the Jew a question: Which of the three religions-Jewish, Christian or Islamic-did he consider true? Instead of answering, Nathan told him a story of a magic ring that could make its owner a favorite with God and men. This ring had been passed from father to son, until one father had three sons. The father then had two more identical rings made, but only one was real. The brothers fought over who had the real one, and they went to a judge. The judge told them that he was unable to judge that, and that the real ring was with the one who was to become a favorite with God and men. That was the only proof, and that they could achieve only by dedication to God and by doing good. Nathan's message: Religion is real, whatever its name, if it motivates the believer to be dedicated to God and to doing good unto his neighbors. 1512. Voltaire was firmly against official religion (in fact, the Catholic church) but he was not an atheist. He claimed that God existed as the beginning of all things, but that one could not learn about God by enlightenment but by reason. Therefore, according to Voltaire, learning about God is not the business of priests but of men of reason-philosophers. Vol1~aire even elaborated three types of evidence of God's existence: cosmological, theological and moral. But what Voltaire preached was deism rather than religion. Deism was too optimistic to be true. A contemporary writer observed correctly that Voltaire's ideas on religion could only satisfy the feelings of those who lived in financial security and comfort: "People who spent their lives in dens remained deaf to the teaching of deism," said this writer. 1556. Science tries to answer the eternal and "final" questions: God, immortality, freedom. The result: (1) Incorrect answers and delusions we talked of, or (2) disappointments due to the inability of the human mind to give a satisfactory answer. Science annuls religion but cannot replace it. A historical example of this is the state of the spirit in Europe in early nineteenth century: skepticism, pessimism and dilemmas, even the feeling of "world pain." There were two possible ways out: return to religion, for some completely impossible, or a negation of the so-called eternal (final) questions: God, immortality, human soul and freedom. The latter way out was offered by the new materialist philosophy. According to this philosophy, reason is not unable. In it, there are no questions, therefore there are no answers. Reason cannot give a reasoned answer to unreasonable or wrong questions, nor can science satisfy non-scientific requests.


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On Religion and Morality Instead of losing faith in reason, according to materialists, we should give a new definition of the reality of the world, draw a line between reality and illusion. 1756. On his unfortunate heroes of noble making who suffer, Hamsun says: "They were not made for the world, and the world was not made for them. No riches or sudden favorable circumstances can save them because they carry the doom inside them, in their relentless inner disharmony with the world." My comment: nothing proves the existence of God better than this "disharmony." In the world which is but one, there is no disharmony. 1757. All the horrors on earth are unable to take heaven away from those who found it once-if they found it. 1764. Faith, together with everything else, has a measure of senselessness (or irrationality), which is necessary for a man's life to be truly human. 1791. (From a conversation with an atheist.) He says that it is impossible for him to imagine that there is reason in the universe, especially that the reason existed before nature. I asked: Is an endless, eternal and blind universe any less fantastic, any less of a miracle? There obviously are both reason and nature. That is what testifies our own existence. The entire difference between believers and atheists is in who puts what at the beginning. The believers say: "At first there was a word," that is, reason. And this difference creates all others. 1791a. Man's reason rebels against believing in miracles, and he is condemned to look at the miracle of all miracles every day: endless skies speckled with stars. There is an end-there is no end. For a human mind, this miracle has been and will remain totally incomprehensible, and the question on finiteness and infiniteness will remain with no answer. The first that our reason will deny is the endless sky speckled with stars, but that is not possible, it is too obvious. 1796. The world is a miracle, only we get used to it. Look at a dandelion flower, but with desire, and not superficially as we are used to seeing everything around us, which is why we notice nothing. The first delegation of the Danish government, thanks to air transport, brought a bouquet of fresh roses to Greenland, which was a great surprise. People gathered and looked at the roses as if they were a miracle, danced around them and cried with excitement. And the entire world is a miracle, but we do not care for that. We have become numb. 1803. Existentialism has a specific feature: There is the Christian existentialism of Gabriel Marcel and the atheist existentialism of Jean Paul Sartre. The differences can be found in other thinkers of this style, Kierkegaard, Heidegger and Jaspers. Still, existentialist theists are stronger. In fact, if we ignore the subjective beliefs of the authors, existentialism is a theist learning. 1832. What did the peasants give to the nobility? All the fruits of their hard work. And what did the nobility give the peasants in return? Nothing but an example of an empty, immoral life. Fortunately, the peasants were unable to follow this example and imitate it. If they were to do so, for example in drinking, that was total misfortune. Many a peasant son imitated nobility, always in things that were bad. 1845. Irrespective of all the reservation with which it approaches this world, religion has nothing in common with hopelessness and pessimism. The Gospel is


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On Religion and Morality "Joyful News." Joyful news removes pessimism just like a sunrise sheds away darkness and fog. 1874. The Christian principle of non-defiance to evil was explained by Leo Tolstoy as follows: "Not to defy evil is important not only because man should act in that way for his own sake, to achieve perfection, but also because only non-defiance stops evil, absorbs it inside itself and does not allow it to expand further" (written in Tolstoy's diary on June 12, 1898). In Tolstoy's explanation, the thought on how non-defiance to evil absorbs evil attracts particular attention. An interesting thought! 1939. I have endless respect for faith that seeks no proof, but if it still refers to reasons, then they must "hold." Then, I am very critical, even cynical towards weak arguments. 1962. The first article of the so-called Radya-Yoga consists of five rules of proper behavior: (1) ahimsa-refraining from violence, (2) satya-love of truth, (3) asteyanot reaching out for someone else's property, (4) brahmacharya- control of one's own sensuality and (5) apasigra-forsaking all which is not necessary. One cannot deny sublimity to these principles. Divine origin can clearly be recognized in them. 1963. The principle of asceticism is rather universal and we find it in many different cultures: in Ancient Greece-the Stoics, in Rome-Cynics, in Christianitymonks. In India, asceticism, or tapas, is the third article of the so-called NiwamaYoga. 1971. There is inner parallelism between Christianity and Hinduism. Related are the stories of Christ's alleged visit to India at a certain period of his life and of his secret journey to India after his "resurrection." 1979. One of the symbols of Indian religious thought is the lotus flower. The meaning of this symbol is as follows: Just as a lotus grows out of mud and reaches the water's surface, unstained by mud or water, thus the mind, born inside the human body, develops its true characteristics, after having risen above the torrent of passion and ignorance. Dark sides of the deep are transformed into the pure nectar of the lotus flower. 1983. Every religion is pure at its beginning, but people corrupt it. Listen to the purity of faith in this prayer of the Sioux Indians (original monotheism): Allow my respectful hands to touch the things You created, sharpen my ear to hear Your voice. Make me wise to understand the teaching that You mysteriously placed into every leaf, every stone. I seek strength, but not to overpower my brothers but only to overpower my worst enemy-myself! God, give me strength to endure the things I cannot change And courage to change the ones I can change. And wisdom to tell the two apart. What a sublimity in this Indian poem despite, strangely, senseless beliefs and rituals! Is it not similar with Christianity: the sublime learning of love and idols in churches? It proved that in deformation of a religion, moral (ethical) teachings are its more resilient part, while theology and beliefs were subject to rapid degradation and decay. How can this be interpreted, if not by the fact that the


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On Religion and Morality ritual part of religion was in the hands of priests. They had something "to do" there, while they were not particularly concerned with the ethical part. Additionally, ethical imperatives (love, fairness, respect for the elder, or all Ten Commandments) are clear on their own, while the ritual part of religion was always more or less irrational, and as such required the priests' explanations, and they always further mystified and complicated them. The priests even found interest in making it as unintelligible as possible, for in this way increased their own exclusiveness and the dependence of the masses. In any case, the ritual part of religious teaching was always obviously given greater importance by the priests as well as by common believers, while the moral part was usually neglected by both groups. The multitude of religions exists only in relation to ritual and theology. The ethical part is their logical core-usually similar, and sometimes identical. Finally, all this shows that religions, like all culture, do not know real development. Their "development" and their "history" are their demise. 2006. "Any attempt to impose ideals on man ends in his rebellion" (Amos Oz). In addition, without ideals man cannot live, at least not like a man. When it comes to love and faith, force is of no help. "Let there be no compulsion in religion" (Qur'an, 2/256). 2035. Wind blew, and a few fluffs (or threads) of dry dandelion fell into my hands. Those are the yellow flowers that fields are covered with in spring, and when they dry, they are like light, dry balls. These balls consist of several tens (or hundreds) of seedlings of future flowers. I am looking at one of those the wind brought to my hands. It resembles a tiny parachute made of light fluffy material ending in a point that looks like a tiny ball with the air squeezed out of it. The seed-the purpose of this plant and its existence. In it there is an entire potential new plant and in it exactly the same seed with an endless number of new generations of the same plant, and so on with no end. All this is in harmony with its purpose, nothing redundant and nothing lacking. This is how I think: If all the knowledge of the world was to be gathered in one place, the knowledge contained in all the wise heads and all books of all the world's libraries, thus all the wisdom past and present, and if a team was to be established of all the living scientists and if they were given all the technical resources they may ask or wish for, as well as the desired money and time, all the united wisdom and power of the world could not produce a seedling like this. The rocket men sent to the moon is a rough, barbaric tool when compared with this tiny seed. 2093. Dostoyevsky tests Ivan Karamazov's "all is permitted" philosophy on murder. In this horrific experiment, the philosophy proves wrong. By introducing the devil to the scene, Dostoyevsky shows that this philosophy is satanic. 2094. As for freedom as a precondition of moral responsibility, deserved heaven, hell, etc., it does not matter at all if we are absolutely or partially free, permanently or occasionally free, or rarely and at times, or even just in thoughts and not in actions. The key question is, does freedom exist as a principle or not? Even if we have been free only once in our entire life, in just one inner decision, that is quite sufficient for a judgment to be made of us (and above us), for our destiny in eternity, for our heaven or hell. We are responsible only for our one decision, when and how were we free. All the difference between a good and an evil man is just in that a good man loves and wishes good even when he does not do it, when he confirms the good in neither actions nor words, but in an aspiration or a desire in the very bottom of his soul, somewhere far, "at the end of all ends," at its bottom. There is no man, irrespective of his social standing, his


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On Religion and Morality education, upbringing, imposed philosophy or religion, who could have avoided this test and who did not place himself among those who, despite all, were saved or fell. There is no man who was without this minimum of freedom, and the minimum is complete freedom, and it can be neither greater nor smaller. 2098. Ideas of Kant's antinomies are in the foundations of religion and morality, just as antitheses are in the foundations of science. Science lies on the presuppositions of eternity, divisibility, causality and objectivity of the world. Without these presuppositions there is no science, and conversely there is no morality without the presupposition of freedom. Theses and antitheses of Kant's antinomies-culture and civilization reduced to their most distant, most abstract premises. Further reduction is logically impossible. Moreover, we understand that the four theses (and antitheses) of Kant's antinomies go - together. Freedom presupposes God, just like God is the precondition of freedom. In a world that we can only understand as causal (we cannot understand it differently), only God could have created a free creature. Conversely, an endless world (in space and time) is also endlessly divisible, blind and necessarily impersonal. It cannot be otherwise. Some people can see the world just antithetically (in the Kantian sense); all other views of the world are foreign to them. For them, a thesis is veiled, and why that is so we cannot know (the Qur'an mentions such a veil, Surah 2/71). These people feel quite comfortable with their "view" of the world. To us their "view" is blindness, and it is not so for them, for this is blindness of a special kind. No colorblind person could ever know his condition, nor would he feel deprived of the view of a brightly colored world, if we, "the seeing," had not told him so. And we, "the seeing," are blind (or deaf) to so many parts of reality, such as large parts of the spectrum, for sounds above or below a certain limit, of the scents dogs can smell, for signs and waves our radio can receive. Atheists do not suffer, do not kill themselves, do not fill psychiatric hospitals, and neither do their antipodes- believers. Unfortunate are the third ones, those who seek but do not find, those whose souls and minds are in constant and unsolvable conflict. For them, the universe is not logical and comprehensible, it is not meaningful because it is endless and subject to eternal laws of movement and change. Since they try to "see" with their soul and not with their mind, they only see the "cosmic horror," wasteland and senselessness. They provide recruits for the creators of the philosophy of absurdity, pessimism and nihilism. Believers seek and find, atheists do not seek and do not find, and the third seek but do not find. All three cases are about the relationship of the soul and the mind. Every soul sees the world in Kant's three theses, every mind in Kant's four antitheses. In some people it is the soul that is dominant, in some it is the mind. In third the soul and the mind are in constant conflict, with no end and no result. 2139. If there is no God, there is no man. If there is no man, there is no responsibility. If there is no responsibility, there is no crime. If there is no God, there is no crime. If there is no God, all is permitted. 2152. Some believe that their religious affiliation exempts them from an obligation to think. 2171. Life is not mechanics, not even of the most complex kind. It is drama, tragedy, comedy, absurdity, fairy-tale or myth. It is all this because there is God. Without God, life would return to mechanics, it would become non-life.


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On Religion and Morality 2197. There is no rational evidence of God's existence, but there is an inexplicable and omnipresent (at all times and in all places) need of man need for God. Atheists say: Man created God, not vice versa. But then the question arises: Why? Why did He create Him, not once, but a thousand times, and not in one place, but everywhere on earth? 2216. A sentence in the Qur' an has always attracted my attention, and as far as I know it has been interpreted differently: that everything exists, "happens," because the dilemma has not been resolved. If God were to remove this dilemma, if everything was to become clear, revealed, then it would be "all done, finished" (Qur'an). I think that a similar thought can be found in Dostoyevsky (The Brothers Karamazov), where evil, Satan and suspicion are the precondition of "happening." This thought is presented by the Great Inquisitor. Evil is necessary for without it this contradiction called life would be finally resolved (decided) and everything would stop, even vanish. 2233. Why do political mottos wear with use, and the call from a minaret and the chime of church bells that we have been hearing for centuries are always as exciting as the first time? Do these sounds have some of the quality of a "natural happening," such as sunrise, whose beauty never wears out? 2148a. I once wrote about the nature of sacrifice as the central notion of religion. It is irrational, sometimes senseless, but it is still the only way to man's selfconfirmation. There is no other way for us to "touch and feel" the soul, equally irrational, unattainable, and scientifically nonexistent. A while ago I was reading the writings of the recently deceased Russian film director Andrei Tarkovsky, on his film The Sacrifice. I think that he had the same idea in mind and that he dealt with the same dilemmas. Tarkovsky wrote: "I know that these ideas are not particularly acceptable, for nobody has the will to sacrifice himself, but there is no other way if a man wishes spiritual salvation. . . . Those who do not know this feeling, in my opinion, have not become men. They become things in the hands of society and government. .. . The act of sacrifice may have an absurd reflection on the material level, but on the spiritual level it is truly magnificent, since it opens the road to regeneration...," etc. Unfortunately, I have not had the opportunity to see The Sacrifice, but I know that neither this nor other Tarkovsky's films were shown in the USSR. They were banned there. Tarkovsky lived and made films in the West. He died in Paris in 1986. 2498. Plants are "finding ways" to spread their seed as far as possible and thus ensure their survival and expansion. A dandelion seed has a kind of parachute that helps it fly with the wind as far as several hundred meters. A Virginia creeper plant ties a real sailor's knot, which is, when dry, stretched so hard that the plant can no longer sustain it, and the knot breaks and launches the seeds very far from the mother plant. How do plants know these parachute and knot tricks? It is all a game of coincidence, say the atheists. 2519. I sometimes think that of all the writings it is tragedy that is most harmonious with the fact that there is God. In it, villains get by and get away, and great sincere souls get hurt. And since there is no "intellectual" operation of declaring these eternal losers mad and senseless (for such Antigone, Hamlet, Samson, or Jean Valjean are certainly not) the entire story, and especially its tragic end, are suddenly uncovered as a mere first act of a higher drama that only God could conceive and be the author of. For suffering and death, which are the end of everything of intellect, in this case are a mere intermission between two


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On Religion and Morality acts of a continuing drama. Our admiration and sympathy for a fallen hero are totally senseless from the intellectual point of view, but-whether we are aware of it or not-they are deeply religious. For in such experience-and only in such experience-death and loss have totally different meanings. Tragedy is a religious parable. 2523. The dilemma: reason-being-reason-what was first, what is the beginning-if there is one-in the name of all religions, was resolved by the Bible in the famous sentence: "First there was word." The reply is clear and unambiguous. Any explanation would be redundant. 2532. Scientist-atheists claim that the target direction of physical nature cannot be proved. And since it cannot be proved, it does not exist. Can the finiteness or infiniteness of heaven be proved? 2588. Religion is a radical upturn, a man's way out of an inhuman state. However, contrary to a revolution, an objective way out, religion is always a man's inner upturn, a subjective possibility. 2177. Moral (ethical) teachings proved to be far more resilient to historical definitions than religion. A man who destroys everything he can reach has always been able to inflict more damage to religion than to ethics. A good example of this is Buddhism and Christianity (the contrast being more visible in the former). While ethical teachings of both religions maintain their sublimity, obviously of divine origin, their religious content has suffered sad alterations, obviously of human origin. In Christianity, man invented a "trinity" God and masses of saints, while in Hinduism he dreamt up a multitude of gods, usually based on his own image. 2225. Sacrifice is the central notion of religion just like force (or size) is the central notion of physics. That is why Jesus' suffering became a supreme symbol, and his history (irrespective of whether it is true or not) is the very essence of religion. For however Jesus really ended his life, the history of suffering, the history of sacrifice is a priori true within a truly religious world. From the point of view of religion, with no sacrifice a man's life would not be truly human. The notion of sacrifice includes a multitude of negations, in fact, the radical negation of the world of calculation and interest, and without the negation of such a world there can be no religion. 2227. All our lives we try to defend what cannot be defended and what is condemned to permanent and inevitable decay: life, health, property. In this futile struggle, lost in advance, we forget true values which may be won or preserved, if only we fought for them. All our lives we replace true values with false ones, as clearly stated in the Qur'an. 2229. All things worthy in man's life, all his better feelings, all his achievements that we admire or take pride in, are irrational. What is rational is just his selfishness and his interest. 3090. Man's soul aspires for Infinity, Endlessness, Perfection, Good, Peace, andGod. Is this aspiration not memory? Does it not uncover a memory of a (temporarily) lost world?


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On Religion and Morality 3122. There is nothing deeper or more sublime than faith, and nothing duller or more boring than some believers. 3127. Observing the world (Qur'an: "Observe, watch -Qur'an 56/7,56/ 6-n, 88/17-21, 56/63-78, etc.) can be the most profound religious experience. Nature is full of miracles, but I have always been excited by flower seeds more than anything else. I used to open a blossom and always admired again and again the cluster of tiny seeds inside. Have you ever looked at a dried dandelion flower carefully? Each of the seedlings-and there are at least a hundred on each flower-is a very complex system on its own. The first seed is just a tiny part of this complex machinery. There is spare food and a tiny parachute or wings made of the finest, in fact the most functional, matter found in nature. All the knowledge of this world, gathered by people from time immemorial until today, brought together in one place and placed to serve one and the same task, cannot make a single of these seeds. For in it, so tiny, there is more than just a tiny, mysterious spring called life (vis vitalis) but it also carries a code of the future plant and its appearance, color, scent and the ability to procreate, thus creating in the end more seeds for this cycle and so on and so on. Thinking about this, my heart always trembles again. For me, this has always been a strong religious experience. If it is true that prayer is within and not outside, in the soul and not in words and movement, then for me, this observation of a dandelion flower has always been a true prayer, more sincere than any other I have done in my life. When asked about what a synthesis of religion and science was, I always gave this example, an endless space for human research and again, at the end of it, a secret. Like heaven, with no end. 3139. All around us there are miracles, but man is still the greatest miracle in the universe. 3156. People are always celebrating something. They cannot but celebrate. If they do not worship the Maker, they worship what he made. If they do not bow to the Creator, they bow to the creature. This is the entire difference, but it is essential. 3253. Evil is the condition of life. If there were no evil, there would be a state of moral entropy, thus non-existence. 3309a. When asked about viruses, Jean Dausset gave an interesting reply. Dausset said: "They are much more cunning. The AIDS virus is especially more cunning than any other known so far. First, it attacks the very cells that are supposed to eliminate it, it attacks man's inimunity. And second, it changes constantly, so well that the immune system cannot fight it." My questions: who constructed the AIDS virus as it is and why? 3346. Christian (medieval) scholastics is totally rationalist in its method. It tried to prove God's existence through logical reasoning. I think that it thus opened the path for European atheism. 3352. Existence, "Dasein," in Heideggerean meaning is "to be thrown" into the world. As such, this idea is essentially religious, certainly in the widest sense of the world.


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On Religion and Morality 3375. The formula "if there is no God, there is no man" is a starting point for me. It is Euclidean-like clear, perhaps beyond proof, but also beyond challenge, just like Euclid's axiom. 3482. Magic is not religious. Magic is the belief in forces man can conquer, submit, make them serve him. Religion is the belief in force that man is to submit itself to and serve. Magic always has a worldly aim or interest: harvest, rain, protection from illness, enemy, danger, etc. Religion wants a heavenly kingdom. Absorbed by the worldly kingdom, magic does in no way imply either the man's value nor his eternity. It is all here (hic et nunc) on earth. That is why it is "an illusory technique" because its goal is "practical," but its method is nonpurposeful, illusory. Religion, absorbed by eternity and deliverance of the soul, is consequent, and magic is marked by contradiction of the goal and the way: the goal is rational, the way is irrational. That is why replacement by work, knowledge, struggle-religious or magic-is an illusory replacement. There is another difference: Magic as fake religion is very widely spread, more than we are willing to believe. True religion is a feature of a relatively small number of people, much smaller than we assume. Despite that, replacement of true religion by a false one is a common matter and a constant phenomenon. 3497. It is mid-May and everything is covered in dandelions, the yellow flower that floods fields and pastures in spring. Those are the yellow balls that children like to play with and they are called "blows." I picked a flower like that and the breeze had already removed more than half of the seeds. Have you ever observed or carefully examined one of those seeds? If not, do so and you will meet miracle face to face. If you bear in mind the purpose, procreation of life of this plant, birth of a future, next generation, then you have before you absolute perfection. What you have before you is not a seed in the narrow sense of the word. A seed is the thick black ending on one side. There is a stick and a parachute made of a number of the finest threads in the shape of a multi-tongued star, designed in such a way that the wind can carry it as far as possible and spread it all over the world. Even the thick ending of the stick I have mentioned is not the seed. The seed is just its smaller part. The rest is spare food available to the seed for the initial period until it "settles." Everything about this seed is obviously designed, nothing is accidental. The seed will fall, rains will help it penetrate the soil, it will survive winter, and in spring it will "remember itself," it will sprout and from it a yellow dandelion will grow, whose every petal will slowly transform into such a seed and so on forever. When I think that all our science, all our scientists and all our technology, even if they were to be gathered into one place and if they were able to work together harmoniously, even in a hundred years they would not be able to produce a single seed like this, and when I think that they will never be able to do that, I must wonder how can people ignore this obvious reason behind nature. And what kind of blindness is it?! How can one explain man's indifference before such an obvious "sign" (ayyah) of God. And this sign is just one of many, even stranger, even less explicable, even more worthy of admiration and wonder. 3533. If true prayer is within and not outside, in the soul and not in the ceremony, then my most intense address to God was -experienced in observing living nature. I remember a TV documentary. It showed the amazing life of tropical birds, their symbiosis with flowers and the endless colorfulness of the living world. The camera moved from one flower to the other, it looked at the calyxes, followed the flight of seeds carried slowly by the wind. At that time I felt closer to God than I ever had during prayer-prayers can sometimes be routine


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On Religion and Morality and automatic-and I wondered at God's work and living proof of His creation. Turgenev wrote about how "flowers look at us with their innocent eyes." I was perhaps most excited by this silent testimony with no words. There is something truly harmless and touching in this "look" of a flower. If prayer is in the soul and not in words and movements, then I experienced my most intense prayer during this TV documentary. 3579. A photographer from Tula who was invited to take photographs in Not Clear Fields asked Tolstoy: "Leo Nikolaevich, is there God?" Tolstoy asked him if he had ever seen microbes through a microscope. "If we asked a microbe if there was a photographer from Tula named Rayevsky, what do you think his answer would be?" 3625. Major religions, especially Judaism, Christianity and Islam, have a special place and role in history. After the appearance of each of them, the world was no longer the same. It was always a new, different world. The appearance of these major religions leaves the impression of God's direct, immediate interference with human history and its flow. They were a direct disturbance in the rules of continuity of history. There is no "historical" explanation for the appearance of Moses, Jesus and Muhammad. In each of the religions they were the prophets of which meant a totally new beginning, a new epoch, a spiritual revolution, and not evolution. 3635. The characteristic that makes the Bible so different from all other books before it or the books that can be located at the time when it appeared (of course, I am referring to its original form) is its absolute originality. It is something totally new, as if it was "brought down from heaven," which, in fact, it is. There is an almost general consent regarding this characteristic.


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On Religion and Morality


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Political Notes

CHAPTER 3 Political Notes 19. South America is predominantly Catholic, North America is predominantly Protestant. We have the same division (south-north) in Europe, and what can be noted everywhere is the greater openness to progress in Protestant rather than in Catholic nations. In general, Protestantism is a more powerful impetus in history than the Catholic form of Christianity. 24. The request for the abolition of the death penalty is an integral part of the tendency in criminal law to take more care of the criminal than the victim of the crime. The arguments are problematic. Thus, for example, they describe to you the details of the execution of the death penalty and ask you if you are in favor of it. They could also describe the details of the execution of the crime and the horrible state it left on the side of the victim and family, and ask the same question. However, this is pushed aside, as if two murders do not exist, but only one-the death penalty that would be carried out against the murderer. 34. No doubt corporal punishment contradicts sense of honor and human dignity, as everyone would easily agree. However, seen from the other side, experience shows that, unfortunately, there is the existence of people without the smallest amount of honor and human dignity. The Qur'an says there are people who are like animals, "even worse than them." One who has spent some time in prison with petty criminals can easily be convinced of this. It is peculiar that people in office write criminal codes, people not usually familiar with this human "material." It is unimaginable to think of doctors who have never stepped into a hospital or interacted among patients. This is exactly what happens with criminologists. Most of them, in the best of cases, have met delinquents during a hearing or during a court trial, and what has to be taken into account is that criminals, unlike ordinary people, have a greater power of transformation. Criminals are never naive; there are, more or less, experienced people. Their accounts of life can be wrong, but not due to naiveté, rather due to a commitment to evil, which in most of them is final and incorrigible. In prison, I have seen a great number of people serving time for pickpocketing and street robberies. Not in a single one have I noticed a readiness to begin any type of honest work after leaving prison. On the contrary, they encouraged and instructed each other and exchanged experiences. I have noticed a bit of remorse only in murderers, but even among them the penitent ones were not in the majority. In one scene of a film I watched in the prison theater, a man was attacking a girl with the intent to rape her. While she struggled like captured prey, the majority of the viewers- prisoners-were noisily encouraging the attacker. Petty thieves and pickpockets are particularly unscrupulous types of criminals. They amuse themselves by telling each other how they, month after month, stole the entire earnings of miners. They mentioned a case of some miner who, after realizing he has lost his earnings, committed suicide. One of them, showing me his hands, told me: "Can't you notice that they are not for work, they were created for something else." And indeed, he had beautifully sculptured hands with long fingers. I told him that some claim that it is the type of work that creates the hands. He answered that it, work, surely did not create his. Then I thought he does not deserve such beautiful hands and that it would be completely just he did not have them, only to later remember that the sentence of the Shariah would be just that.


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Political Notes Naturally, one should be very careful in sentencing, but if I were to write the criminal code in prison, and while taking into account all of my prison experiences, I think it would more and more look like the Shariat penal code. As I have before had certain reservations toward corporal punishment, it seems to me at times that God sent me here to compare His wisdom to mine. 48. While reading through the history of a nation or a period, it appears to us at times that some events, victories or defeats, the evil or just destinies of some nation, were a result of fortunate and unfortunate circumstances, that is, of coincidence. However, if we examine things a bit more closely, we usually arrive at a conclusion that the "coincidence" was not as coincidental as we were first inclined to think. 49. I do not know, or do not sufficiently know, the past of my nation. But I know the present, that is, the result. From this present I can conclude a lot about what preceded it. 50. To know a nation or a period, it is in no way enough to read written histories about it. Without Balzac's novels, not even a ten-volume history of France will offer a clear picture of the life of French society. Only with these can we say we know the life of French society of the nineteenth century. Histories inform us of events, while novels, poems, epics, stories, legends, and fables inform us of life of a man-individual, that is-of that which really existed. The one is external, the other internal history. External history is that much more insufficient, for it most often speaks of emperors and kings and events concerning a limited group of people at the court and around it. And I cannot say I know the history of a nation if I know the emperors it had, wars it waged, all the places where it was victorious or defeated. Furthermore, I cannot even say I know that nation even when I know its legislature and culture. I have to know how an individual lived in his home, how he related to his wife, children, servants, authorities. Only by combining both of these pictures, external and internal, I can say I know, in certain measure, that nation and its past- of course, only when taking into account all the limitations and reservations one should have concerning writers and their texts. 52. In history, as in nature, everything is diversity and continual change. I cannot ask for or expect a single situation or condition to become stabilized in history, for history to stop, just as I cannot ask for one of the four seasons to be forever fixed. In history, as in nature, there will always be forces which will cause change. And I, with my wants and actions, am only a minute participant in one of these continual changes. 53. Something over 100 years ago, the United States purchased a piece of land on the west coast of Africa and founded Liberia, the first free Negro state. It was an attempt by the United States, to an extent, redeem itself for the shameful "black cargo" (ill-famed trade in black slaves). A number of descendents of the Blacks who had been caught in the vicinity and forcibly taken across the ocean as slaves had been returned to Liberia. And what happened? These returned slaves became masters in Liberia and, in an unprecedented manner, subjugated the mainly black population from whom they were descended. This rule of the black caste was known as the "reign of terror of 100 families," lasting almost 100 years; it was ended only by a military putsch in 1980. After all this, we can conclude that life sometimes makes a crude joke of noble thoughts or that intentions, good or bad, have no particular significance in historic life. Thus will happen that positive consequences will result from selfish motives, and negative ones from the most noble of motives. On the other hand, the delineated case indicates how in slaves and those who suffer lurk veiled oppressors, and how


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Political Notes much depends on circumstances. As people often say: God knows what he is doing. People, in actuality, can be only externally divided into masters and slaves, oppressors and victims. From the moral standpoint, in every man there exists both a master and a slave, and sometimes it is only a matter of circumstances what someone objectively will be, that is, which of these two possibilities can actualize in historic life. 68. While reading the chronicles about the developed phase of one society or civilization, we shall come across historians informing us of spiritual and moral decadence, stating resignedly that in the midst of plentitude and luxury, there is less and less of a man. Only moral dwarfs remain, waiting for the relentlessly approaching demise. Here and there appear great personages, but those are only the rare individuals powerless in the midst of general weakness. Their greatness appears even larger the more it is in contrast with the general state of spirit. 69. Nations enter history as morally affluent and materially poor. When they exit history, the situation is usually completely reversed. This is confirmed in the histories of almost all significant peoples: ancient Persians, Romans, Greeks, Arabs, even the modern Western nations. From this ensues a conclusion that a civilization (which is only objectified, materialized knowledge) can be explained through historical development, while morality cannot. It is precisely morality that is not a result but a prerequisite for a historical, external power, and one could say that people, fulfilling themselves historically, live at the expense of this moral supply, spending it, just as a prospective plant sprouts at the expense of the supply of food in the seed. At first, we always come across a man and with him examples of very pure and exalted religious awareness and morality. As the historical development proceeds, religion is either abandoned or it deteriorates, to finally have, on the eve of demise, godlessness and complete moral deterioration. Morality, therefore, is nowhere a product, we find it in the consciousness and life of people in its original form, most often without the ability to explain it. It can be found as an integral part of the "human material" that announces its entrance onto the historical stage. What has created this original morality? Nothing, if we take this word in its literal sense. That morality is not the result of life, but life itself, or a source of life that is only to begin. The debauchery and depravity that appear at the end are only the expression of the wasting and loss of ideals. They are the gray hairs of a life that is approaching its end. Debauchery is an expression of weakness, not strength. Why are all young races moral (puritan), while decadent ones are immoral? "Sexual revolution has its turn when any other positive revolution is impossible. It heralds the time when there is no strength nor will for any other ideal. It is a mark of the lack of true will and purpose. For everything that is good is a laborious 'ascent up the mountain'" (Qur'an 90/11). 88. Dictatorship is immoral even when it prohibits sin, democracy is moral even when it allows it. Morality is inseparable from freedom. Only free conduct is moral conduct. By negating freedom, and thus the possibility of choice, a dictatorship contains in its premises the negation of morality. To that extent, regardless of all historical apparitions, dictatorship and religion are mutually exclusive. For, just as in the body-spirit dilemma, religion always favors the spirit, so in the choice between wanting and behaving, intent and action, it will always favor wanting and intent, regardless of the result, that is, the consequence. In religion, an action is not valued without the intention, without "intent," that is, without an opportunity or freedom to act or not act. Just as coercive starvation is not a fast, so the coerced good is not good and is from the religious standpoint valueless. That is why the freedom of choice, that is, of action or lack of it, of abiding or transgressing, is the prerequisite at the basis of all prerequisites of all religions and all morality. And that is why the elimination of this choice either by physical


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Political Notes force in dictatorship or obedience training in utopia signifies their negation From this the idea follows that every truly human society must be a community of free individuals It must limit the number of its laws and interventions (degree of external coercion) to that necessary extent in which the freedom of choice between good and evil is maintained, so that people would do good, not because they must, but because they want to. Without this intent for the good, we have a state of dictatorship or utopia. 94. When one world loses the ability of great politics, diplomatic hairsplitting "diplomatic state," as expressed by Hegel) begins. 100. People and a crowd (a crowd of people) are not the same. This difference is well known to demagogues, so they amply use it for their purposes. People are degraded into a crowd when they lose an internal principle of awareness, morals, ideals. People without awareness equals a mob (crowd). A mob is an amorphous crowd of people without ideals, a sum of individuals in which each lives for himself and has only one's own interests or desires without the awareness of something higher and communal, without even a name. People still have ideals, a mob only has wants. We find it at the end of the historical road, on the eve of demise. A typical example is the Roman lumpen-proletariat before the demise of the Roman Empire. 103. When social life loses its true meaning, or cannot find it, individuals, depending on their personal dispositions and character, escape into thought and mysticism, or give themselves to sensual pleasures. The situation in which there exist only two kinds of people-ascetics and practicing epicures-is a reliable sign that a society is diseased. 104. When ideas are concerned, there are two kinds of prohibitions. The first is the resistance of those in power toward advancing ideas, the time for which has come. The second is the prohibition of something that is receding, moribund, for example the edict of Emperor Theodosius against pagans. In actuality, paganism was already dead, and this prohibition was only a death certificate, the announcement of the natural death, which had already occurred. Both prohibitions are without purpose. The former is useless, since it cannot change anything, the latter unnecessary, since the change has already occurred. 110. When laws are concerned, it is very important that principles of some state system or order are based on the spirit of people, for these to live in people even in a form of vague notions that the system then only articulates, names, brings to full awareness, makes a reality. If some fundamental values are not known or felt by people, the noble lawmaker will be in a difficult position, since his laws may remain empty declarations. It is one situation if people believe in the equality of people, another if they have deep-rooted racial prejudices. In the latter case the constitution regarding equality will be "digested" with difficulty and will have little chance of being brought to life. 254. Democracy and stability are mutually conditioned. We need democracy because of stability and stability because of democracy. 271. What do we need: people who believe or people who think? Do these exclude each other? 274. If you read some publications between the wars-it was then fashionable to find so-called sociological explanations for all events-you would, for example, come across the assertion that the increase in the criminal act of rape is a result of sexual repression, conservative morality, etc. Expansion of this offence in the


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Political Notes United States and Western countries, especially after the so-called sexual revolution, shows that the sociological explanation was not correct. 285. Henry LeFebvre claims that for twenty years the Communist Party of France has ignored the existence of Khrushchev's secret report of the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. 293. As in historical events, people are not only motivated by interests but also ideals, history is not predictable. To the contrary, that would be one causality that would differ from the natural one even if only in principle. As historical events are interfered with by the spirit (in the form of morality and ideals, or the motives of justice or injustice), in other words, because its actor-man- is motivated by pain and usefulness (interest) but is not its slave, history cannot be predicted. It continually makes its forecasters "lie." The last example is Marx's failure to predict history. I am thinking, of course, of the absence of world socialist revolution. 297. More than half of humanity today (end of 1984) lives in about twenty federal states. The organization differs from one country to another. Differences are mainly contained in the degree of independence of federal states with respect to the central bodies of government. 298. History has shown repeatedly that serious difficulties in every great undertaking appear only in the later phases of its implementation. This is indicated equivalently by the histories of Christianity, Islam and socialism. 301. In the preparations for the new post-industrial era, especially after the "oil crisis" in 1974, two million workers were fired in the countries of the European Economic Union, resulting in the number of unemployed rising to over 12 million people in 1984. The question, then, is in which way are we meeting the new era that is inevitably coming? Development, especially of the third (tertiary) activities, offers opportunities exclusively to small, dynamic companies. It is estimated that during the computable period since 1977, in the United States 600,000 companies are established and 40,000 companies go bankrupt annually. Currently there is a battle that relentlessly imposes the market, and in which rule the steel laws of Darwinian selection. Newly founded effective firms are usually small companies with fewer than 20 workers. 315. During the Congress in Bad Godesberg in 1959, the Social-Democratic party of West Germany abandoned Marxism as a "method of analysis of social events." This party preferred the "welfare state" to battle between classes. Swedish social democracy achieved this turn almost thirty years earlier. 317. Currently in effect is the process of constant decrease in purely industrial working posts in the economy of all highly developed countries. On this basis, Alen Turen alleges the gradual disappearance of the classic working class. The number of unionized workers is also on the decline. In France in 1984, for example, only 30 percent of workers were members of one of four large unions. 318. In America during the last century, a thief used to be hanged for stealing a horse. That was considered completely natural. 319. In 1984 in San Quentin Prison (California) alone, 155 convicts were waiting for execution.


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Political Notes 329. When we speak of differences between the sexes, we think of men and women, not feminists. Unlike women, who are one principle or element of the world, feminists mean nothing. They are like plants pulled out by their roots, and thus outside of any sort of comparison and consideration. 331. It would be normal to expect large differences between old and new generations in our time. A child who has grown up with radio and television discovers from earliest childhood that there are people at the other end of the world who think, live, and feel differently. This should have as its result a greater degree of tolerance and less chauvinism of every kind. For a child sees people who believe in different things, but are equally good and evil, just like the environment to which he belongs. Greater tolerance would be a logical result of this experience. But, is life logical? 332. In spite of everything, in our century there has been a democratisation of relationships among people. The one who doubts that should read the obliging inscription of I. Kant (in the foreword to the Critique of Pure Reason) to some anonymous bureaucrat (or minister) in Konigsberg. Kant, "an obedient servant," dedicated to him "all the interests of his literary career." Meanwhile, the expression of subjugation, deep bows ("to the ground"), was something that was at that time encountered at every step. 333. Television keeps incessantly hammering into the consciousness of people the standardized messages and images that correspond to the official philosophy and ideology. That is why television is a powerful weapon in the hands of totalitarian regimes. However, new technological developments in this area (cable TV, more channels, satellite TV, private stations, videorecorders, videotapes, etc.) break this ideological and political monopoly. It will be amusing to see how totalitarian countries, which have rushed to introduce TV, will offer resistance to the introduction of these innovations. They are already doing this, since they either ignore or avoid these developments. It does not suit them. 334. A totalitarian society is inclined toward uniformity in the upbringing and education of people, as that makes manipulation easier. The behavior of uniform people can be more easily controlled, it is predictable, and it fits better with already existing forms. 339. Every fact of life and everything that is related to a man is complex and cannot be explained nor solved with a simplified theory. Still, this is a century in which people believed in theories. The Bolsheviks in the workers' power, Germans in the superior race, criminologists in the futility of the punishment (for the behavior of the offender is absolutely conditioned by biology and social circumstances). Further still they went in Italy when they abolished insane asylums and let the sick people out on the Street. They believed in the theory that illness is of a social origin and that insane asylums were purposeless. Although there is some truth in the assertion that a disease is socially conditioned, by abolishing insane asylums, a service was not done either to society or the patients. 343. As can be rather well seen, every technological advance is first the advance of espionage and the military, and then all else. It has always been so. Today that is only more apparent. 346. During the early 1950s of this century, the president of the International Court of Justice in the Hague, who was arbitrating a dispute between the British and Iran, was a Briton. In this dispute he voted against his country. British people were angry, but they have not declared him a traitor to his homeland.


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Political Notes 350. High technology (high-tech), does not necessarily lead to unemployment, as is commonly thought. Toffler states that in the period between 1963 and 1973, Japan had the highest rate of investment in new technology and concurrently the greatest increase in employment. To the contrary, Britain, which had the smallest investment in machines, recorded the greatest decrease in workplaces. 351. Changes in the economic life of a post-industrial nation: in 1980, in the United States, of the 85 million employed, only 20 million produced material goods for all of the 220 million inhabitants of the country. The remaining 65 million "manipulate symbols" as Toffler says, that is, work in non-material production. 352. Some leading American firms achieve greater profits-or have greater lossesthrough currency and financial manipulations, rather than through production itself. Therefore, in the majority of corporations, one often increasingly comes across the position of the "director for international cash transactions," actually, a man who participates in the world electronic gambling-houses. His task is to search for the lowest interest rates, the most propitious currency transactions and the quickest turnover. 369. Mercator's projection of the globe does not suit us well. It incites Eurocentrism. By distorting real relationships, it made the northern, developed parts of the world disproportionately large, and in such a way fuels the feeling of the greatness of the colonial powers with respect to the colonies (Scandinavia larger than Congo, although opposite in reality). 382. This persistent pressure for employment of women outside the home, her inclusion into production, also has its psychological form: it consists of not acknowledging all of the economic values a woman creates at home, by giving birth, raising children, and maintaining a family. The homemaker, that worker who puts in 10 to 12 hours daily, is represented by our statistics as unemployed and categorized under the heading "non-working element." All of us know how busy a woman is, and at the same time we pretend not to see it. This neglect of woman's work is yet another, this time moral, form of pressure on a woman to leave home and turn her back on the family. Islamic culture must head the other way. The beginning of this would be the acknowledgment of the work of the mother and homemaker. 383. Alvin Toffler predicts that alcoholism costs American industry $20 billion annually, while these numbers are even more adverse for Poland and the Soviet Union. Fyodor Uglov, a member of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union, suggests passing a law on the complete prohibition of alcohol in the Soviet Union. "Otherwise, the Soviet nation will disappear," says Uglov. There are over 40 million alcoholics in the Soviet Union. Each year over a million people die as a consequence of alcohol, and every sixth child is born handicapped because one of its parents was an alcoholic, claims Uglov (Osmica, March 14, 1985). 386. Even American Christianity was contaminated with racism. On many churches, even around the middle of this century, one could read a sign that that church was for whites only. 403. Even if power can be gained through promises, it can be only kept with results. 420. Alcoholism became a first-rate problem in the Soviet Union. It has been determined: in the twenty years between 1960 and 1980 the production and consumption of alcohol increased eightfold. In 1980-30 liters of alcohol per capita and 40 million alcoholics. According to one analysis of the Academy of Sciences in


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Political Notes the Soviet Union, alcohol is a direct or indirect cause of death of more than -1.5 million people yearly-which equals the effect of 13 atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima. Alcohol is the cause of the 25 percent decline in birthrate, and of the 40 percent growth in death-rate. Some claim the benefits of alcohol. This too has been calculated. The gain (for the state budget) 49 billion rubles, a loss of over 150 billion rubles ("There is some good in it too, but the harm is greater than the good" (Qur'an, 2/2 19). Ninety percent of all resources intended for health are spent only on the treatment of alcoholics. Alcohol is the main culprit in 90 percent of the crimes registered annually in the country. Academic Fyodor Uglov even suggested the complete prohibition of alcohol in the country, for "otherwise, the nation will completely disappear," he claims (Politika, Belgrade, May 15 or 16, 1985). 421. Andre Breton claimed somewhere that he would like to live in a "glass house" in which there are no secrets, in which everything is transparent. I presume he was a socialist fanatic. 425. I believe that the world is made of individuals, that is, that the world consists of individual people and individual things. For everything that exists, exists individually: nothing general exists-it is construction of our logic, and not reality. 434. Erich Fromm defined the "socially structured defect"-which he considered an event whereby some clear depravity or inhumanity becomes not only normal, but even desirable in one equally depraved and inhumane society. A good example is an aggressive and unscrupulous individual in some markedly militaristic society (that individual is already "well adjusted" and will not become neurotic), or pornography and marital infidelity in a society following "sexual revolution" where marital fidelity is ridiculed, etc. That which is sick and hideous becomes normal. 435. In the nineteenth century, white traders used to send tons of opium to China. Around 1840, there were so many drug addicts among the Chinese that the Chinese government came to the decision to destroy 20,000 cases of opium, after which followed a declaration of war on China ("The First Opium War"). After the peace agreement in Nanking, China was forced to pay Britain for the destroyed opium, open its ports to British traders and surrender Hong Kong. Bound by contract, China had to decrease its import custom-duties, so that cheap British goods flooded the Chinese market and thereby almost completely halted the industrial development of China. 437. There is a conspicuous similarity between Soviet admonition of "decadent art" (conceptual detailing is ascribed to Plehanov) and the Fascist rejection of "degenerate art," under which Fascists implicitly included all of modern art. In any case, this almost equivalent relationship of communist and fascist theoreticians with modern art is not coincidental and points to deeper equivalence and similarity. 442. Statistics tell us that every living human today has about 20 million ancestors. This calculation has been done according to some presupposed age of humankind. 450. Historical time is always bounded by apocalypses-many little wars between two big wars. 451. One of the characteristics of social realism: pseudo-classic architecture, and enormous monuments, tastelessly pathetic and violently symbolic.


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Political Notes 455. Finally, there exists this inhuman, but unavoidable and relentless fact of the power of the atomic bomb: Everything we consider must take into account this circumstance, must adjust to this relentless fact. 456. Huxley speaks of a population of slaves who can be made to love their slavery, and that task in today's totalitarian states is assigned to the ministries of propaganda, newspaper publishers and teachers. 462. Sexual freedoms in the so-called socialist countries become a replacement for political freedoms. Authorities are well aware of this connection. 467. When the Soviet Union introduced non-working Saturdays, the consumption of alcohol rapidly increased. 476. Social realism does not paint true life, but an imagined life in utopia. The picture is usually optimistic, but false. Realism, in spite of the dark sides which it presents (for example, Balzac), captures us with its truth. Social realism repulses us with its falsehood. This could be called the "unbearable lightness of utopia." 483. Some facts: In classical Greek art, the greatest development was experienced by sculpture and drama, while we do not find music. During the Renaissance, poetry experienced powerful revolution and, a bit later, music and architecture as well; during Romanticism, lyricism came to the forefront, and in the rationalist nineteenth century, the novel. Some nations seem to have certain arts particularly suited to them: music for the Germans, poetry for the French, artistic prose for the English and Russians, painting for the Italians. All this is not exclusive, but some rough divisions can indeed be noticed. 510. Between 1968 and 1980 there were 6,700 terrorist actions registered in the world, of which 2,206 occurred in Western Europe and only 62 in the countries of the Eastern bloc (Intervju, July 5, 1985). Terrorists evidently abuse freedom. 511. In the book How to Succeed: Messages from the Most Successful American Companies (Thomas Peters and Robert Waterman, 1984), there is a conclusion, based on analysis of the 62 most successful American firms, that the most significant factors of success were not inyestments or automation, but the worker himself. The book presents the assertion: "Good management is the one which is able to create a working atmosphere in which each individual gladly cares about the company and society in its entirety." This conclusion, in complete opposition to Marx's vision of development, even better confirms the case of Japanese firms and their economic expansion. 512. Here is the "famous" sentence of Max Rafael concerning the dependence of art and development: "A painter thinks he is completely free in his choice of material and forms, while in reality this choice is conditioned by the state of material and spiritual production, the artists' class, and especially by the history of the art of painting itself." Materialists have always been passionately proving to us that we are not free. Even where freedom is most obvious, as in this inauspiciously chosen example of Max Rafael, they are convincing us we are bound by three heavy chains: (1) state of spiritual and material production, (2) class membership and (3) the entire history. Nothing in the likes of freedom brings their vision of an enslaved world into question. 513. There are some characteristic symptoms regarding the newest developments in the world: (1) in the Scandinavian countries, a movement against feminism and pornography, (2) in the United States, alcohol-free disco clubs, and a new young generation that accepts work and discipline with pride, (3) the reawakening of an interest in religion in the youth, (4) the precipitous fall of the influence of Communist parties, in both the West and the East, (5) critical


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Political Notes reexamination of Darwinism and especially Freudianism and (6) passing legal measures against alcoholism (in the Soviet Union, Scandinavian countries, England, West Germany, etc.). 531. In Norway the "Action Group Against Pornography and Prostitution" (the opposition immediately called it "The Coalition of Hypocrites") was established in 1981; judging by its support and influence, it represents some type of a national party. The movement gathered approximately 400,000 members (out of about 4 million inhabitants of Norway). Ideologists of this movement claim that "after the atomic bomb, pornography is the greatest danger to humanity." They demand the complete prohibition of prostitution. The most radical followers and advocates of the movement are precisely the feminists, who claim that pornography (and prostitution) is a direct attack at the human rights and dignity of women. Both the Conservative and Social-Democratic Parties compete in offering increasingly piercing paragraphs against pornography. It was the Social-Democratic Workers' Party that was the initiator of the introduction of changes in the Criminal Code that sanctioned the sale of pornographic publications, pictures, films, video stores, etc. (NIN, Belgrade, June 30, 1985). 574. Huxley taught us two things: (1) that utopias are possible and just because of that, dangerous, and (2) that not all people like freedom and that people should be called to or taught freedom, just like everything which is elevated and noble. Freedom is not a natural, but a cultivated state. The largest number of people would easily substitute it for security and enjoyment. The history of the twentieth century confirms this. 575. American judgments and opinions appear, at times, too naïve to Europeans. Americans have heard of Hitler, Nazism, war, gas chambers, Stalin's clean-ups, etc. from the newspapers, while for Europeans there were immediate and bloody events. This is where the certain idealism of Americans and certain cynicism and incredulity of Europeans come from. In question here is the enormous difference in the measure of that which we call historical experience. 595. When we speak of European civilization, if exaggerated enthusiasm sometimes carries us away, let us remember that Nazism and Bolshevism were also products of this civilization. That memory cannot be avoided. 597. In Ethiopia, when thousands of people, mostly children, died of hunger (between 1984 and 1986), the military spent over a billion dollars for weapons, and, of course, did not feel the dearth (Duga, No. 299/1985). 599. Ideology asks how and from what people live. Religion asks why and what the people who live so are like. That is where the continual misunderstanding between ideology and religion comes from. There where ideology finds progress, religion sees utter relapse, for it does not find any people, but beings who only function and consume. 606. Revolution is bounded by no laws-the attitude in the classics of Marxism. 608. Some sentences of the New Testament sound anti-Semitic. 618. Gorky thought that (the disappearing) religion would be replaced by art, and that "esthetics is ethics of future." An artist or a writer would occupy the place of a priest. And to the question of one party official as to what will replace churches, Lenin answered: theaters. 624. One of C. Milosz's psychological analyses (concerning the dream of Piotr): "It was-said he-a dream about complete protection.... When a man is given to a


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Political Notes force which is stronger than him - said Piotr - he reaches a limit where that which he hates becomes the object of admiration. He does not want to admit this to himself. It is very unpleasant. But then, actually, there is no other salvation but being closer to the center of that force. That is where kindness and beatitude is" (C. Milosz, Conquest of Power). Actually, Milosz attempts to uncover individual factors that make people suitable for the acceptance of one totalitarian system. Milosz' s hero becomes partial to Stalinism under the decisive influence of terror, faced with a force stronger than himself, and in order to propitiate and tame that force, he accepts its totalitarian logic" (Nikola Milosevic in the foreword to the Captured Mind). 625. Passion of destruction-the dominant tendency of the radical left. 626. In 1984, Latin America paid an average of about 40 percent of export income toward the interest payment on its debts (some countries even more: Argentina 52 percent). It is thought that, without harming development, one can set aside a maximum of 10 percent of foreign-currency income. 628. With regard to the theory of reflection,, one can justifiably ask the question: If art and literature are truly a passive reflection of socioeconomic circumstances, why then is the engagement of writers and artists in socialist countries so energetically demanded? From this request, one could sooner conclude that ideas are creators of reality, and not the other way around. The contradiction is obvious. 630. "They have killed your father, and that is why they appear stronger to you," says Teresa, in Milosz' s novel Conquest of Power. Faced with relentless and blind force, Piotr attempted to turn the object of hate into an object of admiration. - In the foundations of the majority of primitive, pagan religions, exists a similar feeling as well. Primitive people did not revere their gods because of love or respect. Personified in those gods were the forces at the mercy of which they were left exposed. Wrestling with fear, a primitive man attempts to propitiate those forces; he offers his submission, admiration, reverence. The same is done today by some people before omnipotent authorities. People subjugate themselves, not because of respect or good will, but out of the feeling of utter powerlessness before its nature. C. Milosz has shown by his outstanding psychological analysis how one arrives at a paradoxical result: Not having a choice, man turns his hatred into admiration. The greatest good is to be "in the good books" of the people from whom one can expect only trouble. Does not Orwell's hero Winston end up loving Big Brother? 632. Herbert Marcuse, the greatest critic of capitalism outside the Soviet Union, admits that capitalist mass democracy is not based upon terror and indigence but on efficacy and wealth, and on the will of the majority of the governed population (H.M., End of Utopia). Having this as his starting point, Marcuse concludes that a capitalist regime can be overthrown only by out-of-parliament means, therefore, by the means of terror and violence. He advocates this route. 643. According to the study of economist Ruth Sivard (conducted in 1984- 1985), the amount of an unpaid woman's work, meaning domestic work, totals $4 trillion a year, which equals a third of the total world production. The majority of countries in the world today officially recognize the equality of men and women. Women account for one-third of the world workforce, and they realize only one-tenth of the total income. Working women, as a rule, have a double working day, one in the office and one at home. Some statistics show that working European women have less free working time than their husbands do, by half. A similar case is also with working women in other countries.


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Political Notes 656. There is no defeat for which the defeated nation bears no responsibility. In the "dumpster of history" there are no innocent ones. For to be weak is a fault from the standpoint of history. To be weak is immoral in history. 660. Is it true that only "empty stomachs set history in motion?" 664. In times past, people killed in the name of religion, today, in the name of ideology. In this century millions of people were killed in the name of ideology. 673. Ordinary people hold the conviction that AIDS is a price that modern civilization pays for "sexual liberation." This conviction has been stimulated by the reminder that Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed by fire from the sky as a punishment for unnatural lechery. 674. Investments into research and development (R&D) programs in the world. In 1985: In Milan a meeting was organized that was supposed to answer the question of how Europe and European industry would respond to the technological challenge given to the world by the United States and Japan. The question was in fact, how certain countries relate to technology and how ready they are for the upcoming technological game. Cohn Norman, one of the experts in this field, estimated that at the end of the 1970s, over $150 billion was spent on R&D worldwide. Of course, the main impetus of this race is the current confrontation. The main areas of investment are: electronics (especially microelectronics), the chemical and pharmaceutical industry and space. In the United States, these investments (R&D) amount to more than 2.4 percent of the Gross National Product (GNP), but together with resources invested in it by industry, this rate increases to 4 percent. Japan follows with 2.11 percent, or 6 percent of its GNP if the share by the economic sector is included. For space exploration in 1980, Japan spent about a billion dollars a year, and what has to be pointed out is that reliance on technology is the only chance Japan has, literally, the precondition for survival. West Germany sets aside about 2 percent of its GNP, Great Britain 2.2 percent. In the USSR this work is coordinated by the Gosplan, Committee for Inventions and Discovery and the Academy of Sciences (established in 1724, now having 800 members). It is estimated that there are about 1.5 million scientific workers in the USSR (in 1980, five times more than in 1958); in 1980, 23.8 billion rubles was spent on R&D. Among the countries of the Third World, only China and India have more developed scientific and developmental politics. It is estimated that there are about 2 million scientific workers in China and that about 1 percent of the GNP is set aside for R&D. India estimates: around 2.5 million scientific workers and engineers. Since 1947, a continual growth of funds for research and development has been recorded. 677. History is not mathematics, and in it there is no mathematical necessity. Engels has stated in many articles, interviews and letters between 1891 and 1895 that the impending conquest of power by the social democratic party is a "mathematical necessity." That did not happen, and when it did, it was no longer Engels' social-democracy but Bolshevism, in fact, the totalitarian power of former workers. 679. When Spain and Portugal become full members of European Union (1986), "The Twelve" will have 318 million inhabitants-significantly more than the United States (232 million) and the USSR (275 million). In addition to this there is a great cultural and scientific tradition, as well as resources for development. When one adds the investments into scientific research of only three countriesGermany, France and England-one gets an amount equal to that invested by the United States, and twice that of Japan. But the effect of these investments, due to the present fragmentation, is significantly smaller. These drawbacks should be eliminated by EURECA (European Research Cooperation Agency).


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Political Notes 683. In manuscripts recently found and published, Marx said that he built his historical method precisely while reading Machiavelli's History of Florence, in which the history of class struggles in this city was presented. Machiavelli separated politics from ethics. He divides morality into individual and public and subjugates the former to the latter. Machiavelli also emphasizes "public interest" as the aim of the community, but his theory might have served to show how much the so-called public interest can be immoral or amoral. His The Prince is a cynical manual for all autocrats, and "Machiavellian" a synonym for that type of methodology of conquest and preservation of power. 686. What is the "Swedish model of welfare state," which has been being created by the Social-Democrats for almost 50 years? On the basis of mutual solidarity, society attempts to provide humane conditions of life for every member of society. Every child older than 18 months has a secured place in a child-care institution. When he goes to school, he will have free books and school supplies, as well as a meal. When he finishes school, he will get a job, and if there are no jobs, the state will create one for him through public work or subsidies to the employers who hire unemployed individuals. That is why in Sweden unemployment is less than 3 percent (1985). When he marries, he will get an apartment or will buy it, depending on his prospects. When his children are born, he gets privileges. If he becomes ill, he will get 90 percent of his pay from the first day of his illness. Even if he refuses to work, society will give him minimum support. When he grows old, he will get a pension, regardless of the number of years he worked. If he grows weak, he can get a place in a senior citizen's home. The downside of this system is that it is rather bureaucratised and therefore rather expensive. Health, education and social assistance are the greatest items in the state budget; as a result Swedish taxes are some of the highest in the world. As is known, during the 1985 elections, the Swedish Social-Democrats launched a program of "workers' funds." The idea is that workers pay in the excess of their pay into these funds, through which they buy shares and so become co-owners of the companies and factories (Danas, September 1985, and NJN, May 6, 1985). 687. Do we want to be governed by people or events, mind or coincidence? If people, which and what kind? 688. Separate ministry for science (or for research and development - R&D) - Why not? 692. The 1984-85 elections in Scandinavian countries (Sweden, Norway, Denmark) show the movement of the voting body toward social democracy. This tendency was registered somewhat sooner in Spain, France and Greece and finally very clearly in Portugal (fall 1985). There is definitely a difference between European socialists and social democrats. Explaining this difference, Leonid Zospen, the first secretary of the Socialist Party of France, said in one analysis (1985) that social democracies in essence only engage in "better and more just redistribution of social wealth (income). They, as a rule, do not engage with changing the type of ownership and reorganization of the production relations in society." "We, socialists, however, have in sight both of these components of the socialist transformation." My comment: all such concepts are in visible recession starting with the 1980s (I think, of course, of the latter-the socialist ones). 698. According to statistical data, during the 1970s and 1980s the number of women in high positions declined in Western countries. There are fewer women ministers, ambassadors and parliament members today than 30 or 40 years ago. The only exception is Sweden, where the number of women holders of higher functions increased.


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Political Notes 717. There are occurrences (or events) that in themselves collect all the dispersed characteristics of one phenomenon, and thus become a symbol. 730. Freedom and anarchy-two concepts destined to be confused with each other. They are not the only example (damage-sin; useful-good; God-nature, etc.). 744. "The results of bourgeois emancipation must be preserved. Socialism without constitutional rights is utter nonsense."-Jurgen Habermas in one interview (NIN, November 24, 1985). Habermas is considered to be the most significant Marxist writer of the modern age. This was not a hindrance to his appointment in the 1970s to the post of director at the Max Planck Institute for Research of Life Conditions of the Scientific-Technological World (West Germany) (in this capacity he wrote the book The Problem of the Legitimacy of Late Capitalism). In a reversed situation (if he wrote in Communism against Communism) he would get, like myself, 14 years in prison. That is that "certain" difference. 754. The most important economic resource is good quality personnel whose knowledge and capabilities are created and objectified through scientific work and education One dollar invested into scientific research work is returned after ten years as twelve, and in the case of information technology, even double. In Japan, national income has increased in the period between 1970 and 1980 from $1,806 to $12,000 per inhabitant annually, but the expense for the development of information technology was $350 per inhabitant annually (Danas, Zagreb, November 26, 1985). 777. French sociologists claim that alcoholism is "the mass genocide of a less valuable and superfluous population," for the life expectancy of alcoholics is on average 20 years shorter than of people who do not drink. Alcohol is one of the evils that strictly conform to the "principle of equality," for it equally attacks intellectuals and workers, young and old, rich and poor, peasants and artists, men and women. Children of alcoholics become alcoholics themselves. In 1951, the World Health Organization conceded alcohol the status of a "virus"-a scarcely curable disease of society and family. Among treated alcoholics in Yugoslavia, there is the greatest percentage among workers, around 90 percent. In Yugoslavia, three million of people drink often and vast amounts, of whom one million are chronic alcoholics, while only ~ to 4 percent are abstinent. Out of 1,000 surveyed students, every third one started drinking between the ages of 11 and 15, and every tenth had wine before he was five, etc. (NIN, December 15, 1985). 778. "There where a man wants to be complete, the state will never be totalitarian" (Denis de Rougemont). 780. When Denis de Rougemont invited Europe to unite immediately after World War II, his appeal was greeted with ridicule. But 40 years later, this unity is becoming a reality to an increasingly greater extent, and that which is happening in this direction is undoubtedly one of the most significant facts of this century. 791. The true differences between people, societies and political systems are not in aims, but in methods. Therefore, do not ask much about the aims, for proclaimed aims will always be noble and good-ask about the methods or observe the methods. That never deceives. 814. Over 100 nations and ethnic groups live in the USSR, and they formally have their own national republics or autonomies. The Union contains 15 federal and 20


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Political Notes autonomic republics, eight autonomic districts and ten national regions (Danas, December 17, 1985). In spite of this, Russian hegemony is felt throughout. 815. During the last census in the United States, when asked about ethnic background, as many as 83 percent of Americans stated some ethnic identification, and only 6 percent stated they were Americans. In spite of the "melting pot" theory, it was shown that ethnic identity is extraordinarily stable, ethnic homogenization did not happen, and thus America has remained a pluralistic community in the ethnic sense. 828. Positivists are proving that differences in the role of a man and a woman in a society are not natural, but created by long practice and upbringing. Without those artificial conditions, it would be possible-they claim-to equalize these roles. Furthermore, it is claimed that even for the different choice of games and toys that boys and girls make, where boys imitate handymen and soldiers and make weapons and vehicles while girls make houses, dolls and pay social calls, it is societal pressure that limits the freedom of choice, activities and toys for children (ex. Vesna Janjevic, psychologist). The advocates of this theory claim that children do not make this choice spontaneously, but that parents, teachers and pedagogues habituate them to it, etc. This does not sound convincing. 831. French poet Louis Aragon wrote an ode to the Soviet secret police. His is the verse: "Long live the GPU, the dialectical expression of heroism." He is also an author of the "famous" sentence: "We put Stalin above Shakespeare, Rambois, Goethe, Pushkin." Later he changed his opinion. Historical distance is necessary to all, especially poets and writers! 836. Total population of Earth-estimates (NIN, December 29, 1985): 1985-4.8 2000-6

billion billion

2025-8 2050-11

billion billion

The number of inhabitants of the white race is decreasing in relative terms. In 1985, white people constituted 34 percent of the world population, in 2000 they will constitute 25 percent, and in 2025, 18 percent. Does that signify the twilight of the race that dominated the world for centuries? The black population of the United States is growing twice as fast as the white. Today, 320 million people live in the European Community, but the rate of growth is only 0.5, so it is predicted that by the end of the century, the number of inhabitants of the European Economic Union will fall to 280 million. The USSR today (1985) has 276 million, but at the end of the century a number between 310 and 320 million is expected, with growth exclusively to the advantage of the non-Russian nations. In Algeria, every woman gives birth to an average of seven children. Of the 35 poorest countries, 23 are in Africa. In the white communities of Europe, the United States, and the USSR, fewer and fewer children are being born. Reasons: late marriages, egotism ("I want to live for myself and not for a child"), career, divorces, employment of both parents, decreased fertility, drugs, venereal diseases and mass abortions. The causes of demographic crises are in greatest part of a moral nature. 839. Racism has no scientific basis: 99 percent of the genes that represent the inheritance of the individual are common to all people. One percent of the genes


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Political Notes conditions the physical appearance of a human being, that is, his racial identity. Modern genetics refuted the old explanation for the differences between races. 844. What are the driving forces of technological development: economic mechanisms, the people who are always searching for something new, the race for extra profit, military contention for dominance, state administration? In the Far East a series of little countries (Taiwan, South Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong) is powerfully advancing. This is an imitation of the Japanese model, but which forces were active in Japan itself? In some cases a desperate attempt with the aim of military domination was shown to be the most powerful driving force (the United States is a good example with Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative, SDI-known as "Star Wars"). Half of the amount spent for research and development by the United States is spent on defense. The case is similar for the USSR. However, in the United States the results of research in the military sector are quickly transferred to the civilian one, which is not the case in some other countries. Can one go faster? The example of these countries shows that one can, they have achieved a degree of development in half the time taken by Japan. The first phase in the development in each of those countries lasted less than five years. Its main characteristics were: reliance on the world market, private initiative, administrative deregulation, opening up for foreign investments, low custom duties, symbolic taxes and abolishment of different taxes and permits. In this way, Singapore became the largest world exporter of diskette units for computers in 1985, and Malaysia the largest exporter of diskette electronics. The Japanese model is founded on so-called soft government, that is, the incessant process of consultations between businesses and state administration. In India, as opposed to other countries, the driving force was politics. At the head of the Department of Electronics is the president of the government himself. In the world, it is otherwise not usual for bureaucracy to incite technological development. It is usually the force of the status quo. 845. From lack of understanding to aggressiveness is but one step. 851. For the first time in its history, humanity faced the possibility of its own annihilation, actually self-annihilation. This feeling has a sobering effect and will influence the behavior of all future generations. Let us hope! 868. Algerian poets are dissatisfied with the slow process of Arabization. They know what significance the act has of returning to their country a language that has been so cruelly taken away by French colonial politics. 913. Even since the seventeenth century, the school system in Japan was so developed that the percentage of illiterate was the smallest in the world. Japanese lettering is very complex. This does not depend on lettering, but on people. 915. "When Japan opened toward the West, it invested all of its efforts into the education of people, and in a much more liberal way. I was shocked that here in a village, about thirty kilometers away from Paris, where my son attends elementary school, there is no piano, no drawing lessons, and not even the natural sciences are being taught. All of that existed for a long time even in the smallest village school in Japan. And the French are surprised how the Japanese could rise so quickly" (Japanese painter Jase Tabuchi, NIN, January 19, 1986). 927. One society excludes itself from the civilized world if it falls behind in the area of knowledge (science) beyond a certain historically tolerable measure. What are we to conclude about our future in light of this fact?


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Political Notes 931. In 1985, in the United States, four-member families with an annual income of less than $10,609 had been assigned to the category of "poor." This category constituted 14.4 percent of the population of the United States, or 33.7 million people. A great majority of this category consists of black people. 937. Culture is before all a sign or the evidence of the existence of one people. 939. When civilized societies retrogress, they do not return to the traditional forms of life (traditional society), but are de-civilized. That is the customary case when, because of insufficient material development, the trend of civilization cannot be followed. What happens is complete material and spiritual impoverishment. 941. One of the rules of bureaucracy: Better to do nothing, for one who does nothing makes no mistakes, and one cannot be accountable for inaction. That is why bureaucracy is the factor of the status quo and opposition against every innovation. 942. No freedom is possible, or is real, if from above (decreed). Freedom is not gained, it is taken. 947. The motto of all sailors (after all shipwrecks and damage): "One must sail." 949. Crime in the world increases yearly at the average rate of 2 percent. These numbers continually grow, despite the fact the efficacy of the police in the last decade has increased by 50 percent, and financial resources invested in the fight against crime nearly doubled. This can be concluded from the report of the General Secretary of the U.N. at the conference dedicated to the question of crime in the world (Delhi, 1985). During this gathering, it was determined that "Crime today is a phenomenon which exceeds national and international dimensions, leading to the slowing down of political, social, economic, and cultural development, and hindering the actualisation of both human rights and elementary freedoms." 950. Democracy, by its definition, contains as well the possibility of misuse of democracy. Who attempts to "cure" democracy from this danger kills with this cure democracy itself. Freedom should be accepted as such, with all of its risks. There is no choice here. 951. If a book, a record, a film, if all these are only merchandise, then uncultured consumers decisively affect cultural politics, for they have purchasing power at their disposal, which opens doors to trash and kitsch. 959. Newly composed music actually "newly composes" the consciousness of the people. 972. The Italian Mafia was created in the fight against the Bourbons who ruled the "Kingdom of Two Sicilys" (with headquarters in Palermo and Naples), which helped it gain from the people a certain patriotic or romantic halo. But later, a stratum of the rich separated within the Mafia (as happens with any power without control), and under the slogan of the fight against foreigners, increasingly concentrated power in its own hands. Since the beginning until today, the rules of the Mafia have remained the same. These are: animosity toward authorities, conspiring (omerba), clear social division of the powerful and obedient, and periodic redistribution of power among families-clans (cozahe), which leads to mutual merciless confrontations (faida). Otherwise, the Mob today is a typical criminal organization. In 1980, only from the sale of drugs abroad, it earned four times more than the entire public budget of Sicily.


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Political Notes 975. Two opposite statements on freedom of thought: Richelieu: "Give me two sentences written by the hand of even the most honest man, I will find in them a cause to hang him" (writes Mrs. De Motwille in her Memories). Voltaire in a letter to Helvetius: "Dear Sir, I do not agree with your opinion, it is revolting to me, but I will defend your right to hold it until the end." 986. There are people who are good not out of goodness, but out of stupidity or weakness. They are, to say so, objectively good, not subjectively. However, as much as this goodness out of narrow-mindedness (or timidity) is without real moral value, one cannot ignore its objective value, that is, value for other people. Those people are at least not harmful. If they are not morally useful, they can be socially useful, so no single realistic politic will ignore them. There where the questions are asked about intentions and motives, and not results and consequences, their lives are of no value. Those are two different worlds: moral and social. 992. An odd paradox is in effect: while churches in the West are frequented less and less, they are increasingly filled in the socialist East. According to sociologists, in both cases this is due to the crises of the institutions: in the West of the religious, and in the East those of the state. 1023. The Chinese "Cultural Revolution" was the most radical and far-reaching attempt in human history to remove not only the influence of the diverse past from present and future generations, but also to erase from the consciousness of these generations even the memory of it itself. We do not know if anyone put before themselves a similar ambition. Perhaps Kemal in Turkey during the 1920s. 1024. Jonedij Masuda, one of the leading Japanese experts on computers, claims that our knowledge-rich future will direct us to replace the interest in material things with interest in spiritual values. Within this perspective he also sees a future world religious renaissance. As is known, Adam Smith developed a similar thought in his work Wealth of Nations, a hundred years before. For now we know that the optimistic predictions of Smith about man's turning toward the spiritual life in prosperity did not come true. 1028. The Qur'an, and its spirit of mercy and justice, has become people's feelings and the everyday philosophy of ordinary individuals. This source was alive and active, even when it seemed it had run dry. Even then-in the times of decadence-although it did not directly affect social-political life, it did affect the formation of people's feelings, which will be and which are (today or tomorrow) the source of laws. Those laws, if they express the spirit and feeling of people, will be laws of justice and equality. 1032. In April of 1986, Pope John Paul II visited a Roman synagogue. That was the first time in history that the head of the Catholic Church crossed the threshold of a Jewish temple. In the Vatican it was announced that this act represented extending a hand to a people that had, for the last twenty centuries, been accused of the murder of Jesus Christ. Somewhat earlier, in 1965 during the Second Vatican Council, via the declaration Nostra aetat, Jews had been officially released of this accusation. In 1985, Pope John Paul II visited Morocco and spoke before 80,000 young Muslims about "our common God of Abraham," which was an argument that could have equally been offered to Jews as well. (In Rome, in the sixteenth century, following the order of Pope Paul IV, the so-called Roman Ghetto for Jews was established. It was abolished over three hundred years later, in 1870.)


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Political Notes 1039. It is important for a nation to always "want something." Let us take India: In the 1950s, Nehru emphasized the motto of industrialization, in the mid1960s the "green revolution" (the advancement of agriculture), in the early 1960s the motto "Garibi hatao" ("Root out poverty"), in the mid- 1980s the technology (computerization) of Rajiv Gandhi. You will never achieve everything you intend to. However, you especially will not if you do not intend anything, and that type of apathy and inertia we find, unfortunately, in a large number of countries. 1045. The German Kaiser Wilhelm, otherwise a very average man, wrote this comment under some painting, "reminder to peoples of Europe to take care of their 'holy goods' before the danger from the East." This was much before the revolution in Russia. Hesse writes about this in 1919 (in an essay on Dostoyevsky) and says that the Emperor felt some vague fear of the masses from the East, which could be set in motion against Europe. This "vague fear" came true many years later. 1052. According to data in the magazine Journal de Brazil, out of the $100 billion of foreign debt that Brazil had in 1985, one-third, or $35 billion, had been effectively used, while all the rest was "eaten-up" by the mechanism of "refinancing of original loans" (Vjesnik, April 14, 1986). 1107. There exist two terrors of the twentieth century: the Gulag and Nazism. 1113. That which we sometimes see as a disease of an individual, is in fact a disease of times or society. 1115. Even the most beautifully invented institutions grow old after a certain time, are petrified, lose their internal life, even their true and original meaning. 1127. Mind (or human spirit)-is it the ruler and lawgiver of life or only its interpreter? 1128. Are laws at variance with freedom? Do both morality and laws limit freedom? Will life, if it is freed from the laws, start acting against itself and selfdestructing? Do we have experience with this situation, and what does it say to us? 1146. The iconoclastic attitude of Islam has two meanings and both are relevant. The first is literal-fight against the concretion of God, against his degradation to a painting or statue. And the other: against many little Gods, infallible, all knowing, magnificent, "one head above the others," untouchable, sons of God and sons of the leaders, Fuhrers, the greatest ones, etc. This multitude of "little Gods" was abolished by Islam and it was proclaimed: La illahe Illallah - there is no other divinity but God1. These two iconoclastic meanings "Al-Akida" are in mutual relationship and complement each other. 1166. There are many parallels between Nazism and Stalinism, but one is both more conspicuous and more important than the others: In both systems the individual does not exist and means nothing. From this fundamental equivalence followed all others.

1

Note from editor an of the OCR-ed version of this book: A translation closer to the traditional translation of "La illahe Illallah" might be "Nothing is Holy, except for Allah (God)" or "Nothing is worth worshiping except Allah (God)". IH


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Political Notes 1182a. Conflict and social dissatisfaction in the ten most developed countries of the world 1973-1982. Country Austria West Germany Japan Sweden France United States Great Britain Spain Italy

Conflict Inflation Index 1 6.3 3 4.9 6 3 16 35 39 68 100

Unemployment

8.1 10.9 11.3 9.0 14.9 1 7.1 17.2

Social Dissatisfaction 2.0 8.3 4.2 9.1

2.0 1 .6 5.1 7.7 6.1 6.2 7.2

10.1 12.5 16.4 16.7 21.0 23.3 24.4

Notes: Conflict Index = relationship between days of strike and total employment (Italy = 100); Social Dissatisfaction sum of percentages of inflation and unemployment. Source: Table composed by the Italian economist Paolo Silos Labini-NIN, May 11, 1986.

1183. Paolo Siles Labini (see the table in the previous note), Italian economist, and author of the book The Social Classes in the Eighties, a bestseller in Italy in 1986. Main ideas: (1) Economic, social, and political inequalities have been progressively decreasing in the last two centuries; there is, therefore, no inescapable social polarization of the society, as announced by Marx. Impoverishment (proleteriatization) did not happen as well, just the opposite-class differences were reduced. (2) The class problem is a characteristic of European societies that had passed through feudalism. In the United States, which did not pass through feudalism ("in which not even blood was of the same color"), class divisions did not have the significance they had in Europe. In India and some Asian countries, class division follows from castes. (3) Development is characterized by drastic diminution of the agrarian class and the rise of the urban, as well as by the increase in the number of clerks and continual decrease of the number of workers. (4) There exists a permanent revolution-but a revolution in education. "A monopoly on the highest education was the first element of the domination of social groups," claims Labii. (5) What is noticed is a continual diminution of the difference between the average pay of clerks and workers: at the start of this century in Italy this relationship was 4:1, and in the United States 2.3:1; today (1986) it is 1.2:1 (Italy), and 1.3:1 (United States). Labii believes that prospects are that a worker's pay will surpass a clerk's pay; (6) There no longer exists the acute "peasant question" that for long preoccupied political parties before World War II. Reason: not that the conditions have noticeably improved, but that the peasantry has practically disappeared as a class. Thus, today in the United States, independent farmers account for only 1.5 percent of the population (in 1890: 22.7 percent), in Italy 7.6 percent, in France 6.2 percent, in Great Britain 1.3 percent, in Greece still 29 percent, in India 50 percent, in Egypt 34 percent. Will the same happen to the working class (and the "worker question")? (7) Class differences in highly developed and post-industrial societies are expressed as cultural differences. Even in general, holds Labini, class


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Political Notes battle was politically relevant because it was intellectually relevant. Those who have insisted the most and worked in the direction of radicalization were intellectuals, not workers. (8) The working class is changing quantitatively and qualitatively-the latter especially under the influence of informatics and robotization. (9) In the United States, the main contrarieties are not class ones, but racial and ethnic. The ethnic picture of the United States in the 1980s: Anglo-Saxon group one-third, Hispanic group around one-quarter, Blacks about 12 percent, and one-third of different little groups from Slovaks to numerous Oriental peoples. Even the particular kinds of crime are ethnically determined. (10) Three ideals of the French revolution, equality, liberty and fraternity, are still topical today, the first two being in the foundation of all aspirations and topical political movements in the world, while the third-fraternity, "sounds pathetic, and as opposed to the first two, cannot be easily institutionalized." The coexistence of the first ideals is difficult but necessary since in egalitarian societies without freedom, different forms of privileges and inequalities soon take roots, and crude shows of economic inequality autocracy lead to autocracy. (11) Social picture of Russia before the revolution: 80 percent peasants (including kulaks), 14 percent workers and craftsmen, 6 percent bourgeoisie (traders, landowners, and imperial functionaries). In this situation equality, and not freedom, was the first ideal. However, repression of freedom in today's USSR is becoming a problem, not only politically but also economically: development is halted. "Weakness in technological innovation is the Achilles heel of the Soviet Union." There exists almost no technical innovation that the USSR has exported to the West. The reverse is the rule. During the last two decades, stagnation in the economic development of the USSR could be noticed. The main problem is the ruling class of the "nomenclature"-the ruling people in the state and party apparatus, directors of larger companies and academics. They, alongside the power, enjoy significant material privileges as well and show no readiness to renounce them. These privileges have outlived all other political and economic changes in the USSR (so-called reforms). It is thought there are around 700,000 members of the nomenclature. That is the strongest conservative force (force of the status quo) in the USSR. (12) A shocking fact: The average life expectancy in the USSR is on the decline. The death rate of newborns has increased as well in the period between 1965 and 1981 from 23 to 28 per thousand. (13) In the West, there is an increasing number of workers and union organizations among the owners of joint-stock companies. Additionally, the increasingly greater development of small companies, which show themselves to be very effective, takes away all allure from nationalization, which was so popular immediately after the war. 1189. Erich Fromm has shown (in "Escape from Freedom") that dictatorship, totalitarianism and a state of the lack of freedom in general do not have a base only in social and political institutions, but also in a man himself, in his character structure. Freedom is not something that is understood by itself or realized as a value. People need to be taken or called to freedom as true religion. For some people, freedom is an excessive burden. Therefore, escape from freedom. Fromm reminds us of Germany in the 1930s, when "millions were as eager to surrender their freedom as their fathers were to fight for it" (p. 19). 1203. At the foundation of all the progress and power of the West in the last five centuries is the cult of work, which appeared at the beginning of this historic period and remained a main value in the eyes of the greatest number of people


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Political Notes until the present. Linked with it is a particular concept of time, as something valuable, that cannot be wasted. In Niirnberg, even since the sixteenth century, clocks sounded the quarters of hours, which reflected a new feeling for time, which is passing and needs to be economized. The first law of morality became industrious and honest work, and the first sin indolence and unproductiveness. The main objection to both clergy and monks was that they were not productive. What are the origins of this new spirit that suddenly reigned over millions of people? It is most often ascribed to Protestant ethics. However, regardless of its source, one thing is certain: it contains the main factor of superiority of Western civilization. 1214. Communists claimed that classical freedoms have only formal nature and no value. What is the value of freedom of religion, that is, the right to believe according to your own choice-they say-when an individual loses an internal ability to believe in anything that cannot be proven? Or, what is that so much praised freedom of speech for, when much of what man thinks and says is in actuality that which others think and say. Or, what is it worth to you that you are free from external authorities (kings, dictatorships, church) when anonymous authorities such as public opinion and the press have even more authority? These internal authorities have greater power over man than the external, etc. My response to this: Give us as many of those "formal" freedoms, and do not worry about our health. It has been shown, namely, that this objection to formalism of freedom is in fact justification for a totalitarian system of government. For, those who have talked of formal freedoms did not instead of those give real ones, but have abolished both the one and the others. This hypocritical game continues and repeats itself, surprisingly with success. 1216. The principle of true capitalism is not spending, and therefore not luxury or prodigality, but accumulation and, on the basis of it, new, increased production. 1221. In authoritarian systems that last, and where the prospects for resistance and change of conditions have been reduced to a minimum, resignation appears and, with time, acceptance of such a state of things. In Poland in 1985, a turning away from "Solidarity" was noticed, not because of the rejection of the movement as such, but because of the loss of hope that even after ten years of resistance anything could be changed and that every violent attempt would end up with further aggravation of the conditions (for example, direct Soviet occupation, such as in Czech lands.) Dictators are not usually satisfied with only the absence of resistance. They demand to be glorified and celebrated, and usually succeed. Psychoanalysis gives the following explanation: Suppressed feelings of hate turn into acceptance, and even into blind adoration. This reversed (sick) logic was shown by Orwell in his 1984, and E. Fromm in Escape from Freedom has very convincingly written about it as well. 1224. Hypnosis and similar techniques prove how - we can experience some suggested thoughts and feelings, which have no objective basis, as our own (for example, a hypnotist suggests to the subject that the potato he holds in his hand is a pineapple, and the latter eats it, enjoying it as if he were eating a pineapple). Television, with constant repetition, becomes something similar. Millions of viewers accept, as their own, opinions that sometimes have no real basis and are often completely foreign to them. This is mass hypnosis, which is achieved through persistent repetition of some opinions and attitudes. 1230. "The right to expression of opinions has meaning only if we are able to have our own opinion" (E. Fromm, Escape from Freedom). Beautiful thought, is it also true? Can the free expression of an "imposed" opinion in Western democracies be equated with the prohibition of expression of any different opinion in the countries


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Political Notes of the socialist stock? Even if theoretically this seems very similar, the practical difference is large, especially since an imposed opinion is never imposed in its entirety. Even when accepting some opinion, an individual himself has had some contribution, has colored it, even to a certain degree, with his personality. It is hypocritical to equate the position of the citizen in a democratic society, where he is exposed to the influence of commercials, TV, partisan propaganda machinery, press, which "help" him accept (actually impose) some kind of thinking, with a citizen of some totalitarian state, where only a single opinion is served and all others are persecuted and rendered impossible. Pluralism itself, which is characteristic of democracy, and the freedom to think differently (as theoretical as it may be, and hindered with many real limitations) draw a boundary between these two different situations in which an individual can find himself. All culture and upbringing are in a certain sense limitation of spontaneity and freedom: a request to do something (because it is good and beautiful), or not to do it (because it is bad and ugly). Looked at from the outside, culture is repression and is in opposition to freedom. Does there exist an imposed behavior that is in accordance with freedom? Is every externally imposed opinion (or behavior) a limitation of freedom? Is a parent's insistence, for example, that a child brush his teeth or treat adults respectfully an attack on the child's freedom? Impeding expression of opinion for a long duration in the life of an individual or society leads to the disappearance of one's own opinion. People will avoid developing thoughts and feelings that they will not be able to express or that will, furthermore, represent a burden, even danger. Finally, it is possible to imagine human beings without opinions. How much they are still human beings is another question. 1237. Adjustment is the greatest negation of one's own "I." It is forcing one to want what one must want, or accept as good and beautiful that which one has to consider as such, or finally, to accept another's opinion and taste as one's own. As long as you express that opinion aware that it is another's and that it has been imposed on you, things are not hopeless. Manipulation is complete when you do not notice that those are others' opinions or tastes, or you start to deceive yourself that they are your own. 1266. I wrote somewhere: "Hamlet cannot be translated into scientific language, nor But there have been attempts. Hegel attempted to make a philosophical analysis of Hamlet and Antigone, wanting to show through this interpretation how ideas in these poetic works are identical to those from his own philosophy. How successful this analysis was is another question. Besides, it is not difficult to prove that the reduction of a work of literature to an idea, to a rational concept, leads to the abolition of literature (and art in general) and, as a further consequence, to an absolutism of ratia. All this, in the end, is an integral part of the authoritarian spirit. 1269. Not all that a Marxist is writing is Marxism, nor is everyone who thinks he is a Marxist one. If we compare what individual Marxists in this century wrote and said about some important questions, we will find more differences among them than similarities. In general, we are often victims to a fallacy that subjective and objective attitudes match, and that is much more rare than we think. 1279. Reading novels confounded Don Quixote's mind. He stopped differentiating imagination from reality, truth from the story, dream and waking state, past and present, finally, that which is written in books and that which is real. But it was a fallacy of a noble kind.


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Political Notes 1327. England-industrial revolution; France-political revolution; Germanyphilosophical revolution. That which the English and French have done in the field of economy and politics, the Germans did in the field of thought. 1382. Moliere, with his cutting satire of the vices of the ruling classes before the French Revolution, prepared the confrontation with them. It was not the revolution that created Moliere, but Moliere that created the revolution ("In the beginning there was a word"). 1422. Herman Hesse clearly expresses his own view of history when he puts words into Tegrearus's mouth, according to which history is "something so revolting, at the same time banal and devilish, at the same time horrible and boring, that it cannot be understood how can a serious thinker engage with it. Its content is only human selfishness and the eternally same fight for power, for material, brutal, animal power. . . . World history is a story without an end of violence of the stronger over the weaker. Race with time, race for profit, for power, for wealth. . . . Spiritual work, cultural work, artistic work, on the contrary, is completely opposite to that, it is always an escape of man from temporal slavery to another plane, into the eternal and timeless, divine, completely nonhistoric, and even against the historic" (Hesse, The Glass Bead Game). 1428. What is world history? Is it a continual shifting of the center of gravity? Are we not standing now before one such shift? 1434. "In the beginning there was a word"-it has always been so: the French Revolution (1789) was preceded by the "philosophical revolution." In 1776 David Hume died, and in 1778 J.J. Rousseau. The printing of the Encyclopedia (Diderot, D. Alambret, etc.) was completed in 1780. Kant's Critique of Pure Reason came out in 1781. Great political events that have changed the world and started with the French Revolution were preceded by human thought. 1451. The state in Italy (especially Florence) at the end of the thirteenth century: "Popes and Emperors have for long forgotten the great aims their predecessors were led by. Ambition, thirst for power and wealth, were the only motives of their actions. The Church stopped protecting the oppressed and had long since taken on the role of the oppressor. Bribery and the rights of the powerful ruled the courts, ministries were given to lechery and priests would go from night orgies to church to perform services" (Cohen, History of West-European Literature). 1461. Copernicus's discovery was a cultural-historical, as much as an astronomical fact. It was not only a turning-point in the field of astronomy, but in culture as well. Copernicus had shown to man that not Earth, and not even he himself, is the center of the universe. This realization affected his dignity, as well as his haughtiness. On that basis, a different feeling about the world was born, and thus also a different culture, which had to have different life and moral concepts and political views. 1465. Anti-Semitism in Germany is very old. Even at the beginning of the sixteenth century, renowned German humanists Reuchlin (1485-1522) and Urlich Kohn Guter (1488-1523) wrote piercing discussions and pamphlets against the Jews and advocated an imperial decree for the confiscation and destruction of all Jewish books. In this conflict, intellectual Germany was divided into two camps. The University of Cologne supported action against Jewish manuscripts, and the University of Erfurt put itself in defense of freedom and against any persecutions. This was more than 400 years before Hitler appeared.


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Political Notes 1471. During the entire Middle Ages, Jews were the object of the cruel hatred of Christian society. They were deprived of the right to participate in public life and were left with nothing else but to dedicate all of their attention to earning an increasing amount of money. In that way trade and banking became the main occupations of Jews. 1474. In The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare dealt with the centuries-old problem of the West-anti-Semitism. In the strong character of Shylock, Shakespeare paints a Jew as he sees him to be during that time: biblically wellread, a passion for wealth and money, vindictiveness, fickleness, formalistic respect for tradition, formal understanding of the law (the letter but not the spirit), but simultaneously: dedication, perseverance, diligence. Shylock sends word to the Christians: "The villainy you teach me, I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction" (III, i). 1482. In Shakespeare's tragedy, Caesar is a worthless personality but is a carrier of the principle that triumphs. And vice versa, Brutus is a great man, "the most honorable Roman," but he represents a concept that has been historically destined to defeat. For in that moment, republican thought was already dead, people were ready for slavery, they could not imagine Rome without emperors, regardless of the name of that Caesar (people asked Brutus to be Caesar). 1489. Milton's celebrated tract on freedom of the press, which appeared in 1644, is equally topical even today. His was the idea that censorship presumes that the censor is smarter than the writer, which is preposterous. Censorship humiliates the writer and readers, as well as the censor himself. 1496. The English Revolution happened under the influence of two contradictory teachings, which is normal for England. It at the same time proved the sanctity of the principle of the monarchy and the sovereign power of the people, two, at first glance, inconsistent principles. The clearest explanation of the former can be found in Hobbes' s Leviathan, and the latter in Locke's discussions on knowledge and civil government. 1504. Read Moliere's comedies and you will get a picture of the spiritual and moral state of French society in the seventeenth century. Cohen, describing the state in France after the death of Louis XIV (the beginning of the seventeenth century), writes in his History of West-European Literature the following: "Searching for pleasure became the only impetus in life of the higher classes. Religion was ridiculed, the family did not exist, marital fidelity and love were considered lower virtues. And besides all this, the failed aristocracy kept using extraordinary privileges and rights. Their representatives were given high functions in the state. Both external and internal government of the country was in their hands. They kept looking disdainfully onto the rest of population, valuing above all their only advantage-heredity. Both legislature and state power served to support their privileged position. It is not necessary to point out that the aristocracy never even thought of using those advantages for state interests. Higher officers rarely went to their garrisons and had spent most of their time in Paris. Also reveling in Paris were aristocratic landowners, completely neglecting their estates in the provinces. Bishops were not far behind, spending a greater part of the year outside of their parishes. Thus the country was almost without its higher officials, as they enjoyed themselves in Paris, squandering and reveling." 1505. The results of our actions do not depend much on our intentions. Rousseau, for example, was explicitly against revolution and violence, but his Social Contract became the gospel of the revolutionary movement, and "revolutionary leaders brought his conclusions to a terrible end by themselves" (Graham Grey).


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Political Notes 1506. Rousseau's abstract "state" religion based on his "social contract" had two main principles: belief in God, and belief in the afterlife, where the good are rewarded and the bad punished. His social science changed the world; his religion, because artificial, was quickly forgotten. 1517. The main characteristic of the capitalist system: free game of talent and personal abilities. From this follow all good and bad human sides of capitalism. Beaumarchais illustrates this nicely in the character of Figaro: "People disturb my work-says Figaro-and I take revenge by disturbing theirs. That's what everyone does. Well, could it be different. There is a mob before you. Everyone wants to catch up with another, they rush, push, choke, curse one another: those who can, succeed, others struggle. It has always been like that" (The Marriage of Figaro). 1518. The Thirty Years War set Germany back. Contemporaries spoke of the unruliness and general spiritual backwardness that marked the entire second half of the seventeenth century in this country. The recovery started at the beginning of the eighteenth century, with the awakening of people's awareness, revival of Germanic tradition and resistance to foreign influences. Every rebirth starts with the feeling of respect toward oneself. If it is true, it does not implicitly include fencing off the rest of the world, rejection of every form of communication. It is the choice of one's own path and two-way communication with the rest of the world. That is true rebirth. 1522. In the world mainly two models of the fight against drugs exist: rehabilitative and legal. According to the former, the offender (who can be one who grows, produces, distributes and uses drugs) is re-educated, according to the latter, punished (in some countries very severely). In theory and practice, the first model was for a long time predominant, but with very poor results. Recently, the course of punishment can be noticed everywhere in the world. One group of American authors who used to be known as liberals now advocate criminalizing even when only the use of drugs is in question. Some have experienced this change as society's admission of defeat in this fight. Taken generally, undeveloped countries are mostly the producers, and developed countries the users. There form the different aspects of the problem. 1532. Let us notice how much more convincing and more powerful are the words of Karl Mor (Schiller' s "Robbers") when he speaks about the overthrow of the old order than when he speaks of the building the new one. When he appears in the role of the preacher of positive ideals, the words of Karl Mor turn into undefined dreams. 1533. Let us pay attention to the following facts: the freethinking ideas of the Encyclopedists in France ended in revolution, and in Germany-with great philosophical and artistic works. In the former case with practice, in the latter with theory. 1535. Goethe was not an adherent to violent overthrows. He wrote somewhere that people should "drucken" (press), but not "uberdrucken" (oppress). 1537. The French Revolution and Encyclopedist ideas brought to the society of the early nineteenth century double disappointment: first, with the power of the human mind, and second, with the practical results of the social overthrow. People were convinced that neither the Revolution nor reason fulfilled their promises: reason did not open a path for the creation of the ideal society, and the revolution did not establish freedom, equality and fraternity in the world. The reaction to this was Romanticism.


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Political Notes 1538. Completely unexpectedly, since it fought against dogmas, Rationalism established its own dogmatism, nothing short of the dogmatism of the Church. Someone humorously noticed that just as Louis XIV ordered the trees at Versailles to be trimmed, and thus subjected nature to rules and order, so the French Encyclopedists trimmed historical facts to fit into the framework and boundaries of their theories. 1540. Intentions and our personal feelings have no influence on the world of politics. Metternich, an absolutist, and other protagonists of the St. Alliance, known for their cruel politics, were Romanticists. Romanticists awoke the interest for the past and history, and thus inadvertently stimulated the development of Realism, that is, ensured the premises for the shift to Realism. 1542. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, as a consequence of the economic disturbances of the Napoleonic Wars, there was general impoverishment in England. One contemporary wrote that the majority of the population of Manchester lived in sod-houses. In order to get into a sod-house, one needed to descend a couple of steps into the ground. In those pits, there were often continuous puddles; through the muddy floor, dampness perpetually exuded; the air was teeming with stench. And still, entire families lived in those sad holes in the ground; they slept one next to the other, on the wet and dirty floor (Cohen, History of West-European Literature, p. 341). 1545. How poorly Romanticists see reality is well illustrated by the case of Lord Byron. He saw in the Greece of that period the "spiritual leader of the people." It was shown that this had nothing much to do with reality. A great poet, but no politician. Fantasy is necessary for poetry, but detrimental to po1-itics. 1546. Two different views of freedom: for Rationalists "freedom is a right to do that which laws permit" (Montesquieu), and for Romanticists, it is freedom from all laws and limitations (for example, the freedom that rules in a wild tribe or the freedom of some hermit under the wing of nature). The latter was described by Rousseau-who else?-in his New Heloise. 1549. A wolf lives in a pack, a lion is a loner. What can be said for man? 1557. Although industrial civilization was in close relationship with new rationalist and materialist philosophy and with the ascendance of science, it still affirmed human spirit and man as a spiritual being. The predominance of machines, which are the products of the mind, impressively symbolizes the predominance of human awareness over matter. 1558. Capitalism, thanks to the automation of production (or the continual technological revolution) creates enormous wealth, but at the same time also posits the problem of the distribution of that wealth. In its creation participate both capitalists and workers. How to divide this wealth among them? Originally, these two groups were in opposition to each other. The capitalist had to lean to the increase of profits, and according to Marx, he could do that only by decreasing wages, therefore, through exploitation. Only much later, it was seen that this relationship is much more complex, and that the impoverishment of the working class is neither inevitable nor the only route in the development of capitalism. 1563. Sometimes I have an impression that almost all new ideas for which the New Century is famous for were born in England. France accepted and translated them into a practical program, and then turned them over to Europe.


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Political Notes 1566. In the first half of the nineteenth century, England was an example of economic exploitation and political oppression. English poetry of this time "registered" this state. The poet Ebensher Eliot paints horrible pictures: deterioration of the poor family, auctioning of its miserable property, intoxication of the father of the family who falls into despair, mother who while in a state of mental disorder kills her hungry child, daughter who due to destitution gives herself to prostitution. Those dark pictures end with a curse on the wealthy: "0 God, why is bread so expensive, and body and blood so cheap! ?"-a seamstress asks herself, ill with overwork and destitution in the Poem on the Shirt by Thomas Hood, written in 1844. "Work, work! Work, as soon you hear the first cocks, work even if your stars shine with blood! The one who wears this shirt will not know the price paid for it." This state was faithfully and universally represented in the realistic novels of England and Europe of the nineteenth century (Dickens and Thackeray in England, Balzac and Zola in France). 1578. For the indigent world whose income is constantly smaller than the necessities, especially for homemakers whose husbands do not earn enough, one's entire life turns into an "endless arithmetical task"-continuous calculation of how to make ends meet. 1580. The question is: should social institutions or human hearts be changed? The only true answer is: both. Still, where is one to start? The heart, of course, if that is possible, and if you know how. Political Notes 79 1589. North-South scientific key: Switzerland invests $361 "per capita" for research and development, Pakistan only $0.49. These facts say and explain all (source: Politika, Belgrade, July 22, 1986). 1593. French Utopian Fourier (1772-1837) is the author of the expression "negative production," under which he implies the production of goods or services that do not serve to the satisfaction of man's natural and justified needs. Not all production is useful. 1598. Competition among firms is a new form of "war of all against all," with all that war signifies. 1601. From whichever angle one observes work, it will not be able to be reduced to a single dimension. At the end of the analysis, one will always find two contradictory components, (1) work as means of survival and (2) work as a pure human function. In the former case, the purpose is external, in the results of work, and in the latter case, work serves its own purpose. The moral significance of work is no less than the material one. 1614. In nineteenth-century France, battles were not only waged between the adherents of republic and monarchy, proletariat and bourgeoisie, indigent and wealthy. An equally bitter battle was waged between the adherents of Classicism and Romanticism. When Hugo's play Ernani came out in theaters (around 1830), destroying all classical canons, two opposed camps were created, no less fanatical and bitterly at variance than were the Republicans and the Royalists. This spiritual conflict, actually a fervent interest of the public in one question of spirit and arts, indicated that great days were coming for France. 1617. Paradoxes: In contemporary (capitalist) civilization, the superhuman exertions and merciless competition of minds and talents leads to the unimagined development of science, technology and art but also simultaneously stimulates


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Political Notes egotism, mutual annihilation and perishing of the weak, all this not as a byproduct, but as the condition or the inevitable consequence of the former. 1631. The true patriot is not the one who puts his homeland above others, but the one who acts so it would be worthy of that praise. More than glory, he cares about the dignity of his homeland. 1634. E. Zola (1840-1902) was a typical bourgeois both by descent and way of life-he earned significant wealth early on and filled rooms of his palace with the glaring luxury of the parvenu-but that did not stop him from becoming a very cutting critic of bourgeois society. He is not the only example of spiritual attitude not being very dependent on "class." 1647. One different opinion about democracy: "Democracy levels and vulgarizes humanity, makes it crude, and drowns it in economic interests. . . . Victory of democracy will bring the rule of metal craftsmen, tanners, and peasants who hate everything that is beautiful and that is above them" (Przybiszewski in Homo Sapiens). 1658. Democracy in society and realism in literature went side by side and supported each other. I think a similar parallel can be drawn between socialist ideas and naturalism in literature. Democracy to realism is as socialism is to naturalism. Socialism is naturalism in politics. These relationships are not abstract. For it is obvious that socialism is the child of democracy just as naturalism is the child of realism. 1677. Marx was Darwin's student more than he might have been aware of. - ,~ Darwin proclaimed the ruthless battle of species in the biological world. Marx, the ruthless battle of classes in social life. In both cases, ethical considerations have no part, neither in the battle nor its outcome: not the better but the stronger wins, moral values are proscribed by a winner. Socialism does not triumph because of some ethical considerations, but because it represents a more advanced form of social life, reasons Marx. Marx's reason is utterly Darwinian. 1686. A lie in personal life is immoral. However, it has been shown that in many cases the lie is an unavoidable actor in social life or the condition of stability and peace in society. Unfortunately. 1699. In the mid-80s of this century, the movement that aims to push the state from the area of economy and property is in full momentum. That process is present, in its own way, as well in the Socialist East, Hungary, China, even the USSR. This is a true renaissance of private entrepreneurship. The state is accused of being the main obstacle to swift technological development and innovation and the main cause of accumulation of budget expenses, that is, taxes. In Britain, they even want to privatize the national water-supply network, in America prisons. The "sell-out" of the state is talked about. Great Britain, which went furthest with it in the era of socialization, is now the quickest to move in the opposite direction. The government is preparing to hand over almost all state property to private auctioneers. Twenty giant companies found themselves in private hands, among them TELCOM (the complete system of telecommunications), as well as many giant automobile, gas, and airplane firms, docks, etc. The minister of finances stated that the initiated program would continue until all the industry in state ownership is returned to where it belongsthe private sector. A similar process is happening in several developed capitalistic countries. In Japan, privatization of the railway is being prepared, while the French government, since the elections of 1986, is preparing, as a first step, to privatize the 65 largest companies and banks, the value of which is estimated at $40 billion. (All situations pertain to the end of 1986.) In the United States, the


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Political Notes increasing role of the state in American economy was characteristic for decades, and then Reagan won twice, promising to "take the state off the people's back." In Spain we have a paradox: conservative Franco nationalizes an entire line of companies that the socialist government is returning to the private sector. The practice in socialist countries has shown that alongside nationalization of the economy came "nationalization" of political and personal freedoms. 1749. "To be able to rule over them, one must be one of them," the king says resignedly in the Eternal Fable by Przybiszewski, after realizing the futility of his efforts to raise the people and warm them to noble causes. "The true victory is not to force slaves to obedience by force, for they will remain slaves anyway. The true victory is to escape from them into pure contemplation," ponders the king. 1753. In Czechoslovakia the number of divorces in the entire postwar period has been increasing. According to some data, every second marriage in Prague disintegrates. Having the same laws, more divorces happen in the Protestant Czech part of the country than in Catholic Slovakia. That is probably one of the causes of the significantly lower birthrate in the Czech part. As a result, the share of Czechs in the total population of the country is decreasing. Among other things, it is thought that the main reason for the disintegration of families is the economic independence of women. One-third of the children in Czechoslovakia are children of divorced parents (Politika, Belgrade, August 31, 1986). 1839. Socialism announced the withering away of the state. But what is actually happening? Instead of the state, the economy is withering away. The state, on the contrary, is growing fat and strong. 1842. Poland, one of the victorious countries in World War II, after the "victory" was left "smaller" by 79,000 km2. At the end of the war, the USSR annexed about 180,000 km2 of Poland's territory (in the east) with 12 million people, and as compensation gave Poland the "western provinces" with an area of 101,000 km2. It is thought that during and after World War 11(1939-1956), in the area of prewar and postwar Poland, 22 million people were moved from their homes (Arso Milatovic, Five Diplomatic Missions). 1858. There are people of continuity, but also those who are "break-through names" in the history of science, art, politics, and so on. 1862. Gunther Grass invited writers to deal with modem problems, not to seal themselves in ivory towers, to illuminate the background of events, their human dark side, and "catch politics before it camouflages itself as history" (from the exposition at the Congress of International PEN in Hamburg, 1986). Clearly, in politics "camouflaged as history," many important aspects of life are no longer visible-one cannot see living people, their habits, vices, fallacies, hesitations, enthusiasms, prejudices, etc. Only the surface is visible, events, phenomena and results. Perhaps Alexander the Great was not great at all, and Ivan the Terrible might have had some human feature. Perhaps many little, ordinary people (which history did not record at all for they were that nameless mass who fought and died) were true heroes, while heroes wreathed with glory, about whom children learn in schools, were cowards, etc. The latter can be revealed to us by literature, not history. 1878. To Dostoyevsky has been attributed the statement: "Save me, God, from fanatics!" 1883. Yes, although Bosnia is "both fasting and bare, cold and hungry, it is defiant from the dream" (Mak Dizdar).


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Political Notes 1888. Anti-Semitism first consisted of religious antipathy toward Jews, later to gain the character of racial hatred. Ghettos appeared in the Middle Ages. Jews were called "Christian murderers," "ritual murderers," "devil's children," etc. Jews were banished from England in 1290, from France in 1306, and from Germany, Austria and Spanish cities during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. As is known, they lived freely in Muslim Spain, and after the Inquisition they suffered the same fate as the Arabs-exile. A large number of Jews then found haven in the Balkans, in parts under Turkish rule. Bloody Cossack pogroms over Jews were recorded in Poland in the seventeenth century. Where literal banishment was not in effect, all kinds of restrictions toward Jews were everyday occurrences. AntiSemitism appeared in a very cruel form in the twentieth century: the physical destruction of six million Jews under Hitler. Depending on the political needs of the persecutors, Jews were pronounced capitalists, a communist danger, or sometimes both (for example, in Nazi Germany). They were blamed for lost wars, stimulation of liberalism, for revolutions, intellectualism, moral decadence, for vulgar materialism, spiritual pacifism, and freemasonry, and what not. 1893. Europe is strange. It considered itself the cradle and teacher of democracy and has simultaneously shown an extraordinary "ability" for dictatorships and totalitarian ideas. 1894. The majority remained the highest, if not the only criterion in democracy. It is true, it is beautiful, it is moral-that which the majority says is true, beautiful, moral. The majority, though, does not have the reliable criteria of truth and goodness. It is governed by passion and desire. Democracy is the process that cannot be halted. What could the final result be with democracy itself? 1906. Analysis of the movements in the most developed countries of the world show that small businesses have 25 times more innovations than large ones, and through the introduction of modern information technology, they achieve a reduction of up to 80 percent of business expenses. That makes them much more competitive. In the United States, those little companies launch more than threequarters of new products on the market. 1908. J.S. Huxley wrote somewhere that a nation is based upon the fallacy of common descent and on the feeling of aversion toward neighbors, therefore two negative facts: fallacy and aversion. 1912. The truth and light of the idea are turned by people into the lie and darkness of ideology. 1914. Many followers of Sigmund Freud joined Marxism (Freudian Marxist groups of Wilhelm Reich and Otto Fenihil). 1940. In all schools in the Muslim East, I would introduce classes of "critical thinking." As opposed to the West, the East did not go through this cruel school, and that is the source of its many weaknesses. 1993. If Western Europe or the "welfare states" are observed, one comes to a paradoxical conclusion, that different socialist aims in health, education, leisure, culture, a standard in general, are achieved in capitalism. It seems that only the capitalist economy was productive enough to sustain these large expenditures and still remain capable of extended reproduction. Socialist economy could not answer to both of these demands. 1997. Anti-Semitism is a phenomenon of Christian countries. The current confrontation between Arabs and Jews is not of that kind. It is interesting how the Israeli writer Ephraim Kison explains this phenomenon: "Christians usually think


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Political Notes that Jews are the people who killed Jesus, forgetting that he himself was a Jew. For two thousand years the Christian Church narrated this and I call it antiSemitism. When I was in Japan and talked about this, everyone was amazed, no one understood what I was talking about. They have no complexes about Jews, because they do not belong to the Christian Church" (from an interview with a Belgrade newspaper, October 1968). 2015. Even socialist societies have, somewhere openly and somewhere curtailed, offered unlimited sexual freedoms as a compensation for denied political freedoms. It is interesting how some traditional societies under socialism have quickly traversed the gap between sexual strictness to abolishment of all limitations. It has been shown that these latter "freedoms"~ are not dangerous for the ruling classes, but on the contrary serve as a good vent for emptying social and political tensions. Only the government that believes in itself and in its path can take the risk of denying the "social sedatives" such as drugs, alcohol, sexual freedoms and other tranquilizers. 2017. The one who does not understand the value of individuality and freedom should read Huxley's Brave New World. However, there are some who will be thrilled by the delineation of Collectivity, Sameness, and Stability. There is no help for those. It is futile to speak of the beauty of a rainbow or a sunset to one who was born blind. Do not respond to one asking what is wrong with the "brave new world." His question reveals that your every effort is futile. 2021. Propaganda, indoctrination, is based upon the psychology of conditioned reflexes, thus, on animal psychology. It aspires to the creation of the "associative pairs" in consciousness. Thus, for example, in atheistic propaganda, the concept of religion is persistently linked with the concept of backwardness and superstition. This is done since day one in school and continued. For someone who has been "processed" like this, even the mention of the word "religion" inevitably (therefore, automatically) invokes as its twin one of the mentioned associations, of course always negative. Prejudices of that kind are so deeply rooted in the consciousness that they are maintained even in spite of sometimes utterly evident inaccuracy. I had an acquaintance who had been brainwashed that religion is nonsense, and he believed it. However, he at the same time loved Leo Tolstoy very much, claimed he was his favorite writer. It has never become clear to me how he reconciled these two obviously contradictory things, and it seems to me he did not even notice this contradiction. In fact, he was a victim of "conditioned reflex," that is, an associative pair: religion-superstition. 2033. Reject idols, keep ideals! 2057. For the simple reproduction of population, it is necessary that every woman who lives through her reproductive years gives birth to a little over two children (precisely 2.15 children). 2058. It is time to stop speaking badly of Germans. There are Goethe's Germans as well. These better Germans are in exceptional prevalence. 2077. In economy, one phenomenon was manifested: the stronger (harder) the state, the weaker the currency, finally, they both perish. 2081. Development sometimes strays into a blind street, from which there is no further path. Examples are socialist states. One can feel the absence of spirit and meaning, and some monstrous enormity. Are these not a historical error in the development of society, like dinosaurs in biology or the zeppelin in technology? The main trouble with these "mistakes" is that this is where further development


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Political Notes is stopped, that one must return to the crossroad from which the deviation originated. 2117. The integration of the EEU is advancing. In 1992 the internal borders of 12 countries that were in the past at war with each other will be open. 2118. For some, pornography is one form of freedom and democratization of society. Pornography is underestimating the moral integrity of another person, especially woman, etc. There are two international agreements on combating pornography; it is characteristic that they are both from early in this century: 1910 in Paris, and 1923 in Geneva. After that, as far as I know, there are none. "Democratization" does not tolerate them. 2125. One Indian economist calculated that in his country, more is spent on astrologers and fortune-tellers than on schools. Some are convincing us that the situation is no better in other countries as well, including some developed ones. Sounds incredible. 2129. I do not want democratization, I want democracy. 2140. What has overthrown feudalism? Many things, but before all-gunpowder. 2141. I think that the time of armed revolutions, at least in the developed part of the world, has forever gone. Due to the complexity of the weapons the modern state has at its disposal, chances are on the side of the authorities, and almost none on the side of the insurrected people. During the American and French Revolutions, there were very small differences in the weapons that were at the disposal (or could have been at the disposal) of the people and the weapons with which the groups in power defended their positions. Let us compare that to today's state: tanks, rockets, airplanes, helicopters. What revolution can take that into account? Tactics and methods of future overthrows will have to be completely different: passive resistance, general strikes, civil disobedience of mass proportions, etc., simply everything that is not in the form of weapons. Armed rebellion suits power-holders since it gives them a 100 percent chance. 2142. On the frontispiece of Gandhi's autobiography is a picture of all the things Gandhi owned at the moment of his death. It is estimated that all of it together was worth about 5 pounds (G. Orwell in his essay on M. Gandhi). 2145. Regarding the word "Satyagraha," usually translated as "passive resistance" in the West, Gandhi opposed this translation. In the Gujarati language that word means "perseverance in truth." 2158. History is mainly a just judge. There are no undeserved defeats. People come down from the historical stage with fate they deserved. The same thing with civilizations. They do not live through violent death. They die of their own diseases. The raid by barbarians is only the coup de grace for a civilization that has lost the ability to live and to protect and defend itself. 2162. Men are (as a sex) more often than women unsuccessful, frustrated and maladjusted. One of the interpretations is that a man is a "more complicated machine" and that his social role is more complex and difficult. 2182. Why is the EEU so important? It is not only a significant political integration but also a strong epicenter of concentration of economic and intellectual (technological) forces.


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Political Notes 2236. In the confidential report that a Moscow administrator delivered to the authorities of that day, he wrote, among other things, "Count Tolstoy is scribbling something." For the authorities of that period, War and Peace and Resurrection were "scribbling." 2244. Only in the Russian Soviet Socialist Republic are there about half a million illegitimate children born annually. The Russian family is in crisis mainly because of the changed position of women. In a family, a woman dominates, and in some fields even in society: There are six university-educated men for every ten university-educated women. Divorces are on the agenda. A new very widespread problem: the loneliness of a woman. The motto of a young woman: I want to be a mother, I don't want to be a wife. After youth passes, this wish changes (Politika, Belgrade, January 4, 1987). 2263. The excessive emphasis on the social character of man as a social being leads to the negation of individuality, and from there to dehumanization. From the claim that we are "social animals," that we are members of the herd, to the "logic of the herd" is only one step. The true preparation of man for life in society leads via the opposite path: the development of his individuality. The social animal never becomes a social human. All human experience confirms this. 2266. In 1952 Japan had $162 and in 1986 $12,000 of national income per inhabitant (Danas, January 13, 1987, p. 53). It is thought that Japan can thank, above all, the high level of education and two traditional characteristics of the Japanese, diligence and thriftiness, for this "miracle." Even today, the Japanese have the largest number of working days in their calendar and the greatest savings per inhabitant. In addition to this, during the entire postwar period, military expenses were extremely low (only 1 percent of national income). 2281. In the book Farewell to the Proletariat, Andre Gorz (Marxist or postMarxist) claims that the working class in the West is integrated in the system of reproduction of capital, that is, that it participates in the "game of the development of capitalistic production forces." Revolutionism cannot be expected from such a working class. According to Gorz, this is not some subjective fault of the working class but is about technological development, especially automation and robotization, which change the content of the concept of "working class" itself. Work in the classic sense is increasingly disappearing. 2304. The economy of Sweden according to the concept of a "welfare state": around 85 percent of the economy is in private hands. When compared to other Western countries, unemployment is low (around 2.5 percent) but inflation and working expenses are greater, which reduces the competitive ability of the economy on the world market. Pol-Martin Meyerson in the book Eurosclerosis: The Case of Sweden analyzes the Swedish model and points to its deficiencies. He recommends "re-modeling" the Swedish model, transforming an unwieldy state apparatus and abolishing some forms of pre-dimensioned social care that is expensive and de-stimulating. In Sweden, around 85 percent of the workers are organized within the Union, which is not the opposition, but an equal partner in the triangle: capital-work-state (employer-Union-state). Will transforming actually mean "dismantling of the welfare state?" Since the Napoleonic Wars, Sweden has not been at war. The gross national income per capita is $11,400 (1986). In some companies and banks, employees participate in the profit, but they get it in the form of stocks that they cannot cash until after retirement. It has been shown that the worker-co-owner works and saves better. 2308. The word "holocaust" is originally from the Bible, and was derived from the Greek words "holos" = "whole, entire" and "kaustol" = "burnt."


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Political Notes 2323. Social salvation is always communal, morality is by its nature personal, individual. That is because moral salvation depends on the man himself, because only he, and no one instead of him, can deserve it, not even actualize it. Social salvation as well as social ruin often does not depend on the man who is caught in it. They happen without merit and without fault. 2371. Many analysts consider the phenomenon of the disappearance of the classical worker as related to a rapid decline in the authority of the Communist Party (CP) of France. As opposed to the Italian and Spanish CPs, the French CP held itself closer to dogma and continued to emphasize its "worker" character, while the workers this party had in mind and was referring to decreased in number as the days progressed (more on this: Vjesnik, February 8, 1987). 2393. In France, after the victory of the right, denationalization of state companies followed. Among other things, the Saint Gobain Company, a glass giant, one of the ten largest companies in France, employing 150,000 people in 16 countries, changed to private hands as well. Privatization was accomplished by the sale of 30 million shares, which were bought off by 1.5 million Frenchmen, mostly young depositors, and the demand for shares was 14 times greater than the number of shares put on the market. A similar thing happened with shares of the French bank, Paribas, which were acquired by over three million people. "I think the French are now promoting a new system of popular people's capitalism," stated then general director of Saint Gobain on this occasion. The price of a single Gobain share was 310 francs. 2404. Strictness and clarity of thought are the products of Western civilization and the standard of thinking that it established. Therein lies one of the sources of power of the West. 2423. Lawrence Durrell called the Mediterranean basin "the womb of civilization because of the large number of cultures and spiritual revolutions that had their cradle exactly here or in the near vicinity. 2428. International PEN held a symposium, "Writers for Peace," on March 3, 1987 (PEN day). The topic of this symposium was: "Falsification and misuse of historysource of conflicts and crises." Writers of the world should fight for truth in history, for the veritable representation of the past. 2431. Modern society feels increasingly less classed. Classes from societal poles are disappearing in favor of something that could be called the middle class. 2434. To the question of one journalist whether the revolution will soon inflame Switzerland, Lenin, who resided in this country as a refugee, answered: "In a country with 3.5 million inhabitants and 3,800,000 saving accounts, this can be hardly expected." 2437. Marvin Minsky, mathematician and psychologist, one of today's best experts on artificial intelligence, considers psychology and artificial intelligence as "the same thing." Obsessed with an idea of constructing a robot who thinks, speaks, and sees, he once presented a thesis that hundreds of little machines and mechanisms without some center operate in our head. "The individual is," says Minsky, "actually a cooperation of all those mechanisms, all those machines" (from In Mind's Company). My comment: the same positivistic position that too easily slights some questions, for example, how does a machine "learn"? A machine can be unusually complex, but its essence is that it does not learn. Regardless of its sophistication, it remains incapable of learning. 2445. Non-sovereign people will atrophy politically.


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Political Notes 2447. Two coefficients, employment and fertility of women, stand in a reciprocal relationship. Some nations could pay a high price in the race for the increase of social wealth. Perhaps the ominous prediction that everything will be there except people will come true. The question can be posed: How much material wealthsteel, automobiles, rockets-is a happy childhood worth? Does a happy childhood with a mother have a price, and can it be compensated for by something else? 2453. Totalitarian regimes quickly understand that stupid, incapable and cowardly people pose no threat, so they support and encourage them. 2480. For, what else is this much-vaunted "state cause" in our times but the expression of the same will or self-will of the power, expressed in the ancient era by "Quidquid principi placuit habet legis vigorem" (Everything the ruler orders has the force of the law). The essence of authoritarian power, named differently in different times. 2489. The way in which Marsilili (1280-1342), a legal theoretician from Padua, saw "people" of that time: he divides them into popolo grasso (fat people) and popolo minuto (thin people). The former is the aristocracy, and all the rest-the poor. 2492. When it has weapons and power, stupidity does not appear that stupid. Then we see it as strictness or danger. When it loses that power, stupidity becomes what it has been-stupidity. 2512. The origin of the names "right" and "left" is linked to the debate about the Constitution in the French Assembly in 1789. The advocates of large empowerment of the king sat to the right of the president, while the advocates of the large empowerment of parliament sat to his left. That division later acquired a general meaning, with those on the left being those asking for changes, and those on the right for the status quo. The left-right division has other meanings, this being only one of them. 2517. The position of the ruler, or authority, is almost an unmistakable measure of the civilization of one people. Tyranny over truly civilized people is not possible. Such people traversed all those complex degrees of internal and external development that are necessary for government to be put under the control of law. With primitive peoples, the government is always above the law. According to this criterion, all so-called socialist countries are still at the level of barbarism. 2526. Before the end of the Empire, the Roman military consisted only of cavalry. "They conquered the world as an infantry, lost it as a cavalry." 2533. Hugo Grotius (1583-1645), the greatest jurist of the Western world, did not consider slavery neither unnatural nor unlawful. For him freedom was alienable good. 2553. As opposed to materialists, for us a man is always the cause of things, and not the consequence. For Marx, "It is not the consciousness of people that determines their being but vice versa, their being determines their consciousness"-man is a product, a consequence. In the world in which the first postulate of philosophy is that man is a consequence, "clean-ups" and "Gulags" are an unavoidable (law-abiding) result. 2559. Hegel yet discovered the role of wars in consolidating the state, the fact that was known to conquerors from before. "Happy wars, opposite from the wonderful time of peace, prevent internal unrest and help in consolidating the


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Political Notes power of the state, although they put its existence at stake" (Hegel, Foundations of Philosophy of Law). 2560. "World history is the world court"-Hegel's renowned saying according to which the power of ideas, states and movements is only evaluated according to their destiny in world history, that is, practice. 2573. Exponential growth is characteristic of human knowledge. It is thought that all knowledge produced up until 1900 was doubled by 1950, then this knowledge was doubled by 1960. The same now happens every 7-8 years. Through qualitative change of the educational system, in a short time, decades and even centuries of normal development can be leaped. The example of Japan and South Korea confirms this. At the end of the last century in Japan, after the famous Meiji Revolution, there was sudden expansion in education. The Constitution of Japan at that time had only five articles (!), and the last ended with the sentence "knowledge should be acquired wherever it can be found." This sentence played a crucial role in what is known as the Japanese economic miracle. 2710. In politics it is not important what really is, what exists-it is important what people believe is, believe exists. 2711. The British believe that sometimes not only unsuccessful, but also successful governments should be changed-for they will either become ineffective or become oppressive. Not a single government that stays too long is goodaccording to British thought. 2732. In the Far East a miracle is happening, and some are beginning to remember a few ancient prophecies. The Far East is today the most productive industrial area of the world. It seems that inhabitants of those countries can produce everything we can-only cheaper and better-says American economist George Goodman. They called them yellow-colored Americans. These countries are Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and. Hong Kong. One of the explanations: the specific quality of the culture of the Far East, which is 2.5 thousand years old and which to these people is an inheritance of a tradition of work, education, modesty, thriftiness, and natural loyalty. In monetary terms there is the expression "Confucian capitalism," which synthesizes all these characteristics. 2737. Galbraith' s prediction that we are approaching the exclusive power of large corporations did not come true. On the contrary, small elastic firms adapted better and faster to the demands of new technologies and are winning a battle in the competition with large corporations. 2842. When Margaret Thatcher was appointed the Prime Minister of Great Britain in 1979, it was expected that more women would be in significant political positions. But this did not happen. Only one woman came to the position of assistant Minister. 2848. In the 1987 election campaign, Margaret Thatcher promoted the slogan of so-called people or mass capitalism. She said that capitalism is a superior system because it creates possibility for an increasingly larger number of people to create goods available previously only to some, and that, by continuing down this path, a day of general ownership will arrive. Nationalized companies were sold to small shareholders, which today number 10 million in Britain. 2858. I have heard that in America even a piano concerto by Tchaikovsky on TV is interrupted by commercials. Still, you can choose between 30 and 40 channels, so my objection does not stand in the American case.


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Political Notes 2860. The number of computers in use is doubled every three years, the cost of their production is cut by half. The third medium-term plan by UNESCO (19901995) speaks of developed countries establishing general control over less developed ones through education. The global social relations will first depend on the strength of individual countries in the area of education, science and communication. This is global promotion of intellect as power. At stake are not only the massive participation but also the quality of education. Fast "informatization" of education by introduction of microelectronics is being done. The emphasis is on natural sciences and foreign languages. Current trends in production, actually constant introduction of progressively newer technologies, forces people to adapt during their working lifespan or even change their specialty, always with increasingly stricter criteria of knowledge. Even Americans are dissatisfied with their system of education. In 1983, a report with the panicky title "Nation at Risk" appeared, prepared by the National Commission for Education. A series of radical changes in education was suggested, with an aim to prepare the American nation for the expected global "economic war." Massive reforms are currently in effect in the USSR, West Germany, Japan and England. The "brain drain" from undeveloped to developed countries continues, which further intensifies the already existing gap. Where are we? 2870. The amount of coercion in a state is in an inverse relationship with its true authority. 2871. One of the declared aims of the feminist movement is "fight against the glorification of motherhood." 2873. The participation of women in the parliaments of some Western countries: Italy 7 percent, West Germany 15 percent, Ireland 8 percent, Norway 30 percent, West-European Parliament 20 percent (in 1986-1987). In Italy, there are 52 percent women and 48 percent men in the general population, and there are more women at universities and higher-education institutions. Still this is not the case for the decision-making positions. One of the reasons: when women vote, they do not vote for female candidates, but for men. 2875. In the nineteenth century, books over 20 (double) pages in length were excepted from censorship, it was assumed that only a few people read them, so they could not be dangerous. 2898. One interesting explanation for the stagnation of Oriental societies: the absence of the so-called middle class. It is interesting that the same reasonabsence of a middle class-explains still another phenomenon: eruption of the "social revolutions" in Russia, China, Ethiopia, Cuba, etc. 2899. Progress is a contradictory process. The idea of social equality is as old as man, it had a large impelling force, although it is in a literal sense pure illusion. Every progression is expressed through differentiation in which the more able and strong win. 2921. Medieval folk culture-it is a mixture of folk tradition and official church doctrine. 2133. In Carter's time, the Law on Ethics was passed in the United States, concerning the behavior of the government. The purpose of this law was to return the shaken belief of the public in the holders of responsible functions after Watergate. Still, during the first four years of Reagan's government, more than 100 officials were faced with investigation due to warranted suspicion that they transgressed the norms of ethical law. Government either dangerously corrupts people or offers an opportunity to corrupted people.


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Political Notes 2135. First we had military-political colonialism, then economic, and now finally, so-called technological colonialism, that is, the almost complete technological dependence of less developed countries on the most technologically developed ones. The gap is incessantly widening. The progress is so fast that particular technological solutions become antiquated in three to five years. Where are we? 2203. Impersonal, collective humanism does not exist, and neither does impersonal, collective freedom. Every type of humanism and every freedom is before all freedom and humanism of a free individual, a free person. 2237. The conservatism of workers and radicalism of the so-called middle classes are now being mentioned, while the Marxist Habermas states that the "utopia of work lost the power of persuasiveness." 2238. It is beginning to be understood that the position of the woman in the socalled civilized countries has changed but not improved. On the long list of imperiled categories, alongside the inhabitants of regions with no perspective and youth with poor qualifications, in first place are women, because their emancipation was followed by the disproportional increase in professional and social responsibilities and obligations. 2239. The origination and development of new social necessities is linked to the great oil crisis of 1972-1974. This was undoubtedly the turning point for the accelerated movement toward new technologies. 3059. I have read somewhere that in Cleveland, Ohio (United States) as many as eighty different nationalities live, each of which is proud of its symbols, it cherishes them, and respects those that are different. No one is cramped for space in Cleveland. 3060. When water comes up to the throat, it is not advisable to undulate. 3070. What is the difference between a statesman and a politician? Answering this question Churchill said: "A statesman thinks of the state, and a politician of the following elections." 3076. Law and justice are not always in accord. If that is not the case, for a true man, the former is the latter. 3095. Legend says that it took 40 years for Moses to lead his people out of Egypt. Why so much time for something that could have been done in a week or month? Because the legendary "departure" was not mere travel, but a rebirth of one people. Egypt here is not a country but a metaphor for slavery, just as the "Promised Land" is metaphor for freedom. The path from Egypt to Palestine is the path from slavery to freedom. One people started from Egypt, and after wandering and suffering, another arrived into the "Promised Land." 3096. High Yugoslav official Draza Markovic writes at one point in his memoirs: "One comes to the old question if Yugoslavia is the state of Yugoslav people, or is it a state of Slovenians, Macedonians, Montenegrins, as well as a state of Albanians, Italians, Bulgarian, Hungarian, Slovaks, etc." (Diary Notes, Belgrade, published in NIN, September 6, 1987). Where are the Muslims here? Draza mentions Italians and Slovaks, but is "blind" to a people of over 2 million individuals. Why? 3102. Why is the destiny of utopias to produce tyrannies? The link is indubitable, but what are the real reasons. Maybe in an answer to the question: can an


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Political Notes "earthly kingdom" be conceived without God and against God? Every utopia implicitly or explicitly advocates just that: kingdom without God. 3105. In Stalinism, the Marxist, anti-individual philosophy and the imperial, autocratic, despotic tradition of imperial Russia "happily" met. Stalinism is a synthesis of European doctrine and Russian notions of relationship manpower. Or more simply: Stalinism = Marxism + Russia. Stalinism is a product of these two factors. 3107. It is estimated that since the end of World War II, in the period between 1945 and 1987, more than 100 local wars have been waged, mostly among less developed countries and on their territories. In these wars, about 22 million people lost their lives. 3109. In the book The Control of Foreign Politics, Dr. Smilja Avramov emphasizes that the brutality of the two world wars and barbarian methods of totalitarian systems instigated the odium of common people toward the state, whereby the state was identified with violence and trampling of elementary human rights and freedoms. 3114. Tourism, following the oil and automobile industry, is becoming the third most powerful economic branch in the world. However, many analysts point also to its negative consequences for the host countries. The opinion is being expressed that "tourism devours lands, nature, cultural goods as a new colonizer and destroyer of environment" (Josta Krippendrof, Traveling Mankind). 3133. Adam Smith noticed as far as 200 years ago that the man who cannot acquire property has no other interest but to eat as much as possible, and work as little as possible. 3145. On the 1977 world map, deserts make up 2 percent of European land, 19 percent of American, 31 percent of Asian, 34 percent African and 75 percent of Australian land. About ten countries in the world are exposed to a high risk of desertification, among which are Iraq, Pakistan and Turkey. Through comparison of satellite pictures of Sudan from 1958 and 1975, it was determined that the edge of the desert extended an entire 100 km. This expansion of the desert is not a natural process. It is mostly due to the human factor (excessive grazing, irrational wood clearing, lowering the level of subterranean waters by intensive drilling though underground currents, etc.). 3147. In Animal Farm Orwell has shown what happens with equality when pigs are the ones deciding on it. 3149. Wars destroy, but also create. Peter Kalvokrezi and Guy Vint in the book The Total War (Rad, Belgrade, 1987) showed how the unprecedented competition of the warring sides in World War II accelerated the development of technology and achieved new breakthroughs, in the areas of aviation and shipbuilding. These efforts led also to creation of new industrial branches and revival of economic development of many undeveloped fields. In the concluding chapters, the writers gave an account of the deep changes the war instigated in the area of technology, demography, international relations, the way of life and political philosophy of people. 3151. Prof. Rasi Batra in the book "Great Depression 1990" announced that in three years the world would undergo a much larger crisis than the one in 1929. We shall see how realistic (unrealistic) the prognoses are. The writer is of Hindu descent, and is an assistant professor at Southern Methodist University in the United States.


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Political Notes 3154. "It was our turn, getting onto bus, taking our seats. Behind us two young men who were, while waiting in line, completely unnaturally and unpleasantly raving about, and now they sat, put on earphones from their walk-mans, and disappeared. Listen, my friend said,. . . in this country, only Blacks know how to enjoy life, only they know how to be happy, to truly rave about, to express happiness they are alive. This is one human desert in which New York is somehow like a miracle, like a mirage, like a giant saguaro cactus in the Sonoran desert.... And this here is not a way of life but a strained, frantic attempt to live, to be alive. Black people try, through crime, through their money, through their religiousness, to prove to themselves they are alive, and every such demonstration is realized in exaggeration" (from the travelogue of New York by Tvrtko Kulenovic). My comment: there surely is truth in this description, but it is not all truth. I do not know why all foreigners see America through New York. Who are, and how do they live, the millions of people in the little cities outside New York, Chicago, and Detroit? I think that, mostly, they live a normal life. The strength of America rests on them. 3155. Why can one's country not be abandoned? It cannot be done, since tombs cannot be taken with us, and the tombs of our fathers and grandfathers are our roots. The plant pulled by the roots cannot live. We have to, therefore, stay. 3157. Traditions correct the negative influence of civilization. That is why one must treasure them. According to some information, for four decades in a row, crime in Japan has not increased. In 1986, almost the same number of offenses was recorded as thirty years before. Pickpocketing is almost unknown. The institution of the type in Japan is unknown. If there is a robbery or theft of a wallet, the perpetrators of the crime are regularly foreigners. In Japan, there is 270 times less stealing than in the United States. However, not even the Japanese are immune to some types of crime such as tax evasion, bribery, business fraud and machinations (information from the article "Japan: The Safest Country in the World," Novosti 8, November 12, 1987). 3158. According to some information, 50,000 rapes are reported yearly in West Germany, in the United States almost 250,000. It is interesting that the so-called countries of sexual freedom are at the same time at the top of the list for the number of rapes. The actual number of these offences is most likely larger, for many attacked women, especially from conservative environments, do not report the attack. The data show that rapes are about one hundred times more common in countries of sexual freedom than in those which we call conservative. 3187. The status of the so-called continual neutrality of Switzerland had been determined at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 on the basis of the decision -by the Swiss Confederation and the international agreement, signatories of which were the great powers of that time. After World War II, a similar status was gained by Austria, also through international agreement, in 1955. 3190. For the inanities you sometimes hear from the mouths of politicians, you cannot always blame just them. Often their public is "more deserving" than that. A politician sometimes, against his own convictions, says things that are expected to be heard from him. True and intelligent messages are often unwanted and the public would not accept them. That is how the wisdom of people having leaders they deserve is realized. But that is why we have the appearance of intelligent but hypocritical politicians, on one hand, and the refusal of intelligent and honorable people to be involved in this work at all, on the other. In authoritative regimes there is less political hypocrisy, but it is not about the honesty or morality at all. In question here is ignoring the public. We do not pretend before those whose opinions we do not care about.


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Political Notes 3192. Hannah Arendt wrote somewhere that totalitarianism - both leftist and rightist - is based, among all else, on pedocracy, the mobilization of the youth, which is always invited to overthrow the "old world." 3212. They elect themselves (self-elect) and bestow honors upon themselves. 3214. You and I would have difficulty in convincing people that communism leads nowhere. Only communists could have convinced them of that, with total and complete success. 3237. Technology produces forces, both productive and destructive ones. The latter with even more success. For, today's technology cannot create, but is able to destroy the world. When the destructive force of today's resources is in question, we usually have in mind the sight of deadly weapons of mass destruction. We forget the more subtle ones-television, for example, which steadily destroys the traditional way of life and which brings crime and violence into our homes, bringing up our children. 3256. It is normal that in every dogmatist, mental activity weakens. What can I think, when everything is already thought of? Thinking, in that case, is necessarily experienced as retrogression, as an inevitable introduction of confusion into something that is clear and certain. 3269. According to the definition finally adopted by the General Assembly of the UN in 1946, genocide is "an action which has as its aim the complete or partial destruction of some social group (national, religious, or racial)"; this action can be carried out directly or indirectly, therefore not only by physical destruction, but also indirectly by "placing a group in such living conditions which lead to the disappearance of its political, social, and cultural institutions." Genocide is considered an international crime against humanity. 3271. While we would hope that disturbing facts about stories are the products of a sick imagination or horror story, it is not always the case. For instance, prostitution in Brazil. In a report from the "International Federation for Human Rights," prepared by a group of researchers for the OUN, it is reported that in Brazil there are about 7 million underage girls (age 8-12) who make their living from prostitution. In the region of Dorado (Mato Groso), there are over 1,200 brothels, of which police recently closed down 400 only because there were underage girls, under ten years old, employed in them. It is estimated that in the city Recife (around 2 million inhabitants), there are over 90,000 prostitutes (official information; it is believed that the real number is larger). Almost all suffer from venereal diseases. According to a report from the Brazilian Ministry of Health, about 6 million Brazilians suffer from sexually transmitted diseases, of whom 200,000 have chronic syphilis. Now the disease is expanding with a geometrical progression. Film director Glauber Roca writes: "Girls from poor families quickly enter the world of prostitution. Parents sell them, masters rape them, and pimps use them to amass money. After that, they die very young from tuberculosis, hunger, knife wounds, gun shot wounds, venereal diseases. They give birth to their first children when they are 11-12, which they then leave on the doorsteps of churches or orphanages, on the streets or garbage dumps. Others kill their children, claiming they died, as the result of an unfortunate accident, to accumulate some change which, according to folk custom, is doled out at the funeral" (Duga, Belgrade, January 9, 1988). Can there be any horror story to equal this one from reality? 3273. While destroying the Weimar Republic in 1933, the Nazis claimed that the Weimar Parliament was a mere prattle-house (parliament-prattle-house), and discussions in it empty babble.


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Political Notes 3276. During the last years of Cromwell's power, the wisest Englishmen were invited to take over power. This "cabinet of the saints" or "cabinet of the sages," as it was called by the English, soon disintegrated and was compromised, showing that perhaps the sages are not the most suitable people for solving the entangled problems introduced by life. 3278. Plagiarists of the great artists always lived better than the artists themselves. That is the rule. 3282. About a hundred years ago, the main raw material for energy was coal, 50 years ago that place was taken by oil, and now that important place has been taken over by gas. The country with the greatest reserves of gas (according to present information) is the Soviet Union, followed by Iran, the United States, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Canada, Mexico, Holland, Qatar and Norway, but the reserves of the first two countries (U.S.S.R. and Iran) make up 60 percent of world reserves. In the future, gas will be used more as a petrol-chemical, rather than energy producing raw material (Vjesnik, Zagreb, January 16, 1988). 3287. A certain immaturity or naïveté of America that is mentioned here could be a consequence of the fact that America did not have a Middle Ages. It did not go through this cruel school that was traversed by Europe and that can be felt in the views and style of America. It does not even have the almost two thousand years of Christianity that Europe possesses. That is probably why its religiousness is slightly strange and perplexing to Europeans. German writer Martin Walser noted in one interview (1987): "The worst thing I have seen in America is their relation to religion. Their television preachers are something much worse than can be possibly imagined. In spite of that, their influence is enormous. For me it is one special disease of the capitalistic entrepreneurs, which are treated as religious entrepreneurs, large religious companies which literally sell religion, in a way unimaginable to Europeans." 3288. The five "w's" -five laws- the five golden rules of the press: who, what, when, where, why. Actually five rules of truthful, timely and complete information. As in other cases, laws are there to be broken. 3316. From the report of the EEU, which illuminates the current situation in Yugoslavia: "The agreement signed in Belgrade in 1980 [reference to the agreement between Yugoslavia and the EEU, my comment] is defined as an agreement sui generis, in the sense that political motivations prevailed over the economic ones, firstly due to growing tensions in the country, then due to the increasing role of the SEV zone in the Yugoslav external trade, and due to the delicate political moment which followed the death of president Tito. Based on motivations of political nature is almost a complete lack of obligations of Yugoslavia in the reciprocity of concessions" (written in Article 2, point 17, of the report by Giorgio Rosetti, an ambassador in the European Parliament, submitted on behalf of the Commission for Foreign Relations). The report was accepted at the session of the European Parliament, in January 1988 (Integral text of the report in Star, February 6, 1988, pp. 6 1-63). A clear example of a pragmatic approach in lieu of one that is principled. Europe has stopped fighting for the idea long ago. Everything has turned into a calculation. 3336. According to Ortega Y Gasset, the leading minority of one people can be neither too small nor too large. If it is too small, it is powerless to direct the majority in the desired direction. If it is too large, it will be divided, and start dealing with itself, becoming exhausted with mutual rivalry and conflicts. 3342. The quality of the laws and the respect for them are often in inverse relationship with their number and long-windedness. These facts comment on


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Political Notes this: The Decalogue (God's Ten Commandments) that changed the world contains fewer than a hundred words. The longest constitution in the world is that of Yugoslavia (406 Articles), and the shortest is the American with only seven Articles (with 36 amendments added during the 200 years of the existence of this Constitution). The country that is taken as an example of a legal state- Englanddoes not even have a constitution in the formal sense of the word. Nicaragua has a voluminous Constitution-336 Articles. I presume that legality is not proportional. The Constitution of the Federal Republic of Montenegro, a federal unit of Yugoslavia, which has half a million inhabitants, is larger than the Constitution of India, which has 700 million inhabitants, around 30 federal units and a large number of different ethnic and religious groups. A short constitution is most often a sign of the continuity and stability of the system. 3343. Goebbels called radio the "spiritual weapon of the state," of course a totalitarian one. There is no reason not to believe him (in this respect). Still in 1925 he proposed that every house in Germany should have radio. 3344. For ancient Greeks, barbarians are the ones who still cannot even speak, which can be seen from the etymology of the word "barbarian." one who stutters. 3359. According to predictions of Igor Bestuzhev, a director of the Institute for Social Prognostics and Social Design of the USSR, the population of the Asian parts of the USSR, inhabited mainly by Muslim peoples, increased by more than three-fold from the end of the war (in the last 40 years), and will double in respect to the present number in the next 15 years. In the remainder of the USSR, the opposite process exists: depopulation, single-child families, a large number of single people, unstable and easily disrupted marriages. In his opinion, about 60 percent of marriages are destroyed due to the alcoholism of one of the partners (Danas, Zagreb, March 15, 1988, pp. 74-75). 3366. "Pornography-theory, rape-practice," words from one women's manifesto against pornography. 3367. The creation of the so-called people's capitalism in Western countries is done in accordance with the continual expansion of the number of small shareowners. The system created by this has been shown to be economically very effective. The number of shareholders in Great Britain in the last couple of years (1980-1988) rose from 2 to 9 million. In 1982, the British government sold the state transportation company, National Freight Corporation, exclusively to the workers employed with the company. The shares of that firm, which had previously been working at a barely profitable level, are today worth 50 times more, thanks to the direct interest of the employee-owner. Excellent economic effects have also been recorded in 16 other large state firms that the British government sold to private individuals (among the other renowned firms Jaguar, British Airways, PTT, airports, etc.). The main characteristic of this process was that the shares were bought by millions of small investors. In France, a similar process was put into action after Chirac' s arrival to power. In three years the number of French shareholders increased from 1 million to 5.5 million. It is interesting that neither the Labour government in Great Britain nor the socialist opposition in other European states claims that it will, if elected, again nationalize that which the governments of the right put into private hands. The idea of nationalization and state ownership, sometimes very popular and "revolutionary," seems to have completely lost its attraction after an evidently bad experience. 3369. Democracy (and freedom) is not in that we do everything we want, but to want everything we do (according to Tolstoy).


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Political Notes 3370. Why does the so-called sixty-eight, which blew over the world like some fever, remain only as a memory? It had to remain so. It once again attempted that which was not to be achieved, that which history had already surpassed. It attempted to bring to life ideals of the past, and those ideals were no longer realistic. Everything that occurred later-the conservative movement in the West and religious renewal around the world-shows that the ideals of 1968 were out of its time and the general historical trend. The ideals of the generation were not as innocent as they were at the start of the twentieth century, for they were already weighted down with the sins of their application. 3384. Hegel thought we lived in the time of the twilight of art and that perception about art is becoming more important than art itself, as intellectual reflection replaces spontaneous creation. Hegel stated this over 150 years ago. Once again the prognoses failed. Events did not confirm this claim of Hegel's. History cannot be predicted. 3386. There was someone who said "we only have differences in common." 3388. A man cannot be a resource. Every use of man is misuse. 3392. The French Revolution called to Reason, and in name of Reason guillotined thousands of reasonable ones. 3404. Whoever goes to the people to teach, but does not to learn from them as well, is a conceited fool. That meeting will not bring him or the people any good. 3409. I have just read that the centers for the posture, movement, and balance of the body are in the cerebellum, and for human creativity in the cerebrum. Some people obviously have a more developed cerebellum than cerebrum. 3440. True democracy is not only a government of the majority. Just as every right is the protection of the weaker, so is democracy the protection of the minority. Without the latter, the government of the majority would be a tyranny like any other. 3446. In the Western world, work gained its dignity for the first time in one of Luther's 95 celebrated theses. That thesis runs: "Ora et labora" (pray and work). This is the basis of the renowned Protestant work ethic. Formerly, work was until then equated with suffering and slavery, and physical work unworthy of the free man. With "ora et labora," Luther placed work in the same line with prayer as also one of the ways to serve God, and thus established the practical foundations of Protestant ethics, and even the power of the people who accepted it. 3447. Genghis Khan-the "atomic bomb of his time" (as called by one historian)destroyed Afghanistan's state and the civilization brought to it by Islam in the thirteenth century. He burned the cities, destroyed beautiful edifices, dams and irrigation systems, turning prosperous lands into desert. Even today, Afghanistan still has not recovered from this misfortune: Great parts are today still deserts due to this unprecedented devastation. 3449. Bosnia and its "dark beauty" (Andric's expression)-"land of historicalcivilizational discontinuities." 3456. In the period starting from 1961, around 7,000 Afghanis finished military schools in the USSR and countries of the Eastern bloc, which practically amounts to the entire staff of Afghanistan's army. If it is worth mentioning at all, political indoctrination accompanied military training. The result is known.


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Political Notes 3463. Developed countries earmark significant resources for different programs of social protection of the poor and underprivileged classes of the population. In 1987, in the United States, $491 billion was provided for these purposes, $511 billion is predicted for 1988, which amounts to 11% of the gross national product. These resources will be spent for health protection of the poor and unemployed, subsidies for rents, vocational training, additional education, as well as for direct help in terms of food by granting "food stamps" and the gratuitous distribution of agricultural excesses that the state bought from farmers. The greatest part of this sum still goes to social, health and pension insurance. In the United States the poverty limit for a four-member family is an income of $11,000 a year. It is thought that one-fifth of Italians have a standard of living that necessitates help from the state. Statistical data for France states that 15 percent of the population lives in poverty or on the border of it (according to their standards). According to EU standards, those who have less than 50 francs at their disposal daily are considered poor. It is thought that in West Germany there are about three million poor people, with the same amount surviving exclusively on social aid. An additional 2~2 million receive help to cover rent, food, or clothing. The most important institution for this kind is the obligatory contribution of 2.3 percent of income from all employees and employers, which provides 50 billion DEM yearly, the initial purpose of which was to help the unemployed. Out of 56 million Britons, more than 8 million receive some kind of assistance or have some social privileges, for which $90 billion a year is set aside ("New Poverty," Danas, May 3, 1988, p. 8). 3466. (Anti-Semitism-some historical facts that concern the territory of present Yugoslavia): Between the fifth and eighth centuries, Byzantium passed laws that forcibly converted many Jews in Macedonia to Christianity. In Dubrovnik, in 1502, 11 Jews were accused of "ritual killing." As a result of the trial, one was strangled in prison, four were burned alive, three died from torture, and the rest were exiled. In 1797, the "Council of the Entreated" passed a law that prohibited Jews from entering cafés. In Split, in 1553, all Jewish holy books were burned and Jews were ordered to wear a yellow sign, first introduced in Venice in 1314. In the area of Slovenia, all Jews from Koruska, Stajerska and Ljubljana were exiled by the decree of Emperor Maximilian. In Vojvodina, they were not allowed to inhabit cities, in Serbia the opposite: Milos' s son, Mihajlo, prohibited Jews from leaving cities and going inland. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, Turkey prohibited them from dressing like Muslims-wearing a turban and dressing in green; they were also not allowed to ride a horse in the city and wear weapons. At the Congress of Berlin, Jews were formally granted all civil rights. 3483. In the book Macedonian Muslims, Then and Now, author Jakim Sinadinovski, professor of sociology at the University of Skopje, opposes the thesis on Macedonians converted to Islam that claims that Muslims in Macedonia are a separate ethnic group that significantly developed under the influence of the religious factor. Muslims differ from Macedonians in linguistic expression, dress, custom/moral norms, culture of residence and food, and even the type of economic life-which gives this group a separate identity. The book caused a strong reaction in those who claim that Muslims in Macedonia are Macedonians of Islamic faith, that is, Macedonians converted to Islam and as such, a part of the Macedonian people. The book was issued in early 1988 in Skopje. 3486. Some want to literally equate a man and a woman, not in rights and human dignity, but in the way of life, type of work, dress, behavior, thus in everything in which these two sexes differ by their natures. On the other hand, even psychologists claim there is even a "masculine" and a "feminine" way of writing, masculine and feminine literature, even a "masculine" and a "feminine" way of reading. Milorad Pavic wrote two versions of his Hazar Dictionary- one "masculine" and the other "feminine." When you travel by train through the


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Political Notes Soviet Union, along the track during a winter storm at minus 20 degrees Celsius, you see track-workers, women, not as an exception, but hundreds of them. That is that "equality." 3501a. A program and people are often in disagreement. Often quality people advocate a completely unrealistic and retrogressive program, and vice versa: good program, bad people. 3504. "Let us build trade, and a historian of the world will see that trade was the principle of freedom, that it colonized America and destroyed feudalism, that it made peace and that it maintains peace and that it will abolish slavery" (Emerson, Diary). Compare the Qur'an: "God allowed trade and prohibited interest" (2/275). 3505. "The harvest will be better kept and will last longer if it is in private storage, in the shed of every farmer and basket of every woman, than if kept in state granaries. In the same way, the same amount of money will last longer and be better used if every man and woman use it for their own needs, feeling that the money is theirs, than if it is spent by a powerful Governor or state representative of the Minister of Finances. If you take away the feeling that I have to depend upon myself, if you give me even the slightest indication that in reserve I have good friends and assistants who will support everything readily, I will immediately loosen my diligence,. . . and certain slackening will expand to the conduct of all of my work. Here is a $100 bill. If it comes into the hands of a profligate, who did not earn his estate and who knows how to spend. you will see how little change this will cause in his affairs. At the end of the year he will be as far behind as ever. But if it goes into the hands of a poor, sensible woman, every little part of it will be used to reduce debt, or add to present or permanent comfort, fix a window, buy a blanket or fur coat, or get a stove instead of an old hearth." This was written by Emerson in his Diary in December of 1842. I give this long quotation for it took 150 years and the wandering of 100 million people, the loss of trillions in national income, to understand this simple truth. 3506. Weak people are the advocates and support of authoritarian government. They lack the feeling of self-worth, from which the desire for freedom and independence stems. A weak man runs from freedom and responsibility. An authoritarian government is a refuge from this burden, without which one can comfortably live. The precondition for this is known, why repeat it? 3515. Strong and spontaneous aspiration for knowledge, as in the case of American lyceums in the mid-nineteenth century, most eloquently speaks of the great future of one nation. A lyceum, one type of a public university, is a specific American movement that flourished between 1830 and 1860. A group of citizens would associate, collect money and invite lecturers to be guests in their homes during winter. When this movement was at its height, there were over 2,000 lyceums in America. 3516. They like to speak of independence of state, but reluctantly speak of independence of citizens. That independence, without which there is no freedom, can be hindered (destroyed, taken away, reduced) equally with intimidation, as well as with persistent persuasion and "brainwashing." Regardless of what method is used, the result is the same: a dependent, un-free man who is everything, but not a citizen. 3517. Napoleon had predicted the great future of America as far back as the early nineteenth century ("in 25 years, the United States will dictate the political order of the world"). Clearly, he was not only a great soldier. He had an undeniable sense for history. He is known to have made a similar prophecy before the Battle


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Political Notes at Valme: "A new period in human history is beginning, and you can say you were present" (cited by Goethe). 3520. What is the meaning of the story of the creation of the first man in the Qur'an (Qur'an 2/30-34)? It contains at least two critically important things: (1) All people are, if not brothers, then some far cousins, and as such, equal, and (2) First there was a man and woman, and then persons and people. Ensuing from this is that "human rights" are older (and more important) than peoples, tribes, communal and state ones. Human rights are primary, the rest are deduced. 3523. In her book The Real World, Marguerite Duras dedicates the largest chapter to the home as a woman's universe. 3524. From the General Declaration on Human Rights: "Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression. This right includes the freedom of keeping one's own view and accepting information and ideas from all media regardless of borders" (Article 19 of the Declaration). 3525. The most widespread form of violence in the world is the one happening in the family. However, this violence in the greatest number of cases remains undiscovered and unpunished, for it happens within the walls of the "inviolable" home and private life. 3526. It is interesting how, in one study, the inhabitants of the future United States of Europe (the present EU) made a list of the ten values they find worthy of their personal engagement. In first place they place the equality of sexes, then in declining order: protection of the environment, peace in the world, battle against poverty, national defense, religious freedom, unification of Europe, personal freedom, human rights and (in tenth place) revolution. The study was done in early 1988 (Vjesnik, Zagreb, May 28, 1988, p. 5). 3568. Politics (after all, like life itself) is full of paradoxes. For example, only certified anti-Communists, Nixon and Reagan, could agree with the Soviets and even make certain concessions. Anyone else would be accused of selling out to the Communists or being politically naïve. 3572. Americans gave $93 billion to different charities in 1987 (Oslobodjenje, June 29, 1988). Giving to others, mutual help, is a natural thing among people. It appears everywhere in the world as an integral part of civilized life. 3577. Marie Ebner-Eschenbach said that the greatest enemies of freedom, alongside tyrants and bureaucrats, are happy slaves. Danko Plevnik commented on this thought: "These are those plain little people who add to the pyre of bureaucratic short-sightedness their dry twigs of blind faith in their inanities." 3624. A man of self-realization and original spirit is either a hermit or an apostle, says Leo Beck. A hermit relates passively (introverted), an apostle actively, dynamically toward the world. The former changes only himself, the latter attempts to change the world, that is, the people around him. This latter, dynamic type can predominate in one group or people. According to Beck, Jewish people are a specific example-perhaps most pronounced-of such dynamic personality. Furthermore, such spirit can exist only in a small community or small people. 3627. (Factor of time): An American asked an Englishman how he manages to grow such wonderful grass. "Nothing simpler," said the Englishman. "We water it regularly and cut it every morning and evening." "That is the same thing I do,"


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Political Notes said the American, "but my grass is pitiful." "Yes," said the Englishman, "but we have been doing it for 400 years." Today my little granddaughter Jasmina turned five. She was born on August 11, 1983, during my trial. My dear Jasmina. 3641. Japanese industry developed quickly. Thus, for example, the motor vehicle industry was started in 1930. That year only 458 trucks and buses were produced. In 1965, around 1.9 million vehicles were produced, and in 1986, 12.3 million. Japan today (1988) is the largest producer of automobiles in the world (followed by the United States and West Germany). 3648. Human communion is specific. Some animals, for example, hunt together, but eat the catch by themselves. While all animals provide food only for themselves and their young, group distribution of food is characteristic only of humankind. Anthropologist Glina Issac says: "If a chimpanzee could describe the characteristics of human behavior, he would first point out that that being shares food with other members of the group." 3654. American psychologist Carl Rogers, in the book How to Become a Person presents an "efficacious rule for discussion," which is, according to Rogers, this: One can speak for oneself only after one correctly repeats the ideas of one's collocutor, and in a way that satisfies the one who spoke before. "But if you attempt to do that, you will discover that it is one of the most difficult things you have ever tried to do. However, when once you are able to understand another person's point of view, your own judgments will be drastically changed. You will also find that emotions are disappearing from discussions, that differences are reduced, and those which remain are rational and comprehensible," writes Rogers. To be a person, therefore, means, among other things, to be able to understand one another in the best way possible, that is, to be able to put yourself in another's position, live for a moment in someone else's skin. That is one of the reliable signs of a mature person. 3656. West Germany paid 9,000 DEM to Romania annually for every member of the German minority who was allowed to leave the country. In this way, West Germany, as reported by the BBC, "bought back" around 100,000 fugitives. When this was discovered, many reacted with bitterness, especially Hungarian intellectuals whose compatriots were also endangered in Romania. In the statement by the Democratic Forum of Hungary in August 1988, it is said: "We are filled with apprehension, for people are turning into worthless goods. The price is not only a cash amount, but moral and political support to one of the least humane dictatorships of this century" (Vjesnik, August 25, 1988). In relation to this, one could cite a statement by Prof. Ivo Banac, an American historian of Yugoslav origin, author of the book The National Question in Yugoslavia, who speaks of an unexpected paradox of the unsolved national question in almost all socialist countries. He said: "I will be ironic: today one can speak of 'proletarian nationalism' and 'bourgeois internationalism.' Just observe what is happening in the Soviet Union, what are the relations between Hungarians and Romanians, not to mention Kosovo" (Danas, August 25, 1988). 3658. "Culture demands slaves, and if there are no slaves to do the ugly, difficult, and boring jobs, culture becomes impossible. Human slavery is wrong and demoralizing. The future of the world will depend on mechanical slavery- the slavery of machines" (Oscar Wilde). Currently, there are about 180,000 robots in the world. This, which Wilde stated, might perhaps explain the persistence of the institution of slavery, which was abolished only in the nineteenth century (slavery and culture).


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Political Notes 3662. The development of criminal law and the related sciences (penology, criminology, process) was marked with what it usually called "humanization" in the last one hundred years: the mitigation of punishment and conditions of its execution, abolishment of corporal punishment, especially the death penalty. But what have theoreticians of criminal law who advocated these ideas known about the people who were perpetrators of criminal acts? The greatest number of those theoreticians, even prosecutors and judges, most often did not know the life and the kind of people about whom they spoke. They wrote books without ever getting to know the offenders, who those people are, what they are in fact like, what kind of "human material" they are made of. That is one side of the problem. Due to this, humanization on the side of the perpetrator most often meant complete indifference or complete oblivion toward the victim. The abolishment of the death penalty clearly represented a great relief for a murderer, but has surely also meant diminishing the security of innocent people, potential victims of the crimes. Humanism toward the perpetrator meant inhumanity toward an innocent man-a potential victim. As a reaction to this, a separate discipline was recently developed-victimology, which attempts to establish a balance and observe the crime from the position of the victim as well. One should expect that this new discipline will introduce more justice in criminal law and act as a redress to the continual tendency to give understanding and mercy in circumstances where there is little cause for consideration and mercy. 3663. We are not only divided into good and bad people, but into good and evil within ourselves. The division does not go between people, but through them. There is also a division into good and bad people, but it is a secondary one, derived according to some balance of good and evil in a man. The primary division is on the good and evil which resides in people. That conflict is thus imminent, internal, dramatic and not externally social. True conflict is in the soul. 3667. To the spirit, and even culture, the principle of hierarchy is imminent. It is foreign to democracy. The question, then, should state: What is the relationship between culture and democracy? 3671. In the book Nations and Nationalism, Ernest Gellner expressed an opinion that nationalist activity is not a permanent characteristic of people, but that it becomes topical in the time of crisis.


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Political Notes


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Islam Between East and West

CHAPTER 4 On the Margins of the Book Islam Between East and West For the reader who has never looked into the book "Islam Between East and West", for a better orientation and understanding of the notes that follow, I will briefly present its contents. The main theses are: There are only three perceptions of the world, and there can be no more: the religious one, the materialistic one and the Islamic one. Everything has been created in pairs (Qur’an). Man is a dual being: body and soul. The body is nothing but “the bearer of the spirit.” The bearer has evolved, consequently, it has its history, while the soul has not, it was inspired by God’s touch. The first side of man is subject to science, the second to art and ethics. Therefore, there are two stories and two truths about man. In the Western world they are symbolized by Darwin and Michelangelo. Neither does Darwin speak about Michelangelo’s man nor the other way around. Their truths are different, but not exclusive of each other. Through time they are projected as opposites, civilization and culture, respectively. Science and technology belong to civilization, religion and art to culture. The first is an expression of human needs (how do I live?), the latter of human aspirations (why do I live?). This is the contrast between utopia and drama. Utopia is not about personality, drama or morality. The entirety of the scientific method leads to the denial of God and man, while the entirety of art is essentially religious. If there is no God, there cannot be man. If there is not man, humanism, human dignity and human rights are empty words without substance. Civilization does not know the notion of duty; the entire culture is an affirmation of the victim. Civilization aspires toward the “earthly empire,” utopian equality; religion aspires toward the “heavenly empire.” This is Campanella’s Civitas solis versus St. Augustine’s Civitas Dei. There is no moral order without God. Morality is just “another state of aggregation” of religion. Civilization is evolution, history. Religion and art have no real evolution. Every religion was pure in the beginning (pre-monotheism). Its history, as with art and morality, is the history of its decline. Hence the opposition: Jesus and the Church. Every true law is dual, and medicine is never just a science. Drawings made by cavemen or masks made by Polynesian aborigines are works of art equally exciting as the creations of the “Moderna.” The entirety of human life is marked by that primary dualism the “signs” of which can be found in every phenomenon related to the name of man. That is the difference in the spirit of the Old and the New Testament, between Moses and Jesus. One is the leader of his people, the other a moral preacher. There are two different justices and goals they strive for: the Promised Land and the Divine Empire. The two opposites are reconciled in man and in Islam. Islam is a synthesis, a “third road” between the two poles that mark all that is human. 3. “The nature of the spirit can be recognized by means of its total opposite. As the substance of matter is its weight, the substance or the essence of the spirit is freedom” (Hegel, Philosophy of History). 7. “Because that what exists is the individual and not man in general, because it is not man that exists, but a certain man” (Hegel, ibid.).


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Islam Between East and West 10. According to Hegel, art, in its most dignified part, shows “the divine and the spiritual in general” (Hegel, ibid.). 13. Hegel noticed, “India, in spite of its rich spiritual accomplishments that reach the greatest depths, has no history” (Hegel, ibid.). 15. “Consequently, the history of the world is an exposition of the spirit over time, same as the idea is exposed in the space” (Hegel, ibid.). 25. Controversies about abortion show that it is a moral, metaphysical issue. It is about our understanding of man. Darwinists are not against abortion for the same reasons for which they are not opposed to euthanasia. The underlying philosophy is materialism. That is an issue of the sacredness of human life declared by religion but abolished by Darwinism. Abortion contains the denial of human rights in its very premises; it is a denial of the human right to life. 29. Studying and meditation are two different spiritual activities, turned in opposite directions. The first is turned toward the outside—toward nature—the other toward the inside—toward the spirit or Myself. Here India comes to my mind. Sometimes it seems that a minute effort of thinking, even a single clear thought, could destroy the entire miraculous structure of the Indian spirit. However, the deepest meditations known by that spirit have not even grazed it. Thought leads to history, meditation leads away from it. 36. The poetic and the primitive perceptions of the world have something in common. Nature and dead objects are personalized in both. While science reduces the personal to the impersonal, the living to the lifeless, proving that personality and life do not exist, the poet and the primitive are equally persevering in inspiring life to dead objects and attributing will and desire to unconscious things. For a primitive conscience, a rock can represent a deity or incarnation of a deity; more often it is fire, the sun or a star, all inhabited by some ghosts, good or evil; for a poet, everything in lifeless nature is living, loving or hating, bringing oblivion or cherishing memories, suffering and sympathizing with the poet. This relation with the primitive conscience proves that there is a strange link between poetic art and the infancy of humanity. This is how a poet (H. Hesse) sees characters in nature: Hot summer days burnt like flags in flames. . . . It seemed that the mountain was crying, torn by pain. . . and along the road, stunned by the summer day, dozed bright yellow houses, while metal white willows, bent and half-dead, spread their heavy wings along a dried brook over golden meadows. . . . Old giant trees, as in love with their own picture in the mirror, hung over a dark-green willow vaulting it with darkness. Incredible vegetation, lianas, cork oak and other strange plants, stood impudent, shy or sad on a pasture covered with flowers, while the white and pink lights of village houses floated on the distant banks on the .other side of the lake. Everything was charming and close, cheerful and friendly, inspiring health and trust. . . . The ancient village of Kareno, cramped, dark, Saracen, with its somber stone caves under the dark faded bricks, its narrow streets like nightmare impasses full of darkness, and then a small square like a sudden cry under the dazzling sun.


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Islam Between East and West 64. Hegel maintains that India does not know about the science of history. He says that the Indians became famous in geometry, astronomy, algebra, philosophy and grammar and concludes: “History is completely neglected, it does not even exist. . . what exists of history is absolutely useless because it is mixed with imagination. For example, it says that some kings ruled for seventy thousand years or more. Some kings left the throne to withdraw to a fairy tale and then reemerged after spending ten thousand years in solitude.” 76. A thought came to my mind several times that the creator of the Sphinx might have had the same idea: an animal body inspired with the spirit, that is incarnated by the head. For the Sphinx is like a man, “an ambiguous creature” (Hegel, Philosophy of History, p. 186), a spirit that moved into nature, into the animal. And if this idea of the dual nature of man, of its two origins, was to be illustrated by a symbol, it would be a Sphinx or something very similar to it. 92. The ancient Greek and Roman spirits—these represent the soul and the intellect, or the culture and the civilization. 96. Culture and civilization—Athens and Rome: Hegel comes to a conclusion that “the first Roman community was constituted as a state of bandits. . . . Roman virtus is bravery, not a just personal one, but bravery expressed in companionship.. . that can be connected to all kinds of violence. . . . According to tradition, Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome, were bandits abandoned by their family and deprived of family affection.” “It is to the un-free, heartless and spiritless side of the Roman world that we owe the creation and development of Law. Romans discerned, to a certain extent, the line of separation and discovered the legal principle, which is external, free of conviction and heart. Their religious interior did not reach for our spiritual and moral contents, for itself. It could be said that their worship did not evolve into religion. . . . That is why Roman religion is quite a prosaic religion of restriction, purposefulness and usefulness. . . . Similar differences can be seen in the way the Romans and Greeks organized their games. Romans were just the audience... . Instead of human sufferings in the bottom of their hearts and souls. . . Romans watched the cruel reality of physical sufferings. Let me mention augurs, auspices, Sibyl’s books to remind you how the Romans were restricted by all kinds of superstition and how they cared only about their goals” (Hegel, Philosophy of History). My comment: The statement on Law is controversial. The Law is never just external, in essence it is the idea of the justice it is striving for (Islamic nature of Law). 98. The skill of writing appeared very early with the Romans (probably in the seventh century B.C.). It is obvious that the Romans had an alphabet—not oral tradition—from the beginning. A culture can exist without an alphabet, but civilization cannot. 105a. (In the “Chart of the Opposites”): The promised land from the Old Testament and the Heavenly Kingdom from the New Testament—two Testaments, the Old one and the New one, and two different symbols, it could not be otherwise. 106. Darwin (and Engels) connect the creation of man, and his humanization, to physical facts.


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Islam Between East and West 107. In this glorification of man, Christianity got carried away, it exalted man to God, identified him with Him (Christian “God-man”). The mission of Islam was to repeal that sin and untrue unity and, confirming the relative value of man (angels bow before man—Qur’an, 2/34), to establish the absolute sublimity of God (“did not give birth, was not born”—Qur’an, 102/3). We could say: Christianity made final the revelation of man, while Islam made final the revelation of God. 108. All religions made a revelation of God and Man, and these two ideas are interconnected, since “if there is no God, there is no man,” but both revelations had to be confirmed once again, for the last time. And the order by which they came had to be as it was: the revelation of God had to be and was the last. In that lay the connection between Islam and Christianity and their final meaning. 113. “The Isaurian king, Lion, persevered in chasing idols and by the end of 754 A.D. he proclaimed idolism the devil’s invention. Queen Irene introduced them again at the Nicaea assembly in 787 A.D., while the empress Theodora confirmed them finally in 842 A.D., acting energetically against the enemies of pictures. However, the West had rejected idolism at the Frankfurt Church synod in 794 A.D. and, though keeping the pictures, criticized the superstitions of the Greeks most severely. Only in the late Middle Ages did idolism meet general acceptance after silent and slow progress” (Hegel, Philosophy of History). My comment: Considering the clear personal character of Christianity, the victory of idols and pictures was a natural outcome of the conflict. 115. Greek education and, in particular, the philosophy of the Greek and Roman worlds mediated in the creation of the Church. Through councils and church fathers, who were fully educated in Greek and Roman philosophy, the Christian religion became an almost dogmatic system, as if the church became a fully developed hierarchy (Hegel, Philosophy of History). 116. Tacitus gives a positive picture of the morality of the wild Germanic people. 125. Christianity, by its internal logic, had to affirm the principle of victim to the greatest extent possible. In the story of Jesus’ suffering the principle of victim assumed its highest form. 128. Opposite to the Church, as the organization of spiritual life, there was (and inevitably so) the perverted feudal system as the organization of the earthly, real life, a sort of Christian “oblivion” of history. 131. The Christian values were reversed within the institution of the Church. Finally, in the crusades, we see the Pope acting as the emperor, the head of the earthly power (Hegel, Philosophy of History, p. 359). 132. Orders were not created with the Church, but in opposition to the Church, in opposition to the secular character of the Church (Hegel, Philosophy of History, p. 360). Though being in opposition to the Church, they corresponded to the spirit of Christian teachings. That explains their relentless spreading throughout the Christian world. They could not be prevented even by the opposition of the Church. 133. The Church became learned. The Scholastic Anselmo: “If a man has reached the faith, it would be negligent of him not to use thought to become


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Islam Between East and West convinced of the contents of the faith.” Fully in accordance with the spirit of the Church, but not at all with the spirit of Christianity. 141. The Reformation did not reach every corner of the Catholic world. It first appeared in Germany and was accepted mostly by Germanic peoples. 152. “As far as the moral feeling is concerned, the reconciliation between religion and law was achieved by the means of the Protestant church. There is no saint or religious conscience that would be separated from the secular law or it even would be opposite to it” (Hegel, Philosophy of History, p. 407). My comment: The same goes the other way around. 155. Islam is the unity of faith and the world, but it is “an unstable compound.” The split between Islam and the State began relatively early. The Omeid State was an almost completely secular state. But what was characteristic is that the weakening of political power took place in parallel with another process: the development and progress of Sufism. Islam was divided into two components: religion and State. All Turkish sultans appreciated Sufism, which was not just accidental. It obviously suited them better. It is closer to the Christian formula: what is God’s goes to God, what is the emperor’s goes to the emperor. The spread of Sufism as a religion for the masses is just the reverse of this basic split. 156. Let us recall the main characteristics of Sufism: man is just a soul, not a body; monistic pantheism, love for God instead of fear of God and, finally, identification between God and man (does this remind you of something?). Some Sufi orders introduced music and dance into their rituals, advocated celibacy and exaggerated Muhammed’s moderation, describing him as ascetic. The Sufi scholar Suhrawardi criticized Ibn Sinna’s thesis on the distinction between God and man, while Ibn Arabi (1165—1240) elaborated the idea of the universe as a “micropersonality” and of man as a “macro-anthropos” (el-insan-el-akbar). Tensions between the orthodox system and Sufism as a religion for the masses are the basic characteristics of the intellectual history of Islam. 174. The unity of humanity originates from the unity of God. 175. Muhammad a.s. as the Islamic prophet was bound to succeed. He could not afford perishing, otherwise he would not be a prophet of Islam. FazlurRahman noticed well that Western biographers were reluctant at the very thought of Mohammed’s militancy. They were so obsessed by pathetic stories of suffering and crucifixion that the very idea of success was disgusting to them. 177. The difference between Jesus and Muhammad lies primarily in the fact that Islam had to be realized, that performance and success were component parts of the mission. The difference is derived from the very nature of the two teachings, as well as from their missions. The former gets fulfilled through suffering, the latter through victory. That is why Christ’s suffering (and the cross) became the greatest symbol of Christianity. On the contrary, only one month before he died, Muhammad ordered a military campaign to the north. 181. Just because it was bound to succeed, Islam had to be realistic. It could not declare any grandiose, yet unrealistic visions. It had to be connected to the current level of historical development in order to follow up. It could not, for


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Islam Between East and West example, declare abolition of slavery, because the time was not right. As we know, it would have taken take another 12 centuries for this to occur. Islam had to find a fulcrum in the real world. How did Islam achieve this? It introduced significant changes into the existing way of life, approving all the rest tacitly. 181a. The Qur’an, in one of its sections (su’ras) published in Mecca, which was rather early, rejected the statement on the divine nature of Christ. 265. Dual character of Islam: on the one hand it gave birth to Sufism, while on the other hand many critics perceived it as an extremely rational and nonemotional theology (F.R., pp. 336—337). 270. The animal is superior to man in some skills. A master is more likely to get lost in a forest than his dog. Most animals are better hunters than men. Some animals are familiar with the order, punctuality, organization (ants, bees), division of labor, etc, but not with morality, because morality requires free, conscious opting for good and against evil. Animals cannot make that choice and are not free; they are completely innocent, but this is not what morality is about. Morality belongs only to man. As well as the immorality, naturally. 289. Only thanks to the cruel experience of the Middle Ages, the Western world could embark on “the western adventure of man,” as Denis de Rougemont calls it. 290. Art has no history, it knows only about the “now.” For art, there is no time or space. Picasso said that he had understood the meaning of the paintings in his encounter with ancient masks made by African wood-carvers. Almost all great artists of his generation were inspired by works of art created by primitive cultures in Africa, America and Oceania. Contemporary art, such as it is, cannot be understood without that inspiration. At the exhibition “Primitivism in the 20th Century” (New York Museum of Contemporary Art, 1958), works of modern European art and those of anonymous artists from the most underdeveloped parts of the world were standing next to each other. This “ignoring” of time and space which are so important for science and civilization—was a manifestation of the general human character of art. 303. Researchers noticed long ago the strong impact music had on men of primitive tribes during rituals. Moreover, rituals accompanied by music are used in some modern methods of treatment of health problems—so-called ritual music. 305. The World Health Organization, in its program “Health for All by 2000” published in 1976, wrote a special report entitled: “Traditional medicine and the broadening of health care.” Starting from the fact that the number of doctors in most underdeveloped countries was absolutely insufficient, this organization accepted the participation of lay healers in its program, along with professional physicians. According to some data, there is one doctor for every 40,000 inhabitants in Africa, and one healer for every 500 people. Most of the types of treatment in traditional medicine are a combination of rational methods and religion. Among them are: Unani (a method created in Arabia, but used mostly in India and Pakistan), Ayarveda (which can be found in India and some East Asian countries) and traditional Chinese medicine (the most famous form of treatment: acupuncture). We can suppose that traditional medicine has much to offer in psychosomatic treatment, which according to some data is the case (diabetes, ulcer, bronchial asthma), and vice versa: that is the domain in which scientific medicine proved to be the least competent.


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Islam Between East and West Acupuncture was devised in China 2,500 years ago. Will science ever fully examine all its secrets? Is it a rational method at all, and can it be explained by rational means? The question can be formulated otherwise: Is an ailment just a condition of the body, a disorder in secretions, matters and functions or is it a condition of the soul at the same time? 311. Psychology is not a science of the soul. Recent successful application of computers in psychology supported the behaviorist theory of psychology as a pure science, since computers operate only with numbers and values and represent an example of a pure quantitative method with corresponding results. 312. (Culture and civilization). For example, what does culture have in common with Toffler’ s six principles of industrial civilization? I believe that the principles of culture could be derived by reversal of the arguments. Or, like the difference between the body and the soul. 322. In the epic Gilgamesh, which is over 4,000 years old, there are thoughts on human destiny, life and death that are equally exciting and deep as those of Shakespeare or Goethe. Culture remains beyond history. 323. Cyclic and linear time: cyclic time belongs to culture, linear time belongs to civilization. The former is a constant circling, permanent returning, repetition, illusion of time, even timelessness itself. Only linear time is a real course, symbolized by the clock. It is astronomic and physical time, a sort of special time, that is, of the time that we can comprehend only as a movement, that is, as space. 324. The poet Lucretius, famous for his atheism, elaborated on a kind of atomistic philosophy. That suited his atheism. 327. Descartes suggested that every problem that is under consideration should be “divided into as many parts as possible.” By this, Descartes defined the essence of the scientific method. In art, everything is exactly the opposite. 338. In the spectacle of the Hajj, the genuine human aspiration for equality is reflected. It will never be fully achieved, but it will be always a part of the human dream of a better world. The Hajj is a sort of utopia, a moment of universal brotherhood and equality. 345. Completely organized “social care” for people undermines the social (humane) behavior of individuals because it gradually reduces (or deforms) private care for others. The society “takes care” of everybody, so that instead of man’s care for man, there is total indifference and absence of care. This is one of the ideas from Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita and from Kundera’s novels. The Unbearable Lightness of Being is about the total irresponsibility of the individual within a social project of well-being, which creates a feedback effect on the society and its “care about that man.” 353. Cognitive theory teaches that there is a correlation between the subject and the object, that the entire cognitive process takes place within that correlation and that there is no cognition beyond that correlation. That does not go with art. “The one who asks material questions about art, should be questioned himself” (Kandinsky). Is the object just a reason to initiate imagination with colors, sounds and shapes? Wagner states that music has its own logic—”the logic of music.”


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Islam Between East and West “The struggle between motifs in music is similar to the struggle between principles in the life of a drama,” said Wagner. 354. Feruccio Busoni states that music does not develop by passing through some historical periods. It is always one and the same, “non-historical unity.” 357. The main result of civilization was the turning of the world into a market. That was its “mission.” That mission obviously does not have much in common with culture. 358. Art callnot be interpreted. Berlioz wrote a program for his Fantastic Symphony with the aim to help listeners to “understand” it. That was a failure, in the same way as Balzac’ s earlier introductions to his great novels. 359. In this relation: Christianity—Islam—socialism; Islam both separates and connects these two extreme entities. 361. Man, even if he wanted to, could not reject his body and heed only his soul. The one who rejects his body becomes its victim. That is man’s destiny, or it is “what it is meant to be.” 363. The comparison between craft and art shows the following: craft is intended for the consumer, art for the viewer or listener. A craftsman’s product has a usage value, while art is “aimlessly purposeful.” Craft is intended for the body and it meets a need; art is intended for the soul and meets an aspiration. Both, taken together, reflect and confirm the dual nature of man. 364. The “reversed” nature of life: previously generally accepted and—one must admit—quite a logical assumption that complex organisms originate from simple ones has been challenged recently. Biologists are announcing a completely opposite thesis, that is, that simpler forms of life (e.g., bacteria and algae) originate from the more complex ones. The life witnesses of a “reversed” logic—a reversed, “negative” development. Compare with this a similar “negative” development of art: “Since the time of cave-dwellers, art has kept regressing,” says the Spanish painter Joan Miro, a contemporary of Picasso and Dali. 374. Biblical texts served as a background or inspiration for many chorales, cantatas and oratories in music and for innumerable paintings and literary works. 376. Duality (and unity) of body and soul is the fundamental, the greatest and the oldest human experience. No human philosophy could ignore this problem. Since prehistory until the present, every human thought is marked by this relationship and deals with it. 380. A member of utopia is not a man, but Huxley’s or Orwell’s humanoid. 390. So-called holistic medicine dealing with “health as a whole” (similar to Gestalt medicine in psychiatry—Gestalt therapy), a movement based on the conception that health depends on the integration of the physical and the mental. This movement does not exclude medical quackery. “Up until several years ago it was inconceivable for a government to sponsor a health conference covering topics like treating illness with religion, iridology, acupressure and Buddhist meditation,” wrote Science magazine. Nowadays this is possible.


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Islam Between East and West 391. A new notion, “holism,” has been created—meaning comprehensiveness, synthesis, integration as the opposite to analysis, one-sidedness, separation. Holism can be understood as a criticism of the one-sidedness of Christianity and socialism, or of their underlying philosophies. 396. Every culture is oral in its pure nature. The alphabet is a necessary evil in a culture. On the contrary, a civilization cannot be imagined without an alphabet. If we continue further with that “oral” character of a culture, we will find out that it avoids the word as well as much as it can. The word is replaced by the picture. This tendency is especially perceived in Christianity, which is the spiritual prototype of any culture. China remained illiterate of its philosophy, poetry and drama for almost three thousand years. The Chinese invented gun-powder, but they used it to make fireworks for celebrations (cultural events). Only the Europeans began to use it for “civilized” purposes. 400. A photo of your grandmother can incite emotions in yourself only because you inspire life into it with your vivid feelings and memories. Anyone else would remain indifferent or pretend to be interested. However, an artist’s painting of your grandmother would incite emotions in all those who look at it. The reason for this is because a painting portrays the personality, the soul, which concerns every man. 401. A psychologist from the U.S. National Institute for Mental Health states that in the United States there is no family without some form of mental disorder. “Psychological disorders are raging through American society which is confused, divided and concerned about the future,” wrote Toffler. Communists lost no time stating that it was the human side of the general crisis of capitalism, a symptom of the decline of the capitalistic system, etc. Naturally, it would be appropriate to ask them, the Communists, why there are 40 million alcoholics in the USSR. As a matter of fact, it is not about capitalism or socialism, but about something that they have in common: civilization, or its unavoidable byproduct. 402. Herman Rauschig wrote that Nazism “was a will to create a superman.” He says that Hitler confided in him: “I saw a new man and he is indestructible and cruel; I stood frightened before him.” Nazi racism is like a derivative from Darwin and Nietzsche. God was against such a vision, so history had to be against it as well. 404. The other, non-civilization, cultural meaning of life is in internal living, in a kind of strengthening and purifying of the consciousness. 407. The “Cultural Revolution” in China began with an attack against the historical drama, Hai Pui Dismissed from His Duty. Drama and a revolution of that type cannot tolerate one another. 408. There is no doubt that drawings on the face and body (tattoos) that can be found with all primitive peoples have the purpose—deliberate or not—to emphasize individuality. With civilized peoples, that role is played by fashion. Striving for difference—against leveling—is found in the very nature of man. This is an expression of a typical human aspiration for individuality. Unfortunately, the aspiration for uniformity dwells within man as well. Man is created from heaven and earth alike.


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Islam Between East and West 410. Art is religious even if the artist is not. Picasso may be a drastic example. But Chagall, too, who painted some of the most “religious” paintings, when asked about God by a tactless admirer, gave quite an indefinite answer. If we switch to the scientific domain, we will find some opposite examples. There we will encounter the deeply religious Kepler and Newton, who objectively defined an atheist universe. 411. The middle road is not mediocrity. The optimum is always somewhere between the extremities. Because “the extremities are the frontiers beyond which life stops” and “every extremist passion in art, as well as in politics, is nothing but a disguised desire for death” (Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being), the most intensive historical life developed in the so-called moderate zone. 412. In art there is no “forward” or “backward” in the historical sense of the word. Those who debate on whether the Americans, Germans or Italians got further than the French in modern art just demonstrate that they have no clue on the subject they are talking about. I never learned that anybody explained what “advancing” or “lagging behind” in art could mean. Moreover, the famous Spanish painter Joan Miro (the greatest contemporary painter, besides Picasso and Dali) stated exactly the opposite. According to him, there is a history of art, but a negative one. History is not a development, but a decline. In one place he says: “Painting has been declining ever since the times of the cave-man.” One of the conclusions drawn from that view is that the painting (art) has no essential relation with civilization and so-called progress. The same goes with religion and man. Historical development could be defined as well as the decline of humanity. 414. Some call our civilization “hygienic” (“this impersonal, technical, hygienic civilization”). This is a well-chosen adjective. Culture is neither dirty nor “hygienic.” We recall how Jesus, the great prophet of culture, was reluctant to the pharisaical “washing of hands and wooden vessels” and scornfully refused pharisaical hygiene. On the contrary, Lenina in Huxley’s Brave New World stated proudly that “Civilization is sterilization.” Sterile cleanliness prevails in the Brave New World. 431. The animal did not live in Paradise, nor it was driven out from it. That is why the animal is innocent. 433. The Bible, the Qur’an and the Communist Manifesto are said to be “the three most decisive books for humanity”—do they not correspond to the three fundamental views of the world? 436. In the Book of Job (Chapters 7 and 14), Job says that there is no life after death: David, when his son died, said the same. As a matter of fact, neither Job nor David said so. This denial was a subsequent creation of the Jewish spirit turned towards this world (justice “here and now”). 460. Greece and Rome in the Ancient World, Europe and America in the Modern. They mirror the contrast between culture and civilization. Nowadays, that fact is clearly expressed in the cinema. The cinema is at the same time an art and an industry. “Europe is the cradle of the art of film, America is the home of the film industry”(Andrej Zulavski, Polish film director). 463. Richard Gregory, director of the Neurological Laboratory in Bristol, a devout materialist, states that the human mind is a product of the physical functions of


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Islam Between East and West the brain and insists on the analogy between the human mind and the computer. Similarly, Tomazo Pogio concludes: “I am convinced that it is necessary that we understand man in order to be able to understand the computer, and vice versa— that we understand the computer to be able to understand man.” My comment: once again, it is an “homme-machine.” Can science, in spite of the obvious limitations of that approach, perceive the problem in a different way at all? The human brain weighs about 1,400 grams and contains about one hundred billion neurons. Every neuron has a number of branches connecting it to other nerve cells, which form an inextricable network, “unparalleled in complexity in the entire known universe” (Nobel prize winner David Hubbell). Luigi Agnuati (from the University of Modena): “A neuron itself is equally complex as nerve circuits of higher levels. That is a micro-world in itself” Tomazo Pogio: “A neuron is not, as it was believed until recently, a sort of a transistor, but a real microprocessor.” There is no answer to the question how the brain managed to acquire the property that is difficult even to define: to recognize itself, that is, to acquire selfawareness. No increased complexity could explain this. There is a certain analogy between the brain and the computer with regard to some other properties and capabilities, but the computer will never be able to recognize itself, i.e., to become aware of itself. 469. Leibnitz considers that “beautiful is a vague apprehension of perfection and harmony,” while Hegel believes that “a work of art is somewhere in between sensuality and the ideal thought.” That is why it is for him an inferior form of cognition; this idea is not very acceptable. This is a result of a linear (or monistic) understanding of man and the world, where sensuality is on the bottom of the scale, while the ideal thought, the pure idea, is on the very top of it. 473. “When an individual feels something in the soul, the structure of the entire society begins to crumble”—says Lenina, a resident of the Brave New World. Isn’t this sentence the answer to the question why, in some of the “real” utopias of our time (e.g., in China during the so-called Cultural Revolution), the love between a man and a woman was avoided as an issue. In utopia there is reason and order, but no love. 474. With American Indians, marriage is concluded once for good (the husband and wife cannot be divorced). The Indian word for such a relationship means “forever.”The permanent character of the marriage represents an element of culture (and religion). Civilization will always and necessarily have the opposite view. Islam stands “in between”: “Divorce is the most hated thing allowed by God” (Muhammad a.s.). 480. Generality is not real, only individuality is real. Art does the best at indicating that any general story about man is false and worthless. Only a story on an individual, specific person, or on a specific object, phenomenon or situation is really genuine. 484. Someone once said that the difference between science and art lies in the fact that science is looking for the truth, while art is trying to act by means of the truth. The conclusion is wrong. The scopes of science and art are different, and so are their respective truths; besides, art is active, but this is not its purpose. It is similar to confession: in its essence, it is not intended for a third person.


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Islam Between East and West 486. Cubism is not a “transmission of the art into science”—like some believe. There is no such connection between art and science. 489. In Phenomenology of the Soul, Hegel does not consider art as a separate domain. Similarly, in the first edition of the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences, the very notion of art is found only in the compound word “Kunstreligion,” “artistic religion.” Art cannot have any other contents but religion. It is the “infinity shown in the finite.” 501. Venturi, in his book From Giotto to Chagall, writes: “Humanism, in the first place, was a moral issue that dealt with the reform of the religious tradition. Starting with St. Francis, i.e. from the twelfth century, the Italians were as interested in theology as before: they dreamt of a human brotherhood and liked earthly things with a renewed emotion that projected Jesus and his work into human life. That gave birth to a new trust in man in the early fifteenth century. Man is glorified as the center of the universe, he is even deified.” My comment: Humanism, perceived in this way, is a direct continuation of Christianity. Only with utopia, an inhuman world, deprived of God and Man, emerges. Utopia is equally contrary to St. Augustine’s Christianity (Civitas Dei) and to the spirit and aspirations of humanism. 502. Objectively, things are neither beautiful nor ugly. There is no natural beauty. Only when they are perceived by our soul do they become beautiful or ugly, harmonious or disfigured. A musical composition affects our soul because it suits it. The soul recognizes itself in the composition or discovers in it something that has been present in itself. 505. It would be wrong to speak about the theory of art; it is even less true that such theory is based on the history of art, as it is believed by materialistic thinkers (e.g., Max Rafael in his work Towards the Cognitive Theory of Concrete Dialectics). Strictly speaking, there is no theory or history of art. There are only artists and their works in an uninterrupted flow that shows some differences but no development. 506. Marx’s statement (made in his Theory of Surplus Value) that capitalist production is essentially hostile to poetry and painting is not correct for two reasons: first, because it conditions the spiritual production by the material one and second, because it is contrary to the facts. The development of capitalism has refuted it. It is enough to look at the long list of great poets and painters of the twentieth century. 514. (On Sigmund Freud). Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis was compared to the revolutionary discoveries made by Copernicus and Darwin. Modern critics of Freud call it “pseudoscientific religious instruction.” In 1905, Freud treated his friend’s son, a young boy called Hans Graff. Hans had a neurotic fear of horses and refused to leave the house. After psychoanalytical treatment, Freud made a strange and far-reaching diagnosis: the neurotic fear of horses was due to the boy’s feeling of guilt caused by his hidden desire to have sexual intercourse with his mother! The boy held back his incestuous lust, explains Freud, because he feared his jealous father’s punishment, and so on. Freud presented the results of this case analysis in the publication entitled An Analysis of a FiveYear-Old Boy’s Phobia, which his followers believe offered evidence toward Freud’s theory on the Oedipus complex. Freud’s disciple Kurt Aysler, who lived in New York, said with enthusiasm: “The moment little Hans confessed his Oedipal desire to his father


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Islam Between East and West was a starry moment for all of human kind.” I do not understand why the destruction of the myth of motherly love would be a “starry moment for all of human kind.” Even if it were true, it would be an ugly truth. But, with the atheists and materialists there is some inexplicable wish to destroy everything that is sacred and which helps us to look at the human being with respect. This analysis of Freud’s was challenged later on. The psychologist Christopher Eschenreder, in his book "Where Freud Went Astray", offered a completely different explanation of the boy’s fear of horses. As a matter of fact, just before he was struck by the neurosis, the boy saw a workhorse falling down helplessly, fettered in harnesses, which shocked him. Echenreder concluded that Freud’s theories were mere “prattling and fantasizing” and that they did not offer any scientifically acceptable evidence for the psychoanalytical hypothesis. British biologist and Nobel Prize winner Peter Medawar believes that doctrinaire psychoanalysis is “the most terrible deceit of the twentieth century.” As we know, Freud himself gave up on this theory (the theory of incest). “All psychoanalysis relies upon Greek mythology,” concluded the surrealistic painter André Mason. 516. There is one more piece of evidence that man has a soul: unpredictability (or impotence) of upbringing. The same conditions (causes) do not give the same results (consequences). Some will successfully prove that a traumatic childhood produces insecure, neurotic personalities, a statement that is generally accepted. However, in recent research undertaken by British, American and Swedish sociologists, the following findings were discovered: unpleasant experiences in childhood—problematic family relationships, neurotic and coarse parents, adoption and so on—had results opposite to expectations. Many such children became firm individuals, while, on the other hand, well-cared for and nice children grew up as unstable personalities. If man were an animal, the result of upbringing would be predictable and powerful. The same conditions would always give the same or similar result. To the extent to which man is not an animal, to which he is a personality, to which he has a soul, in a word—to which he is a human being, he is free and it is never sure (or predictable) how he will respond to external stimulus. The law of conditional reflex does not apply to man. 518. Freud’s “biology of the soul” could end up only with the denial of the soul. 519. Given that Hegel perceived art historically, as a sensual way of knowing the world, he could not avoid coming to the wrong conclusion on “the end of art.” For him, real art existed only in the past, and its time was over for good. However, developments that took part in art after Hegel proved that he had been wrong in his predictions, as well in his historical approach to art. 524. Max Bense, in his Esthetics, states that “every literary text can be translated into a logical configuration.” Such an opinion is due to Bense’s materialistic approach. 526. It is also wrong to state that “classical art builds its artistic reality on feelings, while modern art builds it on thoughts” (as many materialistic thinkers do). Art is impossible without immediate experience, while every thought is mediated. An artistic work that starts from a thought (not from an emotion) is constructed, it is not a piece of art but its imitation. 536. One of the most interesting questions for historians, theologians, scientists of ethics and many others, is why the Jewish people, the bearers of the religious message and mission, kept objectively generating materialistic philosophy and


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Islam Between East and West atheism throughout history. The explanation should be sought in the exclusive orientation toward this world, toward “the Promised Land” (hic et nunc), instead of the dream or myth of the “Kingdom of God,” without which religion and moral thought cannot exist. The myth of the “Heavenly Kingdom” was replaced by the myth of the Promised Land. These two great symbols— the Promised Land and the Heavenly Kingdom—stand opposed to each other and designate two worlds, two directions, two human destinies on Earth. At the same time, the suffering of the Jewish people through history has been a constant source of disappointment in God and moral laws. From that disappointment, the spirit of doubt and rebellion was born. That spirit accompanied the Jewish people through history and was the consequence of unrealized (and unrealistic) hopes and expectations about the “Heavenly Kingdom,” a reward for serving God. The main Jewish assumption that justice must prevail in this world—being wrong and remaining unfulfilled—generated the spirit of rebellion and doubt, which is only one step to atheism. Franz Kafka and his book A Reflection on Sin, Suffering, Hope and the Right Way are an expression of that spirit. You could study Kafka for ages, but you will still remain in a dilemma about him being a believer or an atheist. After all, Kafka himself offered the best answer in his famous sentence: “God does exist, but He is mean.” Obviously, that is not atheism, but it is not religion either. The Austrian Marxist philosopher Günter Anders called Kafka a “shy atheist” (in his work “Kafka—pro et contra,” Munich, 1951). Kafka reversed Jesus’ words: “The door will open to he who knocks at it,” into: “He who seeks will not find.” “Kafka did not know which world or which heaven he should belong to,” says Anders, describing in general terms the internal dilemma of all Jews. Jewish atheism is strange: It does not deny God, but refuses to recognize and celebrate Him. Kafka was considered equally by atheists, mystics and existentialists as one of them. Every religion believes that this world is not a reward but a temptation. That is not the way the Jews feel, and that is their atheism. Jews were disappointed in Jesus Christ for that same reason. His history of sufferings is in total contrast to the Jewish hopes and expectations and represents a striking denial of all of their assumptions on happiness for righteous men in this world. Here we can notice that Islam is a religion “turned toward this world” as well, which is true, yet Islam did not get lost or forgetful while caring about this world. Its strongest and most dramatic message is devotion. The idea of the Kingdom of God is strongly emphasized and maintained. 544. All the classical culture of China, almost 2,000 years old, with undisputed accomplishments in the domains of philosophy, religion, literature, religion, lyrics, drama, narrative prose, is expressed by oral tradition. China used to have a highly developed culture in a more distant past, while its population was almost 100 percent illiterate. Only limited circles in the privileged castes could read and write: emperors, court dignitaries, mandarins and higher government officials. They made up less than 1 percent of the overall Chinese population. The Chinese alphabet consists of almost 44,000 ideographs, 4,000 of which are regularly used, but are still very complex. The alphabet is a necessary evil in a culture, but it is a necessary condition for every civilization. However, there is a curious fact that deserves to be mentioned: the Chinese Encyclopedia Ku-kin-Tu-Tsi-Cheng includes over 2,000 volumes. It is an arranged collection of tradition that passed from generation to generation since ancient times. The Chinese book Shi -King, meaning “Book of Poems,” represents one of the most valuable collections of poems in world literature. It consists of 305 rhymed poems written between 1500 and 1600 B.C. Kong Fu Tse (Confucius) and Laotse were contemporaries. While Confucius was a pragmatic and socially active person, Lao-tse preferred isolation


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Islam Between East and West and meditation. The two personify two opposite aspects of the Chinese spirit. Lao-tse was also atypical prophet of culture: We shall get to know the world, Without going out through the door, We shall discover the meaning of the sky, Without looking through the window, Who goes furthest will know the least. The verses are a good example of looking inward, toward the soul, instead of outward, toward the world. There is a phenomenon in Chinese poetry that is characterized as the incompleteness of Chinese poems. An anonymous Chinese (folk) poet makes a sketch or draws a picture, deliberately incomplete, aiming toward the involvement of his audience. He lets them use their imagination to finish the picture and make the experience intimately theirs; he makes them create instead of listen or read passively, and become poets themselves. The superiority of that illiterate culture was something amazing. Every conqueror of the area would forget his own and adopt Chinese customs and views. Chinese culture was not influenced by any other culture, but it exercised a significant influence upon others. This influence is especially visible in Japan, which, unlike China, developed its civilization. The Japanese did not have their own philosophy or religion. Shintoism is of Chinese origin. The relationship between China and Japan reminds one of the relationship between Athens and Rome in Ancient times, or between Europe and America in the New Age. Japan is Asian America, and this analogy is sometimes almost complete. 550. Basho (who lived at the beginning of the seventeenth century) is considered by many as the greatest Japanese poet of all times: he belonged to the Zen sect, which has maintained the true, genuine spirit of Buddhism the longest. He insisted on completely frank and sincere expression of feelings. A poet must not think about the effect or the impact his poems might have upon others. In his traveling diary, Saga-Nikki, he wrote: “I am alone and I am writing for my own pleasure.” 551. The listener or the viewer “participates” in creating of a work of art without being aware of it. Our enjoyment in music is actually participating. We “sing” with our interior voice and we “listen” with our interior ear to a composition that was not made by us. Without this active attitude, the work of art remains unnoticed, non-existing. 560. There is an important point of contact between art and existentialism. Existentialism, like art, deals with the concrete, individual, specific human being, specific thing or specific situation. Existential philosophic problems are solved by artistic means. Existentialism is an attempt to perceive the world in an artistic manner. Existentialism is in eternal opposition to society, which is another point of contact with art. 566. Controversies about music: H. Helmholz believed that the auditory effect of music is due to the physiology of the hearing organ and acoustics— which is wrong. Similarly, Sietman explains “similarity between the tone movement and


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Islam Between East and West the movement in a physical organism” (materialistic explanation), while Riemann states the contrary: “It arises as a live feeling in the composer’s spirit and immediately turns into a live feeling and spiritual experience for the listener.” Beethoven wrote his Missa Solemnis and other symphonies when he was totally deaf; professional musicians can understand and enjoy a musical work by reading it, using their eyes instead of ears, a result of using their spirit. “If the composer and the listener of a musical composition belong to the same social class, it will naturally contribute to the liking,” says Ivan Focht, expressing his Marxist view of the issue, which seems to be rather forced. Most of musicians deny, in principle, any possibility of a scientific interpretation or analysis of music. 581. Art interprets the world—if it does at all—by means of details. Science does it in a completely different way: by generalizing, by reducing everything that exists to one unit. Heisenberg’ s theory of the unique field represents the ultimate scientific truth, its ultimate thesis: everything that exists can be reduced to one unit. So science put its final abstraction covering the entire world against the concrete nature of the world of art. 613. Man has an intrinsic resistance against an exclusively rational interpretation of the world. He also has an innate inclination to the secret and the irrational. 614. Scientists’ inconsistency: Pavlov, author of the theory of conditional reflex, went to church every Sunday. There is nothing so irreligious as the premises of the theory of conditional reflex. 619. Nietzsche’s slogan “God is dead” had to be followed—by inexorable logic—by Michel Foucault’ s “Man is dead.” If there is no God, there can be no man either— they are interrelated. 634. Expansion of social democracy in Europe and (in particular) in South America: socialists came to power in Greece, Spain and France. In Latin America, socialists are in power in the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Costa Rica, and Peru. There are strong trends toward social democracy in Brazil, Argentina, Panama and Mexico. As a matter of fact, there are developments toward the center, with alternate, but not significant, shifts to the right or to the left. In politically mature societies, the extreme (radical) political solutions remain on the margins. 669. About hygiene: St. Ambrose never took a bath in his life, in order not to succumb to the “pleasure of touching his own body,” while the “odor” of Louis XIV’s feet could be smelled at a distance of several meters. Leonardo da Vinci went to bed with his boots on and, since he did not like to take them off, he considered them “his second skin.” Isabel of Aragon maintained that “one should take a bath upon birth and before the wedding.” Given this information, the magazine Europeo (from 1985) concluded: “So it is obvious that in Central and Southern Europe there was not a strong tradition of personal hygiene. The Catholic preaching about shame and carnal sin was much closer to those inhabitants of Europe than the Roman baths from pagan times.” Medical historians found out that the drastic reduction of the rate of death was not due to new drugs, but primarily to higher levels of hygiene. Typhus was curbed at the beginning of the twentieth century, long before the discovery of the corresponding medicine.


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Islam Between East and West It was similar with tuberculosis, where the death rate had been significantly reduced before a vaccine was invented, thanks to progress in hygiene. 671. Celibacy was introduced only by the decision of the Lateran Council held in 1139. It is not a religious dogma but a disciplinary measure, yet complying fully with the spirit of Christianity. The explanation offered by the Lateran Council says that marriage was forbidden to priests “in order for purity, which is God’s will, to be spread among priests and religious orders.” 680. Through a careful study of the nature of nudism and naturalism we could discover some religious roots. Some sects advocate and practice nudity referring to the “return to Adam’s innocence” or associating it with life in Paradise before the famous “fall.” However, after the “fall” everything changed, so the comparison makes no sense. 693. In Europe, and in the West in general, “the right of the victim” was advocated by the rightists, while the leftists, as a rule, tried to excuse the defendant. For almost two centuries, from the rationalists and on, the victim of the crime was more or less forgotten. An absurd situation was created: Peaceful citizens were threatened and criminals were defended by all. It became fashionable to invent theories that explained crimes and excused criminals. This was a reaction to the current criminal codes that remained extremely cruel for centuries. The dilemma was about the genuine, even metaphysical issue of man’s responsibility (or irresponsibility) for his actions. The fact that the victim was forgotten had to do with the theories of man that relied on or originated from Darwin. Darwinian man has no freedom, he is the result and victim of circumstances. Religion, which stated that man has a soul, that is, freedom, was stricter and demanded his responsibility. Atheism and religion became divided on this issue: Atheism took the criminal’s side, religion took the side of the victim. 705. The English Parliament restricted the power of the monarch, but did not abolish the monarchy. The French Parliament believed that it could insure itself against the monarchy only by destroying it. These were two different spirits. 706. All we know about the ancient Egyptians shows that they were obsessed by thoughts on the purpose of life and on the meaning of death. Nothing has changed in the last five thousand years. 707. The pituitary gland, which is considered the most important gland in the human body, weighs only half a gram and has the dimensions of about 5 X 13mm. That gland, together with the hypothalamus, has the function of a control unit—or a central switch—that regulates growth, the function of the thyroid gland, adrenal glands and sexual glands, as well as the production of milk and the quantity of water in body tissues. One thing is certain: such a complicated and perfect “device” was not created by chance. 708. “The pain of the world” belongs to culture, not to civilization. Civilization does not know about such “pain.” 709. Science knows about evolution and has its history. Aristotle’s physics seem naive to us. However, it is quite contrary with Aristotle’s Metaphysics. Unlike his physics, it remains equally interesting nowadays; the main concepts of metaphysics were described and explained for the first time in Aristotle’s Metaphysics.


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Islam Between East and West 711. In the book Crime and Human Nature, written by two Harvard professors, James K. Nilson and Richard Hernstein, criminal behavior is explained by the factors of the make-up of the body (which reminds us very much of Lombrose). According to the authors, criminals are most often young men with a strong muscular build, with an intelligence quotient below average, of impulsive nature, focused on the “now,” which makes it more difficult for them to think about the future and consequences. The authors state that the research they carried out leaves no doubt that factors of bodily constitution are directly connected with criminal behavior. 725. Malarmé’s famous Sonnet on X (middle nineteenth century) has 14 verses that remained completely unintelligible to his contemporaries as well as for his modern readers. The poem is full of puzzling elements and represents the very top of his “hermetic phase.” 751. A computer can know a lot, it can be proficient in many skills, but a computer is stupid. Computers of the so-called fifth generation represent the famous artificial intelligence, of which one was to be completed in the Laboratory of Artificial Intelligence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1987. But, even if the human mind could be copied (which competent experts doubt), one thing is for sure: Computers will never be able to, even theoretically, write poetry. 784. According to Kierkegaard, death is the fruit of freedom. Death was born from Lucifer’s rebellion. In Byron’s drama Cain, Cain wonders about his parents’ guilt and their expulsion from Paradise, expulsion resulting in the loss of eternal life. Innocence is the state that existed before the knowledge of possibility of choice, that is, of freedom. Along with freedom come Rebellion, Guilt and Death. 787. Every utopia is totalitarian by its definition. Besides external relationships, it always includes planning of the human psyche. 801. The asocial character of art is not a “certain negation of a certain society,” as suggested by Adorno (in his book The Social in Art). Every form of art in every society is asocial in a certain way. 821. Even the ancient Greeks required two things: knowledge and skill. They expressed it very picturesquely in their requirement for man to be able to “write and swim.” 823. Artists create art when they “make” their works, not when they philosophize (theorize) about them. Their potential “explanation” of their own art usually makes the understanding of their works more difficult. Balzac’s preface to his Human Comedy is a good example of this. DUrer could be another example. In his book on painting, he defined art as a sum of everything that is based on “measure, number and weight.” This was a definition of physics, not of art. He should rather have said nothing. 848. Mahabharata, the 3,000-year-old ancient Indian poem of 100,000 verses, in which all the wisdom of a civilization is condensed, is the greatest poetic creation of human kind. The poem describes the great dream of Vyasya’s about the destiny of the world. His companion is a boy who asks questions on life and the world. These childish questions are as equally “wise” as the answers of the wise hermit Vyasya, the hypothetical author of Mahabharata.


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Islam Between East and West 852. Aristotle describes the task of philosophy like this: “What was always asked and will always be asked and disputed, namely: what is being, or what is existence?” Aristotle in his Metaphysics defines this question, the book thought by some as the cornerstone of philosophy. Heidegger believes that what Plato and Aristotle achieved “was maintained in different forms in philosophy.” Some call Aristotle’s Metaphysics the “book of books,” the “decisive moment of all of West European history” (Tomislav Ladan, translator of Metaphysics into SerboCroatian). 856. The metaphor is basically a comparison. The question is whether the computer, as perfect as it can be, will ever be able to think metaphorically. How could it distinguish between the literal and metaphoric meaning of a word? 896. In Tonio Kroger, Thomas Mann deals with the problem that permeates his entire work: the attitude of art (and artists) toward normal life, or the attitude of beauty toward the laws and requirements of a “normal civil society.” The artist does not live, he reasons about living. Art is an adventure of spirit that is in discord with existence, and the artist is an unhappy, alienated man, burdened with the curse of knowledge. 908. We cannot talk about Darwinian man. His man is nothing but an intelligent animal. We could even assert that Darwin does not speak about man, as his creature is not torn apart by aspirations or doubts. It is made all in one piece. It will achieve utopia and live in it like a fish in water—if that were possible, of course. 911. In the Catholic Church of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries there were some ideas to proclaim Plato a Saint. 932. Fromm said somewhere that man of the Middle Ages could be considered happy. 938. Euthanasia—”murder out of mercy”—has not been legalized in any country of the world. That happened once only—Hitler’s laws on killing invalids, exhausted elderly people and debilitated children. According to the evidence presented at the Nuremberg Trials (1946—1947), 275,000 people were killed under those laws (Intervju, 31 January 1986). 945. To the moral norms of Judaism, Christianity opposed the moral character of Jesus Christ, to the dead morality—living morality, to laws—life, to rules— personality. 967. As for the Islamic understanding of man, we can speak of what that conception is or is not about. Here is one example of the perception of man by Albert Camus that is contrary to Islam: “No ingenious work has ever been created out of hatred or disdain. That is why the artist, at the end of his journey, forgives and does not condemn. He is the eternal defender of the living man just because he is living. He advocates love for his neighbor, but not love from a distance that degrades today’s humanism to the catechism of judiciary. On the contrary, a great deed (work of art) confuses all the judges. By it, the artist at the same time pays tribute to the noble human character and bows before the worst criminal.” So Camus reasoned and idealized. It is essentially the Christian way, no matter whether Camus was aware of it or not: that love for a neighbor, the rejection of


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Islam Between East and West the court and law (“catechism of judiciary”) and, in particular, “bowing before the worst criminal.” Had Camus really known what “the worst criminal” is like—as Allah knows it—he would not have written those words. Islamic respect for man and his dignity is not expressed by love and forgiveness in the first place, but by the principle of human responsibility. Man is responsible, and the punishment for a crime incorporates both, the human rights and human dignity of every man, including the criminal. 970. Even Adorno recognized the connectedness of art to religion (superstition, as he put it). He designated it as “a vice of art,” because art thus keeps aspiring to return to the myth from which it came. 971. Even now, we get equally excited about reading the Epic of Gilgamesh, which has remained “contemporaneous” after 4,000 years. 981. A computer of the so-called fifth generation (on which the Japanese are working) will be able to talk, understand language and pictures, to learn, associate, conclude, decide and behave the way we believed only men could do. This is what the developers insist. It will be an “intelligent machine.” Some, however, maintain that it is impossible. Their arguments: thinking requires creativity, and no machine can be creative. Intelligence requires one type of experience that can be acquired only through interaction in the real world with similar people. Intelligence requires autonomy, and no machine can be autonomous. Even when it has accomplished a task, the machine will not be aware of it, and awareness is an important component of intelligence. Some believe that it is possible to offer mathematical proof that a machine cannot be intelligent. Yet, intelligence is not the “most human” quality of man. It is a part of a man’s soul, of his humanity. Intelligence was not what was given to man by God’s touch (Michelangelo). It is not the ruh (“He created the soul and made it capable of doing good and evil”—Qur’an). We are witnessing the human endeavor to create artificial intelligence—intelligent machines, machines that think. People who are experts state that such an incredible thing is possible. In any case, there is no essential difference between a classical machine and a computer. 1011. The simple belief in responsibility after death—that people will be held accountable for their deeds, for the way they exercised their freedom—that thought to me today seems to be the only real idea, the only thought that gives sense to this world. All the facts of physics—Newton’s or Einstein’ s—all the knowledge of astronomy, biology and psychology, can leave us indifferent. Only the idea of accountability is exciting and true. There are two separate orders of things: Kepler’s laws on the one hand, and the truth of Shakespeare’s tragedy on the other. 1021. The difference between a painted portrait and a photo: the painting shows how one person is different from another, photographs show how similar we are. A photo is a portrait without a soul. 1033. The English writer Doris Lessing describes in her novel Diary of Jane Romers (published under a pseudonym) the loneliness and isolation of elderly people in civilized countries, especially in Europe and America. In an interview about the novel she said: “It is characteristic in the rich Western societies that the elderly are left on their own. Much is done to keep them alive, but it is not life.” Lessing thinks that this is typical behavior of Western society. “In Africa, where I grew up, elderly people are never sent away from their homes, nor would


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Islam Between East and West they accept to be put in nursing centers where they can do nothing but wait for death. I met many Indians and Chinese who were very upset about the way the elderly are treated in Europe.” 1036. Could it be said that the Chinese culture “has been living” uninterruptedly for 4,000 years? 1046. What is culture if not an attempt to tame the animal called man? 1055. Even the ancient Arabs stated that philosophy is extended Aristotelianism. That is true for any kind of philosophy. 1057. A poet from Muslim Spain (Abul Walid al Waqqasi from Toledo, 1107— 1195) says in one of his poems that men have only two sciences: one that is real, whose borders they can never reach, and one that is false, which is useless. Some believe that by these two sciences Waqqasi meant metaphysics and logic. 1061. The Greek Galen (129—199) exposed the famous theory on four organic liquids that are present in all organisms: blood, mucus, gall and black gall, while in the inorganic world there are four basic elements: air, water, fire and earth. According to Aristotle, there is interdependence between the four organic elements (liquids) and the four inorganic elements. How deep Aristotle’s metaphysics and how naïve his physics! 1062. As early as in the sixth century B.C., Alkmeon and later on, Plato and Galen, later, believed that the brain was the center of spiritual life and thought. The tradition that gives that role to the heart is even older: this view was recorded on Ebers’ papyrus (1550 B.C.) by Egyptian doctors and adopted later on by Aristotle, Ibn Sina and Ibn Tufayl. 1075. Science progresses if it is supported by society. This is the opposite with art. Society’s support smothers it. The Dutch painter Dibets complains about the very favorable situation of art in the Netherlands. “If you want to be an artist, the state will fully support you. It is too easy to survive, especially in the first years that are usually the most difficult for a real artist. This sounds very nice but, on the other hand, it brings about problems. The best artists do not want to accept such support and often leave the country, while the favors provided by the government attract scores of lousy artists. Serious artists ‘suffer’ most, because the government treats them as equally as the bad ones. In the Netherlands it is much more difficult to be successful than in other countries where one has to be very good just to survive” (in an interview for NIN, 20 April 1986). 1079. The dual nature of man has been always symbolized in popular understanding by two organs: the heart and the brain. The heart will become the symbol (and bearer) of spiritual life, and the brain of the psychical. The soul and the psyche are not from the same world, like the heart and mind were not so in primal human conscience. When the primitive wanted to point out his deepest inner feeling, faith, devotion, love, life, intention, soul, he pointed at his chest, not his head. The Qur’an says: “He knows what is in your chest.” 1091. Which is the way for the earth to reconcile with heaven? 1110. There is also the contrast between “homo sapiens” and “homo ludens,” since man is both of them, and it is being both that makes him man.


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Islam Between East and West 1154. Reading Hermann Hesse, I noticed that he was absorbed in the same thoughts as myself, except that he was better at expressing them. The problem of polarity or “the middle-of-the-road” is a constant topic of Hesse, and he varies it in many ways and forms. Here is one of those situations (Plinio addresses Knecht, trying to define their relationship): “You are on the side of privileged upbringing, I’m on the side of natural life. In our struggle you have learnt to trace the dangers of natural life and to target them: your duty is to show that natural, naïve life without spiritual upbringing must end up in muck and become reduced to the animal or something even worse. I, on the other had, have to keep remembering how fruitless life is if oriented solely to the spirit. Alright, everybody has to defend that of which the primacy he believes in is: you the spirit, I the nature.” Knecht replied: “We should not escape an active life for the contemplative, nor the other way around, but we should alternate between them, to take part in both and feel at home in both.” One critic noticed the psychological basis and structure of Knecht’s personality is conceived and established as “uninterruptedly pulsing polarity” (Zoran Gluscevic, An Epilogue to Herman Hesse ‘s Essays). This principal problem in Islam (polarity of everything that exists and necessity of synthesis) was made the principal topic of Hesse in his literature. In his last great work, The Glass Bead Game, on which he worked ten years (1933—1943), he sharpens this issue to the extreme. The main character of the novel, Knecht, develops gradually from a one-sided person into a complex (and contradictory) personality who learns and adopts from his adversaries the elements that fit into the entirety of polarity. In the novel there are a number of crystal-clear views that look like definitions of what we are talking about: “But, you should never forget what I told you so often: it is our commitment to clearly recognize the opposites, first as the opposites, and then as the two poles of one single unity.” Or: “Remember, man can be a strict logician or grammarian, but still full of imagination and music. He can be a musician or a player at gold beads, but yet fully devoted to law and order.” In reconciliation of the opposites, what Knecht is aiming at is the supreme psycho-technique of life. In the personality of Knecht, Hesse put two tendencies that are directed against each other. This is how Hesse himself formulated these two tendencies: “Two principal tendencies, or poles of his entire life, his Yin and Yang, were, on the one hand, the tendency toward preservation, fidelity, unselfish service to hierarchy and, on the other, toward ‘waking up,’ advancing, the reaching and accepting of reality. . . . He served a spiritual community whose strength and purposefulness he admired, but he saw a danger in its tendency to see purpose in itself, to forget about its task and cooperation with the entire country and the world and to finally perish in a great separation from the entirety of life, a separation that gets increasingly condemned to fruitlessness.” In a new encounter with Plinius Designori, after a long period of separation, Knecht and Plinius renew their friendship and through conversation they remove some earlier misunderstandings. But a strange thing happens: a transformation and exchange of opinions. Plinius, who used to be a passionate advocate of the world, finds himself in a crisis and feels the need for something he does not have—for Kastalia, while Josef Knecht, on the contrary, is about to embark upon the “other” world from which Plinius is seeking help and spiritual supplement from Kastilia. In the clash of these opposing views, or even worlds, Hesse shows the fruitfulness of synthesis and the great potential it entails. Without an opposite yet complementary view, no single view makes sense for itself. Exactly as in the Qur’an. For Hesse, an expression of that dualism is also the cultural polarity between East and West, where “in spite of their equality, there is obvious


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Islam Between East and West supremacy on the part of the East” (Z. Gluscevic). Is this not a way to overcome the syndrome of Eurocentrism and an incentive to the highest possible form of tolerance? 1150. Each of the characters in Hesse’s Steppenwoif: Biography of the Soul represents one of the conflicts of the author with himself. The entire literary work of H. Hesse is autobiographic. Hesse himself called his works “a biography of the soul.” 1199. (Renaissance culture without civilization). This can be concluded on the basis of humanist writings of that time, which are witness of the feelings of strength and dignity, as well as of insecurity and desperation. 1201. Mirce Eliade tried to discover the sacred in the profane. Science does the opposite: It looks for the profane in the sacred. All of Eliade’ s opus is marked by the idea of the eternal return to the beginning, and the beginning is sacred. In the story entitled “With the Gypsies,” Garsilesku (the main character) realizes that he did not spend just a few hours with them, as he believed, but twelve years. In his play Adio, there are two separate courses of time for the audience and the actors, who perform behind a closed curtain 1207. The principal characteristic of the Reformation (and Luther’s teachings): man achieved independence in religious issues. Luther deprived the Church of its authority and transferred it to the individual. This contributed significantly to the development of political and spiritual freedom. But, what may seem rather incompatible with this is that Luther, in his works, stated that man’s nature is evil and vicious and that he can only be saved by God’s mercy. A similar seeming contradiction can be found in the Qur’an. Both man’s responsibility and God’s mercy are true. 1210. Calvinism also offers examples of some “contradictory” doctrines being very vital and constructive in real life. There is an obvious contradiction between Calvinist teaching on absolute predestination (fatalism) and the very expressed requirement of necessity of constant human efforts in the outer world. In that pronounced human endeavor, Max Weber identifies an important link between Calvinism and the spirit of capitalism, that is, its extraordinary dynamics in the early period. As for that contradiction, only theorists and analysts discovered it. People who practically accepted Calvinism and lived in it found no problems with these two contradictory requirements. How could this be explained? Only by the fact that life itself manifests a similar antonym that sets it apart from an ideal, a thought, that is from non-life. All analysts fail to offer an explanation to the tireless activity of the people who believed that everything had been predestinated even before birth and that, consequently, no effort could change anything. Calvinist doctrine prevailed as a predominant teaching in the period of early capitalism, which was one of the most active periods of human history. 1213. For E. Fromm, new religious doctrines (Protestantism and Calvinism) were “the response to psychological needs caused by the decline of the medieval social system and the beginnings of capitalism.” They were “to prepare Man for the role he was going to play in the new industrial system” (E. Fromm, Escape from Freedom, p. 105). For others, these doctrines were the response to moral deviation within the official Church. The former view is a good example of the materialistic, the latter of idealistic explanation of ideas and beliefs.


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Islam Between East and West 1219. Taoism—the oldest authentic Chinese religion. Principal teaching: there are two complementary forces, yin and yang, whose interaction and eternal balance maintain the harmony of the world. Jang Ling who lived in the second century B.C., is considered the founder of Taoism (tao = way). He was an alchemist (in a way, similar to Muslims, several centuries later). Lao-tse defined the basic premises of the religion (sixth century A.D.). It is interesting that Taoist monks laid the foundations for traditional Chinese medicine, exact sciences and astronomy (similar as in Islam); and, even today, Taoist temples are schools of Chinese fighting skills that, through Japan, developed into karate and judo. Yin and yang reflect the idea of contradiction in a unified world. All religious ceremonies in Taoism are -oriented towards establishing or maintaining harmony between these two principles. 1227. As poetry is older than prose, which is not very logical or expected, metaphysics preceded physics. If man had been “created” as thought by Darwin, this would be inexplicable. Darwinian man understands only physics; genuine man understands metaphysics. 1228. Violence as the absolute means is promoted in a series of Lenin’s works (with mind-boggling openness in his Sotchinenie). Totally bare violence stood inevitably at the opposite pole, against Christian love and compassion. It is all about principles. 1229. Some of Hitler’s thoughts in his Mein Kampf sound very Darwinian-like. “While Hitler and his bureaucracy enjoy their power over the German masses, those masses are being taught how to enjoy their power over other nations and how to use the will to rule the world as their driving force” (E. Fromm, Escape from Freedom, p. 203). Hitler justified his expansion by the explanation that the will for power was in the very root of the eternal laws of nature and that he only recognized and complied with those laws. Here, besides Darwinian, we discern some of Nietzsche’s sources of Nazism. This becomes even more obvious in Hitler’s speech on the German rule of the world, which should lead to “peace which is not supported by palm twigs of weeping pacifist mourners, but peace brought about by the victorious sword of a nation-master, put in the service of a higher culture” (Mein Kampf, p. 598). In the instinct for survival of species, Hitler sees “the prime cause for education of human communities” (ibid., p. 197). Hitler celebrates nature as “the cruel queen of all wisdom,” whose law of survival is “tied to the iron law of necessity and to the right of the best and fittest to prevail in this world” (ibid., p. 396). 1236. People are equal, but not identical. In this context, equality and identity are two different categories. To God, we are equal, in nature, we are identical. We are as equal as God’s creatures, which means that we have equal value as human beings and that every individual has a priceless value. If it were possible for us to be identical, we could be so only as a product of nature, in what makes us natural beings, in what we get from nature. As souls (individuals) we are equal, as bodies we are (or could be) identical. 1238. The law is not a weapon for the strong, but for the weak. The strong do not need law. Force, by its nature, tends to be unlimited. Let us recall Lenin’s definition of a proletariat dictatorship as “power, not limited by anything and relying upon violence. . . etc.” (Sotchinenie). E. Fromm states that history witnesses that “justice and truth are the most important weapons used by the helpless in their struggle for freedom and progress” (E.F. Escape from Freedom, p. 256).


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Islam Between East and West 1239. Reducing characters to contentment (or discontent) and connecting them to the prime erogenous zones (mouth and anus—oral and anal characters), Freud comes to the conclusion on man’s vicious nature and to the interpretation that all of man’s “idealistic” motives are actually very low. Marx applied similar ideas on history, so he concluded that, for instance, Protestantism was a response to the economic needs of developing capitalism, and so on. 1242. (Culture and history): Compare the relevance of Aristotle’s Physics and Poetics (or Metaphysics), or some of his judgments in these two domains, in order to comprehend the “historicity” of science and philosophy. The concepts from Aristotle’s Poetics remain “contemporaneous” even nowadays and are used in modern analysis of literary works. This is not the case with his Physics. 1256. Jesus and the Inquisitor in the Great Inquisitor (The Brothers Karamazov) can be understood only as archetypes. 1265. According to Hegel, the essence of art is more real than reality in its everyday sense because art is a meaningful and shaped reality. A historical “bringing” of mankind to its senses is achieved by means of art, religion and philosophy. 1268. A similar “Islamic” problem can be observed in the dispute over the rational or irrational nature of art, or in the contrast between logos and mythos in literature. Each of these tendencies, brought to extreme conclusions, leads to an absurd result. In the former, any sensible contents of art are lost, it becomes totally arbitrary, existing only for itself and its creator, unintelligible to others, and nonexistent. In the latter, art is lost because it is reduced to scientific and philosophical knowledge. Only the unity of these two principles, mythos and logos, can explain the real nature of art (like in architecture—the unity of construction techniques and style). That unity is seen in supreme works of art. It is about the way in which life itself begins and continues. Logos is the body and mythos is the soul of art (Aristotle: “Mythos is the main part and the soul of tragedy”). 1271. The famous pair of notions—the form and the contents—belong here as well. The form helps shapeless matter to be “something,” to be a thing. This example of a maxim from Aristotle finds the most obvious example in sculpture. Dichotomy: the form and the contents—are both members equally active, or is one of them passive (“passive member of dichotomy”)? 1277. It is not a coincidence that Leonid Timofeyev, a literary critic of Marxist orientation, believes in the omnipotence and universality of the word and thought: “Everything that is accessible to thought is accessible to the word; thought encompasses all domains and sides of life, which makes literature a universal art” (L. Timofeyev, Theory of Literature). 1284. Fairy tales prospered in the illiterate age of humankind. So did the epic. 1285. In the world of fairy tales the laws of causality do not apply. Milivoy Solar: “There is no difference between the real and the unreal in a fairy tale: miracles happen, but nobody is amazed, people move naturally in unnatural situations, they encounter fairies and witches, fight sorcerers and devils; dragons and dwarves live like men. Animals, plants and things talk to people without any problems” (M. Solar, Idea and Story).


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Islam Between East and West 1292. “In some periods art moves towards science, while sometimes science turns towards art,” says Arnold Hauser in his Social History of Art and Literature, I, p. 325. That is true, but these two phenomena will never become equal or merge. If it happens anyway, that will mean the disappearance of one of them— art or science, but more likely of art. The latest crisis of the novel (designated as “the death of the novel”) is essentially due to the modern novel getting closer to science. In the modern novel there is less narration, less mythos, but more education, science and philosophy. This is not a good sign. That is why the modern novel represents a decline compared to the classical novel, where the balance of elements that make up a novel existed. This scientific orientation appeared in the naturalist novels from the late nineteenth century—the so-called experimental novels, the most famous author of which was Emile Zola. 1293. In a simplistic approach, we could say that romanticist literature idealized man (man is more than man). Realistic authors saw in man all the good and the evil meant by the word (man), while naturalists viewed him as an animal (Zola: Man = Beast). The Moderna movement added the last level of degradation, lowering man to the level of a thing. From an angel in romanticism, man was reduced to a thing in the modern novel. That is why Solar was right concluding that Maupassant’ s and Zola’ s characters look much more human that those of Joyce and Beckett. 1294. The entire history is a part of what is called our destiny. By being what it is, including its presence in our conscience, history determines our relationship to everything that exists and defines indirectly our personal and social situation. 1298. Science itself cannot comprehend the meaning of life. By using its method of endless analysis, for every analysis is endless by definition, science is confronted with “nothing” in the end. All scientific novels, as well the modern novels with a thesis—the “semi-scientific novels” by Camus, Sartre or Hermann Broch confirm this clearly. They are a product of scientific consciousness or of a scientific approach and, in the end, they produce the awareness of absurdity. This is the only possible outcome. 1301. In order to be able to express all the facts about consciousness, and in particular to explain language as a means of expression, we would need a metalanguage. 1302. In the modern novel, often defined as “the novel of the flow of consciousness,” man or personality is not reflected as in a classical novel. Neither does it mirror consciousness, rather just that what is mirrored in consciousness. There, the world is a minor, but we do not get to know anything about the minor itself. 1303. Marxist dogmatism brings many things into shallow waters. For instance, hopelessness, absurdity and a fragmented approach in modern novels, all of which are a consequence of science being misplaced, for the Marxist Lukacs is a result of the wrong political orientation of writers (G. Lukacs in his study on Today’s Significance of Critical Realism). This is a very simplified and wrong explanation. 1307. Physical time is an eternal presence, it is not time, because from the point of view of physics, the universe is endless in both space and time. The physical universe can be imagined as existing only in eternity, that is, beyond time.


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Islam Between East and West 1311. The problem of time in the modern novel. In Kafka’s novels the action has neither a real beginning nor an ending, everything runs in a circle. In Joyce’s novel Finnegan ‘s Wake, all that is happening tends to be condensed in an instant, while in Faulkner’s Sound and Fury, time is in complete disarray. There is a parallel narration about what is happening now and what happened in the past. It sometimes seems to me that classical novels happen in Newton’s, and modern in Einstein’s world. In any case, the times do match. As to man being turned into a thing in modern novels, that happens in the relation between the cause and the consequence. As a matter of fact, the condition for man to be fit for the scientific analysis he is subject to in a modern novel is to be not a personality, but a thing. Only as a thing (not as a man) can he be a subject to the analysis he is exposed to in modern novels. 1315. Hauser wrote about Dostoyevsky’ s novels: “His novels take place on the eve of the Final Judgment. . . everything is waiting to be cleaned, calmed and rescued by a miracle—waiting for a solution that is not based on power and sharpness of spirit and dialectics of reason, but on denial of that power and on sacrificing the reason” (Hauser, Social History of Art and Literature II, p. 351). What does this human drama have to do with events described in a scientific novel or in a social-realistic “production” novel describing enthusiastic masses of people building a collective farm? 1319. With regard to amazement and admiration as the only genuine cognition of the world, we must note that in modern novels there is not a single trace of such feelings. They have been substituted by an analytic approach that divides reality into classes, layers and parts. The “spot-light technique” is a method used in a modern novel to highlight a detail, which is then endlessly dissected and analyzed, while the whole of the world remains unknown. God, love, death, guilt, responsibility, crime and punishment, all remain unnoticed. If possible to say, this is the atheism of the modern novel. 1336. The wife of Vitold Gombovic, a seriously ill man, used to say that his pains were alleviated to some extent only by talking about philosophy. For him, philosophy was a sort of therapy. 1341. A prerequisite for any ethics is freedom. A prerequisite for any natural science is a mechanism. How can the two sciences, whose premises exclude each other’s, exist at the same time? The only possible answer would be that two different worlds exist and that we inhabit them simultaneously. 1380. Miroslav Krleza said on one occasion that everything that is not individualized in art is “equal to zero” (in his Podravski motivi). 1384. For the preface to the book Islam Between East and West: I am not in a situation to write a long preface. I will only make some observations: I am concerned about the experts and their reading “line by line.” I expect that a reader who follows the vision, roughly sketched or just hinted in the book, will be able to discover more than a meticulous analyst. As a matter of fact, it is just an attempt to offer a new philosophy of Islam. I am perfectly aware that the attempt has remained incomplete and just insinuated, even incoherent in some places. As for its incoherence, that refers mainly to the inconsistency regarding categories. I am not sure if the reader will find it justifiable if I say that the inconsistency was conscious, sometimes even deliberate.


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Islam Between East and West For this is not a geometric drawing, but a quick painting in which, though a landscape is discerned, the paintbrush strokes are far from being mathematically perfect. I would be happy if my ideas could be clearly discerned at least. Finally, this is just a testimony brought in favor of one perception of the world. 1385. History is not “a process in which man became man,” as stated by Marxists. Man has no history. He was in the beginning what he is now and what he will be in the future. This is the difference between Darwin and Michelangelo. Darwin’s man is a result of a process, Michelangelo’s was created by God’s touch. 1386. Fasting is an exclusively human choice. Both, man and animal eat (feed themselves). Only man is capable of fasting. Fasting clearly draws the difference between man and animal. Eating (feeding) is done following an urge, a law of nature. Fasting is the highest expression of will, it is an act of freedom. This freedom, rather than any medical reason, is the greatest significance of fasting. 1387. Soul—psyche. The difference is not terminological, but essential. “The psyche is a scientific aggregate of features. The standards of health and illness, and not of purification or sin, apply.”The soul does not know what illness is, just as the psyche does not know what sin is. Explaining the meaning of T.S. Eliot’s drama Murder in the Cathedral, a critic noticed that the psyche as a means of motivation was omitted. “The psyche was omitted and replaced by soul,” he concluded (Radovan Marusic in the article The Problem of Christian Martyrdom). 1394. The idea of human accountability is the greatest and the most important of all ideas connected to the name of man. Its origin dates back to the Prologue in the heavens, consequently before history. The same could be said about human rights. 1425. Not to have the world is one thing, not to want to have it is another. Not to rule the world, and not to want to rule it. Not to know the world, and not to want to know it. The latter is a religion,, but that religion is not Islam. 1426. The two worlds of Herman Hesse (in the encounter of Plinius Designorio and Jozef Knecht): “Sometimes,” said Plinius with resignation, “it seems to me that we have not only two different ways of expression and two languages, each being translatable into the other just with insinuations, but to be completely and generally different beings who can never understand each other, who are actually men, real and of full value, you or we, or whether any of us is a man—I was always suspicious about that. There were times when I looked at you... like at something superior, with some respect, with a feeling of inferiority and envy, I saw- you like gods and supermen who were always cheerful, always playing and enjoying their own being, beyond the reach of any suffering. Sometimes, you seemed to be worth of envying, or of compassion, another time you deserved disdain, you eunuchs, kept artificially in your artificial childhood, childish and innocent in your world of games, passionless, clearly fenced, nicely cleaned world, where. . . any unfavorable excitement of the senses or thought is silenced or suffocated, where harmless and bloodless games are played all the time and where every sublime feeling, every real cause, every mutuality of hearts is controlled, suppressed and immediately neutralized. The instinctive life has been tamed by meditation, dangerous, reckless and seriously responsible undertakings, like economy, law, politics, have been left to others for generations. And, to avoid boredom, such a world reconciles with all these learned specializations, syllables


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Islam Between East and West and letters are counted, glass beads are played on and with, while outside, in the world sludge, crowded people live real lives and do real work.” Responding to this criticism, Knecht described his world as “a certain, nicely arranged world of clear forms and formulae, of pure abstractions and politeness.” Pointing at the night sky, partly covered by clouds, he says to Plinius: “Look at that landscape of clouds with their night ribbons. At first sight, one could think that the darkest parts are depths, but the next moment it becomes clear that the dark and soft parts are clouds, and that the universe and its depths begin only at the edges and fords of those mountains of clouds and sink into infinity, where stars stand solemnly, as the highest symbols of clarity and order for us, human beings. The depth of the world and of its secrets is not where the clouds and darkness are; the depth is in the clear and serene. Let me ask you something: before going to bed, look at those bays and straits with so many stars and do not dispel thoughts and dreams that might come to you” (Hesse, The Glass Bead Game). 1439. The Blessed Jerome (died 420) called Rome “the New Babylon” and “the courtesan in a purple robe.” 1440. The separation of the Christian clergy as an independent authority took place only in the third century but has remained, until present time, continually developing and becoming stronger. This is a sign that it was a natural process that suited the nature of Christianity and its mission in the world. “The Western clergy became a superior authority, the mediator between God and men; they took over the responsibility—-that later was turned into their exclusive right— of being the sole interpreter of God’s will and meaning” (P.S. Cohen, History of West-European Literature). Furthermore: “Basically, monastic orders came into existence together with Christianity. It could be said that in the first three centuries, the life of all Christians had a monastic character to a degree” (ibid., p. 18). 1442. The Gothic style is a full expression of the Christian perception of the world. A Gothic vault, so light and pointed, pulls the entire structure of the temple to the heights, towards the sky. Heine wrote:- “When we enter an old church, we hardly suspect the exotic meaning of its stony symbolism. . . . We feel the elevation of the spirit and the deadening of body.. . and our spirit rises towards the sky together with the huge vaults of the temple, separating itself painfully from the body which remains on the ground like heavy clothes. When we look at those Gothic churches from the outside, those huge edifices, so light, so translucent, so airy, we understand all the power of those times which managed to conquer even the stone and make it look as if inspired by the spirit of providence, so that the roughest material becomes an expression of Christian spiritualism.” 1445. Medieval knights—”the armed force in service of the non-armed truth” (Church). Knights were a military religious order. However, while monastic orders survived and became stronger, the military did not, as they were contrary to the spirit and nature of Christianity. They were an accidental and anomalous phenomenon in one of the stages of the history of the Church. This fact could not be changed by any ritual ceremonies, and armed formations of the Church were destined to disappear.


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Islam Between East and West 1457. Dante, the most Christian poet of the Middle Ages, did not place Popes into Paradise. In the eighth circle of hell we find Nicholas III and Boniface VIII. He punishes them because they were unscrupulous carriers of Christian ideals. 1459. From the artistic point of view, the second and the third part of the Divine Comedy, “Purgatory” and “Paradise,” are far behind hell. Satan’s kingdom in Milton’s Paradise Lost is also depicted with much more strength than Paradise and its inhabitants. The same could be said for literature in general. Does this not tell us something more about the relationships between life, art and the truth? 1463. Rising against the extremities of the medieval Catholic views and developing as a protest against them, Humanist literature went to the other extreme. It celebrated the body and ended up in extreme cynicism and debauchery. The writer Antonio Becadelle (Italy, fifteenth century) openly advocated debauchery. 1490. Milton wrote a treatise in which he defended divorce. The English “middle road,” Baconian dualism in the thought and work of John Milton: (1) In his treatise on divorce he refers to God’s will and the Holy Scripture and considers marriage a human institution; (2) at the same time, he defends the principle of authority and human reason; (3) in his argumentation he sometimes refers to theological postulates, while sometimes resorting to rationalist arguments. Milton is opposed to scholastic education and very much in favor of education covering nature and real life phenomena. However, the contents of his famous poem Paradise Lost describe the fight between Satan and God, imbued with deep religious inspiration. In the poem, the strict Puritanism and secular ideas of the Renaissance are intermingled—though seemingly incompatible; all in all, a typical English case. 1497. In -his theory of cognition, Locke had a strong and decisive influence upon Voltaire; however, what eventually happens: the English (Locke) believes in Revelations as the source of truth and does not see any contradiction in it, while the French (Voltaire) remains consistent. He acknowledges only one principle: the reason as the only source of all our knowledge. These are the two different spirits or approaches. 1510. (History and morality). Tacitus relates how he enjoyed staying with the wild Germans and lovingly describes their innocence, gentleness and simplicity. 1513. Materialism leads to determinism, they are the same in a sense. Diderot, the French materialistic thinker, remains consistent (which is not the case with many other materialists). Here are some of his ideas: There is no such thing as human freedom. All of man’s actions are predetermined. The notions natural and unnatural should be used instead of moral and immoral. Bad or good characteristics of a man do not depend on himself. Everybody is born with bad or good characteristics; every man inevitably succumbs to the general course of events that take some to glory and others to inevitable disgrace. Self-esteem, shame, remorse, they are all worthless and based on the ambition and stupidity of a human being who attributes to himself the merit or the blame for what is a consequence of the inevitable, and so on. Another Frenchman, Rousseau, takes a completely opposite standpoint and preaches the so-called “religion of heart.” In one episode in his Emile (Confessions of the Vicar of Savoy) we can read the following lines: “I see God in all His acts, I feel Him in myself, I see Him around


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Islam Between East and West myself.” Or: “The very fact that evil and injustice are triumphant in this world proves the immortality of the soul.” Rousseau takes the immediate man’s feelings as a witness to freedom. “No matter what philosophers say, I will never give up on the honor of thinking. It is not the word ‘freedom’ which is meaningless, but the word ‘inevitable.’ To assume an action as taken by a human being without his willful decision means to look for the action without a cause, which is nonsense. What is our moral feeling about? Do we not feel spontaneous admiration and respect for great works and noble characters?” Rousseau and Diderot—they represent opposites or two irreconcilable poles of the French and the human spirit in general. They stand opposed in everything—as a thesis and the antithesis. 1519. Aristotle set the three famous elements of the unity of drama: place, time and action. Aristotle’s principles were considered to be the “natural laws of tragedy” by many. There is no history. 1527. Respective “competencies” of religion and of science should not be mixed up. Religion provides the answer to the question on the purpose of living, while science studies life and nature as phenomena. Neither science can answer the question regarding the purpose of living, nor can religion define the laws of nature. Science that pretends to offer absolute knowledge ends up in denial and nihilism. Let us remember the introductory monologue in Faust. 1528. Goethe’s Faust is about the duality of human nature. “I am the face of a deity,” he shouted at first, but concluded later on: “I am a worm crawling in the dust.” Obviously, he is both. 1550. Following the flight of an eagle disappearing in the boundless distance, Manfred (as a matter of fact, Byron) says: “We are a union of dust and deity, neither meant to fly nor to creep; we struggle with our dual nature all our life.” 1559. Two pieces of Kant’s criticism: Instead of striving after the discovery of the original cause of phenomena, science limits itself to explanations of what is happening before its eyes. It ceases to deal with the question why something is happening and limits itself to description and, if possible, explanation of how it is happening. This is physics, not metaphysics. 1562. In his work, The Spirit of Christianity, Chateaubriand (1768—1848), a French romantic poet, proves that Christianity is “the most poetic religion.” He underlines the huge impetus that Christianity gave to poetry and to art in general. It is true that art was and is a great argument of Christianity. While the atheist civilization built a diversified and dynamic world, Christianity built an equally rich inner-world. However, these are two completely different worlds, two lives and two treasures. They do not prove each other. 1591. The greatest representatives of the realist and social novel in England, Dickens and Thackeray, who mercilessly attacked the rich and whipped the vices of the English aristocracy and high capitalist classes, remained moralists rather than social revolutionaries. They did not ask for a change of social order but for a change of people. Today, more than a century after their famous books were published, we can ask ourselves if they were right about the method. Looking back at all that happened in those hundred years, at all the dramatic attempts and their results, and in particular taking into account the real situation in modern England and Russia, we could say that history has confirmed the rightness of the so-called middle road.


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Islam Between East and West 1603. There is more than one evolution. There are cosmological, geological, biological and sociological evolutions. The scientists of evolution say so. When I think about man, religion and art, I do not see any of those evolutions. 1626. Kant took the middle position between the empiricists and the rationalists. He believed that our notions could apply only to empirical phenomena, while at the same time he considered that a priori thinking is characteristic of our reason. These are a priori functions of our conscience, that is, our particular constitutional ability to recognize all impressions in specific forms. Their competence is limited to empirical objects. However, the logical notions, which are the only framework within which we must (and can) think, existed before the experience (a priori). By this, Kant did not deny any world existing above and beyond nature, but he did deny the possibility of its, cognition. Later on, philosophy went back to pre-Kant metaphysics (Fichte, Schelling and others). A. Hegel: “Absolute reason, in order to get to know itself, takes nature as something else, separated from itself. In that way, nature is its ‘other being,’ its relative opposite. That what exists as the object of a thought is conceivable and we cannot know anything else but what is conceivable. Cognition is possible only on the basis of equality or coincidence between who thinks and what is thought about (the subject and the object). Consequently, being and thinking is the same,” concluded Hegel. 1626a. An artist (painter) said: “What matters is not that what a creator thinks he knows, but that what he does not know. If it happened that one day he comprehended what he did not know, he could leave his easel or chisel, for it would be the end of creating.” 1638. According to Zola, the writer has to stick to the truth. Of course, Zola meant the scientific truth. “What would we say about a poet who maintained that the sun orbits around the earth, though science discovered that the earth orbits around the sun,” explains Zola (Experimental Novel, p. 142). And I could ask: What would be left of poetry if from it we eliminated everything that is contradictory to scientific views? What kind of a poem would it be if it spoke about the moon as a cold satellite, where freezing and wasteland prevail, which keeps orbiting the earth without any visible reason? 1640. Critics used to object Zola stating that he was not good at depicting positive characters. When he tried to (in his Dreams), it resulted in a forced drama. Zola is good at writing about (painting) “the eternal animal” in human nature. 1641. The history of the European culture is a story of the Western thought that kept swinging, like a pendulum, from one extreme to the other. For example, only in the nineteenth century we witnessed both the end of classicism and the victory of romanticism. That victory, however, was quite temporary. The European spirit soon returned to realism and, seeking its extremities, reached the naturalism of Zola and Hauptman. In the 1 880s, however, naturalism was in crisis. The Western thought turned to new extremes: Nietzsche and symbolism entered the scene. Naturalism lasted very briefly: Zola, its most important representative, witnessed its beginning as well as its end. The more extreme a thought is, the stronger its “flash” gets and the shorter its life is. The naturalist cult of the masses replaced the aristocracy of personality, while the so-called scientific method in literature was rejected in favor of fantasy and “poetic license,” etc. Sometimes I think that this pendulum is the fate, or maybe the mission, of the West.


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Islam Between East and West 1643a. The internal drama in Maeterlinck’ s play Intruse. Behind unimportant events and talk, a drama is developing: everybody feels the presence of death, everybody thinks of it and keeps silent about it. The real drama is not seen, it exists in looks, in the silence, in the fear everybody feels but nobody shows. Death is the main character of the play, but the main character remains invisible while at the same time occupying all the space on the stage and the souls of all the actors. As a matter of fact, it is about showing (or hinting at) the unspeakable in the spoken and the invisible in the visible. 1667. Describing the merciless fight for survival, Darwin showed us nature in its heartless greatness: “So, the highest phenomenon that we can imagine, the creation of the highest forms of life, originates directly from that eternal fight, from hunger and death.” What Darwin is telling us and what Christ is telling us are two hopelessly contradictory statements. Darwin showed the interdependence of living and dying, and in particular the function of death in the general progress of life. Death, which produces only the darkest thoughts in any human being, according to Darwin, is a precondition to the continuous improvement of the entire organic world and of all the beauty of that world that we admire. If there were an Anti-Christ, it would be Darwin. For him, the law of egoism is the highest law of nature. That law is not only the right, but also the duty of an individual. “Darwin’s theory of evolution brought about such a turn in human perceptions of the world and life, and no other great discovery that preceded it could be compared to it” (Cohen, History of Western European Literature III, p. 38). 1694. The incentive repeated in many places in the Qur’an to “contemplate” (the Qur’an, 2/164, 6/95—99, 21/33, 22/45—46, 26/7, 50/6—11, 56/63—71, 88/17— 20, etc.) cannot be interpreted otherwise but as a firm conviction (and promise) that the testimony of the senses and reason will not suppress the soul’s belief, and that, consequently, at one point, at some horizon, science based on observation and religion based on revelation are no longer conflicting and that they can even support each other. That horizon is what I call the horizon of Islam. 1696. For Maeterlinck, the task of poetry is to introduce us into a higher world— inaccessible to reason—where we can “eavesdrop on the voiceless talk of souls.” “The most sublime means of communication among men, the most secure way to the human soul is—silence.” 1703. According to Maeterlinck, life is not in action, but in the soul, it is not external, but internal. He illustrates this with a strange example: He asserts that Hamlet, as an artistic character, is superior to Othello because he does not act, “he has time to live.” The purpose of the theater is to reach the inner sense of a phenomenon. Maeterlinck introduced the theory of the “silent dialogue” that takes place simultaneously with a loud one. The silent dialogue is essential as it is the soul’s speech which actually defines events. Maeterlinck’ s plays (Tentasile ‘s Death, The Blind, The Unwanted, Pelleas and Melisande) contain that double course; two dramas that happen simultaneously without having much to do with one another. The first one is the outer drama, usually poor in contents and action, while the other is the drama of soul, poor in language but full of suggestive silence and guessing. In the outer drama everything is usually insecure, hesitating and contradictory, while in the drama of soul, everything is sure, consistent, reliable and correct. That is Maeterlinck’s point of view.


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Islam Between East and West 1707. If there is a message in symbolic poetry, it reads: Our senses and our positive thinking, based on experience and observation, offer false, deceitful cognition of the world. The unconscious activity of the soul, on the contrary, represents the only genuine source of knowledge. 1708. The most important things in life remain unsaid. Language is incapable of expressing them. I believe that this is the sense of the Christian “sacred secret.” 1708a. The statement that morality is useful is very close to the statement that morality is a derivative of our interests (even if they were not individual, but general, not accidental, but permanent), which is a denial of morality. Morality as an autonomous value for itself, independent from interests and benefits, can be only based on the principle of duty, which is of religion. 1713. Big cities: Zola’ s Nana feels some “sweet poison in the air” and it seems to her that Paris bridges emits some “flaming stream that slithers down her thighs.” 1737. American paleontologist, Dr. Stephen Jay Gould, the author of the famous book The Mismeasure of Man, asserts that there is a major misconception about Darwin: Namely, Darwin never stated that evolution meant necessarily progress, he even avoided the word evolution. All that Darwin did state was that the organism adapts itself, that is, that changes in the natural environment cause changes in the organism. That is the so-called theory of local adaptation. “The idea that evolution represents a general progress, that it is the advancement from ameba to human being, is nothing but a cultural prejudice,” says Gould. 1738. Regarding evolution, there is the theory of the “missing link” in the assumed transformation of the anthropoid ape into man. 1739. Evolution could lead only to the intelligent humanoid, not to Man. Man could only be created by God. 1741. Talking about man, the clash between nature and culture is the clash between the inherited and the acquired, between genetically determined properties and properties that have been acquired, that is, between determinism and freedom. In this context, an interesting question arises: Is the current superior position of a male (over a female) determined biologically or culturally, that is, is there a gene of male domination, or, are the different positions of genders in a society a result of different social developments? 1783. Learning about man’s guilt is actually learning about his greatness. In order for man to be guilty, he has to be capable of sinning, and that capability presupposes man in his supernatural dimensions. The denial of guilt, of the Original Sin, as well as of any other, is based on the perception of man in his natural, that is, Darwinian, dimensions. Darwinian man is not guilty because he is not capable of sinning, he has no idea of sin, he is beyond good and evil. 1794. A building, as noticed by a writer, is a complex drama where human desires and needs are entangled with man’s dream of beauty in an inseparable web. Otherwise, it is not a example of architecture, but an ugly structure, brewery, livestock farm, industrial plant. 1813. The main existentialist feelings: anxiety, restlessness, fear, guilt—what do they have to do with Darwin and materialism?


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Islam Between East and West 1818. This dualism, usually connected with Descartes in the European culture (“Descartian dualism”), does not spare anybody. We- can find it, maybe unexpectedly, even with Samuel Beckett, in his very strict separation between body and spirit. 1847. Darwinian man, as well as Marx’s society, is predictable and logical— this is a geometrical world after all. Only the soul—if it exists—disturbs that universal geometry and brings a different logic into that world. Let us remember Jesus, Greek tragedians, Islamic sufis, or in Europe—Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, Ibsen and Strmndberg. 1856. (Portrait): Indians believe that they can steal your soul by painting your portrait. 1879. Science is trying to explain or construct a process, while the theater tends to create a character—two activities striving in different directions. 1880. One theater critic about Brecht and his work: “Berthold Brecht is a dramatist who becomes gradually and inevitably outdated. His so-called epic theatre is no longer -exciting for anybody; there are other issues today. Brecht’ s theses and intentions, Brecht’s proletarian feelings and exaltations are a dried up aesthetic potential.” My explanation: The proletariat addressed by Marx and Brecht does not exist anymore. There is a working class, but the social conditions and psychology of that class have changed greatly, so that they do not respond to the old calls and slogans. 1887. Art has no evolution in the historical sense. Sketches for the painting Young Ladies from Avignon, which mark the beginning of modern painting (the painting dates from 1907), show a visible influence of African sculpture. The sketches were exhibited for the first time at a London exhibition in 1986. 1890. Marx admired the ancient (i.e., slaveholders’) art and, surprisingly, did not notice a strange paradox: disharmony between his “base and superstructure.” Marx wondered how Greek poetry could, though the social conditions in which it had been created belong to distant past, give us aesthetic pleasure even nowadays. As far as I know, Marx did not find the answer to this question that essentially challenges his doctrine on the interdependence of the base and superstructure. 1890a. A French critic stated that Kafka’s work was so conditioned by regional facts and circumstances that, even only one hundred kilometers away from Prague, nobody would understand it. He was wrong. It turned out that Kafka was probably the most universal writer of the twentieth century. 1890b. “Slaveholders’ “art of Ancient Greece was an unparalleled model for the artists in the times that followed. For, a genuine piece of art, no matter how significant of a certain time and space it may be, remains generally human and universal, for all times and all spaces. 1916. There is one predominant principle in Western culture. That is the principle of human dignity. The European culture owes this principle to Christianity. If somebody asked me what makes the Christian foundations of European civilization recognizable, I would answer: the predominant principle of human dignity.


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Islam Between East and West 1917. Polish philosopher Bogdan Suhodoiski also developed a theory of two histories. Besides political history, the history of things, there is another history, called by Suhodoiski “the history of man.” He explains that history as “history of ideals, history of religion and philosophy, history of science and art, history of community and morality, is the history of a man’s inner growth.” He also calls it “the human history of the world,” unlike “the history of fighting and wars, domination, heroic victories and monuments built for kings and great chiefs, etc.” 1955. It is interesting that Indians include some forms of psychical life— mind, intellect and the feeling of Myself-—in the eight members of the lower nature of man (“pracrits”). The five remaining elements are: earth, water, fire, air and ether. Therefore, the idea that intellect belongs to the lower nature of man, to his biology and not to his human side, is very old and is found in a distant and completely different civilization. 1956. Here are two completely different positions. “The material world is real to the extent to which it contains ideas” (Plato) and “The thought cannot be separated from the thinking matter” (Marx). 1967. “The greatest yogi is the one whose vision is always the same: when the pleasure of others is his own pleasure and when the suffering of others is his own suffering” (Bhagavad-Gita, VI, 32). My comment: We find the same morality starting from Indian Vedas to Kant’s categorical imperative. 1970. (Morality and religion beyond history). Romans found with Druids and Gauls, whom they considered barbarian, a fully developed doctrine on reincarnation, that is, on immortality, and high moral standards. The Gauls gave a condemned prisoner five years of life so he could prepare himself for the future life through meditation. 1981. It is believed that acupuncture is almost 5,000 years old. It is a mixture of science, philosophy and mysticism. In recent times, it has been almost entirely accepted in the West. 1984. Man’s dual position in the world is a permanent theme. An old Chinese ideogram shows three elements: Earth—Man—Sky. Man is torn apart by the earthly and cosmic forces, of which he is a part. 1985. Objective versus subjective: what flutters, the flag or the wind? Or, perhaps, is it just a fluttering in our spirit? Does the scent of a rose exist independently from the person who smells it? Does the Ode to Joy exist regardless of the ear listening to it? Either: There are two people listening to it; one of them does not hear it, since it does not echo in his soul. Does the music exist in this latter case and, if it does, what is it? Or: an exhibition of paintings. A visitor comes to the exhibition out of his own snobbish motives, he just strolls by the paintings disinterested (or falsely interested), while another is fascinated and cannot take his eyes off the paintings. Do these paintings exist for both of them in the same way? 1987. Two attitudes toward nature: the Western one—mastering nature, and the Eastern one—fitting into nature. The first obviously originates from the Bible. In the Book of Genesis it says: “Reproduce and multiply, settle on the earth and subdue it to yourselves! Master the fish in the sea and the birds in the air, and all living creatures that inhabit the earth.” The Buddhist Metta Sutte sends a


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Islam Between East and West completely opposite message: “Like a mother who protects her son against misfortunes with her own life, so your thoughts should be embracing all that lives.” Eastern painting does not know about natura morte (still life). It shows a flower or an animal as living, inseparable from the environment of which it makes a part. When a man from the West climbs up a mountain peak, he “conquers” it. He fights with the cruel mountain and defeats it, following the order from the Old Testament. A Japanese man or a Chinese man believes that the mountain we climb to the peak becomes our friend, and so on. 1990. The paintbrush cannot make two identical moves. In painting there is no repetition, every move is new. 1991. In Western painting there is something that the West owes to Christianity that could be called “obsession by portrait.” The endeavor rose to the highest secret of the world—the human face. In Renaissance painting, the landscape (nature) is just the background on which man and his face dominate in their absolute greatness. In Eastern painting, in particular in that of the Far East, it is the other way around: on the landscape, here and there, there is a hint of a human figure, usually hardly discernable. That is not a portrait, but merely a sign that in nature there is man who lives there, not as its master or the culmination of God’s creation, but as an integral part. 2002. “A guru is he who at every moment resides in the greatest depths of himself” (Ramana Maharashi). Generally, the West and India are two opposite poles or two different examples of human aspirations. While the Westerner has turned toward the external world, the Indian has turned toward the inner world and discovered an endless world in his own depths (in Himself). All it takes is to get an insight into the science of Yoga and one will gain a bit of that unique experience. 2005. The Jewish Kibbutz, a perfect community the socialist authors of the nineteenth century dreamed about, perfectly suits the Jewish spirit and it is no surprise that it was there that it came about. It is no coincidence. “The Kibbutz is the most original Jewish creation in the past hundred years,” says the Jewish writer Amos Oz. 2008. Austria is an example of order, well-being and legal security. However, its most important drama writers, Wolfgang Bauer and Thomas Bernhard, are witnesses of another Austria. They bring in the focus of their interest the phenomenon of the so-called accidie—laziness of the heart, lethargy of the soul, emptiness and senselessness of human existence. The characters of their plays (Magic Afternoon, Change, Gespenter and others) are trying to fill this emptiness with sex, drugs and other nonsense, yet fully aware of all of that being absolutely useless and to no avail. Futility and aimlessness of living lead their characters to eruptions of brutal violence. Martin Esslin (the author of the epilogue to Bauer’s plays written between 1975 and 1986) wrote that the characteristics of the spiritual condition of the entire Western population found their clear literary expression with the Austrian writers (a phenomenon that first had occurred in Scandinavia by the end of the last century—Ibsen and others). 2022. Cleaning and cleanness in Islam obviously do not belong to its religious, but rather its secular aspect of civilization. Absolute hygiene prevails in utopia. “Civilization is sterilization”—one of the hypnopedic formulae that make part of the “processing” of human individuals in the Brave New World. Culture does not


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Islam Between East and West have to be dirty, but it is not necessarily clean either. It is possible to imagine culture in the dirt, as was often the case (Middle Ages, “sacred dirt” of some monastic orders, dirty reservation in the Brave New World as an island of culture in contrast to the civilization of the artificial world of Huxley’s utopia). It is similar with soberness. The attempts to impose prohibition in some modern countries were requirements of civilization. Cultures get drunk. 2030. Culture deals with eternal topics. They are genuine: love, birth, marriage, motherhood, victim, death. There is a clear contrast between the principles of male and female. In culture, man is man and woman is woman. On the contrary, civilization declares obliteration of the difference, which, from the point of view of culture, is the worst sin and in total contrast with the original image of the expulsion from Paradise. 2036. One of the hypnopedic formulae forced into the minds of Huxley’s twins by endless repetition while they sleep is on collective living, against detachment (loneliness). 2042. “I am convinced that one day we will create living robots, but not during my lifetime,” said Isaac Asimov, scientist and writer. Are they going to construct life or its imitation? If it were life, which I do not believe at all, all books of religion, philosophy and ethics and all works of art should be burnt, as a pile of nonsense. 2059. To the question on which philosophy one should choose, Alain Bosquet answered: “The inner peace full of passion.” 2060. Philosophy as “geometry of the spiritual.” This slogan made in Branislav Petronijevic’s Principles of Metaphysics tells the reader that the way to his system leads through mathematics, more precisely through geometry. 2066. “The wish to change the world has become predominant over the wish to understand it” (Margaret Jursenar). Could we say: human culture is an aspiration to understand the world, civilization is a tendency to change it? It was not a coincidence that it was Marx who drew the ultimate conclusion: “So far the philosophers have been interpreting the world, but it needs to be changed.” With this sentence, Marxism defined its attitude towards culture and civilization and made its choice, recognizing itself as a consequent conclusion of civilization. 2068. As a matter of fact, Dostoyevsky novels are dramas. One of them is “a drama of the human mind.” The human mind strains to get to know the absolute, that is, the truth about existence, and is defeated. After having read Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Dostoevsky transferred his antinomies to the moral-religious level, transforming the dispute that makes the very core of Kant’s Critique into a dramatic conflict between the heart and intellect. In his The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoyevsky ridicules the pretensions of intellect, which considers its knowledge as absolute. That is the substance of Ivan Karamazov’s nightmare, who does not and cannot believe in anything else but the mind, while the nature of the conflict is such that it cannot be resolved by means of the mind itself (without the participation of the heart). 2074. For the murder of Fyodor Karamazov, the human court convicted Dimitri, while “God’s court” found Ivan Karamazov guilty. The reader knows that none of them is the murderer. This is about two kinds of justice.


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Islam Between East and West 2080. In totalitarian systems love and intimate lyrics are undesirable (forbidden) themes. Why? The only possible explanation is that these feelings belong to man as an individual rather than as a member of a society. A man loves his woman only as an individual. Utopian societies do not know about such feelings and do not tolerate them. 2092. Strictly looking, the artist has neither a predecessor nor a successor. If there is any learning, it is about technique, not about art. Where the craft stops, art begins, and there is no more learning. Having crossed that border, the artist continues on his own. 2097. Philosophy in the works of Dostoyevsky is not science but religion. Duplicity and nightmares in Ivan Karamazov’s personality are not due to psychological but moral problems; therefore, they are not about psychological, but rather ethical, that is, religious-moral issues. 2097a. There is another paradox about Kant’s antinomies. The thesis: the world is finite, man is immortal (infinite); antithesis: the world is infinite—man is finite. As if the finiteness of the world were a condition for human infinity (immortality). 2102. If we read an explanation or critic’s review of a painting, we will notice a strange paradox: a complicated and highly intellectual explanation in contrast with the simple or even naïve character of the painting. That is why it is good to see the painting and interpret it by oneself, because highly sophisticated explanations are of little use. A painting cannot be told. The only way to understand a painting—if we are ever to understand it—is to see it. 2102a. Through a constant and prolonged tendency to reject the unnecessary, through our aspiration to reach the very essence, the line, the form that is necessary, without which the painting is not what it is, we came to the point where all that remained of a painting was the white canvas. This aspiration for the “pure painting” ends up with the denial of the work. At the end, the work disappeared, only aspiration remained. There was no event, only experience. There was no line, no colour, and no hand movement, just movement in the artist’s soul. The painting ended up as an aspiration. 2112. Culture knows nothing but questions. The number of questions increases until their sum becomes condensed into the great enigma of human life and history. At the same time, the number of answers decreases. More and more questions, fewer and fewer answers—that is the “progress” of human culture. 2119. There is a parallel between metaphysics and mathematics. With regard to the method, metaphysics remains physics, and in it lies both their strength and their weakness. The motto of the first part of Branislav Petronijevic’s The Principles of Metaphysics (published in Heidelberg in 1904) reads: “Exact mathematical notions are a key to the solution of the world’s enigma.” These meta physics can be theology as well—these two sciences are related—but they will never be able to give any final answers to the so called “ultimate questions.” 2120. Hobbes and Rousseau stand at two opposite poles regarding their views on human nature: man is evil by his nature (Hobbes) and man is good by his nature (Rousseau). 2137. Hitler is obvious proof of how the instruments of civilization: scientific


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Islam Between East and West achievements, discipline, planning, organization and so on, can be efficiently used against all that is culture. 2138. Orwell believes that Huxley’s book Brave New World is a parody of H.G. Wells’ utopia. It is an attack against the hedonist and rationalist vision that Wells developed in his works. 2157. Orwell noticed a lack of artistic talents with the English, with the exception of literature, as well as disinclination to a systematic philosophy. 2160. The opposite of architecture is tecture—”dwelling machine.” 2169. Newton discovered that gravity is the main law (or force) ruling the material universe. Which is the main law that governs the moral universe? I believe that it is the law of freedom. Freedom is in the moral world what gravity is in the material one. 2177. Is it possible to discuss scientific ethics without religion? The French Scientific Ethics Committee has recently launched a dramatic appeal to biological science to stop irresponsible experiments with the human embryo, because its research work “has come to a crossroads from where it might go astray and jeopardize the entire human genetic heritage, including the very future, of human kind.” Can science be subject to the judgment of ethics, whose scientific character it does not recognize? On the other hand, ethics based on scientific principles would not ban such experiments, and the circle is closed. A scientist without religion assumes inevitably the role of Mefisto. 2198a. The focus of Christian morality is on love, while the focus of Islamic morality is on doing good. The Gospel says: “Love others.” The Qur’an says: “Do good things for others.” The former is a feeling, the latter is an act. The Qur’an mentions doing good things as often as the Gospel speaks about love. 2214. Both Christianity and Islam know and recognize the duality of the world. But, if Christianity is all extremely sharp cognition of the contradiction of the world, Islam is a teaching on its resolving. 2229. What was the barbarian morality like as described in the poetry of noncivilized peoples? Homer’s characters, as well as those of pre-Islamic poetry, are kind to their friends and cruel to their enemies, generous in peace, ruthless in war, hospitable to a traveler, open-handed to the poor and orphans, obedient to their parents and the elderly, yet rebellious and untamable. These are characters we encounter in the poems and tales of the ancient non-civilized peoples all over the world. 2230. Arabian pre-Islamic people, prone equally to sacrifice and the joys of life, as their pre-Islamic poetry shows, were predestined for Islam in that sense as well. 2231. The spiritual awakening of Latin America, obvious by the appearance of a series of great names in literature, should be a signal of this continent coming into the social and political scene. South America could represent a good example to examine the connection between spirit and power.


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Islam Between East and West 2251. The relation between soul and body. A group of the Japanese suffering from cancer will try to conquer Mont Blanc. Jiro Itam, a Japanese doctor from Osaka, who intends to prove with this experiment that cancer can be defeated by the will to live and by setting new goals, leads the group. The same group climbed Tudji, the highest mountain peak in Japan, in 1985. The group, The Association to Cure Cancer with Life Goals, was founded in 1984 (Borba, Belgrade, January 5, 1987). 2261a. In his novel The Name of the Rose, Eco made an interesting point: Christ never smiled. In any testimony of him or any of the later countless artistic interpretations of his countenance, we do not see Christ smiling. 2278. Nature is one large pharmacy. 2279. One fact has been often noticed, but insufficiently examined and explained: In the Islamic culture there is a certain aestheticism of daily life based on sensuality. Through that sensuality the aesthetics acquire a truthfulness and a specific realism, different from Western. There is no doubt that this kind of sense of beauty has to do with the teachings of Islam, and in particular with the fact that sensuality is not rejected in Islam. 2296. Nihilism is not deprived of spirituality. In Beckett’ s novel The Unnamable, there is neither world nor man anymore, just man’s soul, inexplicable and inexhaustible. Everything else is nothingness. 2302. Arabia between the fifth and seventh century, with its severe living conditions and its desert, was predetermined for “the science of the skies and earth.” The study of the poetry of pre-Islamic “non-believers” can confirm this. What prevailed there was a spiritual climate very close to Islam, which would find its ideological reasons and fulfillment in Islam. The pre-Islamic poetry of the Bedouins clearly pictures the ethics of a healthy people. It describes the strength, virility, generosity, protection of the weak, solidarity, struggle, courage, respect for women, family morals, chivalry, honor and so on. Francesco Gabrielli, the author of many important books on Arabic literature, wrote about pre-Islamic Bedouin ethics as “having two faces: chivalrous and cruel.”As a rule, Bedouin poets were also warriors. In the Arabian Bedouin, nature had built a type of man who, for his physical and spiritual traits, was predestined for or very receptive of the new science. In Qur’anic teachings he could discover all the reasons and explanations for what he already was. Therefore, all that happened immediately upon the appearance of Islam, the unparalleled military, political and spiritual expansion, proves that Islam was accepted and carried on by an exceptionally healthy people and that the new teaching found its “image” in that already existing type of man. If we seek to recognize the man who emerges, now vaguely, now quite clearly, from the verses of the Arabian preIslamic poetry, the man celebrated and put on a pedestal by that poetry, we will find out that it was always a type of man very similar to the one from the Qur’an. It is neither a thoughtful Hindu mystic, nor a skinny Christian ascetic, nor a cruel Roman soldier. It is a brave knight, “gentle to the righteous, ruthless to the tyrants” (Qur’an, 48/29). 2309. The famous painter Renato Gutuzo (died January 1987), known as a militant and engaged leftist intellectual and member of the Communist Party, reembraced Christianity before he died. The press called his conversion shocking. Considering all we know about art and painting, the question is whether a


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Islam Between East and West religious conversion of an artist comes as a shock or if the famous painter simply managed to reach his home, after being lost. 2325. Asceticism is Christian by its nature even when practiced by a Muslim. That is the case of the Divan written by the famous ascetic poet and devout Muslim, Abu-l-Atahi. In his poems, Christians recognize their kind of piety and their perception of man and his destiny on the earth. 2337. Even in the spiritual segment of life there are many contradictions and contrasts. For instance: On the one hand there is folk wisdom, on the other— the arrogant and unintelligible scholasticism, that is—crudeness of a beginning and the decadency of a culture. The world of love, hate and revenge, the entire living reality of life, versus sophistication and elegance. Heroic greatness versus the anemic and pale compassion, a multitude of very real, alive, almost caricature characters from everyday life and pale, anemic faces with noble and regular features. The medley of sumptuous, somewhat disheveled forms, firmly embedded and fixed to the earth, in contrast to the classical forms, cold and inaccessible. Included are poems from market places and fairs, and court poems, having no connection with the real life, and so on. 2344. If art were a reflection of socioeconomic or historical circumstances, as it is advocated by Marxists, the question of how it is that Greek poetry is still equally exciting for us as it was for the populace of Ancient Athens, though social and living conditions have changed completely would remain without answer. Yes, the conditions have changed, yet man has remained the same; art belongs to man, not to history. 2375. Whether an act (action) is instinctive or intelligent depends on whether the subject is at all aware of what he is doing. Direct action, taken without any interference of the prospective aim, is instinctive. The result of an instinctive action can be better than the result of a conscious action (and is often the case), but only the action preceded by the idea (or picture) of the aim is intelligent. Based on this criterion, can some actions taken by animals be characterized as intelligent? A number of sociologists, ornithologists and anthropologists assert that most animals do think. Donald Griffin, a zoologist and lecturer at Rockefeller University in New York, collected a great deal of evidence in favor of this thesis and published it in his book La Pensée Animale. Christopher Beosch (an expert in primatology), who spent several years with a group of chimpanzees in the Ivory Coast, summed up his research with the conclusion that chimpanzees have the intelligence of a nine-year-old child. The animals he observed used selectively different sizes of rocks to break nuts of different size and hardness, and passed their knowledge on to the next generation. 2377. Asin Palacios compiled a selection of writings of Abou Hamid elGhazali, one of the greatest Islamic theologians of the classic age, named “the Witness of Islam.” Some modern interpreters of Ghazali point at some kind of Christian spirituality—in my view, with good reason—in Ghazali’ s work (e.g., Gabrielli, History of Arabic Literature, p. 225.) When all that is new and specific, that is, its interest in this world, is removed from Islam, when its core, its foundation is reached, what is found there is nothing else but “Isa’s (Jesus’) faith.” That is “the common word” mentioned in the Qur’an (3/64). Naturally, there is no congruence in dogmatic issues. It is only about the spirit of the teaching. Fanatics burned Ghazali’ s book Ihya in a square in Toledo, because in their view it was not Islamic enough. In Gabrielli’s opinion, Ghazali’s works were spiritually nurturing


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Islam Between East and West for Muslims in the coming seven centuries. In my opinion, that nurturing turned the Muslim world away from the real, daily, social issues, including science. It turned the coming centuries into “the Middle Ages” of Islam. 2381. We can think whatever we like of humankind, but we will be closer to the truth if we do not idealize it. Voltaire’s concepts on mankind are certainly more realistic than Rousseau’s. However, it is also true that it is a race that admires most what itself is not, but what it should be. I cannot have a bad opinion of creatures whose greatest idols were losers. The hero is from a poor family, brave and noble, his love is idealistic, he often fights hopelessly and dies in an unequal fight for a just cause—this is a simplified scheme of a thousand stories, poems and epics that were made and passed on through generations by people living at all meridians and in all times and that thrilled and excited them most. This is one of the typical characteristics of humankind and that fact contains a partial answer to the question about the human being—who and what is that being that we call, with disdain or pride, man. 2407. Chinese acupuncture was described by somebody as “a prick into the heart of Western man’s logics.” 2418. Benedetto Croce wrote about the “universal cosmic” nature of aesthetic intuition. 2448. What is the purpose of education: a completely developed human personality or a highly professional specialized industrial working animal? 2450. (Chart of the Opposites): “Love for all that lives” had to find the opposite principle—class hatred. 2464. The ancient Greek polis was a community characterized by a common cult rather than common territory. It was spiritually determined from its beginning. 2481. The idea of law, as well as “the earthly kingdom” that should be regulated by law, is alien to Christianity. The attempt to regulate the earthly kingdom, from the point of view of Christianity, is not only a vain endeavor, but also one of the malignancies that should be eradicated. 2482. Lactaritius (250—325), called the “Christian Cicero,” tried to interpret the stoic natural law by means of the Ten Commandments. 2485. The Christian position on the State was most consistently exposed by St. Augustine. According to him, “the worldly State” originated from sin, that is, from the human act, word and desire that are contrary to the “eternal laws.” The worldly State is a large association of sinners (magnum latrocinium). It was founded on fratricide: the idea that Romulus repeated Cain’s crime. 2503. Chart of the opposites: “the oath of dirtiness” as opposed to “the sterilized civilization” of Brave New World. The middle option is the Islamic ablution as spiritualized cleanness. 2513. Law cannot be based exclusively on Christian doctrine, because law is too narrow for Christian love. Christ refused to be a legislator and judge. 2514. Nature is not about what should be, but what is. “It is not that five plus three should be eight, but they are eight by themselves” (Luther).


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Islam Between East and West 2531. Baumgarten defined science as “deriving the certain from the certain” (“Scientia est certa deductio ex certis”). “Cartesian philosophy fully developed the teaching of Francis Bacon (1561—1626) on the removal of all ‘idols,’ as deceits that prevent our reason from reaching the truth by means of causal science” (Lj. Tadic, Philosophy of Law, Zagreb 1983, p. 77). 2535. Hobbes asserts that the laws are not there because they are just and reasonable, but because of the power of the authorities that impose them. This smells very much of Lenin’s later definition of “law as the will of the ruling class.” Hobbes requested that “the poison” of ancient philosophy be eliminated from high schools. It bothered him. 2545. Pascal’s (Blaise Pascal, 1623—1662) request on bringing together force and justice, in order for what is strong to be just, and what is just to be strong. As far as history (reality) is concerned, the result is paradoxical: “Since it was not possible for what was just to be strong, it happened that what was strong became just” (B.P., Thoughts). My comment: As justice was not able to acquire force, the force did not want to acquire justice. It simply proclaimed itself as justice. 2556. While absolute mechanical action prevails in nature, this clear causality dissolves in the phenomenon of the living so that it seems that the organism carries the reason of its survival in itself and that it is its own cause and consequence at the same time. In life, there is no clear cause-consequence relation, which is present in inorganic nature; nor a clear order, since cause and consequence intermingle, overlap. 2558. Hegel considers that the freedom of personality began developing with Christianity, because for him “the individual as such has infinite value” (Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences). According to Hegel, the principal legal imperative reads: “Be a personality and respect others like personalities” (An Outline of the Philosophy of Law). 2561. For Hegel, “punishment is a human right of the criminal” (Hegel, An Outline of the Philosophy of Law). For, punishment (as revenge) is a consequence of freedom; by the punishment, the punished criminal becomes man and affirms himself as man. 2579. According to Kant, morality of the “categorical imperative” is autonomous, a priori morality. It is valid for itself, is not derived from any other postulate or experience. On the contrary, other moral attitudes are derived from it. 2580. In regards to law, two things are clear: (1) law ceases to exist when reduced to mere force and (2) law ceases to exist when reduced to the idea of abstract justice. There is no law without the fact of force and the idea of justice, but these two extremes (poles) do not contain any law, all that remains are its premises. The experience of the German legal theorist Radbruch, who advocated his legal positivism and relativism only until World War II, is interesting (and educative). Before any experiences with the Nazis, Radbruch wrote: “Those who are capable of enforcing law prove that they are competent to impose it”; Hans Kelsen, who shared his views and was the most famous advocate of the positivist theory, says: “It is nonsense to state that in despotism there is no legal order to deny it its legal character is nothing but naïveté of natural-law. . . . What is interpreted as autocracy is just a legal option (possibility) for an autocrat to make decisions by his own will. . . and to cancel or amend his norms, general and


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Islam Between East and West specific ones, at any time he likes” (H.K., Allgemeine Staatslehre, p. 335— 336). After having experienced Nazi legislation and practice, Radbruch changed his mind radically and, in total contradiction to positivism, wrote the following lines: “There are principles that are stronger than any legal regulation, so that the legislation which contradicts them has no validity. These principles belong to natural law. Exacted compliance (coercion) may be founded on force, but propriety and validity certainly cannot” (Radbruch, Philosophy of Law). 2582. The ideal side of law, the idea of justice, resists definition. I suppose that Schreier had this in mind when he said that the definition of law is “metajuristic in the right meaning of the word.” 2586. Heidegger also talked about “man being thrown into reality,” that is, the fact that “being thrown” is man’s way of existing (Sein und Zeit, p. 88). Man is thrown “in-der Welt-sein”(into being in the world). 2587. How come that both—Darwin and Michelangelo (i.e., science and religion)— ”are right,” though their statements on man’s origin are as divergent as they can be? This is possible because Darwin and Michelangelo speak of different things. Strictly looking, neither Darwin nor Michelangelo talks about man. Michelangelo talks about human spirit (he “paints” the human spirit), while Darwin speaks about the “bearer” of that spirit. We could say that it is a story about two different aspects of a human being. Man is the third, the contradictory synthesis. That contradictory “creation” is beyond our comprehension. Only God could create something like that. All subsequent history is just a projection of the two aspects of human existence, two giant shadows projected through time like culture and civilization: All culture is Michelangelian, while all civilization is Darwinian. The contradiction continues without ending or hope in sight that it will ever be fully settled or resolved. 2690. Dualism is a necessary way of our perceiving the world. Existentialistic philosophy, though it teaches that “self-being and its world” (Heidegger) or “Myself and other-than-myself” (Jaspers) are indivisible, still talks about categories of duality, that is, of “the subjective being in the objective reality.” The categories are the same, only the perception of their mutual relationship is different. Is it possible to think about man beyond these categories at all? 2690a. Somebody noticed that the whole of Heidegger’ s ontology “threatens to turn into the mysticism of being.” As we know, something similar did eventually happen. 2693. The idea of a higher instance in law will reappear over and over again: either like the idea of natural law or a moral imperative that is above any law, or like the contrast between legality and legitimacy (what is legal is not necessarily legitimate.) After World War II important efforts were made to renew natural law. Some believe that it happened under the influence of Scheler’ s and Hartman’s teachings on values, that is, under the influence of ethical teachings. I personally believe that this change was primarily due to the horrible experiences Europe went through under Nazism and Stalinism. After all the crimes, committed in the name of the courts and laws, how could anyone state any longer that every factual authority (the authority that has power to enact and enforce laws) was at the same time a legal authority? It was also perfectly “lawful” that Nazi and Soviet legal theorists finally got to an almost identical negation of the law (that is


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Islam Between East and West always a positivist denial). In the Nazi legal doctrine we encounter the slogan: “The law is what is of use for a nation,” which corresponds to Lenin’s maxim on law as “the policy that is useful for the victory of the working class.” As we know, both doctrines were put into practice as unprecedented autocracy of the authorities (ruling cliques) at the expense of both—the nation and the working class. 2706. Inhuman nature of all utopias—from Plato’s to Marx’s. 2712. The world of morality—that is, the “world-of-what-should-be,” unlike “the world of being.” 2714. I would mention here Maihofer’s teaching on “the nature of things,” whose first thesis is about the “non-legal source of law.” The positivists eliminated this second condition of law and reduced it to legislation, that is, to fact, to force, that is, to non-law. All pretentious reasoning -on law has not been able to annul this a priori idea of law and it always reappeared as the new-old idea. 2715. Sartre repeated Kant’s categorical imperative more than 100 years later. “We cannot choose the evil, we always choose the good, and only what is good for everybody can be good for me” (Sartre in his L ‘existentialisme est un humanisme). I.F. Bolnow, called this quoted thought of Sartre’ s “the existentialist repetition of the categorical imperative.” Morality has no history. There is only “eternal recurrence.” 2716. Does the law rely upon the reason or the will? Every genuine theory of law includes, to a lesser or greater extent, reason as its essence. An opposite statement would be a shortcut to the negation of law, both in terms of theory and practice, that is, to the elimination of the difference that exists between lawfulness and lawlessness and, in consequence, to the affirmation of violence in theory and practice. 2718. Is art just reproducing this “real world,” or is it creating yet another comparative world? This question expresses the essence of the split in the philosophy of art. 2719. For Marx, law is “modern mythology,” whose contents are: justice, freedom, equality, and so on that should cover up social reality, which is: lawlessness, injustice, inequality, lack of freedom. In his essay on the Bourgeoisie and the Counter-revolution, Marx wrote: “Our ground is not legal ground, it is revolutionary.” 2723. The main issue in any philosophy of law is the issue of legal personality. Hegel expressed this in his famous formula: “Be a personality and respect others like personalities.” A legal subject possesses self-awareness and free will, which are pre-requisites for the status of a legal subject. According to Hegel, the idea of absolute value of the individual is “the basis of the law of subject introduced by Christianity.” 2853. (Punishment and “defense sociale”) Following the theory of “defense sociale,” Swedish criminal law cancelled the very concept of punishment. It was replaced by the term “brottspafoljd,” which means “the consequence of the committed act.” This may be wrong, yet it is fully consistent.


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Islam Between East and West 2855. Not science or religion, but science and religion—that is Islam. 2863. In his Duino Elegies, Rilke speaks directly to the angels. 2902. The law cannot be destroyed. Socialist countries are trying to, but to no avail. They tolerate it but keep pushing it to the margin. 2123. An analysis of medieval folk culture will lead us to an interesting understanding on the mixing and intertwining of Christian religious ideas and the rather worldly aspirations of the masses. This is well illustrated by the idea of the sanctity that prevailed throughout the Christian medieval world. Aron Gurevic, who studied specific phenomena of the Middle Ages, wrote: “The cult of the saints in the Middle Ages developed to such an extent that it assumed features of pagan idolatry and, though contrary to the concepts of the Church, was accepted by it.... The relationship between the people and the saints was clear. For their prayers and gifts, parishioners expected to receive immediately the full reward in return, in the form of a miracle. The saint who could not make miracles did not enjoy popularity and respect, and vice-versa, if the parishioners did not fulfill their obligations, the saint turned into a merciless avenger. Local saints were present in every town, village or province and were active among the people, so that their mutual relationships were very close, much closer than the relationships with the distant and inaccessible God” (A.G., in his book Problems of Folk Culture in the Middle Ages). My comment: Popularity of the saints among the people is due more to their belief that saints have some secret powers to help and protect them, than to the respect for the sublime life of the saints. 2139. John Roberts (the author of a television program on European civilization) proves that in the heart of European civilization there are two visions that had a decisive influence upon its course and development. The first one is the idea that man has the freedom to choose, to govern his life and his destiny. The other vision is the idea of history—perceiving things in time. The former is based on the “syndrome of bad conscience”—the feeling of imperfection that brings about the need for perfection and the permanent aspiration to change things. The concept of the value of man as an individual, as a personality, which is clearly Christian, is connected to this idea. The latter is based on the idea of “the chosen people” and its painful journey through the desert towards the “Promised Land.” This is a picture of a people moving in order to change their condition, moving in a direction, toward freedom, toward a purposeful life in which man stops being a slave and becomes the master of his life and his destiny. “The Promised Land” is the first utopia. The Promised Land is Civitas Solis—The Kingdom of the Sun (Campanella). Every utopia is of Jewish origin. And the Promised Land lies in its background, as its original image and original idea. That is why Western civilization is a Jewish-Christian civilization. 2142. The trial stone of a society is its attitude to the adversaries (opponents), to the sick, the needy and the elderly. In a utopia, where there is no humanism, these categories of people are condemned to extinction. Maybe not explicitly, yet implicitly. They do not exist there. 2147. Ten white canvases exposed by Clam as pieces of art can only mean extreme proof, brought to absurdity, that art is still just an aspiration rather than the very work. Unless this is the meaning of the ten canvasses, they either mean nothing or represent a great fraud intended for snobs.


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Islam Between East and West 2151. In Christian morality, Nietszche sees “defamation of the world.” “Have you understood me?—Dionysus against the Crucified” (Nietzsche, Ecce Homo). 2170. In the German language, the adjective gemein means simple, common and general. It is not a mere coincidence. 2172. Trends in modern art (e.g., informal, conceptualism, abstraction, expressionism, surrealism, “new image,” “new geometry,” etc.) are not about the essence of the art. They are about the way the artist tries, while creating his work, to address some philosophical issues, primarily those of the meaning of the language of art and of his own belief. The artist who belongs to a specific trend— for some do not—believes that his personal efforts are subject to a broader, universal context iii which the essential dilemmas of the time get reflected. That is why the ideas, rather than the very art, are reflected in a trend. 2174a. It is wrong to say that religion does not change the world. It changes man and, therefore, changes the world, sometimes very radically. The world inhabited by people who respect the Ten Commandments, or at least know about them, is essentially different from the world where there is no such concept. Changing the man—that is the revolution brought about by religion. 2176. Somebody defined architectural work as “useful sculpture” (sculpture that has its function). 2180. The difference between mechanism and organism is visible, besides others, in the different relations between the form and the matter. In case of a mechanism, the form is imposed by force (externally) on the matter to which it is alien. In an organism, the form and the matter condition one another and make a whole. Or: unlike the mechanism, where certain alienation of the form and matter is visible, the organism manifests certain mutual penetration of the form and matter, internal submission, natural unity. 2190. It has been proven that the so-called magnetic lines, or magnetic storms caused by the activity of the sun, guide migratory birds. It sometimes happens that they begin their migration earlier, because they “believe” that the fall has come. How and why? 2191. Somebody called Jesus “the most challenging personality in human history.” He certainly is. 2195. “We can deny it, but monsters and demons are creatures close to us, that we can love or hate, fear or accept as our guardians. We are their parents and their children. Since the beginning of the world until now, we could not do without them”—Jovica Acm in his introduction to the topic Monsters and Devils. 2198. Poetic personification of the world: “Bewildered Lime Tree” in a poem by Ana Akhmatova (Poet’s Death). 2200. Marx spoke about two empires: the empire of necessity and the empire of freedom. The latter was supposed to be based on material abundance. What an illusion! Such vision of the empire of freedom is given as a function of the production and enjoying the results of production.


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Islam Between East and West 2213. New parts of a town, with their uniform buildings and monotony, represent the so-called “urbanism of mere necessity.” Urban areas of a society are a picture of its principal values and characteristics. The soul of a society, or its absence, is reflected in the urbanism and architecture of a society, as in a faithful minor. 2214. Every artistic work is autobiographic in a way—it is a story of oneself. When the Swedish director Ingmar Bergman directed the movie Fanny and Alexander and, later on, Shakespeare’ s Hamlet, critics and spectators recognized the story of Bergman’s childhood in the former, and of his youth in the latter. He even had engaged a young anonymous actor, who looked very much like him, to play the role of Hamlet. 2218. Even Marx noticed this specific characteristic of English development. From his “class oriented” point of view, he saw England settling in the “middle class” in the future. In one of his writings he concluded that England “is the most civil of all civil countries, where the civil aristocracy and bourgeois proletariat are formed.” These are essentially the same opposites and the same ways of reconciliation, seen and expressed in the category of “classes.” 2222. Art is the name for disharmony between man and the world, in a double sense: (1) it is man’s expression of anxiety, a protest against the world which is not made to his measure, and (2) it is the artist’s attempt to create a parallel world in accordance with his dream. Art is that new and different world, the poet’s dream that came true. 2224. H. Miller says somewhere that he is firmly convinced that art will disappear one day, while the artist will remain. The work will disappear, but the feeling will remain. 2231. Why does the law, in spite of the efforts made by all governments to destroy or at least to subdue it, still survive? Why does the bare “will of the ruling class” never prevail? This is not about law, but about man. The feeling of what is just and unjust is a component part of what we call human nature, and that feeling is as genuine as religion or artistic aspiration. Only with the destruction of man can law be destroyed. Utopia, as a metaphor of non-law, therefore, is impossible. 3044. Plato speaks about causal relationship between music and the destiny of the State: “The principles of music cannot be touched without shaking the highest laws of the State. The lawlessness settles in silently and penetrates secretly the character and the capability, getting stronger and spreading over to citizens’ lives, and from there it takes hold of the law and constitution with such impudicity, oh Socrates, that at the end it overturns all private and public life,” (The State, IV, 3—4). Several centuries later, Boetie stated, “disharmonious music gives birth to the worst distortions of views.” Shakespeare (through Lorenzo’s words) stated, “one who does not feel the harmony of gentle tones was born to betray, cheat and steal.” 3049. Karl Popper was right saying that in the final analysis there are only two forms of the State: the one where it is possible to dismiss the government by vote and the other where it is not. This is what the principle criterion of democracy is all about. It makes no sense to argue about words or names. If the authorities are so constituted that their dismissal is both theoretically and


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Islam Between East and West practically impossible, it is a dictatorship and tyranny. Even if it was not so in the beginning, it will become so in time. The possibility of dismissal is more important than the ruling party, the right, the left, workers, capitalists, and so on, which often occupy us too much. Every government that can be replaced is very motivated to act to the satisfaction of its people. And vice versa: even the best government, if it cannot be dismissed, will be spoiled, because it is not motivated to remain good. 3050. The phenomenon of the closeness between art and religion becomes almost obvious in the case of the recently deceased Italian painter Renato Gutuzo. The exhibition of his works that took place in 1987 under the title “Feeling of Spirituality” was seen by some people as a scandal (betrayal), because the painter was known as an active communist, that is, an assumed atheist; however, all 49 exhibited paintings, made between 1938 and 1985 (almost 40 years) pictured biblical themes. Gutuzo the man could be consciously an atheist, but Gutuzo the artist could not. Some critics, offended by this “hypocrisy” of the painter, requested that the real value of his works be re-examined; Renato Gutuzo is celebrated as one of the greatest Italian painters of the century. Further proof that critics know all about art, except for its essence. 3051. How is the balance of girl and boy babies maintained in humankind? The answer: by a genetic code. So, everything is very simple and clear: there is the code; nobody asks where or how the code was created. 3068. Most of the teachings, ideologies, theories and religions failed, because they wanted the world to be something else, something that it is not. That wish might have been—and often was—sublime and noble, yet it was in vain, and its preachers were destined to defeat. This can be witnessed throughout history. 3075a. Milan Kundera about the Jews: “The only small nation that survived the barbarism and destructive course of history.” 3082. In his The Wisdom of the Heart, which talked about the drama of Christ’s life, H. Miller, came to a conclusion that “the hierarchical sequence of events runs in adirection that is contrary to the course of history, counterclockwise” (p. 178). 3084. Balzac spoke all his life about a strange experience from his childhood when, as he believed until his death, he had been visited by an angel at the College de Vendôme. For Balzac, this event was his experience of the other world, on which he, as a mature man, wrote in his book Serafita. Henry Miller said of that book that he accepted it unconditionally as “a mystical work of the highest order” (H.M., Heart Wisdom, p. 177). The same goes, undoubtedly, with his autobiographic study Louis Lambert, where the famous French writer is described as a devout believer of esoteric doctrine. 3089. “Everything strives for the harmony from which it originated,” says a wise Buddhist saying. Everything is moving in the direction of overall entropy— growing chaos, says science. Religion and science perceive the world in absolutely different ways. 3092. For the poet, every big city in the world “smells up to the sky.” 3101. The “educated” church and its Jesuits reached, in some aspects, the opposite poles, which is a negation of Christianity.. Reading Loyola’ s Jesuit


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Islam Between East and West Principles, written more than five centuries ago, we discover sentences that represent a kind of anti-Gospel. The most famous is certainly the one stating that the endjustifies the means (for Jesus it would be exactly the opposite). Furthermore: “In order to always stick to the truth, we should consider as black what seems- white to us, if it is judged so by the church authorities.” Or: “In order for the company to be properly governed, it seems very useful for the father General to possess the full control over the company.” Stalinism and the Inquisition applied similar logic and practice in the name of completely different principles. It is characteristic that both insisted on admission of guilt, which makes sense in case of the Inquisition but not in the case of the purge inspectors, where one would rather expect to see the principle of objective responsibility. Nikolai Salmanovich Rubashov, a character from the novel Eclipse at Noon by Arthur Koestler, clearly explains this “contradictory similarity.” In one place, Rubashov says: “For us, the question of subjective intention does not matter. One who made the mistake, must pay for it. That is our law. History teaches us that it is sometimes better served by lies than by truth. We have been compared with the inquisition of saints, because we were, like the inquisitors, constantly aware of the burden of our responsibility for the super-individual future.” 3112. The philosophy that underlies the so-called new or “pure architecture,” defined by Le Corbusier, was materialistic. The famous Athens Charter (1943) says, for instance, that “searching for the measure of man means determining man’s needs. They are few; they are same for all people, because all people were made by the same from the same mold.” What logically followed was the definition that the home is a “dwelling machine,” which means: “bathroom, sunshine, warm water, cold water, desired temperature, canned food, hygiene, standard house, standard furniture.” For the sake of his vision of a healthy town with sunshine, recreation, green plants and broad roads, Le Corbusier advocated the demolishing of the old core of Paris, that had been constructed on different, often opposite principles. However, after a period of enthusiasm that did not take long, the first challenging voices were heard in the 60s and 70s, coming not only from the inhabitants of the “new town,” but also from city planners and architects. Sarsde, a suburb of Paris with 80,000 inhabitants, built according to this recipe, became a synonym of all the negative aspects of the new “radiant town”: now it became a “dormitory,” a “silo for people,” “termite hill,” “concentration camp’ ‘—terms that express discontent with the life in these geometrical and standardized settlements. 3118. The discrepancy between the Old and the New Testament, that is, between the Jewish and Christian spirit, is reflected almost literally in the opposition that exists between principles of the Old Testament and the New Testament. Christian recognition of the Old Testament was and had to be just verbal. From the point of view of the spirit, the Old Testament was completely alien to the individualist spirit of Christianity. The figure, the character, as a confirmation of the individualist principle of the world, was bound to finally defeat the iconoclast principle of early Christianity. Origene and Clement of Alexandria, as well as many others, were its advocates and they kept on struggling for their principle for long, against ever-stronger supporters of icons and pictures, in a struggle that had been lost from the very beginning. As history shows, this struggle was not only limited to bitter polemics. It turned into a real war and physical extermination of the opponents. All the highly praised religious painting and sculpture of the most glorious centuries of Christianity were in grave violation of the first Biblical prohibition (“Do not make a figure of yourself, that would look like anything in the sky, on the earth or in the waters beneath the earth.”) As far


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Islam Between East and West as Islam is concerned, it is appropriate to consider that the ban remains in force, as it was repeated in the Qur’an, but only with the purpose of rejecting idolatry. I believe that beyond that function, this prohibition has no sense or meaning. 3129. Alexander Rotchenko exhibited his work Last Painting in 1921. It was “black on black,” a disappearance, a denial of picture, that supposedly was to mark “the end of painting.” 3130. The victory of the principle of the icon in the Christian world (with some exceptions that only prove the rule) obviously had some deeper reasons. It would be right to say that the victory was inevitable, that is, that it derived from the very nature of Christianity. Nothing so clearly shows the different spirits of the Old and the New Testament like this inevitable breakthrough made by the figure and face into the culture of the Christian world. It was an indisputable triumph of the figurative principle, in spite of the unambiguous proscription imposed by the Old Testament. One must ask himself: was individualist Christianity able to observe it, being what it really is? 3142. Critics and their reviews can be interesting, I myself read them with pleasure sometimes, but I think that we have some misconceptions about their function. Critical reviews have no influence upon the course and development of literature (or art in general). Creation always precedes criticism. I do not believe that a single writer ever changed anything in his style due to critics’ views. Critiques do have an impact upon the writer’s reputation and sale of his books, that is, upon his material status, but not his creative work. Naturally, provided that he was a real writer. 3163. It is little (or insufficiently) known that the cult of Satan is very developed in the civilized world. In 1956, the most important Satanist organization located in the United States was established by the movie actor Anton LaVey (he played the role of devil in the movie Rosemary’s Baby.) In San Francisco there is the Church of Satan. LaVey is the author of the so-called Satanic Bible, whose main message reads: “Blessed are the strong, because they shall rule the earth” (a paraphrase and antithesis of the sentence from the Bible: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven”). In their rituals that stir up animal instincts, they recite Baudelaire, take part in orgies and celebrate Satan as the master of “eternal evil.” 3195. The contemporary English painter Francis Bacon, a representative of the “renewed expressionism,” on painting: “It is something mysterious, it is an occurrence... . Look at Rembrandt, his self-portraits. What could be said about the style they are painted in? Nothing, almost nothing. You look at them, and that’s it.” Furthermore: “I never liked modern expressionism, as a matter of fact I like Egyptian art the most. That is the greatest art in the history of humankind” (Vjesnik, Zagreb, December 5, 1987). Nietzsche found “unreachable models” in ancient Greece. Bacon, as we can see, traced the climax of art back to a more distant past, to the very beginning of history or even to the verge of prehistory. 3198. Rationalized Chaos—another name for the alienated world of civilization (author: Filip David, Yugoslav writer). 3210. What are tragedy and pathos doing in the Darwinian-Euclidean world? Who are the big losers and why do we admire losers, if this is the only and the last life we have? What is the origin of our admiration for fallen heroes that has been


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Islam Between East and West following us since the prehistorical epics of the Iliad and Gilgamesh? Even the low-budget Western movies—do they not take advantage of our innate sympathy for the victim (i.e., loser), and against material interests? Sympathy for the victim does not reside in the mind, but only in the soul, that is, in the principle that does not belong to “this world.” I say sympathy, not understanding, because it is not and it cannot be understanding. There is no way to understand, or to explain in rational terms, the sacrifice made by a hero for a just or right cause. All our reasoning and wisdom could not explain nor justify a single case of sacrifice made by a hero for the sake of justice and truth. Something that is so close and understandable to the soul of every man cannot be explained by any science or philosophy. Between the act that is justified and the justification of it, there is no interpolation or mediation of reasoning, no weighing of reasons for and against and, we could even say, no time. That is just an immediate reaction of the soul to the good and just, to something it identifies itself with. In the world that atheists call the only one, the tragic and tragedy are not possible. In such a world there are only incidents and accidents. 3211. De Chirico’s classical period painting is also called “pittura metafisica.” 3238. Marx wrote (most likely when he was young): “since the root of man is man himself.” How can this idealist sentence be put in accordance with the theory of reflection and full dependence of spiritual facts of life on material facts? The only possible answer is that Marx is not in agreement with himself, or that the “mature” Marx discredited the young one and renounced him. 3250. “They want to get out of themselves and not to be men” (Montaigne). Who? Well, both. Christians would turn men into angels; materialists state that we are animals and that we will remain animals. What about man? Man is superior not only to animals, but to angels as well (Qur’an, 2/34). 3283. Remaining faithful to its “theory of reflection” and applying it to the problems of logic, the so-called materialist philosophy defines the notion as “a semantic reflection of essential (necessary) properties of material things.” So, for instance, the notion “houses” is a reflection of all essential (common) properties of all houses. For the spirit (according to the philosophy that supports this theory) must always come after the material reality, it must be in a passive, dependent relation to it. However, this theory became stuck at the first step. We have notions on different psychological phenomena and feelings that are not material objects, such as joy, anger, shame. We also have very clear ideas on various abstract concepts (point, fraction, square, unreal numbers) or some fictitious concepts (fairy, witch, Paradise). These “objects” are neither material nor psychological. They could not be “reflected.” How do we get notions of them? 3308. Poet Miodrag Paviovic wrote a book titled The Poetic Nature of the Ritual of Sacrifice, in which he tries to get an insight into the very essence of the sacrificial offering. In his opinion, by understanding the ritual we get closer to understanding the symbolic forms of human existence and works of art. NOLIT named the book as the best book published in 1987. 3309. “We proved through genetics that all men are different. The environment, though they have an identical genetic code, shapes even identical twins, real twins, differently. Therefore, they are also different beings” (Jean Dausset, French Nobel Prize winner, in his interview with Start, February 6, 1988). My comment: Obviously, God likes diversity.


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3360. By definition, socialism is characterized by “technological optimism,” that is, the belief that technique and technology will make people happy. 3374. (Purge and punishment): “Purge” is the attitude toward a thing, punishment toward a man. In order to be exposed to a purge, man first has to cease being man and to become a thing or animal. In that sense, Darwinism was a precondition for Stalinism. A purge could be developed deliberately and systematically only in a world where there is no God, therefore no man either. 3448. There are phenomena that cannot be rationally grasped or fully understood. The game is one of them. It obviously has some cosmological component or presentiment. The philosopher of game, the German Eugene Fink, noticed, “the human game is just an instant of the game of the cosmos.” Fink further elaborates on this thought by stating, “the game is not an anthropological phenomenon, as it is usually thought of, but much more than that—the way in which infinity exists.” 3455. The anarchists elaborated the doctrine on crime as conditional on the social situation to the furthest conclusions. Petar Krapotkin stated that in a socialist society there would be no criminals of any kind, since crime is due exclusively to private property—based relationships and an authoritative government. Based on this doctrine, Bakunjin and Krapotkin requested that all prisons be closed down. Krapotkin especially advocated the view on the inefficiency of prison punishment. In his article “Prison and Its Effects upon Prisoners,” Krapotkin advocated the thesis that “who has been once in prison, will certainly come back as repeater, but on much more serious charges.” We might share his view on the inefficiency of prison punishment, but no better solution has been found yet. 3460. The greatest Greek tragedy writers lived in the fifth century B.C. Aeschylus, 525—456, Sophocles 485-406 and Euripides 485—406. This incites us to think about the relationship between history and art. Unlike science, art does not evolve. 3465. Some American corporations now (in 1988) employ only 10—12 percent “ordinary” workers. The rest are computer experts, specialized experts, scientists, researchers, designers, and so on. 3470. The Arab scientist Al Birouni taught, five centuries before Copernicus, that the Earth revolved around its axis and around the sun. He was neither proclaimed heretic because of his statements, nor was his teaching considered contrary to religion. That was not due to a more liberal attitude of the society. Copernicus’s heliocentric system was in collision with the Christian feeling of the world. It was not about the Earth and its position, but about man and his position in the universe. Copernicus placed man, together with the Earth, at some peripheral circle. Neither the Earth nor man represented the center of the universe any longer. This could considerably upset Christianity, but not Islam, which was not encumbered with any lofty idea of man. However, a teaching that was ready to identify man with God (“man-God”) must have seen Copernicus’s theory as unforgivable heresy and attack against one of its favorable concepts. This explains the different reactions toward and the different destinies of Copernicus and Al Birouni.


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Islam Between East and West 3477. Art is knowledge of the particular, the philosophy and science of the general. 3494. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in his diary, on July 30, 1835: “You assert. . . that Jesus was a perfect man. I bow before him with true respect.... But, if you told me that he fulfilled all the conditions of human existence, that he developed all the human possibilities to the maximum, I would withdraw my consent. I do not see joy in him, I do not find love for the natural sciences in him, I do not see any inclination towards art in him, nothing that would remind me of Socrates, La Place or Shakespeare. A perfect man should remind us of these great people.” My comment: this is a minor misunderstanding. Jesus was supposed to be a victim, a martyr, the greatest symbol of that sort. And that he was. 3502. Wolves live in herds because it makes them stronger. But if one wolf gets hurt or starts limping, the others will devour him without hesitation. This is obvious proof that the herd is based on interest and instincts. It has nothing to do with solidarity, comradeship or mutual help. Nature does not know of such things. 3510. Exaggerated Christian idealism leads to hypocrisy. As people cannot meet its extremely elevated requirements, they begin to pretend. So, instead of a real sacrifice, we have its imitation. This is a simple fact of life, something that derives inevitably from the unchangeable relation among human forces: body, mind and soul. Yet the Christian requirement, though it has not been fully met, helped the world and man to become better. Without the experience of Christianity, mankind would be less human and it is hard even to imagine how much poorer, spiritually and morally, it would be in all respects. 3528. A famous psychiatrist, who examined the relation between art and psychiatry, or more precisely, the creations of insane artists, noticed that Van Gogh, the painter of unbalanced mind, painted the lightest -landscapes. What is the explanation for this and similar phenomena related to artistic creation? This is one of the answers: “There is only one art. It does not ask if it is created by a mature man or a child, if it derives from the spirit of a man of white, red or black race. It does not mind whether the artist comes from the Paris boulevard, Nubian Desert or Eskimo ice, nor whether it is made by a mentally sound or insane artist.. . the strength of the artistic genius is such a force in the human spirit, that it cannot be broken even by mental insanity” (Marko Peic, a psychiatrist who studied the work of insane artists). 3529. Art reached its climax at the boyhood of humankind—in Ancient Greece, maybe just because it is the boyhood home of humankind. 3535. Regarding the ritual character of art, I found many facts and good points in the books Poetics of the Ritual of Sacrifice, Talking of Nothing and Talking and the Ritual Act, written by the poet Miodrag Pavlovic. From one of his interviews: “Studying human nature seems more difficult than studying the star, mists in the depths of the cosmos. . . . A work of art supplemented the ritual, but it also replaced the ritual in the early periods or substituted for the sacrifice offered in the ritual.” 3538. (Man and machine): There is some inexplicable internal contrast between man and machine. The development of machines (the introduction of a new machine, engine, electricity, air traffic) has always been followed by the arbitrary reactions of people. The latest phenomenon, called cyberphobia, proves that the


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Islam Between East and West reactions were not only due to the fear of losing a job. A study conducted in the United States in 1987, based on a survey of the behavior of 462 managers and computer experts, showed that a relatively high percentage of people using computers manifest signs of “computer related nervousness,” while a number of them suffered from a new disease called cyberphobia (symptoms: in the presence of a computer, they panic, feel terrorized, breathe with difficulty, tremble, lose control and smash the machines). We should also mention here “the Orwellian paranoia,” unreasonable fear of high technology. 3541. If we were to judge by Plutarch’s heroes (if his stories had been true), man has regressed through history. Nowadays, there are no individuals of such human and moral significance (greatness) like the characters from Plutarch’s Biographies (25 centuries ago). It may be true that 90 percent of scientists, of all who have ever lived, have lived in our time, but ten-tenths of all really great men lived in the times that preceded ours. The ratio seems to be reversed here. History is the progression of society and civilization, yet it is the regression of man and culture (Compare: Qur’an, 56/13—14). 3542. It is in our soul that respect for man is written down. But Emerson was right saying that it was not respect for man, but for the related soul. “It is the soul that respects itself,” says Emerson. If we look at man, who he is and what he is like, we can only agree with Emerson. 3561. The culture of pre-Columbian America encompasses a period of 3,000 years (from 1500 B.C. until the Spanish invasion in 1521). All the art of that culture is marked by religion. 3590. Art, just as life, resists defining. It seems that art that is defined would not be art anymore. All great artists are aware of that. The following statement is attributed to Picasso: “If I knew what art was, I would not tell anyone. I would keep it for myself.” 3591. Edward Kotsback wrote somewhere that Christianity and Marxism represent the “bi-polarity of human destiny,” convinced that neither of them is able to reach the whole truth by itself and that by mutual permeation they open new social and political prospects (see the article “Deaf Power” by Zeljko Kruselj, Danas, July 12, 1988). 3607. We were all born with the same moral feeling, whether we came to life in a royal palace or in a log cabin. It was discovered, for instance, that children of the convicts from Botany Bay, the former English penal colony in Australia, had equally sound moral feelings as other children. Subsequent life, education and circumstances do their part, so that the same could not be said for adults; however, the initial moral capital we all get at the birth is the same.

3610. “Society is conspiring everywhere against the human nature of each of its members” (R.W. Emerson in his essay Self-confidence). According to Emerson, only the individual possesses the ability of moral improvement, while “society never makes progress.” 3611. Life cannot be reduced to only one principle, therefore even the wisest and the farthest reaching teachings on life always seem somewhat contradictory. The author of Society and Solitude, R.W. Emerson, says that strict consistency


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Islam Between East and West “haunts limited minds, and is highly valued only by trifling statesmen, philosophers and priests.” For, after all, it is about the conflict of names, titles and definitions, while life is something more complex than them. 3630. We should forgive, because that is the only way to break the chain of evil. We should not forgive, we should punish evil, fight evil with evil, otherwise it will spill over the world. Which of the two statements is true? Where is the solution? What should we do? The only right answer is: punish and forgive. All those who have lived long enough and observed people and the world with eyes wide open and without prejudices, accept these two, at the first sight contradictory, truths. If life was founded on a single principle, then there would be only one answer and one choice: either punishment or forgiveness. This example mirrors the mutual relationships among Moses, Jesus and Muhammad, or among the Old Testament, the Gospel and the Qur’an. The first one is in favor of punishment, the second of forgiveness, while the third is in favor of both. 3637. In Hinduism, divorce is prohibited—another, quite logical overlap with Christianity.

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Communism and Nazism: Some Facts That Should Not Be Forgotten

CHAPTER 5 Communism and Nazism: Some Facts That Should Not Be Forgotten 347. General Zhukov' s decree to the soldiers upon their conquering Berlin in 1945: "You, the Soviet soldier, take revenge! Behave so that the assault made by our armies be remembered not only by today's Germans, but their grandchildren. Keep in mind that everything owned by those inhuman Germans now belongs to you. You, the Soviet soldier, do not have any compassion and mercy!" (NIN, March 3, 1985). 438. (The losses of the USSR in the "purges" before World War II and during the war). A.I. Solzhenitsyn, referring to the estimation of Prof. Kulgakov, claims that the people of the USSR lost 66 million in the years of terror and 44 million in the war. It is believed that these numbers are exaggerated, but even those moderate estimations are not less shocking. The Soviet demographer M. Maksudov carried out analyses and concluded that in the period between 1932 and 1949, a total of 43 million people died from various causes, out of which on the battlefield and from the consequences of the war about 20 million soldiers and civilians died, which corresponds to the official data. The difference of 23 million refers to those killed in the years of Stalinist repression and starvation before the war. According to Maksudov' s estimations, during Stalin's rule, one in two men and one in four women did not die naturally, that is, did not live as long as they could have (according to Roy Medvedev, The Unknown Stalin, excerpts in Duga magazine, Belgrade, April 16, 1985). 453. (Bolshevism vs. Nazism). In 1940, the Soviet Academy of Science, in the review published by its astronomical section, states that the theory on the existence of some sort of relativistic social peace is "enemy fiction of the agents of world imperialism and abominable propaganda promoted by a dying ideology." It is indicative that both official Nazi and Bolshevik propaganda shared negative views on Einstein's relativity theory. Dr. Walter Gross, the state advisor for the "aryanization of science" in Hitler's Germany, stated in 1940 that Einstein's theories are the "product of the frenzy of polluted liberalism and democratic idiocy, absolutely unacceptable to German scientists." 459. In the article by Roy Medvedev published in the Roman magazine La Repubblica (May 1985), entitled The Faults and Merits of Comrade Stalin, there is the following statement: "In 1943, Stalin legalized the Orthodox Church and reestablished the Archbishopric, by which he succeeded to use not only all the Soviet forces but also all the force of Russian patriotism. But, at the same time, he gravely affected the Muslim population of the Crimean, Caucasus and the Volga River basin, who had been forcefully deported to Siberia and into the Caucasus. Hundreds of thousands of lives were lost during this horrible evacuation." 517. "The labor camps in the USSR enjoy a great reputation as institutions for the re-education of thousands of people"-American journalist Ana Louise Strong in 1973. My comment: to these words, the millions of victims of these camps are turning in their graves. 576. "...and the fathers of the families, instead of letting them go back home for dinner, were sent to the areas where climate suits the white bear, not people."


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Communism and Nazism: Some Facts That Should Not Be Forgotten 592. Socialist realism (Soc-realism) in literature and the agricultural collectives in the economy go hand in hand. 593. "Purges" disregard people, they deal with "human material," and "human material" has neither personality nor soul. 627. Trying to appease the ruling Stalinist regime in Hungary, Gyorgy Lukacs in his presentation before the Hungarian Academy of Science, held in June 1951, stated that Stalin's works in linguistics (published in 1959) have historical significance and criticizes his own colleagues who are trying to sell certain politically unacceptable views. This, Lukacs' criticism of his own colleagues, was a mere denouncement. In his paper, he supported the most vulgar form of theory of reflection, reducing art and literature solely to socio-economic relations. 629. In his book The Sentenced Group of Six, Mensur Seferovic tells the story of six communists who were sentenced to death by the Communist Party in 1942 because they had refused to carry out the decision made by the Party to execute several renowned citizens of the town of Bihac. The sentence was later turned under one condition: within a new, delayed, deadline, the six men had to carry out the order. The decision had later been suspended and the sentenced men rehabilitated (Oslobodjenje, September 1, 1985). 637. "Lenin is more alive than all the living" or "Lenin is more human than all humans"-such and similar slogans could be read all over the USSR. Later, it would be Stalin, then Krushchev, then Brezhnev. 641. In the book Heavy Wings by the Chinese writer Zhang Li (translated in the West), life in the Peoples' Republic of China is described in grim colors: corruption, intrigue, broken human relations, women being subordinated. All the heroes of the book are dissatisfied with their lives. All the positive characters of the novel are apolitical. The writer herself spent three years in an educational reformatory institution during the so-called Cultural Revolution. In an interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel, Zhang Li describes the condition in that institution: "I was awfully skinny and, despite of that, I had to carry out the hardest work that only men could do" (the Zagreb magazine Danas, August 28, 1985). 642. Janez Stanic, in his book The White Stains of Socialism (published by Globus, Zagreb, 1985), describes what is usually considered as the deformations of socialism in Russia and China. Some drastic examples include the collectivization of agriculture in the USSR carried out in the 1930s, known also as the "liquidation of the kulaks as the class," the actual physical extermination which took over 6 million lives (deportation and death in Siberia), events that many historians, even those Soviet, Mikhail Geller and Alexander Nekhritch, consider to be one of the greatest genocides in the twentieth century. Soviet agriculture never recovered: The country with the greatest area of fertile soil in the world is now incapable of feeding her own population and has become one of the biggest importers of food. The second example is the so-called "Great Leap Forward" in China at the end of the 1950s, when tens of millions of people were evicted from their villages to build factories, railroads, dams, and the like (in the official propaganda, it was called "the release of the creative energies of the masses"). One of the actions of the "Great Leap Forward" was known as the "Campaign for Steel." In rural communities, this campaign resulted in the construction of around two million small, primitive steelworks in which, at the peak of the campaign (195 8-59), over 60 million people were employed. During this time, China produced around 11 million tons of steel, of which the real steelworks produced 80 percent; the primitive ones not more than 20 percent. In addition, there was an enormous disproportion in labor; in the larger steel-works,


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Communism and Nazism: Some Facts That Should Not Be Forgotten approximately one million people worked, producing about 9 million tons of steel, while about 60 million workers produced the remaining 2.2 million -tons. These data were published later within the process of the "correction of errors." The key problem and harm were done because these people stopped cultivating their land (Danas, Zagreb, August 28, 1985). 645. In his book Punished Nations, the Soviet writer Alexander Nekhritch investigates and describes Stalin's genocide of the small nations in the USSR. Soviet General Grigorenko was thus removed, pronounced insane and put into a psychiatric clinic because he advocated the rehabilitation of Attars from the Crimean and the permission for them to return to their island. 654. In his Tales of Kolyma (about Stalin's camps), Varlam Shalamov gave a description of the life and death of Siberian camp inmates. These stories are almost impossible to retell. Most of them are improbable, said Predrag Matvejevic. "Shalamov' s stories hold a very odd measurement: the manual for the endurance of material, applied on men" (Sinyavski). In most of the cases, culture in those camps soon disappears, faster than one could have thought. In the Gulags, there are no heroes. "I was a mere corpse and lived in accordance with the psychology of a beast," says Shalamov (p. 251). "Among other things, Shalamov offered the answer to the questions such as: how could this have been possible? An unpunished requital where millions of people succeeded because those people were innocent" (Predrag Matvejevic, NIN, August 11, 1985). 718. What else could I expect from judges (prosecutors, investigators), who have based their knowledge of law on the Marxist premise that "law is the will of the ruling class transformed into statutes," a formula that is a cynical contradiction to the very idea of law. 719. The classical principle: It is better to leave a hundred guilty men unpunished than to sentence one innocent person. Lenin confronted to the opposite principle: "It is not so important to punish a crime severely, but not to leave a single crime unpunished," cites Boris Elesov, Deputy Minister of the Interior of the USSR, in a 1985 interview with the magazine Panorama. According to the same source, 10 percent of crimes remain undiscovered in the USSR, that is, go unpunished. As far as I know, in the United States the situation is quite opposite. It is a different story to establish the price of this "efficiency" and the number of those who have been sentenced in this way. 746. "Given that among 9 million Bulgarians, ethnic minorities make up 12.5 percent of the population". . . "the integration of minorities" started as early as 1956. Since that time, as many as 1,299 mosques and other religious and national symbols have been destroyed. At the tenth Bulgarian Communist Party Congress, in 1971, the creation of a "single socialist nation" was proclaimed and, another curiosity, citizenship and ethnicity were merged. What followed was the action of changing Muslim names to Bulgarian, all under the aegis of socialism, communism and patriotism. Those who opposed were told: "Those who do not wish to continue living in their native villages and wish to move, competent authorities will provide the possibility to move within three to four hours." These words were uttered by Stanko Todorov, Politburo member and the speaker of the National Assembly of Peoples' Republics of Bulgaria, at the beginning of 1985 (published in Slovensko Delo, March 12, 1985). 748. The basic premise of Leszek Kolakowski is that the historical role of Marxism has been completed. The project of the revolutionary change of the world has proved a failure.


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Communism and Nazism: Some Facts That Should Not Be Forgotten 749. In the mass expulsion of people, the method as well as the scope varied (Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, "the boat people," etc.). Romania, however, set a precedent in this respect. In the spring of 1985, Romania passed an administrative decision pronouncing a large group of citizens (roughly a thousand people) personae non grata and deported them. They simply loaded them on planes and sent them off to West Berlin and Stockholm. Authorities in these two cities did not know what to do, as the deported people arrived without passports and it was impossible to establish their identity (from the Belgrade weekly Interview, November 22, 1985). 813. The oppression of minorities is a sort of "natural state" that can be constrained by culture and civilization. We have found that in our century typical ethnic oppression is-perhaps paradoxically-carried out in the countries of the "peoples' democracy"-Bulgaria, Albania, Romania and the USSR. Hundreds of thousands of Turks, Macedonians, Serbs, Roma and Kurds in Bulgaria have ceased to exist overnight by way of state decree. They became Bulgarians, with new Bulgarian names. In Albania, at the same time, roughly 120,000 Macedonians, Montenegrins and Serbs were reduced to no more than 3,000 Macedonians living in nine villages. At the same time there were growing tensions between Hungary and Romania over the destiny of two million ethnic Hungarians in Transylvania, the group the Romanians are trying to assimilate (Danas, December 17, 1985). The slightest inquiry from their homeland about their destiny is understood as "interference with internal affairs" of the country in question. The tendency to assimilate seems to be "natural." How could this occur, as a delayed phenomenon, in the countries of this type, where one would not expect "ethnic criteria" to be predominant? The reason lies in the fact that this natural "instinct to assimilate"-actually to subordinate and suppress-has no hindrance in the legislation. On the contrary, even the disrespect for human and all other rights, a trait inherent to these political systems and ruling ideology, opens the gates wide to the savage nationalism of the majority that meets no resistance whatsoever. In this type of country, this disrespect for the rights of the citizens -goes even a step further: The very laws of the country are being disregarded. What rules is the pretext of voluntarism that originates directly from the well-known formula proposed by Marx (and Engels) on legislation as the expression of will of the ruling class. 863. In 1939, Europe was faced with the most difficult dilemma in her history: to choose between "Evil with Hope"-Stalinism-and "Evil without Hope"-Hitlerism. That is how it looked, but only virtually. Both were evil and both were hopeless. 891. Soviet artists, members of registered associations, were obliged, as stated in one of the statutes, to "present life in light of socialist ideals" (one of the postulates of socialist realism). Emotions and experiences that were not related to work and socialist development, from the socialist viewpoint, were neither of any merit nor interesting enough to become the subject of art. 892. There are many reasons to believe that, in the case of the "Cultural Revolution" in China, the expulsion of people was, thanks to the endless wealth of Chinese traditions and their immense imagination, "enriched" by new, unprecedented forms of terror. The Cultural Revolution was very un-cultural; it was the greatest barbarism of this century, not only because of its violence, but also for its massive repression. It is estimated that, one way or another, over 100 million people suffered from its cruelty. 893. When it comes to the banning of books, the fact that there are indexes of banned books is not the greatest problem. It is even worse when there is no such list, so that all books, except for those officially approved, are either suspicious or banned, that is, when instead of an index of banned books there is only the index


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Communism and Nazism: Some Facts That Should Not Be Forgotten of those approved. It is destructiveness at its maximum. Such a situation was created by the Chinese Communists between 1966 and 1976. 960. During the "Cultural Revolution" there was the establishment of "Committees for the Surveillance of Bourgeois Monsters." These monsters were primarily writers and artists. 989. In his speech at the twentieth Congress, Krushchev cited that, out of 139 members and candidates for the Central Committee, selected at the seventeenth Party Congress, 98 had been arrested and executed. Stalin was the author of the notion "enemy of the people," which served as the excuse for the cruelest violence and executions without charges lodged or trial. 1029. Viewed historically, the credit for introducing the institute of the criminal act of enemy propaganda, i.e., the ban on the freedom of speech, belongs to the first socialist state in the world-the USSR. In the proposal for modifications of the Criminal Code of the USSR, in May 1922, Lenin claims that enemy propaganda is one of the six new criminal acts carrying the death sentence. Along with this proposal, Lenin offered this explanation: "The idea is clear, I hope: we need to grant the most extensive possible formulation because it will be the revolutionary consciousness that will eventually determine the appropriate implementation of this provision in practice" (in a letter to the Judiciary Commissar, Dimitri Kursky, in the Belgrade daily Politika, Svijet, March 18, 1986). 1031. (Nationalism in socialism)-After the October Revolution, the Cyrillic alphabet spread even to the nations who had had their own alphabet and had been literate, such as the Kyrgyz, Uzbeks and Kazakhs. The explanations offered were that it was ancient literacy "built on foreign linguistic grounds." This mainly forceful approach made Cyrillic the basic alphabet of some very ancient nations, far beyond the borders of the republics inhabited by the Slav population. Even in present-day Mongolia, Cyrillic is used. 1044. In The Brothers Karamazov Dostoyevsky showed-or at least wanted to do so-that the emerging Soviet man, embodied in the Karamazovs (all very different: Alyosha, Dimitri, Ivan and Fyodor), is equally capable of great deeds as well as evil, equally ready to create both the Kingdom of God and the Empire of Satan on this earth. The latter happened. 1081. The suffering that mankind has gone through could be understood as God' s punishment for man's attempt to create heaven on earth without God and against Him. Such a project reached a planetary scope in the twentieth century, and consequently the punishment had a planetary character. The attempt ended up with the creation of the greatest inferno in human history. 1099. In the twentieth century, so proud of its name and its achievements, we have become introduced to a literature known as "camp literature" that emerged from the horrible circumstances of Stalin's and Hitler's concentration camps. Readers have different feelings about this literature; most of them would rather not read it at all, closing their eyes and shutting their ears to it, in order not to "know," if they had the right to ignore it. Faced with the description of human suffering, we could agree with the writer who said that "the extreme insight into the fact that people, even at the lowest level of humiliation, discover the indestructibility of their humanity, therefore, as a supernatural fact" (Jovica Aéin, Delo, Belgrade, No. 4-5/1986, p. 9). 1108. "You know, once one has spent years in camps, one needs nothing, and everything becomes a pleasure to him," wrote Margaret Buber-Neumann, the German writer, who spent two years in a Soviet concentration camp in


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Communism and Nazism: Some Facts That Should Not Be Forgotten Karaganda, Kazakhstan, and then, after Stalin handed her over to Hitler (she was Jewish), she spent an additional five years in a Nazi camp. 1162. Varlam Shalamov, the Russian writer who wrote tales from the concentration camps ("Tales from Kolyma"), was born in 1907 and died in 1982, having spent almost 25 years in the camps-from 1929 to 1934 and from 1937 to 1957. This martyr-writer writes that a horse loses strength much faster than man and that there is no horse (except for those from Yakutsk) that could endure what people endured in Stalin's Siberian camps. Following this thought, Shalamov even claims that man is the animal who can endure most, physically, and that this is the reason (neither his mind nor his soul) why man distanced himself from the animal world and became human in the first place. Perhaps it was the hope that kept man in the hardest of conditions, continues Shalamov, because animals know nothing about hope, whereas man, thanks also to a certain measure of foolishness, continues to hope-and survives. 1169. (On political rulings). It often happens that the public considers those charged with a political offense guilty for "selfish" reasons. This is a kind of defense mechanism. People refuse to accept the fact that they live in a world (society) in which man is protected by law and order. Then, for them, the question arises, how could they keep silent? That is why they have to believe that those sentenced are guilty, at least have breached the law, and that otherwise they would not have been sentenced and imprisoned. If a man is sentenced even if he is innocent and sentenced unlawfully, then the one who- is thinking about it is no longer secure; such is the option people instinctively-in self-defense- tend to reject. This conclusion is easier to impose upon oneself-and to accept- the more severe is the sentence in question. In the absence of evidence the severe sentence itself becomes the proof of the existence of guilt. This is how ordinary people reason-if someone were not guilty, he would have been sentenced to two or three, not to 15 years of prison. It is exactly this viewpoint that those who have decreed the sentence have counted on (naturally, it is not the court but the committee). If guilt is not clear and obvious, then a mild sentence becomes suspect and shows that the authorities lack self-confidence. With a strict sentence, such doubt is out of the question. Thus an innocent man is punished twice. This is an old trick, also used by the Nazis, who applied it not in the duration of the sentence but in the cruelty of its execution in their concentration camps. (They would not treat him so cruelly if he was not a traitor, would theythis is how this idea was approached by the ordinary German.) 1171. German concentration camps were extremely inhuman, though rational, based on a sort of demonic science. Torture and humiliation of camp inmates was rational in the sense that it was calculated so that in the shortest time possible a man's personality and will for resistance was broken. The same method was applied by the Gestapo and in the arrests, that is, in the selection of those to be transported to the camps. They were mainly the groups and community leaders for whom there were grounds for suspicion that they could become opponents of the system. If that would not suffice, the circle of those arrested expanded. In a relatively short period of time and with relatively few casualties, Hitler succeeded in suppressing resistance and channeled the people of Germany towards the aim he had defined. For the Soviet concentration camps, as for the method, one can say that they were equally cruel and inhuman, but, unlike the Nazi camps, they were not rational. It was cruelty for cruelty's sake, torture with no purpose whatsoever, and arrests without any grounds and logic. Still, German camps remain a grave accusation against the perception of civilized man and show that without ethics the acceptable humane and human matrix could not be created. "Once the inmate," wrote Bruno Bettelheim, a Nazi camp inmate himself, "reached his final stage of adapting to camp conditions, his personality would have changed and he would start accepting the SS values as his own." One of the


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Communism and Nazism: Some Facts That Should Not Be Forgotten "rationalities" of the German concentration camps was their attitude toward those inmates incapable of labor and the ill. The Gestapo considered it useful to liquidate them as soon as possible, so they were either murdered or else everything was done to see them die as fast as possible. This "rational selection" buried all the weak inmates as early as the first days of their detention. Bettelheim calls those camps "Gestapo laboratories for the subordination of free people," where "laboratory" is a rational, even scientific, but not always human and humane term. 1173. In the Soviet concentration camps, people often caused injury to themselves in order to, at least temporarily, gain admission to the hospital and thus escape the insufferable living and working conditions of the camps. But, once those cases became too frequent, the camp authorities discovered what was happening and only those injuries that could be proven were accepted. All other cases were defined as "premeditated self-inflicted injuries" and as such they qualified as sabotage that led to an additional ten years of prison. Gustav Herling Grudjinski wrote about this in his article Resurrection (Delo, Ljubljana, 4-5/1986). 1174. With their concentration camps and their monstrous atrocities, both Nazism and Stalinism remain a grave accusation against western civilization. Whatever we might think, these monstrous methods and the people who applied them were one of the possibilities of this civilization, a possibility that, alas, had materialized. 1360. In Lenin's famous definition, "dictatorship of the proletariat is a boundless authority and power relying on violence. . ." and so on ("Sotchinenia"), one can sense the praise of violence, not as the means, even less as an urgent necessity, but as the principle or an aim that is self-sufficient. This ode to violence does not make us angry, it shocks. 1946. Vladimir Bartoshewski, a Polish writer (who suffered detention in Auschwitz, between 1940 and 1945 and was then, between 1946 and 1953, a prisoner in Poland, only to be imprisoned again, from 1985 to 1986, as activist of Solidarity), wrote: "He who saves one life, saved the whole of mankind." Compare this with the Qur'an: "He who kills one man, is as if he killed the whole world" (Qur'an, 5/35). Bartoshevski was awarded the German Publisher's Peace Award in 1986. 2004. Stalin claimed that social democrats were the greatest threat to the communists and banned any electoral collaboration between the communists and social democrats. Thus the Germans, voting in Prussia against the social democrats, helped Hitler's rise to power. 2048. In ancient Rome there was the law known as Damnation Memorial, which ordered the deletion of the names of criminals and traitors from all the history books. Following this law, the names of two emperors were also erased: Caligula's and Nero's. A similar practice, only in a more radical form, can be found in the USSR: the practice of re-tailoring and re-forging history. But the most obvious aspect of this re-tailoring, literally, using scissors, is the reshaping of photographs. In the beginning this photo-editing was aimed only at presenting the leadership and their results in development in a better light, namely, to create a sort of propaganda in the form of pictorial hagiography. From the 1930s onward, its purpose was to erase the unwanted. People who had been eliminated from political life disappeared from the photos (most often it meant physical liquidation as well). In 1986, at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris, there was an exhibition of photographs that falsify history. Included in the exhibition were a great number of those retouched Soviet photos. The exhibition proved that this had always been done, but this massive, systematic and brutal form of it had only been a practice of the socialist countries of the twentieth century. Most of the


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Communism and Nazism: Some Facts That Should Not Be Forgotten photos originated from the USSR, China, Cuba and Albania (Start, Zagreb, November 14, 1986). 2136. H.G. Wells, in one of his books (written in the 1920s), caused Churchill not to trust his own propaganda about the Bolsheviks being beasts with blood on their hands, and the like. Wells writes that Churchill feared that the Bolsheviks would bring about a new era where common sense would prevail, along with scientific achievements, and that "there would no longer be room for the men of Churchill's breed." 2149. Each ideological state (even an Islamic one) indoctrinates, to a greater or lesser extent, its subjects, imposing its own system of beliefs and opinions, but indoctrination in socialist countries today is essentially different from the communist type. This current indoctrination has no defined system of values. From its subjects it demands the daily acceptance and confirmation of the new "truths" tailored to meet the needs of the authorities. Needs of the present may be opposed to those of the past. The Soviet propagandists told one story about Hitler and Nazism before the signing of the Soviet-German pact in 1939, and one completely different after. The whole nation was expected to turn some of their beliefs 180 degrees after the signing of the pact. Then, in 1941, at the beginning of World War II, the Soviet agitators offered a completely new, third, "truth" about the Germans, and again the nation had to believe it. Again and again, the story continued. 2155. A fact that acquired an almost global significance is that the socialist movement did not find room in itself for a humanistic culture, which was almost always in conflict with writers. It would be wrong to assume that this was the case only in the socialist East. In the West, particularly between the two world wars, we can find the same phenomenon. And it was by no means by accident! 2232. Socialist realism is one side of the world; the flip side is the Gulag. An idealized image of the world is compensation for the naturalistic reality. Oppression desperately needs the lies; it generates lies just as freedom generates humor. In this analysis, one can start from the other end and find that totalitarianism cannot stand humor (remember Kundera' s Joke). 2237. Soviet writer and poet Bulat Okudzhava' s mother spent nineteen years in a Soviet concentration camp. 2240. In Leningrad, in one of the city's oldest churches, there is now the "Museum of Atheism" (NIN, January 4, 1987). 2262. We were taught at school that man has entered history, that he has become a "historic being" once he learned how to write. But he became what he is, that is, man, once he learned how to speak, to express his thoughts. Then some people emerged and forbade man to speak, invented the notorious "verbal crime," the crime of words, and sent man back to the dark pit he had emerged from. 2267. The Soviet biologist Lysenko once stated: "We, in the Soviet Union, are not giving birth to men, we are producing organisms and then we make them cooks, doctors, mechanists, roads maintenance workers, engineers, etc." ("Interview," January 16, 1987). Believe it or not, he said this with pride. 2291. Socialism is forced optimism. 2306. In 1925, in the USSR, a society called "The Association of Militant Atheists" was established. From 1922 to 1941 they issued the paper Godless, and from


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Communism and Nazism: Some Facts That Should Not Be Forgotten 1925, a magazine with the same name. At the same time, the papers Atheist and Militant Atheist were also published. Within the Academy of Social Science (attached to the Communist Party Central Committee), a special institute for scientific atheism was formed in 1964; in a USSR Communist Party program dated 1961, it was written that the Party would use all the available means of ideological action to make people "remedy their religious prejudices" ("The Dream of Atheists and the Awakening of Believers," Borba, January 31, 1987). 2310. Some statistics on the USSR: In 1920, three-quarters of the population were illiterate, 82 percent of population living in rural areas. Shortly after World War II, there were 20 million more women than men; now they outnumber men by ten million. Men live shorter lives. The reasons: vodka, accidents, difficult life. One-third of the population in big cities lives outside wedlock. This is known in the USSR as the "phenomenon of the lonely." From a divorce rate of 2.3 per 100 marriages 50 years ago, in 1986 divorce had moved to 34 per 100. This is the average for the whole of the USSR. In the European part of the USSR the ratio is even worse, as divorce is still quite rare in Central Asia. The most frequent cause for divorce is the husband's alcoholism. The second is the heavy burden on women (they are employed and also work in the home). In the USSR there are 135 million people employed and 58 million retired; 6 million engineers, of which only 2 million of them have an adequate workplace. Secondary school is compulsory for all. Out of the 135 million employed, 34 million have a university (or other relevant) degree. There are fewer and fewer children. The measures put in place in order to boost the birthrate did not produce the desired results (from the presentation of Igor Bestuzhev Lade, Soviet sociologist, NIN, February 1, 1987). 2449. Bolshevisation has become the denomination for the comprehensive and total control of all paths of life. 2451. At a session of the Association of Moscow Writers, the decision was made to exclude Boris Pasternak from the Association of Writers of the USSR and condemn his literature. From the records of this session (held on October 31, 1958), one can read shocking statements made by mainly anonymous writers against a colleague who was in every sense much above them. S. Smirnov who demanded individual members to vote chaired the session. "I fully agree that the novel Dr. Zhivago is trash and I think that this internal emigrant, B. Pasternak, should be expelled from the USSR," said Smirnov; he proposed to submit the request to the Soviet government to evict Pasternak from the USSR. L. Oshanin, I. Zelenin, V. Pertsov, A. Bezymensky, A. Sofronov ("He should be sent from our country"), S. Antonov, B. Sluatsi, G. Nikolayev ("The story of Pasternak is the story of treason"), V. Soloukhin ("That book is the Cold War weapon against Communism"), S. Baruzdin ("Our people have not known Pasternak as a writer, but they will remember him as a traitor"), B. Polevoy and many others spoke along the same lines. Twenty-nine years later, at the beginning of 1987, in the same hall where these actions happened, Pasternak was to be rehabilitated. This time, again following the orders, albeit different, of the authorities, writers sang odes to Pasternak. Has what they really meant ever been spoken? 2455. Ana Akhmatova's Requiem has been finally published. The comment from the daily Politika (March, 13, 1987): "Ana Akhmatova's poem has, for a long time, been the clandestine, illegal hymn of all who suffered Stalin's terror. The Soviet literary establishment which, in 1984, accepted Ana Akhmatova back in the Pantheon of 20th century Soviet writers, has just approved the publication of her poem Requiem, the illegal hymn of those who had fallen as victims of Stalin's terror in the 1930s. The poem has been published in its entirety in the March issue of literary review October." Prior to that, Soviet readership had the chance


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Communism and Nazism: Some Facts That Should Not Be Forgotten to get to know only parts of the poem. Requiem is dedicated to the poetess's son, who was killed in Stalin's camp. One part of the poem reads:

For seventeen months I have been calling you asking you to come home, begging Oh, my son, my terror crawled before the executioner's feet Everything is forever messed up so much, so that I no longer know who is the man and who the beast nor how much time is left to the execution. Ana Akhmatova, who had been praised, in the decade before the Bolshevik Revolution, as one of the leading Russian poets, died in 1966. Her husband was executed in 1921. 2456. Some things are known about the casualties of the communist system in the USSR and China. According to estimations in the West (in the East, of course, if there are any, such information is not publicized) in the Stalinist purge of 19361938, eight to ten million people died. For the duration of Stalin's rule, from 1924 and 1953, the death toll rose to about 15 million people. When an Italian journalist noted in 1980 that Stalin had, in these purges, killed more people than the "Cultural Revolution" did in China (1966-1976), the Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping responded, "I am not sure about it, I am not sure at all." Hu Yaobang, recently deposed secretary general of the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee, disclosed for the first time in 1980, to Yugoslav newspaper correspondents, the fact, unknown until then, that the "Cultural Revolution" took a toll of three million victims. Together with members of their families, their relatives, friends and acquaintances, who were persecuted because of them or along with them, the estimates are that about one hundred million people suffered this police and political action (Danas, March 17, 1987). 2843. After the conflict between the Yugoslav Communist Party and Informburo (IB) in 1948, forced migrations of Yugoslav ethnic minorities occurred in Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania. Jaksa Petric, Yugoslav representative to the United Nations, informed the UN about the inhuman dislocation into the cold regions of Baragan, actually a desert, of the Serb minority in Romania, carried out with extreme cruelty, resulting in the deaths of many in the severest imaginable conditions (Danas, June 16, 1987). In Romania, the communists were in power in those days, under absolute control of the USSR. 2846. It is interesting that the Nazis and Stalinists have equally opposed jazz. They called it the "cannibalistic music." 2888. When we think about culture and man (about "cultural and civilized man"), we should not, we cannot, it is not permitted, to avoid one question: How could it be that the rage, the madness, the frenzy, the shamelessness and inhumanity that have been "given" to this world by two totalitarian regimes - Nazism and Stalinism - happen in this century of culture and civilization? The answer to this question should make us question once again all of our notions and ideas that we usually link to the notions of culture and civilization. 2889. We cannot pull down the Berlin Wall, but we can hate it and despise its builders. One day, our condemnation will pull down this shameful symbol of barbarism in the twentieth century. 2890. What could one think about the country where scientific disputes end up in Siberia?


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Communism and Nazism: Some Facts That Should Not Be Forgotten 2891. Gumilyov, a Russian poet, husband of poetess Ana Akhmatova, was executed in Petrograd, after the October Revolution. He was rehabilitated after the twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the USSR. 2901. Mao Tse-tung has openly proclaimed tenor to be the law of the communist system and claimed that the Cultural Revolution needs to be repeated every 20 years in order to prevent the aging and sclerosis of a society (Danas, July 14, 1987). 2126. The journalist Alexander Vasinsky wrote in Izvestia about the phenomenon of "homo duplex," thinking one thing and speaking another, imposed on a great number of intellectuals in the USSR. Vasinsky calls it "thinking awry." Princeton University's Professor Robert Tucker, one of the greatest U.S. experts on the USSR, said in one interview: "The origin of this phenomenon is in Stalin's tyranny, in the tenor of the thirties. If one has not learned to be silent, to behave in public in accordance with the prescribed scenario, one's disappearance was very probable" (NIN, July 19, 1997). 2130. The German critic of culture, Max Nordan (1849-1923), wrote a book entitled Perversity, where he interpreted the emergence of European Moderna in psychopathological terms. It is interesting that the Nazis and the Marxists had equally accepted his concept of "perverted art."It is evident from the polemics led in Russia, by the beginning of the century, with symbolists. Nordan's notions of "healthy" and "sick" (perverted) art were to be found later in the articles by which the orthodox Stalinists fought against the opponents of social realism. In an article against Verlain, Gorky expressly refened to Nordan. 2132. One of the fruits of social realism in Russia is the "production novel." The first such stillborn was delivered to this world by Gladkov. His novel had the appropriate title: Cement. 2138. Communists confronted the principle of "revolutionary justification" (opportunism) to the rule of law and legality, which became an alibi for endless lawlessness and arbitrariness, because what is revolutionary justified at some point, was decided upon by the leaders (most often, one man) in power. As it is known, at a certain point they have concluded that it is justified to destroy the independent judiciary, organize staged trials, introduce censorship, decimate the intelligentsia, occupy other peoples' countries, force millions into exodus, and the like. All this thanks to the theory of revolutionary justification instead of the rule of law. 2163. In 1937, two grand exhibitions were opened in Munich: first, the "Great Exhibition of German Art" (actually the Nazikunst), and a day later, the exhibition of the "perverted art" (Nordan' s term). The latter presented 730 pieces (paintings, sculptures, prints) by 112 artists. The European Moderna was presented here as a psychopathological phenomenon. 2206. Very few people know that Hitler's Minister for Propaganda, Goebbels, wrote praise to Lenin (in his Lenin oder Hitler?) and that he recommended Nazi film directors to study the Battleship Potemkin, while the Soviet writer Vassily Grossman (in his novel Life and Destiny) deals with the shocking revelation that Leninism and Nazism resemble each other like twins. In the novel that is a variation of this theme, the SS officer Lis speaks about a captured Russian officer and an old Bolshevik Muscovite: "Believe me, the one who finds us terrifying is equally terrified by you." 3075. Immediately after the war, Borislav Pekic (the author of the Golden Fleece and other world-renowned novels) was sentenced to 15 years in prison because of his membership in a youth organization of a social-democrat orientation. He


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Communism and Nazism: Some Facts That Should Not Be Forgotten served five years and described them in the novel with the characteristic title, The Years Swallowed by Locusts. 3119. "Pressurized by this environment," (referring to the situation and condition of the Partisan units in Herzegovina in 1942, my note), in the Partisan HQs and among the party leadership, a belief had been generated that behind the Chetniks there was the Kulak Fifth Column, whose physical extermination was the primary task of the Partisans, according to correspondence between the Operational HQ of the Kalinovik Sector within the Supreme Command HQ of the Peoples' Liberation Movement during April 1942, as well as reports sent to the Supreme Command HQ by the Operational HQ for Herzegovina. On the assault on the stronghold of Borac, the commander of OHQ for the Kalinovik Sector wrote in his report: "Upon the evacuation of Borac, the houses fell one by one. . . . I think that we need to cleanse all the volunteer units, disarm the necessary number of them and execute some. In the zone of operation of this HQ this is already being done. . . . After the fall of Planina and Bjelimici, we intend to destroy the Fifth Column in Trnovo, then Zagorje.. . because this is the fortress of Kulaks and Greens.. . . It would be good if you could send some of your political activists to this area in order to explain to the people this operation of cleansing the Kulaks." Informed of this campaign, the Operational HQ of the Kalinovik Sector of the Supreme Command of the PLM issued, two days later, the following instruction to commander Rade Hamovic: "All those who have sabotaged the struggle in Borac must be liquidated. This is your personal responsibility. . . . Also, you must cleanse the entire Fifth Column in the area. Therefore, you must act most energetically." The commander of the Kalinovik Sector responded urgently to the Supreme Command: "We shall ruthlessly kill all those of the Fifth Column, and the village of Gradina shall be burnt down. . . The stamina that has taken our comrades from Herzegovina has also taken us, because one can go nowhere unless we uproot not only the Fifth Column but also those who shall belong to them in the next 20 years." (All quotations from the book The Muslim Autonomous Movement and the 13th SS Division, by Enver Redzic). 3137. Some took the myth on the development of a new society on the "ruins of the old one" literally, and they never stopped destroying. This destruction most frequently turned into the destruction of tradition and the ruthless eradication of cultural values. 3142. Andrei Sinyavski, a Russian émigré-writer, former camp detainee, now living in Paris, says that one of his wardens had said, in a moment of earnestness: "All writers, from the greatest to the smallest-Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, each and every one of them, without exception, I would put into a lunatic asylum; they disturb the normal course of life." 3143. In the USSR, for the writer who was accused of something, there was a special legal status prescribed: "particularly dangerous state criminal." This was the qualification for Andrei Sinyavski and a number of other writers who had been put into camps. 3161. The official name for the Soviet institution in charge of censoring literature and printed material in general is: the Committee for the Protection of State Secrets in the Press (Danas, November 10, 1987). 3197. The description of the trial to Joseph Brodsky, the Nobel Prize laureate for Literature in 1987: "We have just witnessed a fantastic play in which nothing was preserved by the form. Yes, the trial observed all the rules: on the podium, in their high chairs and engraved wooden USSR coats-of-arms, seated, there were the legally appointed peoples' judge as well as the two judges selected by social organizations, lawfully nominated peoples' jurors. Everything followed the


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Communism and Nazism: Some Facts That Should Not Be Forgotten prescribed order: the questioning of the defendant, statements of the witnesses of the prosecution and those of the defense, the public prosecutor's and defense lawyer's address, the judges' deliberations in the special room, the solemn pronouncement of their ruling 'in the name of the Russian Federal Socialist Republic,' even the audience's applause after the ruling and the guards taking the indicted from the courtroom. One fraud after another" (from the documentary chronicle Notes of Non-Conspirators by Efim G. Etkind (London, 1977). 3286. The Communist Party of Italy has more members in the less developed (semirural) South than in the industrial, that is, workers', North, which is an anomaly in Marxist terms. 3290. "It is estimated that in the USSR there are about 18 million employed in administration. At least two-thirds are redundant. However, behind those 12 million redundant clerks, there are at least 10 million dependent on them-their children, parents, relatives, close friends. They all receive some of the benefits and privileges-special storehouses for supplies, special hospitals and outpatient clinics, villas, chauffeurs, etc. They are the fiercest opponents to any change" (from an interview with Abuladze, director of Redemption (NIN, Belgrade, January 31, 1988). 3301. When the famous anti-Stalinist movie Redemption, directed by Tenghis Abuladze, was shown in Tbilisi, Georgia, a poli was conducted; audience members were full of praise, but there were exceptions still. Who were they? In an interview, Abuladze responds to this question: "There were exactly 27 of them, mainly jurists and judges, aged between 60 and 70. Weren't they the bullies and torturers my film dealt with?" wonders Abuladze. There is violence and injustice in every society. The specific trait of communist oppression was its lawlessness nicely packed in legislation and form. It is this hypocrisy that generates total confusion. Some people live and die in such systems, never learning the distinction between the truth and a lie. Putting their naïve confidence in the press, authorities, and official statements, they live in constant delusion, involuntarily and unconsciously supporting the lies and injustice. It is from these people that you often hear, flabbergasted, the naïve explanation: "It was in the newspapers." Stalinism and this uninformed and unenlightened crowd go hand in hand and make each other possible. 3305. Once he had carried out, at Stalin' s order, scores of atrocious tasks in the purges at the end of the 1930s (the last being the execution of the entire leadership of the Komsomol, the Communist Youth Organization), the chief of the secret police, NKVD, Yezhov was accused of treason himself and executed (I think it was in April 1940). On the liquidation of the Komsomol leaders, see Politika, February 15, 1988. 3313. It is not about the simple, say, feudal, early capitalist or medieval poweriessness of ordinary people. This time it is the case of the deliberate, premeditated, organized lack of powerlessness. In our time of mass literacy, mass media and mass communications, this powerlessness can only be deliberate and organized. 3317. Ethnic minorities in the states of the so-called real socialism (The Soviet Zone): At the International Conference on Human Rights held in Venice (at the beginning of February 1988), the Germans accused Poland of the persecution of Germans in Poland after World War II, referring to the "disappearance" of Poles in the USSR, the Turks demanded the condemnation of Bulgaria for eradicating the Turkish minority there by the simple change of their names into Bulgarian, while the Hungarians strongly criticized Romania for the discrimination against Hungarians in Transylvania, the Italians were objecting to the low status of the


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Communism and Nazism: Some Facts That Should Not Be Forgotten Italian minority in Yugoslavia, and so on and so forth. In a word, ethnic minorities were persecuted in the "a-national" communist systems of Poland, Russia, Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania and Yugoslavia. Instructive! 3324. In the countries of the so-called real-socialism (the USSR and its satellites), there is a party personnel monopoly realized through the system of the so-called nomenclature. The nomenclature is actually the list of most influential positions in politics, economy, culture, and so on one is appointed to and dismissed from solely with the permission of the Party Committee. The nomenclature is actually made of two lists: the list of posts available exclusively with the approval of the party body in charge and the list of individuals who could be elected for those posts. Both lists circulate only internally (see Vladimir Goati in his study Position of the Party in Socialist Countries' Political Systems). The nomenclature implies privileges structured according to the caste system; for the Politburo there are no limits in privileges; below that stratum, there are various benefits (high salaries, dachas, special train compartments, special schools for their children, access to exclusive medical institutions, special storehouses for their supplies, etc.). Privileges are distributed according to rank, decreasing in quality, choice and scope from top to bottom (NIN, February 21, 1988). In the book Social Inequalities in Yugoslavia, Eva Berkovic described the system of similar privileges in our country (salaries, villas, apartments, cars, cheap holiday resorts, et alia) that spread from the federal to the republic level. "Each public, even strictly internal party, debate on the privileges was hindered as anti-socialist and antistate," wrote Berkovic. The fact that the existence of the nomenclature denies any meaning to the elections and turns them into mere farce for naïve people does not deserve further explanation. 3362. Since Gorbachev's rise to power, a lot of unknown facts of the Stalinist era have been unveiled. It was confirmed, among other things, that Beria's men used to kidnap young, pretty women in the street, put them into the car and take them to their boss. These women would disappear forever afterwards! (Danas, Zagreb, March 15, 1988). 3372. What characterizes Stalinist oppression, distinguishing it from other, similar forms, is its massiveness. Stalin was not very choosy. In his persecutions, it was not just intellectuals, writers, politicians, generals, businessmen, managers, or Jews who suffered and lost their lives. The suffering encompassed scores of ordinary people, particularly peasants. Millions of them died from starvation and inhuman conditions in the mass transportation and the inhuman working conditions in the camps. The special chapter in this mass tragedy was the mass suffering of women. There are scores of testimonies (the books of Solzhenitzyn, Shalamov, J.S. Ginsburg, etc.) on the suffering of women who were humiliated and tortured more than men. The suffering of women in the Stalinist camps is the greatest and the most massively organized tragedy of women in human history. 3412. Soviet historian Yuri Borishov, a specialist of the period of Stalin's cult of personality, quotes the letter, dated 1937, in which the then Minister of the Interior, Yezhov, requested Stalin's approval for the liquidation of a large group of people. Stalin and Molotov signed the letter, with a "yes" added to the signatures. The letter was published in the magazine Komsomolskaya Pravda on April 2, 1988, and reads: Comrade Stalin, I am addressing you with the request to approve the four lists of people who are the subjects of the Military Staff Tribunal's ruling: 1. List No. 1 (general) 2. List No. 2 (former army personnel) 3. List No. 3 (former NKVD personnel) 4. List No. 4 (wives of peoples' enemies)


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Communism and Nazism: Some Facts That Should Not Be Forgotten Please, give your approval to have them all sentenced based on the first category. Signed: Yezhov The first category, explains Borishov, meant execution. Stalin, according to Borishov, considered all the lists, and each was marked with a "yes," together with the signatures of Stalin and Molotov (Oslobodjenje, April 3, 1988, p. 5). 3429. Upon his return from exile in Gorky in 1987 (or 1986), Andrei Sakharov sent a letter to Gorbachev containing, among other things, the following lines: "I am appealing upon you to help the release of all the prisoners of conscience, who are either detained or exiled, upon being sentenced on the basis of Articles 109/1, 70 and 142 of the Criminal Code of the USSR and respective articles of the codes of other republics, as well as the prisoners of conscience held, on ideological and political grounds, in the special psychiatric clinics" (NJN, April 10, 1988, p. 35). 3433. The book The Anatomy of the Ethics of a Stalinist, by Jevrem Brkovic-the war biography of Milovan Dilas ("the ocean of tragic, mad acts and murders which Milovan Dilas committed whenever there was nobody to prevent him"-Joza Vlahovic). 3438. In the USSR, the printing and import of the Bible were banned until as late as 1988. That year, for the first time, on the occasion of 1000 years of Christianity in Russia, the import of 150,000 copies of the Bible donated by Scandinavian Biblical societies was permitted. Until then, the Bible was treated as a banned commodity, its printing was punished just like any other smuggling, by the seizure of goods and a fine, even a prison sentence (Politika, April 13, 1988, article from the Viennese magazine Die Presse). 3445. Alexander Solzhenitsyn lost his Soviet citizenship primarily because of the book entitled The Gulag Archipelago, after it had been published in Paris, in 1974. A tragic event preceded the publication of the book: A former camp inmate and the writer's friend received a copy of the manuscript of Gulag from the author and failed to give it back to him, considering it her duty to keep it in case the author's original somehow disappeared. But it was her copy that was seized, and she hanged herself after being interrogated by the police. It was only upon this tragedy that Solzhenitsyn, who was otherwise reluctant, decided to publish the book. 3489. Terror in the USSR did not commence with Stalin but with Lenin. Solzhenitsyn considers the latter the author of the Gulags. He claims that the pretext for the creation of those camps was the failed assassination of Lenin, upon which the Bolshevik leader personally signed decrees on ruthless and mass terror. Lenin explained the establishment of the camps by the "need to cleanse the Russian soil of all detrimental insects." The terms "cleansing" and "purges" thus entered into use, and the culprits were not human beings but insects. The statistics testify that as early as the end of 1920, in the Russian republic alone, there were 84 camps with over 50,000 detainees. Since then, both the number of camps as well as that of detainees was in a constant increase. According to Solzhenitsyn' s testimony, over 55 million people disappeared during the rule of the Bolsheviks. Other sources speculate with considerably lower numbers, but none goes below 15 million. 3492. From Alexander Solzhenitsyn' s book The Gulag Archipelago: "There must have been a special, clandestine reason behind the arrests of ordinary party activists, the reason that has never been explicitly stated in the minutes on the rulings: to arrest primarily those who had become party members before 1924."


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Communism and Nazism: Some Facts That Should Not Be Forgotten This rule was particularly consistently applied jn Leningrad, where the opposition "platform" was signed (i.e., Zinoviev and Kamenev, author's note). Solzhenitsyn adds: "And this was the situation, this is an illustration of those years. The party conference in one region of the Moscow district. Chaired by the new regional committee secretary, whose predecessor wa~ already behind bars. At the end of the conference, a message is read with an expression of loyalty to comrade Stalin. Naturally, they all rise (just like they all rise whenever, during the whole conference, his name is mentioned). Applause thunders in the small room rising to ovations. Three minutes, four minutes, five minutes. However, palms start to hurt. Hands get paralyzed. Middle aged men become exhausted, even those who sincerely believe that Stalin is God Almighty start feeling that all this is insufferably stupid. But-who dares to stop first? The secretary of the committee could do it first, he who had read the message and is still standing on the podium. No, he is a new one, he has replaced the one who is in jail, he is also frightened. Because, in this small room there are NKVD agents applauding, and they carefully watch for who would be the first to stop. A thundering applause for their leader in this small, isolated room in this godforsaken town, roars for five minutes, seven minutes, eight minutes! They are done! This is the end of them all! Only a heart attack can save them now! In the farthest corner of the room one can cheat a bit, one can take a slower rhythm, less energetically, less frenzied. What could those on the podium do, those who can be seen by everybody? The manager of the local paper factory, the man strong and independent, standing on the podium and applauding, although he is more than aware that the situation is as artificial as it is hopeless. He has been applauding for nine minutes! The tenth minute: he looks desperately at the secretary but he does not dare to stop. This is madness! This is collective madness! The regional leaders start exchanging glances with poor hope, still with the expression of sheer happiness on their faces, and continue applauding until they collapse, until they get dragged away on stretchers. Those who remain will remain with their faces frozen. . . . The eleventh minute-and the manager of the paper factory again assumes a serious look and sits down. And-the miracle! What happened with the inexpressible and irresistible excitement? Suddenly they all stop applauding and sit down. They are saved! Finally, salvation! But this is exactly the way to discover those with independent minds. This is how they can be eradicated. The manager of the factory was arrested that very night. No problem getting him ten years in jail, for something else, something that has nothing to do with this" (Danas, May 17, 1988). 3513. Joseph Brodsky, Russian poet, 1987 Nobel Prize winner, on the USSR: "It is quite an awful country, but that horror is what makes it interesting, as Russia is a vivid and simple example of what a man is capable of doing to another man. In this century, she has shown a phenomenal degree of the negative potentials in a human being.. . . Russia was a lecture on what man is capable of. An enormous number of human beings have been destroyed there, millions were exterminated-however, in order to exterminate millions one needs the millions who would conduct the exterminations. According to the final calculation, the closing balance sheet, Russia is, in a sense, comprised of executioners and victims. That is, more or less, how roles are cast there" (Talking to Jerzy Ilga, for the Polish review Puls, partly issued in the Belgrade literary magazine Knjizevne novine, May 15th, 1998). 3551. "The abstract working class is actually a fantastic mask for totalitarian dictatorship. It is actually on her behalf that the so-called 'workers' state' acts, even though it is everything but 'workers'.' Bakunin anticipated this as early as 1879, when in a polemic with Marx, he claimed that it would not be the workers ruling, but the former workers ruling over the real workers and that the rule


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Communism and Nazism: Some Facts That Should Not Be Forgotten would be much more cruel than the capitalist one" (Prof. Drazen Kalodjera, Start magazine, June 11, 1988). 3576. "While the French intellectual reacted to social phenomena led solely by his or her own free choice, his or her own conscience as the only judge, the history of the East-European intellectual is a long, painful history of bans, compromise, censorship and self-censorship, slander, jail and post-mortem rehabilitation" (from Danilo Kish' s foreword for the book In Praise of the intellectual by BernardHenry Levy, Belgrade, 1988). 3580. The bureaucratic group is the most numerous and the most powerful status of Soviet society, amounting to about eighteen million men and women. 3581. The Soviet painter Ilya Glazunov, in an interview, states how 80 percent of Old Moscow was destroyed in order to construct the communist settlements, "the machines for accommodation," as Le Corbusier called them (Danas, June 18, 1988). 3582. Pierre Beaudeux published a book in France, in 1988, about the wealthiest men in the world. In this book, the result of 2.5 years of work involving thirtysomething experts, the Romanian boss Nicolae Ceaucescu was also mentioned. The book claims that he possessed a personal wealth worth $33 billion and that he ran his country as if he were the manager of an enterprise with twenty-two employees, while he was showing all the external signs of his enormous wealth (palaces, aircraft, yachts, etc.) (Danas, June 28, 1988). 3584. On September 12th, 1971, Nikita Khrushchev died. He was buried as ordinary citizen at the Novodyevicthansko cemetery in Moscow. The media reported that "Nikita Khrushchev died, as a retired citizen." In 1984 his wife Nina, a party activist for years, died. On that occasion, in the daily Vecernja Moskva, the obituary was published announcing Nina Petrovna-Kuhartchuk. The surname Khrushchev was omitted. This detail itself is insignificant for the deceased woman but is terrifying as a symptom. We had only 16 years of the twentieth century left. 3632. (On various forms of utopia) There is literary utopia such as More's and Campanela's and the real utopias of Stalin, Mao Tse-Tung and Pol Pot. There are also the so-called positive and negative utopias, Huxley's and Orwell's. I feel that I could write a book on the thesis that there is no substantial difference between these phenomena called utopia, be they literary or real ones, positive or negative. The negation of the individual (personality) in literary utopia turns into practical destruction, eradication of man in Stalin's and Pol Pot's utopia-states. And the socalled positive utopia is no less inhuman than the negative one. Neither acknowledges either God or Man. Utopia is nothing but an attempt to create "heaven on earth," without God and against Him. The result is known. Although we knew it, we could not prove it by the mid twentieth century. Now, at the end of our century, everything is very clear. What occurred is a historic experiment. Unfortunately, the price of the experiment was over a hundred million human and family tragedies. Today is August 8, 1988. I am 63. I have been in jail for five and a half years. Less than half remains-three and a half years. Out there, there is a storm raging and I can only watch it. That is still more than nothing. The scene is extremely exciting. 3640. Mohammed Assad, in the book, "Journey to Mecca", tells the story of his first and lasting impression of the USSR. It happened at the Mary railway station in Turkmenistan in 1926. On a wall a giant, nicely designed poster depicting a


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Communism and Nazism: Some Facts That Should Not Be Forgotten young worker in blue outfit pushing a ridiculous old man with a white beard from the cloudy sky with his foot. Below, in Russian, the caption read: This is how the workers of the Soviet Union threw God out from his sky! The USSR Association of the Godless. 3673. Ivan Kriznar, president of the Commission for the History of the Sbvenian Communist Party Central Committee, in an interview for the daily Borba about the Dachau Processes, states that a group from the leadership of the Interior Ministry of Slovenia, applying Stalinist methods, in 1942 executed the suspects they found in the liberated territory of Dolenjska Valley. This group was trained at the Dzerzhinski Police Academy in Moscow and made the core of the Slovenian OZNA (political police). The group later took part in the staging of the Dachau Processes (Danas, August 30, 1988). 3675. An interesting case sheds light on the logic and reasoning of communist rule. In Poland, for example, during the latest wave of strikes in 1988, workers were constantly criticized for posing not only economic but also political demands (the authorities refer to the workers' demand to legalize Solidarity). Look at this criticism. Why wouldn't the workers have the right to pose political demands? When did they lose that right and who was the one who took it from them? But, bureaucratic authorities shamelessly consider that workers and other citizens have no such rights and even succeeded, repeating the point time and again, in convincing most of them that this absurdity is logical. That is how it happens that citizens, when seeking their rights to be observed or lodging complaints, claim that their demands have nothing to do (God forbid!) with politics. Political rights are forever the monopoly of communist bureaucracy.

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Communism and Nazism: Some Facts That Should Not Be Forgotten


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Thoughts on Islam: Historical and Other Observations

CHAPTER 6 Thoughts on Islam: Historical and Other Observations 40. So far we have been talking about damages and defeats inflicted on us by others. The time has come to start talking about damages and defeats that we inflict on ourselves. That will be the beginning of our maturity. 41. Fasting can be defined as the most apparent attempt of the spirit to master the body and to keep and maintain that victory at least temporarily. There are other meanings and uses that can be identified in fasting, but they are obviously of minor relevance. The relationship between body and spirit, and the affirmation of the latter, remain the first and most important meaning of fasting. 41a. Why are the peoples whose prayers are connected with cleaning and constant following of time not examples of cleanliness and punctuality? Why have the peoples who deprive themselves of food and drink thirty days a year not become an example of discipline? How come that, after fourteen centuries of this sometimes cruel and strict practice, cleanliness, punctuality and discipline have not become second nature or even an obsession to them? The individual who could offer a satisfactory answer to these two questions would deserve the Nobel Prize. 77. Herodotus stated that the Kolhids (an ancient people that inhabited modern Syria), ancient Egyptians and Ethiopians had practiced circumcision. 81. Hegel believes that the fantasy and magic that characterize tales from A Thousand and One Nights are alien to the Arab spirit and seeks their origin in Egypt. As we know, Hammer shares a similar view. 83. The Qur'an and Islam is the environment in which the world lives like fish in water. 84. While nationality is based on a natural relation link, Islam is a relation based on spirit, law and morality. 111. In the history of Islamic peoples we should distinguish between those whose education began with Islam and those who had been at certain level of education before Islam. We encounter both cases in Islamic history. 117. "Enthusiasm as such has never achieved great accomplishments"- wrote Hegel about the expansion of early Islam (Hegel, Philosophy of History, p. 330). 165. According to Fazlur-Rahman (The Spirit of Islam, Chicago, 1979; hereinafter: F.R.), such philosophy on peace with the cosmos "brought comfort at a time when the external situation was far from being favorable" and "in the society that became increasingly prone to internal decline and disintegration." The question remains whether such philosophy was the cause or the consequence of that situation. 185. In the beginning, the interpretation of the Qur'an was free, but the process of creative interpretation (ra 'y) was gradually restricted by sunna, kiyas and i~jma, and so on until it was completely rigidified by the theory on the "closing of ijtihad" (in the third century). All innovations were completely prevented. Ijma in islam means "communis opinio," community consensus.


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Thoughts on Islam: Historical and Other Observations 187. There was a situation that in history was called "classic opposition" to the Hadith. The opponents were not opposed to the Hadith itself, yet they stated that the practice established by agreement (al-amal) was more reliable for the purpose of interpretation of the Qur'an and its meaning, than the Hadith, the reliability of which could be questionable. 192. The Qur'an criticizes the Prophet: 9/44 and 80/1. 195. The members of the early schools of law recognized the principle of ijma (consensus) as the definite and decisive argument in everything, yet the emphasis was not on the absolute truth of its contents but on its practical value. 196. In the late third and early fourth centuries after Hijra (ninth and early tenth centuries), the dogma and the law acquired their final form and "the doors of if tihad were closed." Since then until now, very few changes have been made to Islamic law and dogma. 197. Mawardi (died 1088) quotes a Hadith that says that even a bad sovereign should be obeyed, provided that he does not issue the wrong orders (F.R., ibid., p. 118). 198. The fact is that advisors to the Umayyad dynasty did not interpret the Qur'an and Hadith on the basis of the principle of purposefulness and opportunism, which brought about major distortions. During the rule of the Abbasid dynasty, the Shariah was supplemented with a small code passed by secular authorities, while the Turkish sultans, besides the shariah, enacted a compendium of laws known as Kanun (canon). "Canonic legislation was a product of the sultanate, not the caliphate," concludes F.R. (ibid., p. 122). As judges were appointed by the state authorities, their independence was rather questionable. Therefore, the literature refers to many cases during the rule of the Umayyad dynasty, where the ulema, lawyers and Sufis accused the judges of being servants to the sovereign, instead of the sharia and justice. 202. Is man's freedom in obeying (submission to) God-as it was taught by some orthodox theologians who refuted teaching of mu 'tazila (islamic rationalists)? They spoke about "the aggressive pressure of proud and superficial rationalism, striving to make the reason equal to the revelation, or even superior to it." Ebu-lHasan Ashari (died in 1268) stated that God's justice could not be defined by human standards. 207. "Ilm" and "fikh"-learning and understanding-two opposed yet complementary concepts, both recognized from the very beginning as ways of knowing Islam. One sort of knowledge is given and complete, the other is creative and open. The former is the objective, the latter the subjective principle of cognition. 209. In the opinion of F.R., the Qur'an contains very little theological doctrine, just "the minimum without which there is no religion" (F.R., ibid., p. 153). 212. Around the tenth and eleventh centuries A.D.~ Islamic theology split to assume two different aspects: (1) as the dogmatic and formally rational theology of kalam and (2) as a speculative theology of sufism. Later on, theology will monopolize the entire area of metaphysics and even of cosmogony, denying the right to free research of the cosmos and nature. This way of thinking condemned Islam to scientific and political stagnation. 213. It is interesting that four essentially different streams found their place in Islam: rationalism, sufism, theology and law.


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Thoughts on Islam: Historical and Other Observations 217. When superstitions take the place of clear theological principles, then moral negligence becomes a substitute for moral principles. Superstition goes hand in hand with relinquishing moral strictness. For superstition is not just stupidity, its mockery of the reason quickiy turns into the mockery of morality. Sufi mass religion ("religion of the masses") did not recognize either strict theological or moral norms. The spreading of moral looseness can be fairly blamed on the Sufi doctrine that asserted "the one who is the witness of God's will is no longer bound by God's command." 218. Acceptance of the principle of "closing the door of ijtihad" led to rigidity and the unchangeable character of adopted legal norms. This situation was the main reason for the secular authorities to pass a secular code-a canon that, according to F.R., "at first supplemented and then replaced shariah law" (p. 167). 219. Islam (and its ethics, sermons, faith, etc.) in its beginnings created and maintained a sharpened sense of justice and injustice, and that was the sense that would always lead to a right law and, furthermore, to its right implementation and practice. Without that sense, every law is powerless, ineffective. The topic that prevails in the Islamic legal books and debates is the issue of "intention," that is, a purely inherent, ethical issue. "What Islam inspired its early followers most often with, yet to a different degree, was a serious feeling of responsibility before God's justice." (F.R., p. 186). 220. It is characteristic that Islamic philosophers readily took over the idea of radical dualism between body and soul, that is, between matter and spirit, from Greek philosophical and metaphysical theories. In that idea they discovered the point of coincidence between the Qur'an and Greek philosophy. 222. As far as the credibility of the Hadith is concerned, it is not the seneds (the chain of those who passed it, traced back to the source) that count; what counts is their essential conformity with the spirit of the Qur'an. So for example, the Hadith preaching withdrawal from the world-and it seems that there are many of the sort-are not credible, regardless of the collection they make part of. In such a case, the Hadith is not to be rejected as a source, but considered exclusively in the function of a better understanding of the Qur' an, which is the only and highest authority. 223. "Particularly unacceptable for Islam was the negative attitude of sufis towards this world that, as it seemed, spread among them at amazing rate" (see F.R., ibid., p. 192). In the opinion of F.R., had it not been for the resistance to this approach, the Sufi movement would have ended up establishing "real monastic orders, which would certainly have destroyed the entire structure of Islam" (F.R., ibid.). 224. The Sufi Du-l-Nun from Egypt (died 659) classified levels of spiritual development, very similar to the manner of the Hindus, and was accused of heresy. 225. Some Sufi lines established the institution of saints, as discussed in detail in a book by the Sufi Hakim Tirmizi (ninth century). In further development this led to a teaching on the hierarchy of saints who "maintain the world." F.R. says that this teaching became a component part of the Sufi doctrine as early as in the fourth/ninth century. These saints were gifted with the ability of performing miracles and with other talents and privileges (keramat). Eventually, Hallaj identified himself with God, saying: "I am the truth" ("ene-l-hak"). Islam was gradually reduced to Christ's din (faith).


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Thoughts on Islam: Historical and Other Observations 227. The occurrence of the Sufi theosophy altered the character of Islam and marked almost an entire millenium, from the eleventh to the nineteenth century. At the same time, it paralyzed energy, or turned the spiritual energy of the best minds inward, putting a veil on the Qur' anic order to "observe."This was a step away from real life, from history; the eyes were moved away from nature, contrary to what the Qur'an requires. The Qur'anic order to "observe," no matter what different meanings it may have, certainly is not "haqiqa"-the inner cognition of the Sufis. Observation is a typical "external cognition." We should know that even great minds like El-Farabi and Ibn-Sinna took part in the creation of large systems of philosophical mysticism. Ibn el Arabi's theosophy is totally monistic and pantheistic, "absolutely contrary to the teachings of Islam"-concluded F.R. (p. 205). According to him, this Sufi monistic doctrine, known as a doctrine on "oneness of being," "threatened to shake the very concept of islam and the Shariah." 228. Well known are the Sufi practice of worshipping graves and the cult of saints (for example, masses bow before the grave of the famoud Sufi Ali el Hujriri from the eleventh century). Orthodox Islam, though it did not capitulate, withdrew before Sufism. On the other hand, it is the fact that Sufism functioned as a protest against political tyranny, and in Africa Sufi orders offered armed resistance to the advancement of the European colonial armies. However, it was passive, rather than active resistance. 230. The erosion of theological clarity and determination, through the Sufi socalled inner way to knowledge, intuition, illumination, ecstasy, led in some cases to spiritual juggling, exhibitionism or even charlatanry. Parasite beggars and dervish exploiters occurred. "Islam was left to the mercy of spiritual delinquents," concluded F.R. (ibid., p. 216). Widespread belief in bereket or feyd brought about the worshipping and cult of graves, saints and other alleged relics (F.R., 217). Even the mediator showed up-a priest in the position of the absolute authority of a Sufi leader-sheik (pir or murshid in Persia and India, muqadam in Black Africa). 232. Theology-full of order, law, reason, measure, but deprived of imagination, cold as logic. Sufism is all that is contrary to it: full of enthusiasm, but of arbitrariness too, that enabled it to reach unparalleled heights of truth and virtue, as well as to fall to depths of illusion and vice! Theology (as its name says) is a science, Sufism is poetry. In connection to this there are two other phenomena: theological Islam was the religion of the urban, better-educated classes, often shallow and formal. Sufism, on the contrary, became popular, a folk religion. Made up of pure piousness, it allowed for amazing deviations in rituals. In some places, like India and Indonesia, the rituals have many elements of BuddhistHindu origin, and beneath the Islamic surface, we can discover untouched pagan customs and cults. Strictness in interpretation of religion was matched by moral strictness. Law, order and measure in theology were matched by law, order and measure in ethics. Consequently, the occurrence of Sufi superstitions was followed by a similar "liberty" in the domain of morality. On the other hand, theologians always advocated a political status quo. There is the famous conformity of the ulema, "obedience to tyrants, too," etc. Their slogan was that even a bad government is better than anarchy and that one should obey the ruler even if he was wrong and unfair. Sufism, on the contrary, was a potential bearer of revolution, resistance and so on. In some cases, this opposition (theology-sufism) was very effective, like in the case of the spreading of Islam in Africa. In the beginning it was usually just a bare conversion of masses through a compromise with the existing cult and customs. Afterwards the orthodoxy purified and consolidated Islam with the new converts, who had been originally converted by Sufis.


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Thoughts on Islam: Historical and Other Observations The oldest sufi brotherhood-Kadiri (after imam Abd-el Kadir Gilani) dates back to the eleventh and twelfth centuries, which is relatively late. The African variant of this brotherhood is the line of Ahmadu Bauba (Senegal) who gave up on prayer and fasting. The Bedevi order (founder Ahmad Bedevi, thirteenth century) abstain from talking (like the Christian Trappist order); the Bektashi order, widespread in Turkey, are the most distant from the original Islam. In this fact we can detect one of the reasons for the success of the Kemalist movement. That kind of Islam turned to be frail to Western challenges. The Harijji order: absolute equality, responsibility before God, "order the good and forbid the evil," any Muslim, not only members of Muhammed' s tribe, can be a caliph, radical idealism. Two movements from more recent times found inspiration in their teaching: the Muslim Brothers and Jamat-i-Islami (Pakistan). 236. Goldziher: Sunni Islam is the religion of if ma (consensus), while Shiite Islam is the religion of authority (imam). For Sunnis there is if ma, but there is not ijtihad (free, creative interpretation). For Shiites, it is the other way around. "Shiite masses, on the whole, are more superstitious than the Sunni" (F.R., ibid., p. 244). 237. In the early stages of Islam, teachers in primary schools (kutab) were often non-Muslims, mainly Christians and Jews (F.R., ibid., p. 253). 241. A characteristic symptom of the stagnation of Islamic thought was the habit of writing "comments on comments," while the original works that were subject to the comments had sunk almost completely into oblivion. Medressas were reduced to four theological subjects: hadith, fikh, kalam (theology) and tefsir. The Qur'anic advice to "observe the sky" was completely forgotten, as noticed by the Turkish writer Katib Kelebi (seventeenth century), in his book The Equilibrium of the Truth. Even the comments were often reduced to superficial word games, verbal debates and grammatical pedantry. Some books on Arabic syntax, known as Kafiya, were given mystical interpretations by some authors (?!). Mysticism infiltrated everything. Another phenomenon: learning by heart and endless memorizing, repetition instead of the search for knowledge. All these were the symptoms or causes of overall stagnation. 245. Shayh Veli-Allah, an Indian thinker from Delhi (1702-1762), was the first to try to formulate the so-called "integral Islam." The movement of Hajji ShariatAllah (born in 1764), also in India, had a program that included the following points: (1) fight against British rule in India, (2) social and economic reform against the rich landlords, for the benefit of the peasants and (3) elimination of Hindu ideas and Sufi extremes. However, the presence of Sufi elements together with the orthodox Islamic idea was characteristic for these movements, as well as for the Wahabi and Sanusi orders. As a matter of fact, this was the phenomenon of the "new Sufism," that is, the reformed Sufism on orthodox foundations interpreted in an activist sense. 249. Some authors believe that Western civilization is a continuation of Islam because it had its starting point in the Islamic civilization at its climax. One of them is Muhammad Iqbal (in his book The Renewal of the Religious Thought in Islam), who states that the modern thought of the West is a direct continuation of the Islamic culture that spread through Spain and Sicily to the West. 252. The Kemalist idea in Turkey manifested total spiritual sterility. In sixty years of this movement, not a single significant theorist emerged among Turkish intellectuals who would further elaborate and promote the doctrine of radical secularity in Turkey. This unique case of the full success of a secular approach in the Islamic world was a reaction to another extreme: the full predominance


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Thoughts on Islam: Historical and Other Observations of the Sufi Bektashi brotherhood during several centuries. It was not Islam that could not resist the laical challenge, but its Bektashi variant that had prevailed in Turkey and that was equally non-Islamic as its laical antipode, just with a different sign. 253. Modernists should be constantly reminded of the importance of religion. Conservatives, the importance of science. Mutual contradiction is illusory. 255. Even the theorist of Turkish nationalism, Zia Gekalp (died 1924), who was considered by Kemal an ideologist, was not advocating a radical laical approach. He was opposed to theocracy and clericalism, not to Islam. 259. While Shiite Muslims refer to the legitimate principle of the institution of the imam, Sunni Muslims refer to the democratic principle of if ma. 262. The dogma on absolute obedience to the ruler led gradually, through a specific cause-consequence sequence, to the decline of the very civilization of Islam. 263. We need an objective and critical assessment of our history. 264. "The Sufi spiritual ideals offered to the people an escape from the sad realities of life and economic difficulties, social divisions and political uncertainty" (F.R., p. 335). Instead of finding a way out, Sufism taught people certain techniques of self-suggestion and hypnosis-that is, of oblivion. But the secular societies, organizations or movements could not be a substitute for Sufi tarikas. They did not have any of the spiritual depth of the old Sufi brotherhoods. 310. The Qur'an and Islam are too important to be left only to khojas. 444. The absence of any racist feelings in the Muslim world was wittily described by Malcolm X as "color blindness." They do not see the color, they see man. Color does not matter and does not say anything about the man. 490. The final development stage of religious thought, as seen by Hegel, should lead to liberation from the cult phase, that is, the phase of respect for the sensual, and turning toward the interior and the abstraction. This phase of the socalled cult religion was very much linked to images and sculptures. In his Aesthetics, Hegel wrote: "We do not bend our knees before statues anymore." We do not know how correct this is, but considering his other perfectly correct observations, we have to ask ourselves, why did Hegel remain rather indifferent to Islam? Was it due to insufficient knowledge of Islam or to Hegel's Eurocentrism? In Islam Hegel could have recognized this-according to himhighest stage of the development of religious thought, when it gets rid of any pictorial likeness and purifies itself to become a total abstraction in the Hegelian sense of the word. Islam is a crystal-clear example of that development. 670. What could be compared to the rationality of Muslim ritual ablutions? There is nothing neither missing nor excessive in them. 712. Start thinking of yourself as a Muslim, in order to rescue yourself from the narrow confines of the tribe or nation. Become protagonists of the Islamic renewal and Islamic culture. 750. What could one say about this total chaos in the Near and Middle East- the war of all against all, hijacking of planes, suicidal actions, the so-called senseless wars, coups and the like? That part of the world is a sort of pressure-cooker. Judging from the high temperatures involved, many things will burn and


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Thoughts on Islam: Historical and Other Observations disappear, leaving behind the ideas and people capable of living and surviving. After a total mess, when all storms and wandering calm down, Muslims and Jews of a new age will remain on the scene. 756. Considering the relationships between the Arab-Muslim and Spanish-Catholic communities in the medieval Spain, Ortega Y Gasset said: "It is a real shame that the relationships that existed between these two communities have not yet come to light. We must admit that our Arabists (scientists who study the Arab world), led by Ribero, have made some important steps in the attempt to get a clearer picture of the way the Moors and the Spanish lived together. However, unless this issue is approached from deeper layers, it will not be possible to reach much further." Gasset believes that lack of knowledge or poor knowledge also characterized the relationship between Europe and Islam in general-"ignorance of the fact is one of the big realities of the history of the West" (Gasset in his preface to Ibn Hazm's Dove's Necklace). 757. The Arabs learned about Hellenic culture through the Eastern Roman Empire, the Europeans through the Western. 759. Attention should be paid to the fact that the fruits of a civilization are different in its beginning and at its end. All intellectual performance of the classical culture, at its sunset in the fifth century, was reduced to anthologies, encyclopedias, dictionaries. There were no more great works. The situation was similar in the Islamic culture of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. There were no more great interpreters of the Qur' an, yet there were scores of hafis. Instead of creative comments-endless learning by heart, instead of analysis and synthesis-endless repetition. 763. H.R.P. Dickson published in 1949 a comprehensive volume about the life of the tribes that inhabit the coasts of the Persian Gulf. He stated that in Arabia infidelity on any side (male or female) was not known as such then. But at the same time he mentioned that marriages were easily and often divorced. It seems that we have to put up with one of the two inconveniences. 764. Arab origin of the so-called chivalrous love. A knight's love was Platonist, it meant distance, lovers were hopelessly separated; it was not a pleasure, but rather a sweet pain, a welcome wound. "Baghdad love" was famous in Arabian poetry. Gasset believes that it was a result of the introduction of the Platonist feeling into the spiritual life of that time. One of the legends speaks about the Udriya tribe, where men died of love because they deliberately gave up on their beloved. This was a total asceticism in the erotic sphere. 768. With the exception of the Mayan culture, ended by forceful death, all other known cultures in history died gradually as a consequence of aging, the slowing down of life rhythm, some kind of sclerosis, that is, of internal changes. This process can be followed most clearly in Roman civilization, where the invasion of barbarians was just a coup de grace for an organism that had been in the state of agony for two centuries. The Arab civilization was not an exception to this rule. It is up to historians to establish what this culture suffered from, to examine the causes of its decline, in which colonial subjugation was not the reason of its fall but rather a consequence of its internal descent. Anyway, does the Qur' an not say: "Verily never will God change the condition of a people until they change it themselves (with their own souls)" (Qur'an, 13/11). It could be said that this rule has the power of natural law in the life of peoples and their movement through history.


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Thoughts on Islam: Historical and Other Observations 882. During French rule, all education in Algeria was in French. In general, the situation in Algeria, of all colonized countries, was the most difficult. It was somewhat more tolerable in Tunisia and Morocco. 885. We should be cautious about our history being written by others. Algerian writer Abdelkader Mahdad wrote: "When a people does not write their own history, others will do it for them, in their own way." 968. What is forgotten-such was a case of national forgetfulness without precedent-does not exist. Removal of the Arabic alphabet was a radical negation of Turkish history. If Turkey was really supposed to forget its past, to change its being, to cease being what it was-and it was an eminently Islamic nation in its essence-then change of the alphabet was the most efficient way to achieve that. No other measure imposed by a decree could have served that purpose better and more expeditiously. 1050. It has been noticed that two different spiritual activities, like medicine and philosophy, have never been so close as they were in the Arab west in the twelfth century. The most famous doctors of those times were at the same time the most significant philosophers: Ibn Baaga, Ibn Tufayl, Ibn Rushd, Moses Maimonides, Ibn Sinna, and the rest. It was a kind of a "personal union" of medicine, theology and philosophy-a typical Islamic pattern. 1069. Ibn Tufayl (Hayy ibn Yagdan) noticed that the stars Beta and Gamma (two Ferkads) in the constellation of Ursa Minor make the smallest circles in their movement. This is, of course, just illusionary (as perceived by viewers from the earth), as well as the "inertness" of the North Star. 1124. Islam suits the white and the black race-therefore it suits all races or, more precisely, it suits a colorful human race. 1148. Most people experience and remember Hajj as a fairy tale, what it actually is. Hajj is a dream of equality. It is so for a majority of people, primarily because of the spirit of community arising from total diversity. It should be compared with H. Hesse's Pilgrimage-here as well we see "the diversity of worlds where the opposites are so unified to create harmony" (in the words of a critic). 1288. In order for a society to be able to function democratically, there has to be the so-called social consensus, the core of gathering, the basic agreement on at least one main goal, basic principle or fundamental interest. In Islamic countries it is obvious that only Islam can play that role. There are not more than a few societies that could be proud of such a strong consensus about a principle as is the case with Islam in Muslim countries. 1473. Regarding the Islamic world of today, the main impression one gets is a huge cultural and technological gap between it and the developed West. The technological gap could be overcome relatively soon, on the condition that proper care is taken of cultural development, primarily by means of a reasonable educational system and encouragement of all forms of folk culture. A society that organizes itself and sets a clear goal can achieve technological progress in a relatively short period of time that would otherwise take decades or even centuries. 1541. The principle of monarchy is founded on the illusion that the ideal man can exist. Such an assumption is alien to Islam. 1548. When I talk about Islamic devotion, a contrasting example crosses my mind: Byron's Manfred. He is a man who cannot find his peace. He possesses a


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Thoughts on Islam: Historical and Other Observations deep knowledge, his mind reaches what other people's minds cannot, he has power and he destroys his enemies, he invokes spirits and they submit to him. They can fulfill all his commandments and wishes but one: They cannot give him peace. The only thing the proud Manfred desires is something he cannot have, peace of mind. 1592. Saint-Simon advocated a certain linkage between science and religion, but not the way it is understood in Islam. The linkage he spoke about was artificial and external. His ideal was a natural scientist-philosopher in the Pope's throne (he wrote, among others, a book with a characteristic title: New Christianity). 1625. "Observe and contemplate" from the Qur' an-two essentially different ways and goals. The difference between them is the difference between physics and metaphysics. "Observe" is the beginning of any science. That is the positivism of the Qur'an. On the contrary, the objective of metaphysics has always been to discover some absolute principle that could explain all the diversity in the world. For it, it was sufficient to establish the relationships among things (phenomena) without pretension to reach the very essence of those things and phenomena. That was the task of metaphysics that, naturally, it would not be able to accomplish. 1627. What is fasting about?-It is a directly experienced combat between the body and soul. While fasting, the body suffers, requests and does not get served, while the soul is in control of that suffering. It is the victory of the spirit over the body, a painful, directly experienced victory. If one can experience fasting in such a way, it will give him pleasure, not just suffering. 1701. Christianity started from the originally religious premise that the more life is losing of its appearances, the more it is gaining in its spiritual value. Accordingly, the external and internal values of life are opposed to each other, in a sort of negative correlation. Is there a need to emphasize that Islam does not share this view and that that is what differs it essentially from the Christian teaching? 1718. All modernist poetry is, as a matter of fact, a rebellion against provincial mentality. It is a destructive poetry that ends up in the apotheosis of death, as the only way out for a free personality. The individual who has the courage to die in a conflict with the society that does not tolerate individual freedom is free. To be free represents a crime in such society. What is the provincial mentality? It is triviality in both virtue and vice: formal morality, hypocrisy, suppressing of individualism and originality, power of money, marriage of convenience and so on. A provincial character condemns killing, but approves war and capital punishment. He condemns debauchery, but tolerates prostitution and marriage of convenience. He is against theft, but he tolerates fraud in the form of dishonest trade, usury, commercial and banking speculations and financial operations. A provincial character is formally for freedom, yet he tolerates the terror of husband against wife, of parents against children, of managers against the staff, of bosses against employees and servants. It is important that everything is in accordance with the law; he never asks himself if the law is good or not, for the law is the law, it is sacred, and so on. However, modernist art does not protest against these very vices, but against covert forms of such vices. Moreover, that poetry celebrated and described openly the vices and crimes of fearless personalities, if they committed them publicly and if they were ready to pay the price of their audacity. "It is not important who you are or what you do, just stay what you are till the end." How could we explain this open praising of insolent and cynical individuals in the European literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, except by the fact that hypocrisy and


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Thoughts on Islam: Historical and Other Observations false morality had prevailed in that society to the verge of disgust? Moral sermon proves to be helpless against hypocrisy, because it (hypocrisy) keeps telling the same story. The words are the same, the sermon is the same. That is why the European literature of this sort will not juxtapose an honest woman to a former prostitute who became a "high society lady," but a prostitute and coquette who openly takes part in debauchery and justifies it with impudence. According to the opinion of the modernism adherents, that was the only way to shake the rotten foundations of the so-called citizen (false) virtue. Why was it so? According the law of opposites, the unattainable Christian moral ideal had to have its counterpart-the cult of vice and crime. The invitation to selfsacrifice for others (the sacrifice of Jesus) was responded to by the invitation to unlimited selfishness, to the cult of sacrifice-by the cult of vice. Such clear-cut phenomena are characteristic only for Western civilization and, as far as I know, nothing similar can be seen in any other culture. It seems that the ideals must not be unattainable. The inability to attain them brings about disappointment and hypocrisy. Cynical mockery of the ideal follows as a reaction to the hypocrisy. In both cases, what is missing is human measure, moral requirement to man's measure. The ideal is to find a balance: to live at the same time for yourself and for others-like a cell in a healthy body. 1723. European literature sings the praises of "beauty of vice." The Qur'an also speaks about the seducing beauty of vice, which is the act of Satan (Qur'an, 8/48). 1724. In almost all the novels written by Octave Mirbeau, known as the poet of vice, we find one and the same pattern of the development of the human soul. A child comes into the world with love and the presentiment of a light and joyful life, yet it becomes confronted with the madness of life and the criminal and vicious humankind. Looking at that pattern, we cannot avoid asking ourselves on whose side this "illuminator" on evil and vice is: on the side of the purity of the child's world or on the side of the vicious humankind? Naturalism is false (or half-true), as well as idealism. In Mirbeau' s novels, every priest is a hypocrite, every scientist is a government servant, every clerk or policeman is either corrupt or incompetent, every shopkeeper or banker is a thief, every man in power is a tyrant and every family is a hotbed of lies and debauchery. If this were a true interpretation of the world, the entire development of life and society, and in particular some decisive events of the twentieth century that took place after Mirbeau would be inexplicable. The history before and after Mirbeau, or even his own life, could not be explained by his philosophy. Man is neither an angel nor a criminal. The greatest secret about man is that he is not either of them, but-man. He is the most complex and the most difficult enigma to understand and explain in the entire universe. Those who idealize man or who see a beast in him are just simplifying the problem. If man were a beast, all the poetry and literature would be irrelevant and unnecessary. What would the point be for an author who is an animal to prove to his reader that he is also an animal, that all men who surround them are animals? Especially if they are so, if they are supposed to be so and if they cannot avoid being so. Yet, it seems that in the literature of that kind there is a hidden unspoken thought (or unconscious assumption) that man is supposed to be man, that unfortunately he is not able to be so and that this impossibility makes all our life, all history and even the entire universe meaningless. For those works are brimming over with protest, despair, condemnation. Against what? Only against man who is not man, but should be. Mirbeau's novels are even the best example of that. Regardless of the writer's conscious choice and intention, they discover the duality of the human position.


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Thoughts on Islam: Historical and Other Observations We would expect the naturalists to take an objective and indifferent scientific position, like a geographer or geologist. The latter describe without sentiment deserted landscapes and volcanoes that erupt without warning and unexpectedly, devastating their surroundings. We would expect Zola, Baizac, Mirbeau to describe with equal indifference the desert of the human soul and the volcanoes that erupt from it. But this is not the case. They get angry, they accuse their characters and transmit their furious feelings of desperation and hopelessness to us. Why? Obviously, because it does not have to be the way it is, not necessarily. "How many children could have become great men, had they not been crippled by the ignorance and lack of understanding of their parents and teachers," yells the author of Golgotha (Mirbeau, Le Calvaire) through the mouth of his character Jean Mentier. Protest and rage against something that is necessary and inevitable would make no sense. 1745. Islam is remarkably superior in one important point: its teaching on God. That teaching is like the sky: simple, but at the same time magnificent and inexhaustible. In all other great religions there has been some confusion about this capital topic. The pure and very deep teaching on God and the Qur'an represents a large comparative advantage of Islam in an area of human thought and spiritual interest of greatest importance. This is an area in which, I believe, Islamic thought will develop without boundaries. 1871. Islamic tradition carries the message that a new sapling must replace every cut tree. 2013. The perfect man is not our aim, the perfect society even less. All we want are normal people and normal society. God, save us from any "perfection!" 2014. For, if we deleted members of the equation, one by one on the two sides, what would remain at the end, as a difference that cannot be offset between the West and the Muslim East, is a different man-woman relationship. Islam can adopt many things from the West (or vice versa), but if it accepted its family relationships it would not be the Muslim world anymore. For the West will proceed in the direction of sexual liberty. There is no barrier in sight that could hold it back. Islam will provide education and political rights for women, but it will keep its moral strictness. 2048. Islam is the most typical example of continuity in history and culture. It confirmed, without any exclusions, all prophets and messengers who came before it (that echelon includes all known and many unknown prophets). Considering the exaltation of their ethical teachings, we have reason to believe that among the prophets were also Socrates, Buddha, Confucius, Lao Tse, as well as founders of some Indian religions. Explanation? 2067. Hajj (pilgrimage), due to extraordinary historical situations that date back to pre-history, is experienced as a journey through time and space. And the sight of hundreds of thousands of people in white ihram leads our thought to the very verge of utopia. 2114. The present Congregation for Religious Doctrine-the highest body of the Catholic Church-is the former Sacred Inquisition. 2156. When I think about the situation of Muslims throughout the world, my first question always reads: Do we have the destiny that we deserve, and are others always to blame for our situation and defeats? And if we are to blame- and I believe so-what did we miss doing, but should have done, or, what did we do, yet should not have? For me, these are two unavoidable questions regarding our unenviable situation.


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Thoughts on Islam: Historical and Other Observations 2184. Five Scandinavian countries-Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Iceland-are gradually integrating and becoming one single country. So, for instance, a Finnish citizen can work in Sweden, get medical care in Norway and receive his pension in Denmark. A series of common institutions: Nordic Investment Bank, Nordic Telecommunications System, Nordic Technological Development Fund, Nordic Council of Ministers, as well as sixty other common bodies included, get along easily when common interests are in question. The borders are almost erased. The integration is progressing with the slogan "Scandinavia-one country." Nordic legislators who initiated the process of integration met for the first time a hundred years ago. When I speak about the integration of the Islamic world, I imagine it similar to this one. It will take some time, but it is not impossible. It took some time for Scandinavian integration. 2221. They were not Arabs, but they wrote in the Arabic language: Abu Nives, one of the greatest poets of Arab poetry, was Persian. Ibn el Mustafa, also a Persian, was the author of the most beautiful Arab prose (second century after Hijra). Sibenshi, the famous systemizer of Arab grammar, Ibn Sinna and the great scientist El-Birouni were also Persians. Ibn Rumi was of Greek origin, as well as the geographer Jakub, while Ibn-Kufi (Spanish chronicler), Ibn Hazm (theologian and writer) and Ibn Kuzman (great poet) were of Visigoth origin (Francesco Gabrielli, The History of Arab Literature, p. 11). In the first centuries of Islam, the predominance of Arabic language was absolute. The only exception to it was the Persian national reaffirmation movement in the tenth and eleventh centuries, first in poetry and then in prose. The complete separation of Persian literature from Arab happened only recently. The predominance of the Arabic language was everywhere due to the predominance of the Qur'an in spiritual life. 2224. Umayyad period: seventh and eighth centuries. Abbasid period: eighththirteenth centuries. These two periods of about six hundred years make the socalled classical period of Islamic culture. Following that, the Mongolian invasion of the East (thirteenth century), the Reconquista in Spain (thirteenth-fifteenth centuries) and, as a consequence, a deep decadence during next five or six centuries that lasted until the beginning of the twentieth century. The only great name that surfaced during the decadence was Ibn Haldun-an oasis in the vast desert. 2225. Four great names of Persian (and world) poetry: Firdusi, Nizami, Sadi and Hafiz. 2226. We should not forget: Muhammad the Prophet fought against pagans, but he also negotiated with them. 2235. By Kemal' s reforms the necessary permanent dialogue or flux among the past, present and future was interrupted, and without it there cannot be an established system of values nora true feeling of dignity in a nation. 2290. There is no good optimistic literature. Somebody said, "literature lives on the evil that exists in the world." 2293. The balance of power that is founded on the division of the world into two blocks is a favorable climate for the creation and development of a third group of forces in the world. In a bipolar world, either of the two superpowers is practically a factor of balance. Without the USSR, the world would be exposed to a political and spiritual Americanization. It is even more obvious that without the United States, we would have a rude sovietization on the scene. A natural and successful building of a united Europe (on the existing foundations of the EEC) is possible only under current conditions. Interference of superpowers is present even now,


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Thoughts on Islam: Historical and Other Observations but to a very limited degree. In the shadow of this giant confrontation, a new superpower could be born and developed from the ideas and expanses of the Islamic world. The EEC has demonstrated how to do it gradually and it is the model to follow. 2312. The alternate perceptions of life as either prose or poetry that characterizes Islam are literally reflected in the Qur'an, which, regarding its literary form, represents a blend of prose and poetry. 2313. The objective was to create a society, of moral strictness and political freedom. This is a difficult, yet possible task. I believe that it is originally an Islamic concept. 3214. The first of the three great poets from the Umayyad period-JerirTerezuk-El Ahtal, was a Christian from Mesopotamia. Chroniclers describe him as strolling through the palace of Damascus with a golden cross pendant on his necklace and refusing to convert to Islam (Gabrielli, ibid., p. 95). 2329. The disunity that prevailed in the Arab world during its classical period (first five centuries) was fatal in the political domain, but not in the cultural. Gabrielli wrote: "However, this political division [east-west, my comment] did not lead to the breaking of cultural links, and that was characteristic for the entire islamic Middle Ages. Islamic culture was unified in its essence, with some regional variations and features, so we can say that no political boundaries existed for spiritual values." 2332. Spanish Arabs introduced the new strophic poetry, its discovery attributed to the blind poet Mukkadam el-Kadri. The poems of that kind usually consisted of five or seven stanzas with different combinations of rhyme. Ribera and Menendes Pidal made a thorough comparative analysis of this Arabian (Andalusian), and later on of Provansalian, poetry and established numerous analogies, particularly in the metrics of the verse. Similarities with chivalrous (gallant) poetry are deeper and concern the contents, especially the perception of love as service. The origin of this idea in the poetry of the Arabian Maghreb is corroborated by thorough research results and well documented. There is no doubt either that the origin of the rhymed Roman verses is in the poetry of the Arabian Maghreb. 2335. "Who leafs through the Kitab el-Fihrist Ibn-en-Nedim, a systematic catalogue of works and authors in the Arabic language from the second half of the tenth century, will see the significant literary and scientific education the Arabislamic culture could be proud of, and will realize what a small portion of that knowledge has been studied so far, compared to what remains to be analyzed and to what has been lost for good" (F. Gabrielli). Consequently, a relatively small portion of Arab-Islamic culture is known to modern generations. There will be no renaissance for the Arabs and Muslims until the veil is removed from this buried culture that was created under the close and immediate influence of Islamic sources-the Qur' an, Hadith and the first followers. There cannot be a new start without the study and knowledge of the sources and origins, as this has been proved by the Western culture. 2336. When I consider some aspects of Islam, I must admit that there is something primitive in it, but in a positive meaning of the word. What I mean is its natural approach, closeness to the elements of life and to reality; at the same time, it is reluctant to sophistication, artificiality, pretentious education and styling. Islam is close to some truths of life that are not very pleasant to ailing poets or romantics, but that win the hearts and souls of those who are "traveling through the land, seeking God's bounty" (Qur'an, 73/20).


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Thoughts on Islam: Historical and Other Observations 2358. The history of Islam is yet to be written. What exists now under that title is everything but true history, which is not surprising. It was not written by an objective mind and with expertise, but either from passionate hatred or passionate love! Hatred and love write poetry, not history. In more than a thousand years, there were so many of those who reached for pen in order to slander, devaluate or at least cover up. A lot of black paint was used to picture some events, or even entire ages, much darker than they had been. Later on, some more objective minds occurred, but how could they get a real picture of a time that they were not able to know by themselves (directly) and if all information that was available to them was full of bitter hate? Could they make objective and realistic judgments, even if they wanted to? On the other hand, devout and enthusiastic believers exaggerated in their way-glorifying successes of all kinds. But the real truth was most likely somewhere in between, because life, as it is the case, had its ups and downs, its moments of light and shade. However, negative exaggeration was much more frequent and significant, so that it had a decisive influence upon the picture that was created on the developments that had taken place in the territories of the modern Islamic world. 2359. Aristotle's Rhetoric was translated into Arabic as early as in the first half of the ninth century. The translator was most probably Hunein Ibn Ishak (Gabrielli, ibid., p. 187). 2361. The extinction of critical thought in the islamic culture in the thirteenth century coincided with the beginnings of decadency and the fast decline in all domains. Endless repetitions and scholastic compilations took over, opening a period of historical hibernation that lasted until the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. 2363. One detail from Tabari' s vast collection of historical material, The Book of News on Prophets and Kings, gives some indications about the position (and role) of the woman in the early period of Islam. A detailed description of the battle of Kadesi that was to decide the destiny of the Persian Empire includes the following lines: "The sun rose on the third morning, all troops were in their positions, both Arabs and Persians. The muslims had already lost two thousand soldiers, severely wounded or killed, while the pagans had lost ten thousand of theirs. Saad said: You can bathe the killed, or bury them with their blood on. Gatherers carried bodies to the graves, while the wounded were committed to the women's care. Majid ebu Zeid supervised the work. Women and children were digging graves during the two days of Agwat and Armat, on both coasts of Mushariq; two and a half thousand soldiers who were killed on Kadesi were buried there" (Gabrielli, ibid., pp. 198-199). 2365. Seljuk Turks became a decisive factor in the Middle East as early as in the middle of the eleventh century. 2369. If somebody said that the Islamic view of the world is theocentric, I believe that we would agree with him. God is the beginning, the center and the end of reality, as perceived by Islam. 2373. In the twelfth century, Palermo was still a half-Muslim city. The Muslim Spanish writer Ibn Jubeir, who wrote about travels, visited Palermo in 1184 on his way to Mecca. Writing about his trip, Ibn Jubeir described the episode of passing through Palermo, where he saw many mosques and noticed that Christian women were dressed the same way as Muslim women. Gabrielli quotes a part of this description, ibid., pp. 220-222. 2379. Some data from the history of Islam: The thirteenth century was the beginning of a great crisis. Mongolian hordes penetrated from Asia, defeating


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Thoughts on Islam: Historical and Other Observations Persia. in the first onslaught, the Baghdad Caliphate in the second. The threat of the Franks -hung over Syria, Palestine and Egypt. In Spain, the Reconquista defeats Almoravides and Muslim rule is confined to Granada and its surroundings. Arabs leave the scene for the next six centuries, while the Turks take over. Egypt partly recovers under the Mamelukes in the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, after the Mongols had been driven out from Syria and the Crusaders from Palestine. In the domain of culture, there are less and less original works and true literature and poetry; what prevail are encyclopedias, collections, compilations-only repetitions, typical signs of decline. 2382. Gabrielli states that the collection One Thousand and One Nights is more popular in the West than in the East. It marked the end of the age of classical Arab literature. 2384. It would be useful to investigate and analyze to what extent the invasion of Islamic territories by European forces in the twentieth century influenced the awakening of the conquered nations. As a matter of fact, this encounter with the foreign Euro-Christian culture might have had a sobering effect. In addition to that, for many Arab countries, from Iraq to Algeria, the arrival of Europeans meant a change of occupying power. Instead of Turkey, which was tired and had nothing more to offer, new, fresh nations came bringing their prosperous culture with them. This is a fact we have to admit. Of course, it remains to establish respective shares of responsibility for the overall stagnation borne by Turkish domination on the one hand and the fatigue and weariness of the Arab nation on the other, which would maybe, even without Turkish domination, have remained on the margins of history. Anyway, the "holidays" of Arab people lasted too long. 2386. I do not know what was the attitude of Jamaluddin Afghani toward Turkey, but there are some indications that Egypt, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, though under English occupation, offered more freedom to Arab-Islamic - proponents than countries that were under Turkish rule. Obviously, Turkey enforced a purely national policy that led to its total defeat in World War I and to the collapse of the empire. 2387. This is how the Arab poet Michail Nuayma (born 1899) sees the situation in his country after World War I (in his poem Brother): Brother, if after the war some man from the West would praise his accomplishments, if he would build monuments to those who fell and pay tribute to their sacrifice, don't you celebrate the winners, don't you scorn those who were defeated, but come together with me and bow your head in silence, cry with your bleeding heart humbly over the destiny of our dead. . . . Brother, that could not have happened without our will. Don't moan, a stranger's ear does not listen to our grieving. Come with me, and take a shovel to dig a pit and hide our dead in it. Brother, who are we? We have no family, no homeland, no neighbors. Asleep or awake, we are covered with shame and disgrace. The world stinks of us and of our dead. Take the shovel and follow me, to dig another pit to hide ourselves alive in it. This is Michail' s poetic description. Only a poet could know the depth of the fall and misfortune; only he could find the right words to describe it. 2394. Since a sculpture was undesirable (or even forbidden), we can suppose that in the Islamic cultural circle, the energy of plastic art was oriented towards architecture. After all, is a building not a sculpture?


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Thoughts on Islam: Historical and Other Observations 2396. (Forgotten Bidpai). The famous French writer Jean de La Fontaine (1621-1695) did not hide that he owed enormous gratefulness for his fables to the Arab writer Bidpai, called by him Pidpai. Bidpai' s fables were published around 770 under the title Khalila and Dimna; their source was the Indian book of fables Panchatantra, translated first into Persian and then from Persian into Arabic. Bidpai' s fables were translated in the coming centuries into Greek (in 1080), then into Hebrew (in 1250), Spanish (1251), German (1552), French (1570) and so on. Bidpai's name was forgotten in time, so that now large encyclopedias mention only Oesopus, La Fontaine, Krilov and some later fable authors. Panchatantra, the direct source of Bidpai' s fables, had a similar destiny. This "Freudian forgetfulness" can be seen in other domains as well. 2397. By the end of the ninth century, a special school for translation was established in Baghdad with the main task to provide translation of Greek and Roman works into Arabic. It has been reliably ascertained that all the important medical books of ancient authors, in particular of Hypocrites and Galen, were translated into Arabic before 900. 2398. Modern Egyptian writer Kamil Husein (born 1901) wrote Naughty Town (published in 1955). The novel offers a fantastic reconstruction and interpretation of Christ's sufferings, "written with exceptional balance and pure moral sympathy by a modern, average muslim, who is at the same time a narrator, moralist and scientist" (Gabrielli, ibid., p. 286). The book is a mixture of narrative prose and essay, interwoven with historical, philosophical and religious observations. 2399. Teufik el-Hakim, the most famous Egyptian dramatist (born 1903), wrote a drama entitled Ehil el-Kelif (Those from the Cave), inspired by a story from the Qur'an about seven men sleeping in a cave. They wake up after several centuries of sleep and try to connect the broken flow of events from their previous lives. They fail to win this "fight with the time." 2403. Considering such enthusiastic translating of Greek works into Arabic in the eighth and ninth centuries, we may draw the conclusion on certain correspondence between the Islamic and Hellenic spirit, or at least on the absence of any reluctance or prejudice. If in the thinking of great Hellenic thinkers there had been anything alien to Islam, this familiarizing with (or adoption of) Greek culture would have been much slower; but, as we know, that was an unimpeded process, similar to the "discovering of lost treasure" (Muhammad a.s.). This phenomenon, as far as I know, has never been explored from this angle. Naturally, the Western way of thinking will always find a wide contradiction between Islamic theocentrism and Hellenic anthropocentrism. But that contrast is not such as it is seen by positivist minds in Europe. Neither does Islamic theocentrism deny man, nor the Hellenic anthropocentrism reject God. The conflict between humanism and religion will always remain an artificial construction. For, if there is no man without God, there is no humanism without religion either. After all, the humiliation of the human being we witnessed in our century confirmed this close connection between the denial of God and this tragic phenomenon. 2416. Super-nationality of Islam means rejecting the national narrowmindedness and exclusion. It makes it possible for Islam to be open to the real values of all peoples. The boundaries of that openness encompass humankind. This fact explains the absence of prejudice and the openness with which the Arab world approached and accepted all achievements of the Hellenic and Persian cultures in the early centuries of Islam. 2419. There is a widespread thesis on suspicious religious devotion of the rulers from the Umayyad dynasty. Modern historical science considers that this thesis


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Thoughts on Islam: Historical and Other Observations has no standing and that its origin should be sought in Abbasid propaganda, calculated to discredit the overthrown dynasty and to strengthen the legitimacy of Abbasid rule. 2420. Historians consider the period of Abbasid rule as the cosmopolitan "golden age" of Islamic civilization. It was a civilization of the Arabic language, but created by men of different nationalities, "unified by their awareness of belonging to the same civilization macro-sphere" (Darko Tanaskovic). The majority of individuals who contributed to this civilization were not Arabs. This fact gives this civilization a dual character. It is both-Islamic and cosmopolitan. F. Gabrielli writes: "Discussions on ethnic background of this or that writer, fueled by intolerant sharpness of modern nationalism, made no sense in those times, when everybody considered themselves citizens of the medieval islamic polis, and spoke the Arabic language which seemed to be the most convenient means of expressing their thoughts" (F. Gabrielli, History of Arab Literature). 2421. All cultures known by history are the cultures of specific nations, that is, national cultures: Chinese, Greek, Roman, Indian, Incas and so on. There are two exceptions: Islamic and Western cultures, based on two great religions: Islam and Christianity. 2422. There is an interesting definition of Arabism, offered by Gibb (H.A.R. Gibb, English Islamologist, 1895-1971). According to him, Arabs are "all those for whom Mohammed's mission and the mention of the Arab Empire represent the central historical event, and who consider the Arabic language and its written legacy as their common property." 2424. Political disunity of Islamic Spain in the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries brought about Arab defeat and the withdrawal of Islam before the Reconquista. This is one of the rare examples in history where the stronger culture was defeated, not only militarily, but definitely. For in Spain, unlike in other similar cases, the victorious side that was spiritually weaker did not accept the culture of the defeated, but imposed its religion and culture. As a matter of fact, the best allies to the Catholic Reconquista were the very Muslim rulers, disunited and hostile to each other. This overturn, impossible and retrograde from the point of view of civilization, that took place in pre-Columbus Spain, would not have been possible without their support. 3093. Our boasting about the large number of Muslims, which keeps growing more than fast, reminds me of a man who shows his obesity off, pleased with the new kilos he gains. When shall we begin putting emphasis on our soul, our mind, our achievements? Even in a small fragile person, a great spirit and great contributor to humanity can abide. Where is our force, our science, our literature? Where are our discoveries, our contributions to the universal good? 3295. I've been thinking of the ihrams that people wear during hajj: two plain pieces of white cloth. The most extreme simplicity and equality one could imagine. An unreal image, as of another world. Nothing has ever separated and differentiated people among them like clothes. They mirror most evidently all our differences in wealth, class, profession or nationality. 3323. The latest teaching on the universe is actually a teaching on the reflective nature of the basic particles of matter, with each of them having its counterpartanti-particle. It is believed that in the depths of the universe there are counterworlds, counter-stars and counter-galaxies, built of such a kind of matter that represents a mirrored image of the properties of our matter. Paul Dirac, who theoretically established in 1930 that anti-particles exist as absolutely equipotent counterparts to the particles that we know, discovered the theory on anti-matter


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Thoughts on Islam: Historical and Other Observations in physics. Dirac, the author of the notions of negative energy and negative mass, discovered this by purely mathematical method, as his formulae led him to such conclusion. The first anti-particle-a positive one (anti-electron)-was discovered in 1932, and the first anti-proton was produced in an accelerator in 1955 (compare: "Who created in pairs all things that the earth produces, and things of which they have no knowledge"-Qur'an 36/36). 3379. With Judaism, religion came to a standstill, enslaved in rituals and forms, and became incapable of spreading, having reached its limits. Its inner driving force gradually slowed down until it stopped. Jesus had to appear in order to break that shell. That is why his words thundered against form and appearance. They may sometimes sound strange, like those against learning or cleanliness ("Blessed are those poor in spirit," "Where are you scholars," "You wash your hands and vessels, and your souls are dirty"). These extreme requests did not literally mean what they seemed to. They were rather the noble rage of a soul that was faced with the absence of anything that could be a real faith. With Jesus, the pendulum swung in full force to the opposite side. Striving to save itself, its souls, religion rejected for the moment all that was external, all forms and rituals. God then sent a Messenger who would find the right balance between soul and body, essence and form, spirit and law, Moses and Jesus. That was Muhammed. 3508. In the February 16, 1988, edition of Literaturna Gazeta, the Soviet writer Alexandar Perhorov expressed his view that the Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan had been a tragic mistake. He mentioned the words of a reputable Kabul university professor who said, as early as in December of 1979: "There will be no socialism in Afghanistan, because the muslim energy of the people will turn into ashes everything that is strange to the spirit of islamic tradition" (Oslobodjenje, May 29, 1988). 3511. Islam has been criticized for not having abolished slavery in the seventh century. But, was it possible then? Let us remember that still in the nineteenth century, or twelve centuries later, the people in the United States were killing each other because a large part of the South was against the abolition of slavery. The founders of America, Washington and Jefferson, were slaveholders, and the famous Fugitive Slave Law was passed as late as in 1850. According to that law, every U.S. citizen, under threat of prison, was obliged to help in the seizure and return of fugitive slaves from the South. Only in 1964, by President Johnson, was the law on civil rights signed. 3546. This is what colonialism, combined with local weakness, can bring about in a country: a number of important writers from the Arab Maghreb do not write in Arabic but in French. For example, the novel by the Moroccan writer Tahar Ben Jelloune, Sacred Night, the winner of the Goncourt Prize that sold 340,000 copies, was written in French. The same goes with the Algerian writer Katel Yacinom (winner of the National Prize for literature). Muhammad Dil, Abdelhebran Khothabi, Abdelvehab Meddeb and others write also in French. First they became known abroad, and subsequently in their own countries. There is no similar example in all of history; it is even more tragic given the fact that Arabic is one of the world languages in which libraries full of books used to be written. 3555. Some accuse Christianity of being "too white," an impossible accusation in the case of Islam. Its Prophet belonged to the people that are the blackest among the white and the whitest among the black. Black people slightly shrink from "the paleface and blue-eyed Jesus." 3639. Islam, in its entirety, sometimes seems to me to be a request upon man to stick to his nature, without trying to be an angel because he cannot be one, nor to lower himself to the animal, because he must not be one.


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Thoughts on Islam: Historical and Other Observations Courtesy: Bakir Izetbegović © 2006 by Right Holders Fair Use Policy Edited OCR-version: Taskforce Ezania Polity Ezania - The Islamic micronation http://www.ezania.net/ http://www.ezania.net/library/ Distribution on: http://www.muslimtorrents.net/ Presence on: http://www.muslimspace.com/


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Appendix: From My Children's Letters

APPENDIX From My Children's Letters I mentioned in the Preface that, at the end of this book, I would publish some characteristic segments from the letters that, in the period of over five years, I had been receiving from my three children. These accounts illustrate the circumstances and the feelings in the family of a political prisoner in those days and shed some light on their authors. Here are the segments. Sabina, July 9, 1983 Dearest Dad, It has been four days since Braco became a soldier. Bakir, Seka and I drove him, accompanying him all the way to the gate of the barracks. The next morning, he called me. His barracks are nice, full of greenery and very neat and clean. I'll take a bus tomorrow to visit him and take him some cigarettes and fruit. I do not feel the loneliness so much because there is always some work to do. Actually, there is always someone visiting me, or else I go somewhere. So, the time passes by and that is good. Grandpa is as usual, at times a bit better, at times worse. Mom is still with Lejla, but plans to move over to Bakir's before Seka gives birth to their baby to help them out. Seka feels great; they have already started buying diapers and all the baby's stuff. All the rest is as ever and all is good. You take care of yourself and do not worry about us. Much love from your Sabina. Lejia, August 9, 1983 A couple of nights ago I dreamt a short dream: you were leaning against a desk, standing in the dark. I realized that you had returned. Still, you did not answer my questions because you could not confirm that you were back. I had taken your face with both my hands and kissed your cheeks. I do not know whether I have ever in my life, even when I was a child, felt such a deep and strong love for you. My life goes on, as if pushed by some force beyond us. We are cooking our meals, eating, working and going for picnics. That is how it should be, at least when there are small children around. One has to invent stories, laugh and use one's imagination and, besides all that, answer to the countless questions of theirs. Sabina, August 8, 1983 My Dear Dad, You were blessed with yet another granddaughter today and now you are a true, threefold grandfather while I am a threefold auntie. The baby was born about 12 o'clock, and I learned about it at 3:00 once I left the courtroom. I wandered through the corridors to find someone who could pass the happy news on to you, but they had all gone away. They say that the baby is pretty little girl. Seka feels fine and Bakir-in his new role- as a father, I have not seen yet. He was so very full of pride when he came to the courtroom in the morning, around 7 or 8 o'clock, to tell me that he had taken Seka to the hospital. Bakir, August 23, 1983 Our little baby, Jasmina, is, just like all your granddaughters, a gorgeous child. She has brown hair and a light complexion and somehow she is all pink. Her features are unusually clear and distinguished-big eyes, big and well-shaped lips, a lot of hair and small, thin eyebrows. By day she is quiet and mainly sleeps, but at night! Around midnight she starts to stretch, yawn and move-getting ready for


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Appendix: From My Children's Letters another crazy and "unforgettable" night, while Seka and myself-well, our hair bristles. Then, Seka spends the night breastfeeding her, changing her diapers, the baby screams for no apparent reason or else simply lies there silent but with her eyes wide open so that Seka and I cannot fall asleep expecting her to start screaming again. Around five in the morning she calms down and falls asleep as the most innocent of all while Seka and I look at each other disheveled, pale with double circles under our eyes. (I have been joking a bit but there is truth in all this-your little granddaughter is not exactly what one would call an angel.) With love from your Bakir. Sabina, September 19, 1983 Today is the third day of Bayram and with it I wish you less sorrow and more hope. You certainly know how these Bayrams feel for all of us without you around. But still, there are Mom's delicious sweets, although nothing is as it used to be. We are trying hard to follow your advice and live our lives as usual, but it is hard because even the streets and the houses do not look the way they once did. I can feel that these days you are sad. I never stop thinking of you and dream about you every night. I wish you knew how much I am longing for you. Please, take good care of yourself. Do not smoke too much and walk as much as possible. Lejia, December 14, 1983 I have never written you about how much I wanted to see you and have a chat with you a day or two before you left. I had this feeling that I had so much to share with you, to console you so that you could forget the problems that had tortured you then. That desire is still there. I dream about you so very often, as if you come to us but, still, you had to return there. You refuse to look at me, being in haste. If only you would look at me once, that would suffice to make up for the conversation I am so longing for. Bakir, December 30, 1983 So, 1983 is almost behind us. It was not great at all but I am willing to forgive it. At least it brought us little baby Jasmina Izetbegovic. Dear dad, I wish you a much easier and happier new year. I wish peace in your heart and soul. I would be the happiest if the circumstances in which you are now living could change, but since for now it is impossible, I wish you to find relief in yourself. Just think how one day we shall live together again, drink our morning coffee together and travel and buy clothes for our little girls-one smaller and tinier than the others. Try to catch the rhythm, without worrying and doubting too much, spare yourself so that these days won't have any impact on you. In a fortnight we shall come to visit you. Sabina thought of bringing you Orwell's 1984. Please write if you want us to bring it or some other book. Are you reading Signs by the Road sometimes? It is not bad to read a page or two from time to time. Lejla, January 23, 1984 It has been ten months today since all these misfortunes have begun. I want to bring you a piece of good news. Your book has been published! Both in London and in Kuwait! We are all sharing in your joy. I hope it will bring you good fortune and, above all, that those who would read it would realize that its author wished only for the best to human kind. Always thinking of you, Lejla. Sabina, February 6, 1984 I can't wait to see the Olympics end so that we can come and visit you. It is a strange feeling because we always expect so much from those visits, as if a miracle would happen and you would sit with us in the car and come home. And


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Appendix: From My Children's Letters then, it is so difficult when we sit in the car alone leaving you behind those huge gates. I cannot get used to it, I shall never accept it and I shall never understand it. It is not only and solely the matter of the heart because it is also my mind that rejects it. Everything in me rebels and whenever I wake up and realize it again I cannot believe it is happening and if I were strong enough I would have undone this world of ours, or else return to my dreams in order to forget reality. But I can do neither of the two, I have to get up and work and eat and live with the world. All the strength I have I am investing into it but still sometimes I feel that the strength I have is not enough. But there are people and events that sometime fill me with hope and so I pass from one day to the next. What makes me happiest is when someone asks me "Any relation to Alija Izetbegovié?" and I say "My father." This makes my day. Lejia, February 14, 1984 Our beloved grandpa (the old grandpa) died on February 12, 1984. You have probably heard about it already. I know that you regret not being with us now. He was buried yesterday at the New Cemetery, a couple of meters away from grandmother. The last ten or so days grandpa did not even leave his bed, he neither ate nor smoked. His looks changed. Mom and auntie Vahida spent everyday there while Bakir and I decided to sleep there in shifts. Bakir slept there on Friday and I did on Saturday night. I almost decided not to go that evening because Sabina called and told me that he was sleeping peacefully and that there was no need to come so late. But something drove me there. When I went to his room around 11 P.M. he was breathing heavily but asleep. I do not know why I did not sleep at all that night, I kept listening to the sounds from his room but I did not hear him, not even once. About 8 P.M. Sabina checked and thought that something was wrong. Something made me first wash my face and comb my hair before I entered his room. His blanket did not move, his chest, quiet, eyes and mouth closed, and both his hands, one over the other, lying on his chest. His forehead was ice cold. I went to tell Sabina but decided to return and check once again because it takes a lot of courage to claim that a man is dead. I laid my hand on his chest. There was no life. His chest was firm and cold like rock. I was looking at a dead man for the first time in my life, without fear and uneasiness, but with a lot of deep sorrow for he passed away. He was a man full of joy. He liked to raise his hands and dance. He was strong and versatile. He was over sixty when I was born but I still remember him as young and smiling because whenever I caught his eyes he smiled at me. I know that he loved me very much and I loved him. I can't believe that he died the first night I stayed with him. I had this feeling that it would happen that way.

Bakir, February 14, 1984 Dear Dad, Ten minutes ago we returned from Lejla' s. While there, we lined up our three little girls-Esma is a head taller than Jasmina, Selma is a head taller than Esma. Esma was break-dancing (you know, the dancing that black people perform while moving their bodies in an incredible way). Although Jasmina can hardly walk, she nevertheless tried to imitate her. There was the yellow parrot to make the whole picture complete. Lejla let the parrot flutter freely around the apartment and Jasmina was so excited. Jasmina enjoys being at Lejla's. The apartment is spacious so she can run as much as she wants, there are a lot of toys and there are-which counts the most-other children. Selma loves her a lot, the age difference between the two is quite great, and Esma is quite okay given that Jasmina' s presence threatens her-she replaced her as the youngest child. Lejla keeps giving her Esma's clothes and other stuff, etc. A month ago Esma forced her foot into shoes that have gotten far too small for her and then, with a "theyare-too-tight-but-I-am-not-going-to-show-it" expression on her face, claimed that


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Appendix: From My Children's Letters the shoes were okay. But, all in all, Esma is generous and never stays cross for long. Lejla, March 19, 1984 You probably did not know that every day, when you were leaving court, I saw you. One day I even called your name. You did not turn around, perhaps you did not hear me. There was always some new excitement. I wanted to see you, to get as close to you as possible, because my sight was blurred anyway and I could not see you clearly, while the police were pushing us away rudely as if they wanted to say: "he is ours now!" And then an old man, whom they were also pushing aside, started suddenly to curse and swear at them. He asked those enforcers of the law and order whether they had their own children. It seemed to me that everything around us was shaken when the old man uttered his curse. Lejla, December 19, 1984 My Dear Dad, As for my stomach, I haven't had any pains for almost a year now and have gained 4 kilos. With my headaches it is a different story, they are persistent and I have learned to live with them. Only if I could force myself not to mention it to anyone, it would be even better. I have visited a doctor and he offered me a consolation: "60 percent of women suffer from severe headaches after childbirth but it stops after 50." Therefore, I have to accept it and adjust. Fortunately, the children are not as small anymore so I do not have to get up during the night. In the afternoon they can play when I have to rest. That is how things are, my dear dad, do not worry about me, I sometimes have this feeling that I am walking on all fours. The older I get, the easier it is for me to accept life as it is. I had a dream last night that stayed with me all day today. A huge field and a house. I am a guest there. Someone gives me some seeds wrapped in paper to plant. I do it right away. As soon as I woke up the next morning, I could see the sun rising behind a hill and long green sprouts that grew overnight. "They will soon start to blossom," I told the man, and he answered: "It will blossom tonight if there is no snow, these are sword lilies." Bakir, January 8, 1985 My Dear Dad, I have just entered my office from the freezing cold, it is - 13°C. My awful handwriting will be even worse, I guess. The winter is real. It reminds me of my childhood as it has not been this snowy or cold for fifteen years. An avalanche of snow and ice blocked Sarajevo for two days over the weekend. A crust made of trodden snow has covered the streets. Sabina has entered the "last 100 meters of her race." She looks rather big although she has not gained much weight, she moves very clumsily and can hardly find a comfortable position when sitting. She never stops sighing and changing her posture. As for Jasmina. I must complain again. She has covered her white felt teddy bear's head with soup-to be fair, she did this with the best intentions, she wanted to feed him. She pretended that she was herself surprised once we found her in flagrante with the spoon in her hand. Then she opted for defending herself in silence. Besides this sin, there are a zillion other minor tricks-hiding my shoes, spilling milk on the carpet and giving it a thorough rubbing in, calling our decent neighbor "idiots," etc., etc. Sabina, January 19, 1985 Each day I write you numberless letters in my thoughts and have very long conversations with you. And then, when I really start writing I am not sure what I have already written to you or what I have only thought about. I want to write you about everything because that would give me the feeling that you are here


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Appendix: From My Children's Letters with me. I am so glad when you write me that I should move the stove to the room and that the children should not go outside to the courtyard when the snow falls from the roofs. As for the latter, we have taken your advice and so far the snow has not fallen on anyone's head, but as for the stove it is still in the kitchen. Here, there is your letter dated January 24th and the previous one as well. It seems that with this weather even the mail travels slower so that letters cross. Esma, or rather Esme, does not belong to any gender yet, we call her "Bocko" so that she is a boy. She protests and usually gets very tough and claims that she is Esma, pronouncing her own name in a wonderfully clear, ringing way. There is the song, "For Esma," from the latest "Bijelo dugme" record, which she listens to astonished and then concludes that the phrase "Esma and me" means herself and her mom. Otherwise she does not accept any explanation of the dad-mommychildren-grandma, etc. relationships and offers her own, very simple interpretation that mom has given birth to all. I sometimes enjoy irritating her by explaining family relations to her, but her usual conclusion is final and it is "I do not want it that way." I could write you pages and pages about Esma but here is just one more of her "pearls": when she was asked whether her auntie would give birth to a braco (a boy) or a seka (girl), she said that I had already given birth to one "Braco" (that is my husband whose nickname is Braco) and that now it is time to have a "Seka" for a change. Bakir, January 30, 1985 My Dear Dad, Why not type one letter so that you do not have to struggle with my handwriting? I have not received any letters from you since our last visit. Hadn't you written to Lejia and Sabina I would have started to worry. Most probably your letter to me got lost somehow. Last night I had an awful dream and could not get rid of the feeling all day today. I did not dream that you were ill, but sad and hopeless. I do not know whether I have ever told you one of my dreams that turned into reality (I do hope that this would not be the case with the one from last night). Last year, before the Supreme Court ruling, I dreamed that one day the beautiful linden trees in front of our house were felled and immediately, still in my dream, I took it as the bad omen for the outcome of your trial. The next time I went to Hasana Kikica Street I found the linden trees down. I was flabbergasted. The trees were still young and healthy and there was no reason to chop them down. Just before that event your sentence was ruled, the same felling and uprooting of something so healthy and normal. Sabina, February 18, 1985 It is Lejla's birthday today, doesn't matter which, particularly because our Lejia will always remain, to me, our Lolikec, childish and much younger than her real age. I am going now to buy her a gift and in the afternoon we are going to eat cakes. I can already visualize Lejla dressed up and forgetting that she is tired as soon as we get together and "something is happening." My dear dad, February is approaching its end and I hope that March will be nice and will go fast and then there is April. With God's help, we will organize a visit so that we all can come, together with the baby. Whenever I think of it, it occurs to me that things might as well take a different course so that there is no more Foca nor the visits to the prison but to have you with us instead. Who knows? Lejia, February 21, 1985 My Dear Dad, I know that these days, whenever you open a letter, you expect to find news about Sabina. Still no news. It seems that the stork will not arrive before March. I do not know why I find childbirth so exciting, the very thought of it makes me cry. Actually, it shocks me. When I had Esma I was aware that I received another painful wound that life would shoot its poisonous arrows into, and there is neither


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Appendix: From My Children's Letters remedy nor safeguard in this world against such wounds. They grow along with love. On Monday, Sabina and Bakir came to my place and we watched Dynasty together. Naturally, Braco and Bakir ridiculed all the characters, spoiling our "womanly" atmosphere. We teased Braco, telling him that he resembles Jeff Colby. He didn't seem to mindbecause Colby is quite a handsome man. We have heard that the Federal Court has started operating. I do not know whether I have written about it in my postcard, but the results will be known about March 20th. We will pray to God to grant them the sense of justice. Do not give up, my dear dad, we all love and kiss you. Your Lejla. Lejia, February 26, 1985 My Dear Dad, All these last months I have been dreaming of this moment, when I would take a pencil and write you about one of these two pieces of good news. But I never thought that the two joys would occur at the same time. You have a fourth granddaughter! I wish happiness to you and all of us. This little girl with long hair has made us all very happy. After waiting for so long, your book has finally been published in America. It arrived like some being from another world, as salvation and hope. I was so proud! I do not know how to describe how I felt yesterday when I opened the parcel and realized that the book now exists and that I was holding it in my own hands. One dream has come true. It happened on February 25, 1985, in the afternoon and only 24 hours later, today around 5 P.M., Sabina became a mother. You must admit that these two pieces of news are competing with each other. Sabina, February 27, 1985 My Dearest Dad, Another short letter to you-I have given birth to one more granddaughter of yours and I wish her to bring you happiness. I am feeling fine, actually superb, and I will be ready to go home the day after tomorrow. I hope the news of your book brings you happiness, it is very nice, designed with a lot of taste, I will write about it in more detail later. Naturally, I will write more about your little granddaughter. The only thing I'll tell you now is that she is healthy, chubby, pinkish with disheveled hair-enough for the start of life. I have to finish now because this is not my desk so I cannot afford to write at length. These two pieces of news have touched me to the ends of my soul, I am waiting eagerly for one more and I love you. Your Sabina. Lejia, March 12, 1985 My Dear Dad, I am at work. Sitting and waiting for the computer to be fixed so that I can start. This old machine of mine stops working more and more often. One cannot rely upon it and take over a task guaranteeing that it will be completed. These days I have marked the tenth anniversary since I started working. I received a symbolic gift (1,000 dinars). The manager has promised to purchase a good, big computer but it all takes so long as time passes. Sabina needs to recover and the baby needs to get strong enough for the two of them to come to Foca. She is now so small and soft as if made of cotton. Sabina is more than delighted. Whenever she looks at the baby, her eyes fill with tears. I remember that this time last year she said: "I have come to terms with the fact that I will never have a child. It is better to accept it immediately than to spend one's life expecting it." I knew that this was only on the surface and soothing and told her that it was good for her to think about things that way, but I was sure that very soon she


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Appendix: From My Children's Letters would become a mother because that is her nature, she has always liked children and sees something beautiful and sweet in every child. I am watching her now carrying her "little pillow" around the house and how she talks to her with so much joy and tenderness. I am grateful to God for blessing her with that gift. Sabina, March 26, 1985 Please forgive me for my awful handwriting. It is because of my posture and the fact that I am in such haste. I am expecting the baby to wake up any minute and then-who knows when I will be able to finish this letter. I have received your letter from March 18th and, between the lines, I could read that you are full of different feelings, ranging from happiness to sadness and melancholy. I know (at least partly) how it is after a visit, because we feel the same way. But we have to return to this life, our work, problems, among these people, while you have to stay there. That is what I take the worst, the fact that you must remain there. It would be easier for me if I could stay there, of that I am absolutely sure. Sabina, April 2, 1985 This last month has passed so very quickly, as if it were a dream, and now I feel I am slowly recovering. It was so strange that I have lost all interests except for the baby, I could not read newspapers and watch TV whereas I even ate and slept only once I found time to do so. I have completely neglected my work, but now I want to return to my old customs and duties. Of course, that is only if this four kilo chicken would let me. Mom told me that you had written her how depressed you get towards the evening. I do not know whether you felt that before, but in my case that feeling was always there when the evening approached. I have to be very busy to suppress it a bit. Sometimes it is sorrow combined with a certain fear and physical weakness. I know that I have always found it difficult to get dressed in order to go out in the evening. And, as soon as I would go out and night fell, it would all be gone. It seems that this feeling is an accumulation of all my fears, uncertainties, and sorrows. I used to think that it was in this state when people decide to use alcohol or drugs in order to get out of it. I am telling you all this because I want you to know that I somehow know the feeling and that I can imagine how you feel. Prison certainly makes it more difficult, just like, for me, the feeling of freedom in this house helps me get through that part of the day. Perhaps the best would be for you to try and entertain yourself with something once it catches you, read something easy, if you can, or do the crosswords or watch TV. What I know for sure is that in those moments, towards the evening, it is not good to indulge in one's thoughts and emotions. It only makes it worse. You see, I am pretending to be wise again, but I only want to make it easier for you. Actually, what I would wish most is that in those moments you could come to my place and share a cup of coffee with me. But at least you should know that I always think of you, particularly towards the evenings. Sabina, May 15, 1985 Yesterday we had lunch at mom's place, and Cober arrived with his first real salary. Lejla came with her children and in the evening we returned home with that little bed "from Ogad" (Belgrade) and two sacks full of clothes, inherited from an older cousin. I would like so much to see you and I am counting down the days until our next visit even though I know that it will be so short and that we will, once we leave the prison, feel as if we have been robbed. I hope that this time we will have two hours again so that at least I can watch you because I already know that I'll forget all the things I want to tell you. I can hear the rain and little Nadja is breathing deeply while sleeping in my lap. Some people say that she resembles you, especially her eyes and forehead. I love you both so much. Your Sabina.


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Appendix: From My Children's Letters Sabina, June 30, 1985 You know that I never stop thinking about you and, as time passes, it is more difficult for me to accept your absence. It is not true that time heals all wounds. Each day only adds to this anger and pain I feel, and the trial, the more distant it is, the more it is in my thoughts and I have the feeling that today I would not be able to survive it. When I write to you about ordinary, mundane events it is above all because I cannot write to you about my everyday, usual thoughts and emotions connected with all that we have gone through, all we are still going through and because I cannot accept that it is still happening. I put all my trust into the fact that you are aware of all this. But still I have to write to you that never ever, not for one single moment, had I thought or believed that there is a bit of human justice in all this. I hope there will be justice in the decision of the Federal Court. Bakir, July 7, 1985 During the Holy Month of Ramadan I had read the Qur'an a lot. Seka found it a bit odd (I used to read 5-6 hours a day, non-stop) and she finds my ever-growing interest in Islam strange. She asked me to tell her honestly were it not a bit forced, out of spite because of all that had happened to us. I told her the truth-it is certainly not out of spite. Since I have clarified some things inside and from my heart, I feel as if I have washed myself and been cleansed. Sabina, July 21, 1985 Jasmina and Esma are gorgeous, grown up a lot, especially the younger one. She was terribly funny when she appeared in my courtyard: pushing her enormous cart with the doll, a plastic bag with all her "stuff' hanging on one arm and a cloth-apparently the cover for her doll. Full of jewelry: necklace around her neck, a belt, dozens of hairpins. Just like myself when I take a walk in town with Nadja. They played a lot and then Esma discovered bananas in the kitchen and ate them all. Esma has a funny hairstyle, it is called "the hedgehog" and she is definitely the funniest in the whole family although Nadja does jeopardize her standing and status. You can see it from the photos we are sending to you. She is good. She is now asleep not even dreaming that she will have to get vaccinated next week. I took her on Friday for x-rays of her hips and as soon as she smelled the odor of the clinic she started crying. She hardly ever cries. As soon as we got out, back into the fresh air, she was ok. You have probably heard that the lawyers have not received any information from the Federal Court so it is felt that until September nothing major will happen. Perhaps even later than that. One should be patient and spare one's nerves and, of course, one's health. Do not give up, we are thinking about you and love you. Yours, Sabina. Sabina, August 26, 1985 Today is Bayram. The first cloudy days since we have been here. We are preparing to go to nearby Supetar for cakes or ice cream this evening. Today, Nadja is six months old. She is a big girl and has her first two teeth. That is why I hardly slept last night. Besides her teeth, there are mosquitoes, the wind and an awful rooster who starts crowing in the middle of the night. If one morning he happens to be by the tree nearby the house it will be because I have tied him there. I dream about it every night about 2 A.M., when he starts to compete loudly with some rooster we can hear somewhere in the distance. There are about twenty hens with him, naturally, and they are as loud in announcing every single egg they bear. But, they do not irritate me so much. If only you could see how surprised I was this morning when the postman came to bring your letter. We were drinking coffee when we heard the doorbell ringing. That never happens here, because most of the time we are out, and the door is


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Appendix: From My Children's Letters always open. I though it was one of the guests staying on the upper floor and Cober went to see who it was. I was listening and from the corridor I heard him saying: Sabina, it is dad. For a moment, I believed that you were at the door and got paralyzed and then he appeared with your letter in his hand. I do not know how it could have occurred to me, but at that moment it did look real. Sabina, September 3, 1985 I went to the Ministry of the Interior this morning to request return of my passport. Actually, I have been there for the same reason so many times now, but before going to the sea, I had filled in some form they had given me and this time I had some more expectations. But again I wasted my time; they have just told me that the response to my request had been denied and that soon I would be informed in writing-an explanation without an explanation on the reasons for taking my passport away in the first place. Why I am the only one who can not get a passport, I do not know, and I would very much like to learn about the reasons and what the one who personally made the decision had on his mind. I would accept being denied my passport again for the same period of time only to learn the reasons. But it seems that I will be deprived both of my passport and those "reasons." Lejia, September 6-10, 1985 You might have noticed that I remain most frequently in the present time because the past incites some sickening nostalgia in me whereas the future, the "unlived" time, brings about apprehension as if I am entering some forbidden territory. There is something quite interesting here. Man is much stronger in the present than in some moments in the past or future. It is as if one is not aware of how much one can endure and cope with. That is why I think that nobody would want to go back to one's childhood and to live one's life over. We are all afraid of life and in the inner-most hidden corners of our soul we can't wait to see it through, to see the end of it as if over there a beloved true homeland is waiting for us. Sabina, September 13, 1985 My Dear Dad, I received your letter, the one with the poem. The poem is wonderful but for me it was such an "overdose" that I cried. Imagine, when I saw all the verses, I thought at first that you had become a poet. You must admit that it would be a wonder. So, I was rather shaken and now I would not have courage enough to read the poem again. As for Mak Dizdar, I know that he was our neighbor and I know his Azure River very well. I know his son from the times when the poet was still alive because in those days he was friends with Lejla. Sabina, September 30, 1985 From tomorrow onwards I am an employee here, the assignment is for a determined period, two months for the time being until the formalities relating to the job announcement are sorted out. Until then, I will have all the benefits and obligations of a full-time employee, meaning full salary, and compensation for breakfast and tram tickets. It is not to be neglected because once you add to it the insurance there is a big difference from the payment through the students' service, as I have done so far, and this, the normal way of payment, which goes right into my bank account. That is pretty much it as far as everyday events are concerned. A part of these everyday events and thoughts has become the expectation of the Federal Court decision. For days now we have been jumping at each and every phone call with some fear and apprehension. But there hasn't been any news yet. Orhan, the lawyer from Belgrade, told us that the ruling has not yet been made. How long will it all last? I do have the feeling that things have started moving and soon we


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Appendix: From My Children's Letters will hear something. One thing I do not like at all is that my optimism has disappeared and I fear rather than hope. But hope is still the only possible way for us to live and we cannot afford to abandon it. Sabina, October 16, 1985 I keep thinking about you: I guess you received my letter with the information on the Federal Court decision. If only we could be with you for five minutes. No matter how you kept saying that you are indifferent and that you are prepared for anything, I know that it will not be easy for you. This is a concrete final decision and there is no more room for guessing. I do not know how much it will disappoint you. For us, it was a terrible disappointment. Sabina, December 8, 1985 My dear dad, I miss you so much. Did you receive Letters from Prison? I came across the book by accident and read the letter about being in prison for more than three years. By then, they say, three years is the threshold of endurance and one falls into some sort of stupor and changes radically. I do not believe that you are close to such state. At least I am convinced you will never get to that point. Sabina, December 9, 1985 I love this house of mine even more now than when I wrote you about it ten days ago. That is how it is when true love is the case. I missed it a lot recently when I was on a business trip and freezing in the wind and heavy snow. I missed the plane, the trains were all delayed, but I was lucky enough to get a ticket for a sleeping car "under the counter." It was quite hectic when I showed up at the office around noon. When I finally arrived home in the afternoon, I could not have been happier to find where I had left it and inside Cober and Nadja, and your letter waiting for me. To me, this kind of family, and this kind of house is terribly necessary in order to be able to live. The only thing that is missing is to have you with us and when that happens I shall have no more wishes. Bakir, December 14, 1985 Dear Dad, I think you have received Sabina's letter in which she had told you that your sentence was reduced to nine years. Worse than we had hoped for but it is as it is. Do not worry. We were deeply disappointed. God knows how you will feel the moment you learn about it (perhaps this very moment). I was trying to find the words to reassure you and while doing so I somehow calmed myself down. Both you and me believe in destiny, the day you will be released from prison is written somewhere. Numbers such as 14, 12 and 9 are but numbers and one should not worry about them too much. You were so right when, in the end of your book, you wrote that man is great, as great as his "soul that is measured with time" and in that sense you might still get the chance to live a true life. To be in the right place while all of us, all the others, are actually living at the periphery of life or else, at best, we are only the observers. Do not let your nerves weaken and do not have doubts about this. According to the ruling of the Federal Court, you have been pronounced guilty based upon Article 133 (I hope that it is not yet another piece of misinformation because the ruling is already here in Sarajevo). What remains is the hope that this article will eventually be revised, with amnesty, or else the decision to make the prison sentences of political prisoners less strict in terms of living conditions (now, we need to put pressure on them about this, when I say we, I mean we the family).


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Appendix: From My Children's Letters Bakir, December 26, 1985 I have read the ruling. It is true that your sentence has been reduced to nine years but I am convinced that two things made you feel relieved-Article 136 is no more and your Islam Between East and West is no longer a banned book. For the latter, I would be willing to give one year of my life. I went to see Edhem. He did not know me, it was the first time we were introduced. You see, according the original ruling, he was supposed to get released in 1990 but he got out in 1985. I do not consider your nine years as something final. It will be, with God's will, much less, and people will come to see us just like they now come to see Bicakcic (the atmosphere at his place is now celebratory and solemn, the head of the house is back). Naturally, I asked about you and how you were coping with things there, checking your prison account-to what extent you are making things out to be better than they really are. Edo says that it is not unbearable (the two of you have not agreed as to which story to sell us, have you?). Little Jasmina is approaching, I pray God to rescue me! Sabina, December 30, 1985 I received your letter on Saturday, the first after our visit. I can see that you have studied the ruling thoroughly, just like me. The item relating to the book is one bright point in the ruling. I assume that now we can go to the Ministry of the Interior to request the seized copies. I am sorry that you lost Edhem's company (this is quite selfish, isn't it?) but I am glad that he has returned home. We went to visit him, together with little Nadja. I always knew that he would be the first to get out (what wisdom) and for the past three years I have been imagining the day when we would be able to visit him. Actually, we did not know him before, at least not officially, because I had never seen him before the trial. We had a long talk, like good old pals. I was most interested to hear about the conditions there, what you are doing, but I am sure that we would need days and days to hear everything. They have been receiving guests. He says that they are coming to see him as if they were a newlywed couple. They are planning to flee to the coast for a while to get away from the commotion. You know, sometimes, prior to your trial, I dreamed a dream that Edhem was sitting in the first row of the courtroom. I could not see the others behind him but I do know that was when it occurred to me that he would be the first to be released. That this dream of mine has come true is something of a miracle. I dreamed that he was somewhere in my neighborhood, at the entrance to the park, where I used to frequently dream about you. Sabina, February 13, 1986 I returned from Mom's a while ago. I went to give her the results of some of the medical check-ups she had made and medicine. She is still exhausted but I left her making a pie. I left little Nadja with her auntie this morning. Even at 8 o'clock in the morning she was full of energy and ready to play, she even succeeded in messing my hairstyle and tried to pull off my earrings. Then she showered me completely with water from her cup when I tried to give her her medicine. I had to imitate a cat and then a mouse and every other animal in order to trick her and get her to swallow a couple of drops of the syrup. Once, towards the end, I started making sounds as if I were a bear, she was so surprised that she took some of the syrup. We are waging war with her when it comes to food. She is probably losing a bit of her appetite, but the main trick is to grab the spoon in order to use it herself. So, if I want her to eat a whole meal, I have to put everything in front of her and feed her with her own little hand. If I want her to be quiet for at least a minute, I give her a pot with her spoon and she sits there pretending to be eating from an empty pot and nodding seriously. This little girl of mine is as sweet as honey.


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Appendix: From My Children's Letters Bakir, March 1, 1986 I use to bring to Jasmina those small hotel soaps whenever I returned from business trips. I once made a joke and told her that I had stolen it only to make my little, sweet, clever girl (she listened to the compliments with eyes half shut) happy. Yesterday I heard her bragging to Rada, Bisera's neighbor, that I have been stealing so many things for my sweet, little daughter. Lejia, March 5, 1986 My Dear Dad, I received your letter yesterday. You ask me how I felt on my birthday. Well, dad, I am not a child any more! This time I have definitely accepted that fact. I hope in the next decade I will understand that I am no longer in the prime of my youth. I remember you telling me once that when you wake up in the morning you first try to convince yourself that you have three grown children and that you are no longer the same man you were twenty five years ago. It is difficult for us all to accept the passage of time, changing inevitably to the worse, less mobile, more boring, but nobody would want to return to their youth. That is for sure. It is strange, as if we are all still hoping for something better against the odds. Lejla. Bakir, March, 10, 1986 I was thinking about your sentence today. With God's help, it will be shorter. However, if it still remains as it is, God forbid, I know that you shall endure it and leave that place they way you want to be. Athletes succeed in keeping their bodies young and healthy longer than we, ordinary people, who are not using them properly. A person who uses and exercises his brain succeeds in maintaining his mind longer than those who use their head only to carry their hats. Since you are physically fit and your brain cells are always busy and under "pressure," I have no fears that you will ever become a senile old man like those I feel compassion for. With God's help, I plan to live long with you in this world and have long, long talks together. Bakir, May 31, 1986 I have nothing special to tell you. I am going to Neum regularly, fasting, my job is pretty dynamic, which makes me a bit nervous. I sometimes take Seka with me and I am planning to take Jasmina as well, after Bayram ( I should have been in Neum full-time since May, but as they keep postponing it, I have already starting planning the summer in the same pace of my weekly trips). I spend three days in Neum and then I start longing for Sarajevo, the big city, my family, domestic food. Then I spend three days in Sarajevo and I start longing for the swimming in Neum, my solitude and freedom. We have cut Jasmina's hair short. We had to trick her-I persuaded her, whispering to her ear so that Seka did not hear me, that we would go to a hairdresser specializing in making little girls look like grown-up women. We shared conspiring looks, got dressed, and left the apartment. She endured the scissors stoically, you know how children hate them, and returned home with her hair cut short and a mischievous look on her face. From My Children's Letters 225 Bakir, September 13, 1986 They didn't have Kant's Practical Mind again in the fifteen or so bookshops I went to in Sarajevo and Zagreb. They say, "we get it, but it sells out, we'll get it again." I'll see if E~ref has it so, God willing, I'll be able to bring it to you on my next visit. The September issue of (the magazine) Al'Arabija has devoted its regular column "Profile" to you. The column takes up a whole page, and in the last two issues Roger Garodi and the Sudan marathon runner that won the "Live-aid" race (for


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Appendix: From My Children's Letters Ethiopia) were presented. If I get my hands on a copy, I'll send you a translation of the text. A birthday card for you came from England. It is three pages long and some 300 people have signed it. They asked me to try and get it to you. Since you can only receive our mail, I'll tell you this much about that card: it's very beautiful, with life-size flowers-the format is bigger than this sheet of paper that I'm writing on. Bakir, September 22, 1986 Late summer is burning out in Neum (in Foèa it is early autumn). Apart from a little landward breeze in the afternoon, everything is quiet and calm, bathing in the mild golden sunlight. It is not crowded. The crowds have gone away and left the barren beaches, empty cafés, free benches and the most beautiful season to me, Seka and Jasmina to enjoy them as we please. We have a large room with a terrace and a view reaching as far as Italy. The beach is some twenty meters away from the house. We walk down the beach to the market, so in the dusk you can see a familiar little girl in a sailor dress with her parents carrying grapes and a watermelon and going home. An article came out in the magazine "Knjiz~evna rijec~" (The Literary Word) about verbal offenses and it says that in the SFRY (Social Federal Republic of Yugoslavia) these offenses are treated differently in different republics. In Slovenia, they do nothing, but in Bosnia it says "inquisition trials, maltreatment of the arrested, Draconian sentences-and the archetype is the trial of Muslim intellectuals in Sarajevo in 1983." Love, Bakir. Sabina, September 24, 1986 My Dear Dad, I'm "as good as new" again. Nadjica and I are better and yesterday we started "working" again. I got your letter today, so I'm writing back. Mom came over straight from Fo~a on Saturday, so I got fresh news about you and the visit. Of course, I also got a kiss. As far as Nadjica is concerned, she has a new strategy: one night she lets me sleep until 5 or 6 A.M. and the next night she stages protests. Each day she gets to be naughtier and a bigger chatterbox. I spoiled her these last few days while I was at home and when Biba (the baby-sitter) came on Monday, she sat in my lap, tilted her head, smiled and said, and "Biba go to work." So, Biba should go to work and mommy should stay with her. What am I going to do with her? I don't know whether you included our letters in the number of pages you read or if they are extras. Still, I don't think you'll "go crazy" from reading if I don't go crazy from not reading. These days, I have started reading The Fear of Flying, a vulgar feminist book in which I only liked these lines: "Actually, sometimes I do wish I had a child. A very intelligent and witty little girl that would grow up to be the kind of woman I could never be. A very independent little girl with no scars on her mind and soul. A little girl who would not know of submissive senility or polite coquetry. A little girl who would always say what she means and mean what she says. A little girl who would not be mean or cunningly untruthful, because she would be a little girl who hates neither her mother nor herself." Well, I have a little girl. I just hope she turns out like that. Lejla, September 27, 1986 My Dear Dad, If they asked me why of all the seasons I love autumn the best I would say: because it makes me young again, a part of my soul feels 20 years old again. I feel that it will always be like that even if I live to be very old. I don't know whether other people see it the same way. I search for it in their faces. I never find anything even similar. Or perhaps they hide it even from themselves. It's easier that way! To live only for the present moment, the past and the future are something foreign, who knows if we ever were or if we ever will be.


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Appendix: From My Children's Letters Most of all I would like to be able to have a good talk with you. It would make me feel better. I start my third course of English on Monday. It won't be as difficult as the last, because it will have a slower tempo and it will be held at the firm during working hours. It starts at 7:15 A.M. every morning and ends at 8 A.M. So, from now on I will be starting my day with "good morning." Sabina, October 15, 1986 My Dear Dad, Ever since Monday, I've wanted to reply to your letter, the one you wrote after our visit. If I told you that I returned home after dark yesterday and that the day before I was cooking lunch in the wee hours of night, you'll understand that I'm terribly busy again. We have conferences with foreigners at work all the time, I've all but lost my voice, but I am content with myself most of all. In this kind of direct interpreting you feel a lot more important and, if you are good at it, also a good deal stronger. It's especially difficult when you are interpreting for a few directors who can speak English. In this case it is also difficult because there is a lot of specialized computer vocabulary. And I'm only there so that things go smoothly and so that they can concentrate on more important things than interpreting. So they listen to you and control you a bit and it would be enough to make you lose your head if you didn't at the start, in your mind, of course, send them all to hell and just concentrate on your job. Anyway I am getting better at this job and I think I could be good at simultaneous interpretation. The only problem now is that I am not sure if that is what I want to do anymore. I've found that that sort of skill would be a result of managing a certain mechanism and having some experience and I am starting to feel repelled by that "mechanical" part of the job. Probably because it has started managing me. I haven't been able to turn it off when I'm not working. It keeps functioning beyond my control: everything I hear, say, think, I translate into English in my head and sometimes I even try to translate it into French at the same time. Like this letter for example, my translating mechanism keeps translating it into English and I have to make an effort to ignore it. This fact may help me resolve the wild dilemma about my work. Namely, it seems that these directors have suddenly decided that they want to keep me here and now they are asking me whether I would like to take the job. It was easier before: I could happily make plans to pack up and move to the firm next door. Everyone here knows how strong it is. If they start being serious about convincing me to stay, they'll only ruin my satisfaction of leaving. And I'll have to consider whether I should leave at all. Anyway, just so you don't think that I am so preoccupied with my work that I have forgotten little Nadjica, I'll tell you that she is home with "Gagica," who is visiting us for 2 or 3 days. She loves to look at photo albums and she keeps asking, "Who that?" When she saw my photo with the Japanese people from the Olympics, I had to tell her that the man next to me was Japanese. She liked that "Panese" a lot and at the supermarket she immediately identified a Gypsy and started shouting, "Mr. Panese!" My dear dad, I'll write you again soon. Love, Your Sabina. Bakir, October 28, 1986 My Dear Dad, The weather is better in Neum again. We did have sothe terrible rains and chills. I brought a sweater from Sarajevo and woolen socks and a duvet, etc., just in case. While I am writing this to you, the sunlight is coming into my room from the west (actually the southwest, because that's where the sun sets now). All I can see is the sea, the sun and a part of an evergreen forest. And I think how wonderful it would be if you could, now and then, be here with me. I would be making coffee


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Appendix: From My Children's Letters and you could be sitting on the terrace eating these reddish-yellow autumn grapes. I don't know if I wrote you that Andrié has all of a sudden "darkened" for me. I used to read him with pleasure. And then I read his short story "Mustafa Mad~ar." I read that short story when I was little and I've somehow been avoiding reading it again. I guess I had a premonition that it would spoil all the others for me. Andrié writes about this Mustafa in an ugly and probably completely untruthful way with all kinds of atrocities that could not be proven. He describes all of it in his perfect, convincing style. Mustafa is not there to defend himself. Ivo seemed to me then to resemble a well armed, exceptionally skillful man gutting an innocent man (among other things, on one and the same page he writes how at dawn Mathar, with a small group of people, advanced on the Austrian army from the rear and ran among them like a lion starting a battle where the weaker Bosnians defeated the Austrians-these are historical facts, and then he goes on to invent how this hero was a pervert and a lunatic). That is why I brought other books with me that do not confuse me and that do not dwell on ugly things (does it seem to you that one way of working against evil and ugliness is mentioning them and talking about them as little as possible?). It's dusk. Tomorrow will be a sunny day; it's red in the west. The soccer game, Yugoslavia-Turkey, is starting in about half an hour. The guys from S/20 have already taken their seats around the TV and the workers from the construction site are in the TV hall in the Hotel Neum. So, we're going to cheer. Lejla, October 29, 1986 Here I am, having coffee only with you, because Selma is in school, Jasmin at his English course and mom is working around her house. Esma is thawing at the table opposite me. You won't understand me when I tell you that I was glad to spend the afternoon on my own. I like to do that the most when I am tired. When I came into the house, I saw your letter and that's enough joy for today. Maybe all this sounds a bit domineering, but that's how it is. Nobody could ever replace the talks I had with my dad. That place in my life and within me will stay empty until you return. And when God returns you to us one day, our happiness will be so great that it will seem unreal. Bakir, October 31, 1986 My Dear Dad, I have to brag to you, because the workers' assembly has given me an excellent grade for my work and I also got a five percent raise. What is awaiting me ahead is probably a transfer into the next category, because I was appointed the main supervisor at this construction site. I'll let them think of promoting me themselves. I have gotten used to Neum and my solitary life here. I've just made some coffee. It would be so great if we could share it. I have some chocolate, too. In any case, a few days here with me would be good for you. I don't know if I told you that Seka got an 8 on her pharmacology exam the other day. That's the second exam in the fourth year. She has four left to go. Medical studies are five years long. The end is not that far ahead anymore. I'd like her to finish it soon. I am also hoping that in the meantime (through some miracle) I would be able to sort something out so that I start earning enough to be able to support a family of some four or five members. Sabina, November 14, 1986 Dear Dad, It's past 10 A.M. and the fog has lifted a bit to let the sun shine through. I haven't had any work since this morning, so I'm walking around the office and thinking. The colleague that I was substituting for has returned from her sick leave so now even if there is a lot of work, we split it and it gets done a lot faster. I think that this tempo of working will be good and a lot more bearable. Now I


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Appendix: From My Children's Letters can even do something in French and more and more often in Italian. The best day is when, for example, I do a phone conversation in French, translate a letter in Italian and a few pages of prospects in English. Yesterday I went to the SUP (the Secretariat for Internal Affairs) to ask about the passport. Nothing is happening with that, I'm not a good girl. All in all, it's clear to me that I will not be getting my passport, but I still do not understand why. I still can't foresee the consequences this will have on my job. Still, what hurts me the most is the fact that one person can do such a thing to another person. The fact that I don't have a passport, that I might not have a job, is in the background. What worries and hurts me is this other aspect. But, please, don't let any of this worry you. I have a very nice life even without my passport and I would be far happier if they would give you back to me. Love, Your Sabina. Bakir, November 13, 1986 Dear Dad, The good weather is back. It is just like spring in Neum. (I'm like an Englishman, always going on about the weather.) Wild strawberries are in season-they look like strawberries, but they don't taste as good and they grow on the rocky terrain. You and mom used to pick them for Esma around Dubrovnik. Wild strawberries and mandarins, a calm sea, the wasteland underneath the mild sunlight. I was in Hutovo, yesterday. Can you imagine Hutovo in November? Hutovo has a post office, the former railway station (remember the train line Capljina-Dubrovnik?), a restaurant, a grocery store, an elementary school, five or six lazy bums sunbathing beneath this weak sun and dying of boredom, then small gardens with red earth full of stones and cabbage. The geographers have said goodbye and left on the last train to Dubrovnik. Hens and goats walk through the main street. Lejia, November 19, 1986 I suppose you have missed my letters. There are days when it is impossible for me to sit down and concentrate, especially if I want to write something cheerful and nice. I can't say that I am in a bad mood; it's only that I take life too seriously so the subjects that I would like to discuss aren't meant for paper. So today, I will tell you straight away how much I miss you and how happy I am that I can write your name down along with a few nice words knowing that, God willing, you will receive them, because you exist among us. I am reading Znakovi pored puta (Signs by the Road) by that genius Ivo Andrió. I don't know whether you've noticed how much he complained about life. It seems to me that he said it in the most sincere and simple way, without beating around the bush. These days I am finishing up a program that another programmer started before me. He left without finishing the job. So I had to save the day. Sometimes it was easy, but sometimes it brought me to tears. However, I am content now that everything is working just fine. I have English lessons every day. It's not a very intensive course, but it means a lot to me that it is constant and that there is a lot of revision. My vocabulary is still pretty weak, because I am too lazy to learn things by heart. It can't teach itself! Sabina, November 19, 1986 I talked to Lejla and Bakir this morning. We are making plans with the Akiamijas to go out on Friday night. We're going to have Nadja sleep over at Mom's and we'll come for coffee on Saturday morning and to pick her up. I'm counting the autumn days without snow, again, and thinking of New Year's, when the winter is over for us. We have to admit that this boundary has shifted somewhat towards the spring, because lately the real snow has been falling after New Year's. Still, I think it is nice to deceive oneself a bit like with all other things in life.


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Appendix: From My Children's Letters As you can see, I have more time to write you, again. If we are smart, I think it will be good for both my colleague and me this way. Now we have breakfast and coffee in peace and sometimes we can even go for a walk. Nadjica has been sleeping better so I am getting back to my old self again. This period that I have gone through reminds me of those stunts when they shove a man in a barrel down Niagara Falls. Maybe I'm exaggerating a bit, but I still often get dizzy from the tumbling. Sabina, December 2, 1986 You say you don't want to write about yourself. And that is exactly what I look for in each of your letters. So, please, write more about yourself That's what I do: even when I write about Nadja, Mom, Braco or work and the house, I am actually writing about myself And I hope you don't find that boring. What else do all those people who write do? It seems to me that they are all writing about themselves, that they are expressing themselves in some way. I was especially sure of this sometimes at the end of my studies when I had to consume a large amount of books, so I started to feel repelled by all those writers who kept wanting to tell us something. And then in school they make us read all that. Now that I've calmed down a bit, I'd like to read something, but Nadja won't let me. I would also like to travel, but I can't do that either. Speaking of Nadja, it's only fair to write something about her. First of all, she is so cute that it can't be put into words. She talks a lot and she can be quite a naughty little liar. When she wants to get a pencil at any price she says, "Mommy, give me pencil. Nadja write letter to grandpa Ajila," and when she gets the pencil, then, of course, she goes on to draw a "little cat" on my expensive magazines and on the walls. Bakir, January 5, 1987 As soon as the 1st of January arrives, the mornings get brighter somehow. It's real January weather outside-light gray and white with a few rare snowflakes of dry snow. Even though the days are still short and the worst of the winter is still to come, we know that we have descended to the bottom and it's uphill from here-February and March will pass and then comes the better half of the year. You are probably fighting your own battle with this weather and the cold. I guess it's pretty tough for you now. I have been thinking about you these days. You have kept your dignity and behaved like a man, as you should. These may sound like silly phrases, but I think we ought to tell you that we are proud of you and that you couldn't have done anything better for us. I hope that saying is true that "the apple doesn't fall far from the tree." Don't worry about the way nationalism and other untruths are attached to you-the truth about you is even more apparent against such a dark background. Love from your Bakir. Bakir, January 7, 1987 My Dear Dad, It was pouring outside until a moment ago. It showered the lonely concrete pillar with the neon light. I was putting some stale bread into the oven and heating some milk when it occurred to me that I have changed-some five or six years ago I would have thought of this as of punishment, being in some tiny room in a lonely house in deserted and rainy Neum. And today it doesn't make me feel bad at all. Now I'll go on reading Nerkez Smajlagié, I have some raisins and coffee and the heater is warming my back. It has been almost a year now since I started coming to Neum. I have gotten used to this boring place. Neum was built and populated in an unorganized manner and by force. There is no Dalmatian architecture or speech. The houses have no identity; they are just like all the other houses appearing in all the other


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Appendix: From My Children's Letters suburbs or, as you would call them, "newly-built." The speech-BosnianHerzegovinian-it' s strange to hear it by the sea. Neum is in a bay. There is no open sea with waves that would create natural gravel beaches. The hotels make artificial beaches from gray river gravel or from road gravel. Still there are a few things in Neum that persuaded the "little family" to come here next week-there's the sun, the fresh air, the long walking path by the sea, the children's playground with slides and swings, etc. I think I'll be able to send you Critique of Pure Mind soon. The man that promised to lend it to me doesn't have it with him at the moment because he lent it to someone else. How is your bronchitis in this cold? If only I could give you my heater and the woolen socks I bought at the market in Mostar the other day, it would be better. Lejia, March 31, 1987 My Dear Dad, It has been a long time since you and I had a good talk. These years have taken that away from us. It seems to me sometimes that only my father could truly listen to me and understand my small and, at first glance, unimportant worries and feelings. I usually console myself with the fact that my father is still alive and in good health, that I still have a father. Sometimes I long for company, for people who talk and laugh. And sometimes it all seems like idleness to me and I get irritated by everything that resembles a waste of time. What gets to me is my fickle temperament and sometimes it worries me. Am I, in fact, a great worker or a great idler? When life passes, I'm afraid I'll only be sorry that I ever became serious. Lejia, April 7, 1987 My Dear Dad, You seemed cheerful during our visit. I don't know, however, what state your soul was in, it was probably not so cheerful. It didn't take us long to get home, only an hour and a half. After Fo~a I sometimes feel ill. This time I beat that feeling by working around the house. You know my style of work: throw away as many old and useless things as possible. That calmed me down and pushed back some of my discomforting thoughts. When it was time for bed, I felt like going on working or doing some gymnastics. Sometimes it seems to me that this new job is good for me as opposed to the old one. Something new is always going on: we are buying computers, taking courses. We work a lot, but the people have a good sense of humor and we always have a good laugh while we drink our coffee. They are mainly my age or younger. Some good advice is to take life with as much joy as possible regardless of its problems. That's the only way. It's better to be a bit loony all the time than to go crazy once and for all. Bakir, May 12, 1987 Dear Dad, The summer just won't start in Neum. People still walk around in sweaters and jackets and the occasional sunny day seems to have wandered here by accidentno worries, the next morning is bound to be cloudy. My plans of bringing Jasmina here for some sunbathing have been spoiled and that puts me in a bad mood. But this sort of weather is best for fasting. I have gotten so used to it that it doesn't even seem like I'm fasting anymore. Days go by and take the kilos away (maybe not kilos, but I have lost all that I "gained" during the winter, my pants are loose). My daily schedule is just the way I like it. In the morning I take a walk by the sea to the hotel (it's no longer a construction site). My work is not stressful; there is no rush, because everything has practically been finished. Around 4 P.M. I walk back to my room. There I leaf through Nerkez's book or an English book until about 6 P.M. Then I go to buy the papers and to the supermarket, I read


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Appendix: From My Children's Letters again until 7:30 P.M. and then walk to iftar. After iftar I return to my room (my colleague, Milan, wonders about what I do in my room all day), I have coffee, I eat some raisins and read a bit more. Your day and the food you eat must be a lot worse, but, God willing, there will be far better days (it may be in poor taste to predict such things, but I keep having this feeling that you will live in abundance of everything in the years to come). Bakir, June 16, 1987 I was at an interesting concert recently. The band that played was "Zabranjeno pufenje" ("No Smoking") with Emir Kusturica. They belong to "New Primitives," the artists' movement that has sprung up in Sarajevo. In a crude way they talk about gentle and touching things, like, for example, about a man who is sinking into a world of alcohol and gambling and trying to get his wife, Fikreta, to leave him so that at least she could have a better life (when the singer starts off with, "Fikreta, between me and the bottom...," people laugh, but later they become serious). It has gotten dark. I am going out for a walk. Sabina, September 1, 1987 My Dear Dad, The whole of spring and summer have passed and this day that seemed so incredibly far away at that time has arrived. And all those months have not helped me prepare for what is in store-a new child that isn't Nadjica, a fourth member of the family that will soon, God willing, be crying amid these walls and wanting its own way. When I remember waiting for Nadjica, I remember that it was completely different. It was something absolutely real, something that I had been preparing for all my life, something that I was ready for. Now I feel surprised, as if I'm meant to wake up any minute. And it will probably be a turbulent and loud waking into a new dream with a beautiful, healthy baby, I hope. I am having my coffee at home; Nadja has gone to the park with Biba. It's a beautiful September day outside and my thoughts are all wrapped around the coming year and all that I expect it will bring. One of my great expectations is you and in my thoughts I keep going to the 1st of September next year, dreaming about how we'll all be together then. Lejla, September 3, 1987 My Dear Dad, My little girl has started school. Overnight, she has acquired her working status, because all the rest of us already had one. I think she is extremely happy about this. She has been able to reach Selma at least in one way. She has brought a wonderful atmosphere into the house. And it is here that I can sense a difference between the two sisters. On Monday both Jasmin and I took Esma to school. She was all aflutter with excitement. I watched her while the teacher was talking. She was watching the teacher without blinking her large eyes and her mouth was slightly open, like a little bird. When we got back home, I notiàed that she had remembered almost everything that was said. Yesterday she got an "A" in math. Math is now being taught in a nice new way. The focus is on logic, on thinking through sets and relations. Children are good at this. After all, that's the way we think! I talk to Sabina every day. You know that she is on sick leave. But the woman working for her has quit, so she won't be coming anymore after this weekend. Sabina is sad about this, but I think we can find someone else for that kind of money. We'll do our best.


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Appendix: From My Children's Letters These days I've been working on some nice and not too difficult jobs. I'm almost finished and I am quite content. As for the money, it's been pretty good this month. Jasminko's salary has been significantly higher. With his work it depends directly on the results. My firm is still stable and I hope that it will remain that way in the future. Lejia, September 25, 1987 My Dear Dad, As you know all that has been worrying us has come to a happy end, thank God. A sweet little girl has arrived with black hair and almond shaped eyes. She has brought more love into this world. Braco sent you a telegram on Monday, early in the morning and we were all counting on that. I have sent you a postcard, but now I want to congratulate you on your fifth granddaughter. May she love you and spend many beautiful and joyful days with you. We went to get Sabina from the hospital on Tuesday. Everything was festive as it always is when a new child is brought into the house. It was an unusually warm day, the 22nd of September. Now I can honestly tell you that I was very worried about her going into labor. However, Sabina is stronger than I thought. You probably know that we haven't got a clue as to what name to give the child, so if you have any suggestions, hurry up and let us know. I suggested Amra, but it will be confusing, because Sabina's best friend is called Amra. That day, I had a premonition and I thought about Sabina all the way back to Sarajevo. And really, when I called her she wailed that she had been waiting for me for hours. She went to the hospital around 9 P.M. and by 1 A.M. Braco called me to say that it was a girl and that everything was all right. Of course, Selma was the one to give the good news to Mom in the morning. Sabina, October 5, 1987 My Dear Dad, It has been three days since I started writing this. In the meantime it was a bit "hectic." The baby wouldn't sleep and neither would Nadjica and I was grasping for rare moments of rest. I kept looking at this letter that I had begun, hoping I would finish it "in a second," but something kept coming up. It seems the baby has cramps, so sometimes she cries for hours and Cober and I rock her in our arms in shifts. Little Nadjica has a hard time with all this, she gets stressed and starts being a pest. Wonderful and difficult moments come one after another and I keep hoping that this situation will sort itself out in a month or so and that we will all get used to one another and that I will be able to establish some order. Otherwise, this whole experience of having two children is quite surprising for me, it is completely different from anything I could have imagined. Life as a whole has taken on a different aspect. Nadjica is different, too, and not to mention myself. Two children isn't two times one child, I don't know how or why, but the two of them are like one, and the four of us are like one and four at the same time. All of that is in a mess in my head. I am expecting to make some sense of it in this coming year. Finally, a letter from you October 4, 1987, has arrived dated. Cober found it at the gate this morning when he was leaving for work. It seems the postman has been working the night shift. You write that you are tired. So am I in a similar way from the same things. Every day I ask myself how you manage it. Has it really been four and a half years? If we only had all the children born in these families in the past four and a half years.. . and what about all the other events, things and people that life has brought and taken away in this period of time. When we are together again, I don't want us to be a lot different from the way we were four and a half years ago. I don't know why, but I wouldn't like to admit that all of this has changed us, maybe only improved us. Take care. Always loving you, Your Sabina.


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Appendix: From My Children's Letters Lejia, October 27, 1987 I received your letter from a few days ago. I can see that you are full of worries, especially for Sabina. I, too, am praying to God that she comes out of this with her health intact. It isn't anything serious. It's just a chronic state of not getting enough sleep, because when one of the girls falls asleep, the other wakes up, every hour throughout the night: the age difference between the girls is very small, and Nadja is either very sensitive or very stubborn (sometimes she makes me really angry) so either she can't or she won't go to sleep. Last night we went to a concert at the Music School. Selma is supposed to perform next time, so we took her to see what it's like. Esma went along, too. I believe Bakir told you about how Esma went to visit them one night. There the two of them, Jasmina and Esma, played around to their heart's content and ate pancakes. Last night Bakir and Seka came over at 9 P.M. for a late visit. These visits are my favorite because the children are in bed and I make dinner. Seka interviewed us. It was some survey about the medical services, but there are some questions of a private nature, so there was some laughter since Jasminko and I answered separately. There are times when I look at the solution of our misfortune with optimism. For the first time in my life I can see whole chains of events like those in the cheapest crime novel. If someone were writing this novel, they would think the plot was too bizarre. Sabina, December 11, 1987 There has been no letters from you for five or six days now. In your last letter you said that you weren't in much of a good mood, but I hope it was just a passing phase and that this sunny weather has made you more cheerful. Last week I was very depressed, even before Nadja got sick, and I didn't know how to pull myself out of it. Then one morning I simply woke up feeling a lot better. As if there was something "in the air." I tried to clear my head by taking a walk through town, from shop to shop, but Tito's Street seemed really ugly to me, the shops were strangely dark, the clothes were uninteresting, the people were dull and gloomy. I went over to Lejla's, but when I got there I wondered why I should be there, so I couldn't even have any coffee or lemonade ("Lejia's vitamins"), because it all made me sick. All of this for no reason. Then all of a sudden this terrible feeling disappeared. And now I am hoping that your bad mood was also temporary, even though I know that it is much harder to avoid such moods where you are. Sabina, January 23, 1988 Our Dear Dad, We received your letter and card yesterday. The violets are beautiful and they remind me of the violets from my childhood that I sent you (with mom's help) in a letter on my seventh birthday. You were far away then, too. Cober and I have been married for six years now and we have just entered our seventh year which, they say, is critical. We probably won't even notice the "marriage crisis" because of the children. We almost forgot about our anniversary until the last moment. I had already picked out a present and prepared a festive lunch. Last night we were all at the Aklamijas celebrating Esma's birthday. It was a real hullabaloo: eleven adults, nine children and a baby-Emma. Esmica got all dressed up and blushed from excitement. Nadjica had a great time, too, even though she could not come to terms with the fact that it wasn't her birthday. I say to her, "We're going to buy Esma a present," and she adds right away, "And me, too." At the end she finally connected and gave Esma the present murmuring, "Happy Birthday." Otherwise, she is in the phase of endless questions now. Sometimes I get tired of answering her and sometimes I-don't know what to say. By that time I was already getting a headache, but luckily I remembered some chocolates so I


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Appendix: From My Children's Letters changed the subject. She has started asking questions about death already. She saw on TV how some hunters killed some wild boars and came running to me into the kitchen screaming, "Mommy, how did they die, tell me! How did those animals die?" Even though she is exhausting, I love her more and more and I can't wait for Cober to bring her back home from Lejia's where she spent the night. Bakir, January 31, 1988 Dear Dad, Belgrade always reminds me of our trip some twenty-five years ago-we went to the Surèin Airport, the Zoo, we watched that western movie The Burning Star and I ate so much ice cream that it made me sick. The weather in Belgrade is great. Spring will be coming before it is expected. Love from your Bakir. Sabina, January 31, 1988 How are you? Can you smell February in Foëa? If only this were your last February there! Here winter is struggling, it snows and rains at the same time and the air smells of spring one moment and of winter the next. I have a terrible need for this spring. I don't know exactly what I expect of it, now I can only discern it as a light after a long period of darkness. And perhaps it is just a strong longing for light that has turned into an expectation. Mom and Selma returned from the seaside on Saturday night. Nadjica, the Akiamijas and me met them at the station. When she saw all the other people, Nadja forgot about me and buried her little nose into Esma' s coat and stuck to her. She reminded me of a little street puppy that starts following you home from some corner expecting to be fed. That's how my little Nadja got into the car with them and Lejla let her spend the night at their place. I felt suddenly free as I got onto the tram and I enjoyed the ride to the Car~ija as if I was on a tourist bus in the middle of Paris. Emma is beautiful. When I look at her I don't know what to say. Cober just got her Out of her crib and he keeps kissing her. She is smiling and looking at me with her large dark eyes. Her hair is just like mine when I was a baby, but her face is somewhat narrower and her eyes are slanted and dark. She likes company a lot and can forget about hunger and sleep when she is surrounded by people. She still can't sleep well at night. Her tummy is causing her troubles and I don't know how to help her. There is no special news. We often have guests and they always ask about you. I have a lot of greetings I am meant to pass along to you from our friends and relatives, the people that shared the same fate with you in the past years. Bakir, February 8, 1988 The day before yesterday I went to see Lejla and last night I was at Sabina's. Everyone is well and in good health, thank God. At Lejia's I commented on your letter, that is, the bit about "all the celebrations you have planned for this year" and that incited us (Jasmin and me) to pick up the guitar and violin and play some music. That was the first time in our lives that we played together and to our two wives. Sabina, March 3, 1988 I have entered into the second half of my maternity leave, hopefully the better and easier half as well. I use all my energy for household chores where cooking takes up way too much of my time and I can't come to terms with that. I have a feeling that half my life is spent on worrying about food. I keep bringing huge amounts of food into the house and taking out huge amounts of garbage. I don't know if you heard that D~ula gave birth to a baby girl on February 27, 1988. She is supposed to come out of the hospital today and I can't wait to see her and the baby. All of Emma's things will be passed on to her baby and


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Appendix: From My Children's Letters everything is already prepared. She will hold these things for another baby that is on the way Dakzemal's wife is expecting her second child in August. Since D~ula's younger sister got married recently, she will probably "get in line" as well. I have a lot of fun with these things and I am awfully glad to hear that a new baby has been born. It's strange that this joy and pain that is common to us all does not make us women closer and more united. Despite everything, we quarrel more often than we show affection; we hurt each other instead of helping each other. It doesn't make any sense. Just like many other things in this world. Always loving you, Your Sabina. Sabina, March 15, 1988 Today is a beautiful spring day and I can't believe it. I wanted to walk to my firm with Emma, to get some air, but she spoiled my plans: it's half past one already and she is still asleep. Nadja has really come to love her and she is extremely gentle with her just as long as we are not too gentle. Her alarm goes off when she sees one of us fussing over Emma and then she gets into a bad mood and starts being irritating and aggressive. Otherwise, she is really protective of her little sister. If you had only seen her when we turned Emma upside down (it was a way to cure bronchitis). She started hitting us both, screaming in a panic, "Leave her alone!" Apart from that, Nadja is really interesting at this age. The other day she asked me to explain to her what "absolute" meant. I told her, "You are absolutely sweet. That man on the TV is absolutely boring. You are absolutely mine." And she replied, "No, I'm not. I'm Gaga's and daddy's and yours." As you can see, she's starting to understand some things. Bakir, April 7, 1988 Yesterday we had a little celebration for Seka's 28th birthday (they say that the longest ten years of a woman's life are between the age of 28 and 30). Jasmina, Selma (the older one), Bakir, Lejla and Sabina with her kids came and we had a great time and a lot of laughs. I comforted Seka that she has 12 years before her fifth decade. Sabina, April 13, 1988 There's not much happening here, except for a few new things: spring has arrived in our garden and yard, my passport "returned home" two days ago, Cober moved Mom's things to Sarajevo and Semsa and Fata will be arriving soon, if only you would be arriving, too. . . . You ask me if I wait for your letters. Well, this is how it was this morning, for example. Nadjica had gone to the park, Eme was asleep and my ear was listening for sounds in the yard. I hear the yard gate, I turn down the radio and wait for the steps to draw closer. "Postman!" he shouts as if he knew I was waiting for your letter: That's how it is almost every day. I have gotten so used to your letters that I have a feeling that I will miss them when you come back. You'll have to send us at least an occasional postcard then. Last night Cober and I went to the movies with Bakir and Seka. It was the third time we went out since Emma was born, so I am not used to it yet. When we meet so freely in Tito Street an anxiety comes over me and I just want to go back home. Later I relax a bit, but by that time we already have to be hurrying back. Last night Nadja noticed me getting ready and started asking about where we were going. Since I have stopped lying, I told her that Cober and I were going to the movies. She wasn't very happy about this. She went out into the yard alone, sat on the swing and started feeling sorry for herself, "Oh, oh, I can't stay alone with the baby, oh, I wait and wait and dark comes and there's nobody there, oooh She went on and on babbling through her crocodile tears while I was laughing and trying to get ready. Anyway, she gets to feeling so sorry for herself that when I explained to her that Biba was coming over to baby-sit, she said to me through her tears, "No, I want


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Appendix: From My Children's Letters to be all alone and to cry and cry and it's getting dark." Of course, as soon as Biba arrived she forgot about everything and didn't even notice me leaving. Lejla, April 13, 1988 My Dear Dad, There's not much happening in the way of nice events. The only thing is that some pigeons have hatched outside our window. Selma is going all soft. I'm sorry that you can't be here to hear her describe this event and the way she notices all the mother pigeon's efforts to make her young comfortable and to protect them. Lejia, April 24, 1988 Dear Dad, This visit went by so quickly that it seems to me we hardly had a chance to talk. They are long, these years that have been "eaten by grasshoppers," as Pekié says. Even so, I persistently cherish the memory of our last conversations and our meeting in front of the mini-market, if you remember, just before you went away. I'll try to connect that moment with the long-awaited one to come. But I know that we will always divide life into the life before and the life after. As far as this present time is concerned, I think that we will be "accidentally avoiding" it. Bakir, April 23, 1988 You probably read in Oslobodjenje a few days ago that a revision of the Criminal Law is underway and that a committee has been formed in the SFRY Parliament that will be investigating all cases of political crimes, especially verbal offenses and that will suggest that all those who were convicted but haven't engaged in further activities against the State should be pardoned. So, I guess there will be something for you, too, either a pardon or the amendment to the law. I didn't know that the cakes from Ba~ar~ija that I put in biscuit boxes didn't make it past the censors. I was already imagining you trying to choose a cake after iftar-a figaro, a walnut bar or a dry apple cake. I am not bright enough to understand the difference between smoked beef that you can bring in and barbecued meat that you can't, especially because the various diseases, trichinosis and the like usually result from smoked meat. Or I don't understand why you can bring in biscuits that are 24 months old, but not cakes bought at Ba~ar~ija, etc. Lejla, April 28, 1988 I am still not sure if you were joking in your last letter because I know myself that I rarely ask you about your health and the way you're feeling. Part of it is my subconscious attempt to avoid provoking a dishonest answer. Maybe I actually know how you are feeling at any moment. Your letters are the most certain measure for us as to how you are feeling. Lately, it seems to me, a certain anxiety is coming out of them. Can that be a consequence of all these stories about pardons, amendments to Article 133 or the consequence of these five long years? While we're on that subject, I want to tell you how much I admire you. Without a single complaint you have borne your fate. I don't know whether I would be able to do the same. I saw Jasminko off to the airport yesterday. He practically took all his clothes, except the really warm ones. For me that was a sign that he was going away for a longer time and I must admit it made me sad. Everyone has to work abroad sometime and Libya is no longer a place you visit for enjoyment. Two of Jasminko's colleagues went with him and they will spend the first three months together in a bungalow. They'll probably be cooking together. He will be working as the head engineer for lighting in a good firm. He has already begun working today and I expect to hear his first impressions soon.


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Appendix: From My Children's Letters Sabina, May 11, 1988 Our Dear Dad, Your letter has arrived. I see that you are bragging about your good health and I hope that you are being honest. We are all fine, except for Emma, who has streptococcus in her throat so we have to get some penicillin. When we got the test results I came home and said to Emma, "Where's my little streptococcus?" and Nadja replied through her nose, "It's in the little house in the garden." She always hears and comments on everything, so there are a lot of situations like this one. These days I have been painting Cober with Emma next to your mattress and I hope that you will see this painting soon. Otherwise, the garden and the yard are really beautiful. That apple tree in the yard had blossomed so much and spread its scent all over the place, but now the blossoms are falling off and they're all over the yard. There's a little quince tree in the garden and it is also blossoming. I didn't know quince trees had such beautiful blossoms. We're already eating the lettuce, onions and nettles from the garden and the hens give us four eggs every day. What can I tell you, a real "ranch" as Bakir would say. Lejla, May 17, 1988 My Dear Dad, You know the song: "Bayrams are no more I woke up alone this morning. Jasminko is far away, the children are at Mom's, you are on a "business trip." I can't even smell the spice cakes. I get ready in a hurry so as to avoid certain thoughts. I come into the office and the people are gathered around coffee. They expected me to bring baklava. Aco asks about the cakes and I tell him that he'll really get some when they finally amend Article 133. He probably understood me. The others couldn't understand what cakes have to do with criminal law. They could see I was joking, but it sounded strange. I called auntie Samka to wish her a happy Bayram and the poor woman was crying. What can I tell her to comfort her? What? When I see that illness and the years have a hold on her and she never knew how to struggle in life. I keep trying to convince her to move to another flat so that she would be able to go for a walk every day. However, I'm sure she knows it won't do her any good. I ought to call auntie Vahida. I'll do that a bit later. I've decided to visit all those people in these few days. All of them brought me joy when I was a child. Their coming to our house was a holiday, because I felt that they truly loved me. Bakir, May 28, 1988 I read the Qur'an again during Ramadan. This time I especially liked the verses that, so to say, teach a man how to behave-it says, for example, that you shouldn't gossip about other people, that you shouldn't talk idly, that you should respect other people's privacy, that you shouldn't dwell on other people's faults, that you shouldn't expose another's shame, that you should not show your elderly parents that they are a burden, etc. Every time I read the Qur'an it seems different, but it is actually me that has changed, the Qur'an stays the same. We went to Sabina's for dinner the other night. We were sitting in the yard and we started the barbecue when it got dark. Lejla brought my guitar (it's at her place now because of Selma), so we sang a bit. There were seven adults and six children. What the children "love best" is racing around the barbecue and hiding underneath the table with the coffee, especially if it slopes and only needs a slight push to fall over. They also love to swing on that swing hanging from the apple tree in the yard. The way they like to do this is so that the one who is swinging slaps the one who is not swinging and then they both fall over and cry about it. At some point we chased them into the house and would not let them out-every few minutes one of them would peer out asking for something, complaining about the other children, but we wouldn't get soft. We would only go in to check on them when none of them would appear for about ten minutes and when the screaming


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Appendix: From My Children's Letters and the noise about the house would stop, because "that's when they're the most dangerous." Sabina, June 24, 1988 Whenever I go away somewhere, I worry most about Bakir. I miss Lejla, I think about Mom a lot, but I worry about Bakir. I don't know why, but I'll try calling him today, just to see if everything is all right. I love you a lot and I'm thinking about you. Yours, Sabina. Bakir, July 31, 1988 Dear Father, July has now passed. Two more months until we get back to winter. Time does fly, at least for me (it's probably different for you). Middle age -is pretty boringevery year is the same. When I was a young man every year of my life was marked by something: I went to high school, to the faculty, I kept changing and something great was always being expected. I never cared much for middle age. Youth is beautiful, old age is probably wise, but middle age is full of obligations and it is pretty boring. I looked for the book by Asad that you suggested I read, but it was sold out. Still, D~emal has it so he will lend it to me. I haven't sent you a book for a long time. Write to me about which one you want and I'll find it for you. If your locker is too crowded, throw away our letters. It really is high time you did this-you can be sure that you won't be reading them ever again (since you don't read them in this situation), and there is no need for anyone else to be reading them, so Love from your Bakir. Sabina, August 3, 1988 I keep forgetting to tell you about this one incident. One of my friends was abroad and he met a professor there (I don't remember where from), who was asking about the author of the book Islam Between East and West. He said he liked the book very much and that he would like to visit its author, who is in prison. My friend tried to explain to him that this was impossible, but he keeps saying how he must do this, because he feels an obligation to the author of the book. Anyway, whether he set off for Foèa or not, we don't know, but we do know that it's a small world apparently, and a beautiful one. Sabina, October 10, 1988 Bakir brought that request for a lessening of your sentence from a Muslim. It seems good, at some places excellent, and at the end quite "poetically" written. That Nikola is not bad at all. Ohe thing is for sure: he brought both his mind and his heart into your case. As far as I can see, our parliament has not considered Article 133. I guess they have more important things to deal with at the moment. What is happening in the country is horrifying and I can imagine how it seems to you over there. All the more reason for me to be wanting you back home soon. Bakir, October 24, 1988 Dear Dad, The dog, Luri, is always looking for someone to play with. He lies on the floor waiting for someone to look at him so that he can jump up and come over. He usually brings me one of Jasmina's torn-up slippers and then we wrestle for it, each one twisting and pulling it to his own side; he gets most satisfaction when I start shouting, "Let go of that slipper, it's not yours, it's Jasmina's," then he growls. Yesterday, he found a huge spider on the balcony and started playing around with it. The poor spider tried to get out of the game where he gets hit on the head every time he moves, but unfortunately he was killed. Luri was so


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Appendix: From My Children's Letters surprised to see that the spider no longer moved, he tossed it over with his paw and started whining for us to come and help out. I hope that you are all right and that you have enough strength (which I'm sure you do). You know that the sun comes out after the rain, that spring comes after the autumn and winter, etc. God willing, there will come a day when all the past worries will make our happiness seem even more beautiful. Without any exaggeration I can tell you that I would have been lucky in life if I had only met you: the fact that God gave me you as a father is a true honor. Jasmina is going to gymnastics classes at FIS. That place looks the same as when I went there for gymnastics classes 25 years ago. She will be home in about half an hour full of impressions and I will have to watch all the cartwheels, splits, etc. Bakir, October 24, 1988 Dear Dad, I am in a good mood today. I have such a sense of optimism and a will to live that I wish I could transfer onto you. I don't know what I should say, what I should write about in order to achieve that. I simply feel that everything will be all right and that things will get better soon. Today I went window-shopping and I looked at clothes for you. You will allow the architect (advice and all free of charge) to pick out and buy you a pair of shoes and a sweater. Since the last time you went shopping for clothes the selection of clothes has greatly improved despite the crisis. Now one can dress as well as one in Italy and on top of that, it is cheaper and even the quality is better. You can find the best kind of jeans trousers and jackets, great shoes, suits, sweaters, cotton shirts, etc. When, God willing, you get out, the sight of Sarajevo will also be a pleasant surprise for you. We do owe the world 210 million dollars (1,000 per working Sarajevan) for the buildings and infrastructure, but it is worth it. The city is clean, there are many new buildings and the old facades have been renovated. Every day I take a walk down to the ëar~ija (market place) and I do not consider myself to have lived unless I do that. Beg's Mosque is also being renovated (they say that on each stone of the munara (tower), where the plaster had come off, a letter from the Qur'an was found) as well as the Medresa (Islamic high school). The ~ar~ija has been laid with rustic stones and in the part where there was a fire a few years back (towards the Town Hall), a set of shops is being built. Many new pastry shops and cafés have opened and the competition has made the coffee and cakes a lot better (cramped, stuffy cafés are no longer in fashion). The èevabdñnicas keep to their standard level. Seka and I always have devapi at "Zeljo." That's where the devapi have the smell that I remember from my childhood. We get them to go and then eat them on the way so the devapi and the bun and the onion get all mixed up and that's the best. See you soon, God willing. Love from your Bakir. Bakir, October 26, 1988 My Dear Dad, Our special visit went down the drain. Kasumagid probably gave you the message, that is, told you that I was in front of the prison on Saturday, but that the superintendent would not let me see you. If I had been there when he came by (they told me to wait in the canteen until they telephone me after they've checked about the visit-a message wasn't left for them that the educator allowed the visit) maybe I would have been able to convince him to let me in at least for 15 minutes. Sometimes people forget and are not aware of certain things. The superintendent, for example, is not aware of the fact that I came from Neum to see you, that I had received permission from comrade Tijanid and he forgets that you are in prison because of something you said and wrote while others who had robbed and murdered get free visits, get to go home from time to time, get to walk around Foéa, etc. But, what's done is done. I hope that you did not get


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Appendix: From My Children's Letters frustrated because of all this. Especially over the fact that I made the trip in vainI would make this trip for you every day, twice. I am sending you this photo of Jasmina that I had brought with me to give to you today. She looks older than she really is, five or six. On Friday I had a full and unusual day at the seaside-first there was the south wind with flying clouds and great big waves. I went to Peljeiac to pick some dogrose berries for Jasmina. I found one red one as big as a baby's head. It looked like it was made of plastic and it shone like it was covered with oil. Then, all of a sudden the northeastern wind started blowing, the change occurred in a matter of minutes. The wind shifted, became cold, the waves disappeared and the sea started getting "goose bumps" from the wind that came hitting down on mt from the hills. Then it started to rain, an unusual rain that came down in shifts as if someone kept emptying buckets of water. The rain stopped and it got very cold. And then it got sunny! Everything was still soaking wet, but the sun was shining brighter than I've ever seen it in my life. The air was extraordinarily clear-later that afternoon on my way to Sarajevo, from the hill in front of Opuzen I could see Ploée, which had never been the case before. And not only could I see the harbor, I could see the shine of the metal on the ships. I could see the furthest islands as well as the mountains in the depths of Herzegovina. While I was on Peljeiac, in a bay near a place called Broce, at a distance of some ten meters from the shore I saw that characteristic fin cutting the sea as it circled. Still, it wasn't a shark but a dolphin. He was circling in front of me for at least ten minutes. He was jumping up and fooling around and Jasmina wasn't there to see it. My dear father, November's coming in five days, so, God willing, we'll see each other soon. Love from your Bakir. Sabina, November 8, 1988 My Dear Dad, Whenever I write you a letter I wonder which ordinal number it carries. I mean counting from the last. How many more will there be? Few or many? I vote for few: however, yesterday I bought ten envelopes for myself and ten 20-dinar stamps for you. I hope we'll have some left over. But as for Emma, forget about the chocolates, give some coffee and cigarettes! She is a sweet comfort. She still can't walk on her own, but she goes all over the house by way of her silly spiraling on her head. She follows me everywhere and keeps calling me and blabbering on about something. She understands everything except the TV news. I take her into my arms only when I have to: to change her, to feed her and wash her. And it is bliss! Right away she presses her tiny hands onto my face and smiles at me with her asymmetrically grown teeth, then she puts her little nose to my cheeks and blows at me and keeps repeating: Mommy, Mommy, until she suddenly remembers, "Eye!"-and then a finger goes in the eye. Sometimes she just suddenly squeaks with joy and hits me with her head, then she cries. Basically, the petting doesn't last long, either I have work or she does. She simply wants to walk and she gets all fidgety and looks for my fingers to hold on to. It is practically impossible to eat something in front of her, she immediately starts shouting, "Me want!" she keeps wanting to eat something. Last night we baked potatoes in the oven and laid out the small table in front of the TV and sat down, the three of us on stools and Emma-on her potty. It's the only way to keep her still for a while so she doesn't knock everything off the table. There, my dear father, that's the atmosphere at our house. Bakir, November 19, 1988 Do you know of anyone who could lend me the Tevrat (Torah)? I am "suspicious" of the Old Testament, rather I am suspicious of its origin. I am afraid that people have altered it immensely to adapt it to their own needs-if it weren't for the Ten Commandments you could say it was a book about a deity not God. The chosen people are lifted above all others for all time, there is no mention of the other world, virtue in the sense of forgiveness doesn't exist (nobody is forgiven for


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Appendix: From My Children's Letters anything, it's terrifying how heads, arms, legs just fly off). Luxury and splendor of the temples and clergy is insisted upon and the highest ideal is wealth and power. When I read that Moses allegedly ordered that apart from the captured idolworshipping men, all male children and married women should also be executed, I got a headache and I was stressed the whole day. Sabina, November 17, 1988 Early this morning I had a wonderful dream: A kind female voice tells me on the phone that we should come pick you up "tomorrow, because today is Sunday." And so we start getting ready to go. Take care of yourself. Always loving you, your Sabina. November 25, 1988 It was the 25th of November, somewhere between 3 P.M. and 4 P.M. They called me to the administration office, where the commander of the guard, Malko Koroman, in his ceremonial suit and in a solemn voice, read the decision of the Presidency of Yugoslavia that I was being released from further serving my sentence. It was the 2,075th day of my imprisonment.

Courtesy: Bakir Izetbegović © 2006 by Right Holders Fair Use Policy Edited OCR-version: Taskforce Ezania Polity Ezania - The Islamic micronation http://www.ezania.net/ http://www.ezania.net/library/ Distribution on: http://www.muslimtorrents.net/ Presence on: http://www.muslimspace.com/

Make dua for our prisoners


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Notes From Prison, 1983 -1988, By Alija Izetbegović [Alija Izatbegovic]

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