Dec 13, 2024
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On Islam, Arabic Art and Afghanistan: What I Learned on my Journey to the East
by Doniphan Blair
Scene from Doniphan Blair's 6 min video 'Islam, Arabic Art and Afghanistan'. photo: D. Blair PLEASE support our GoFundMe campaign to cover research expenses for our articles and rebuilding the cineSOURCE site.
Although my mother survived Auschwitz, I always felt Jewish, and I stand with Israel, I came up and developed my first big ideas as an Arabist. See my six-minute video 'Islam, Arabic Art and Afghanistan.
It started with a bang when I went overland from Turkey to India in 1972, age 18. My journey east and back can-opened me to a cascade of cultures, people and landscapes. I became an "India freak," as indicated by my dress, behavior and new spiritual ideas, but I was also fascinated with Arab culture: the alphabet, hiking across the desert to pet a baby camel, exploring ancient mud cities, like Herat, Afghanistan, or smoking spectacular hash with an enlightened tea man.
Upon return, I read the Sufi poets and about the Persian Hashasheens. The visionary Arab seemed closer to my New York mysticism and cowboy shamanism than the ascetic Indian sadhus who eschewed sex. Five years before I embarked on my Holocaust studies, in 1983, I had invented a painting style called "Abstract Arabic." Those experiences were central to Ancient Currents Gallery, which I started with my brother and other members of the Modern Lovers Commune in San Francisco in 1976.
A drawing by Doniphan Blair from 1972 when he was in Afghanistan. illo: D. Blair Our idea was to feature tribal art, art by artists from the global south, or "Western" artists influenced by those experiences, which I tried to capture with the concept "Abstract Aborigine," meaning we are all intellectuals and native to this planet. Until 1988, we did over 100 shows and performances, from New Guinea sculpture and South American weavings to the Indian painter Om Prakash Sharma, a poetry reading by Bob Kaufman or the Art War, Anti-Art and Fuck Art shows. While we lacked the backing to blow up, we showed some great art, explored important ideas, attracted a following and developed universalist experimental identities, stand in stark contrast to contemporary identity politics.
Although our neighbors in the now fashionable Upper Fillmore district of San Francisco sometimes complained, the world-travelers and global south artists we hosted loved us, as did the coterie of Black musicians who would come by to jam in our sound room as well as blow gage and enjoy the vegetarian feast we served nightly for a decade and a half.
Growing up Christian and Jewish, from a poor New York neighborhood while attending a deluxe private school, playing Little League as the only white kid in Harlem, I was ingrained with the multicultural exploration that flourished while doing Ancient Current. I developed three different "Abstract" painting styles: Arabic, which featured aggressive scribbles of color streaking through landscapes, Aborigine, which boiled shapes down to archetypes that often puzzled together, and Buddhist, which featured mandala-like compositions. It also fostered a radical centerism, a place of equilibrium, between moral relativism, since things are different in different cultures, and universal law and agreed-upon reality. While never the twain shall meet was the standard philosophical line of some of the classicists and postmodernists, I had met many people, mostly men, in Asia, I had looked into their eyes and felt their humanity, no matter how different from my own it might be.
Since neither Ancient Currents nor my painting took, although I kept painting, doing a well thought out series of ten or more every few years, there was not need to examine the ideas behind my work, until the mid-2010s. First, the Me Too movement called into question the validity of my Nude Series, started around 2010. I was exploiting women with my male gaze, a couple people implied or said outright, even though, my naked women, enshrined in the interlocking Arabic script patterns I had been building on for 40 years, obscured their genitalia and rendered them bejeweled. As cultural Marxism and Identity Politics emerged on top of Me Too, I realized that all my early work in India and South America, as well as with Ancient Currents and in my writing and image making there after could be called cultural appropriation or piracy or bowdlerization.
Fortunately, I was recently in New York City and happened to stumble upon an art show at Columbia University's Wallach Gallery (up until Jan 14) called Partisans of the Nude. And the Middle Eastern artists on display confirmed my 50 year-old experiment in radical multicultural art and philosophy, the painting style I called "Abstract Arabic" and the philosophy "Abstract Aborigine."
Indeed, at this terrible juncture of ideology, action and history, I would like to honor the progressive Muslims and Arabs of the last century, their culture and its effect on me. It’s not easy to articulate after Hamas’s barbaric attack, given the cheering by the hard left and hard right, and the hard military response by Israel, but I have to force myself, given the absence of other people offering creative, centrist or radically multicultural views.
Another Blair drawing, this time of the Rainbow Express, the hippie bus he road from Istanbul to Kabul in 1972. illo: D. Blair My journey to the East started slowly, with tales from literature and world travelers, but it exploded beyond anything I could imagine as I disembarked in Turkey, in September 1972. The onslaught of sights, sounds and smells, especially in Izmir’s vast whorehouse district, triggered an avalanche of newness and oldness, otherness and innermost me, which eviscerated my 17-year-old psyche.
The stimulation kept increasing as I toured Istanbul, including one night with a pack of dogs, visiting mosques, tea shops, steam baths and hippie hotels, notably the Utopia, where I slept on the roof. It was there I first bought Turkey’s psychedelic green hashish, met friends I’m still close to, and boarded a hippie bus for Kabul, Afghanistan. Called the Rainbow Express, naturally, it cost $35.
As we crossed into Iran, my eyes were swamped by Arabic script, which ate like an acid into the squareness of western letters and ideas. In the mountains north of Tehran, actual acid did much the same. Down that path, I found Sufism, the non-sectarian, artistic and mystical wing of Islam, and “abstract Arabic,” a way of seeing which I incorporated into my art.
My “Abstract Arabic” body of work ranges from ink drawings to abstracts, essays, and nudes, paintings of naked women, which might be applauded by the Middle East’s most radical art movement of the 20th century, the Partisans of the Nude.
A Blair painting, done in Brazil six years after he was in Afghanistan, typifying his 'Abstract Arabic' style. illo: D. Blair Some might people might critique me as a drug tourist, Orientalist or cultural appropriator, but that would require that they discount the hotel men happy to have tourists of any sorts, the hotel boys dancing wildly to my guitar, or the Asian guy in the desert with whom I shared a silent philosophical discussion, while the 20 others riding in the small Soviet truck stopped to pray to Allah.
If sometimes a bit stoic, the Afghans I met were almost entirely welcoming, except for the Kabul cabbie with a knife. Afghanistan in the early 1970s was a golden age, a few told me. Tragically, a few years later, they too descended into a hell cycle, which went for 43 years and was worse than the 75 years endured by the Arabs and Israelis.
The mud and dome architecture also enthralled me, after my youth in square New York City apartments. It reached an apogee at the Taj Mahal, which I visited with Mac—we drove 2000 miles together in his VW van—and two French junkies, who liked to argue about cooking. Its domes, pools and jewel-encrusted walls were crafted by Sufi artisans from the Moghul empire, the last emperor of which was also a poet, musician and mystical wanderer.
Although I feared becoming a full mystical wanderer myself, I adopted some of their ways: sleeping on the streets of Bombay, stopping at temples to pray, riding the asphyxiatingly-crowded trains, and eating the spicy street food, which was delicious but brought dysentery and worms.
I was also inspired by the Hashasheens, a literary reference I heard before I went to India from Mick Jagger’s character in the film “Performance”. A 12th century cult which used "macho” monotheism, hashish and the notion that “Nothing is real, and everything is permitted,” they came to be called Assassins, since they were also suicide hit men. Indeed, they terrorized Central Asia and the Middle East for centuries, using misinformation and roleplaying, much like today’s conspiracy theorists, and exaggerated violence, much like today’s radical Islamists.
After driving with Mac into the mountains of Pakistan to buy hash—, $1 a pound—near where bin Laden was assassinated, we crossed India to the hippie haven of Goa, for three-months vacationing and hash vending on the beach. The trip took a hard turn, however, after I got hepatitis and was robbed, but the ideas and inspiration kept in flooding in. So I staggered on, journeying through Rajasthan, Benares and Kathmandu, and returning to the West through the Afghan desert in the summer of ‘73.
And I continued journey after I returned, exploring Arab, Islamic, Persian, Turkish and Indian culture. Despite being Jewish, my half-adopted culture fit in fine with the multiculturalism of Manhattan and San Francisco, where I moved, although it did take me years to decipher what I experienced.
Everything changed after 9/11. I felt obliged to speak up for Arab and Muslim liberals, artists and Sufis, since so few in the media or elsewhere, including on the left or in Islam, were doing so. My “Art Fatwa” (October, 2001), “East Actually Does Meet West” poster (2001), and essay, “What Happened to the Sufis of the Middle East?” (2004), didn't earn much acclaim, but those pieces remain central to my oeuvre and a testimony to the benefits of a journey to the East.
In fact, it was only after 9/11 that my professional studies started, as I raided the book shelves of the Afghan grocery stores of Fremont, California, buttonholed Sufi teachers at retreats and bought every last Sufi book at the world-renown Moe’s Books in Berkeley. After satiating myself on their insightful poetry and advanced philosophy, I tackled the Sufi’s little known history.
I also inhaled Arab scholarship, from the famous Palestinian-American Columbia professor, Edward Said, who lived two blocks from my New York apartment, to Fatema Mernissi, the brilliant Sorbonne-educated Moroccan, and Richard Burton, the 19th century English explorer turned Sufi. If you want a literary magic carpet ride to race you from Arabia’s first poet-prince, Imruʾ al-Qais, to “1,001 Arabian Nights”, I recommend the monumental “Night & Horses & the Desert: An Anthology of Classical Arabic Literature”, edited by Robert Irwin.
What happened to the Sufis of the Middle East after 9/11 became the big mystery I had to solve, both to honor progressive Muslims but also my life work in the realm of Abstract Arabic. I made some startling discoveries, notably that the Sufis saved Islam three times—in al-Ghazali’s theology, after the Mongol devastation, and again in the Sufi Golden Ages—but they couldn't repeat that after 9/11. They feared the fury of the fundamentalists, who had been riding out of the Saudi Arabian desert since the 18th century and killing them.
And now we have the Hashasheens reborn as Hamas, also deeply devoted to the suicide strike. Indeed, Hamas perpetrated hundreds of suicide bombings during the Second Intifada (2000-05) and pushed their entire community onto the chopping block on October 7th.
I am from a refugee family, and I stand with all refugees, but only their right to a safe haven and citizenship not return, which would be insane for the 100 million refugees since WWII. Tragically, the radical Islamists made Israel a religious issue not a land swap between the 750,000 Palestinian and 900,000 Jewish refugees of 1948. And they besmirched the Palestinian cause by slaughtering Sufis, women, artists and Christians as well as Jews. Indeed, the Mufti of Jerusalem al-Husseini directed his thugs to murder many members of the liberal Nashashibi family in the 1930s and spent World War Two in Berlin lobbying for the Holocaust, including plans to set up a death camp in Palestine.
Nevertheless, Muslim and Arab liberalism started with Muhammad. It flowered with the massive Sufi movements, which fostered golden ages in Baghdad, Persia, India, Turkey, Morocco, Timbuktu and elsewhere. It gained power in the 20th century, typified by Said, Mernissi and the Partisan of the Nude artists but also the enormous Arab Spring protests, a dozen years ago.
Yes, the Israel Defense Force had to become brutal after 75 years of existential war with their neighbors, although statistically they remain one of the most pacifist armies on record. Meanwhile, the fact that so many educated, liberal and leftist Americans and Europeans support radical Islamists, at the expense of the Sufis, artists, Christians and women, not to mention Jews, suggests they are unfamiliar with Arab poetry, Sufi philosophy, Partisan of the Nude art or my “Art Fatwa.”
The Middle East is home to the oldest societies on earth, making them some of the most corrupt on earth. Reducing corruption is the radical Islamists’ main virtue, which endears them to impoverished and traumatized Arabs and Muslims. But monotheism means we're all equal, created by one god, which also requires democracy, so we can all worship in our preferred manner. Indeed, we’re already one scabrous, digitally-connected, world constituency, voting with our feet, if not at the ballot box.
So you tell me: will we follow the Islam of the Sufis or the Hashasheens? Posted on Dec 26, 2023 - 02:01 AM
by Doniphan Blair
Scene from Doniphan Blair's 6 min video 'Islam, Arabic Art and Afghanistan'. photo: D. Blair Although my mother survived Auschwitz, I always felt Jewish, and I stand with Israel, I came up and developed my first big ideas as an Arabist. See my six-minute video 'Islam, Arabic Art and Afghanistan.
It started with a bang when I went overland from Turkey to India in 1972, age 18. My journey east and back can-opened me to a cascade of cultures, people and landscapes. I became an "India freak," as indicated by my dress, behavior and new spiritual ideas, but I was also fascinated with Arab culture: the alphabet, hiking across the desert to pet a baby camel, exploring ancient mud cities, like Herat, Afghanistan, or smoking spectacular hash with an enlightened tea man.
Upon return, I read the Sufi poets and about the Persian Hashasheens. The visionary Arab seemed closer to my New York mysticism and cowboy shamanism than the ascetic Indian sadhus who eschewed sex. Five years before I embarked on my Holocaust studies, in 1983, I had invented a painting style called "Abstract Arabic." Those experiences were central to Ancient Currents Gallery, which I started with my brother and other members of the Modern Lovers Commune in San Francisco in 1976.
A drawing by Doniphan Blair from 1972 when he was in Afghanistan. illo: D. Blair Although our neighbors in the now fashionable Upper Fillmore district of San Francisco sometimes complained, the world-travelers and global south artists we hosted loved us, as did the coterie of Black musicians who would come by to jam in our sound room as well as blow gage and enjoy the vegetarian feast we served nightly for a decade and a half.
Growing up Christian and Jewish, from a poor New York neighborhood while attending a deluxe private school, playing Little League as the only white kid in Harlem, I was ingrained with the multicultural exploration that flourished while doing Ancient Current. I developed three different "Abstract" painting styles: Arabic, which featured aggressive scribbles of color streaking through landscapes, Aborigine, which boiled shapes down to archetypes that often puzzled together, and Buddhist, which featured mandala-like compositions. It also fostered a radical centerism, a place of equilibrium, between moral relativism, since things are different in different cultures, and universal law and agreed-upon reality. While never the twain shall meet was the standard philosophical line of some of the classicists and postmodernists, I had met many people, mostly men, in Asia, I had looked into their eyes and felt their humanity, no matter how different from my own it might be.
Since neither Ancient Currents nor my painting took, although I kept painting, doing a well thought out series of ten or more every few years, there was not need to examine the ideas behind my work, until the mid-2010s. First, the Me Too movement called into question the validity of my Nude Series, started around 2010. I was exploiting women with my male gaze, a couple people implied or said outright, even though, my naked women, enshrined in the interlocking Arabic script patterns I had been building on for 40 years, obscured their genitalia and rendered them bejeweled. As cultural Marxism and Identity Politics emerged on top of Me Too, I realized that all my early work in India and South America, as well as with Ancient Currents and in my writing and image making there after could be called cultural appropriation or piracy or bowdlerization.
Fortunately, I was recently in New York City and happened to stumble upon an art show at Columbia University's Wallach Gallery (up until Jan 14) called Partisans of the Nude. And the Middle Eastern artists on display confirmed my 50 year-old experiment in radical multicultural art and philosophy, the painting style I called "Abstract Arabic" and the philosophy "Abstract Aborigine."
Indeed, at this terrible juncture of ideology, action and history, I would like to honor the progressive Muslims and Arabs of the last century, their culture and its effect on me. It’s not easy to articulate after Hamas’s barbaric attack, given the cheering by the hard left and hard right, and the hard military response by Israel, but I have to force myself, given the absence of other people offering creative, centrist or radically multicultural views.
Another Blair drawing, this time of the Rainbow Express, the hippie bus he road from Istanbul to Kabul in 1972. illo: D. Blair The stimulation kept increasing as I toured Istanbul, including one night with a pack of dogs, visiting mosques, tea shops, steam baths and hippie hotels, notably the Utopia, where I slept on the roof. It was there I first bought Turkey’s psychedelic green hashish, met friends I’m still close to, and boarded a hippie bus for Kabul, Afghanistan. Called the Rainbow Express, naturally, it cost $35.
As we crossed into Iran, my eyes were swamped by Arabic script, which ate like an acid into the squareness of western letters and ideas. In the mountains north of Tehran, actual acid did much the same. Down that path, I found Sufism, the non-sectarian, artistic and mystical wing of Islam, and “abstract Arabic,” a way of seeing which I incorporated into my art.
My “Abstract Arabic” body of work ranges from ink drawings to abstracts, essays, and nudes, paintings of naked women, which might be applauded by the Middle East’s most radical art movement of the 20th century, the Partisans of the Nude.
A Blair painting, done in Brazil six years after he was in Afghanistan, typifying his 'Abstract Arabic' style. illo: D. Blair If sometimes a bit stoic, the Afghans I met were almost entirely welcoming, except for the Kabul cabbie with a knife. Afghanistan in the early 1970s was a golden age, a few told me. Tragically, a few years later, they too descended into a hell cycle, which went for 43 years and was worse than the 75 years endured by the Arabs and Israelis.
The mud and dome architecture also enthralled me, after my youth in square New York City apartments. It reached an apogee at the Taj Mahal, which I visited with Mac—we drove 2000 miles together in his VW van—and two French junkies, who liked to argue about cooking. Its domes, pools and jewel-encrusted walls were crafted by Sufi artisans from the Moghul empire, the last emperor of which was also a poet, musician and mystical wanderer.
Although I feared becoming a full mystical wanderer myself, I adopted some of their ways: sleeping on the streets of Bombay, stopping at temples to pray, riding the asphyxiatingly-crowded trains, and eating the spicy street food, which was delicious but brought dysentery and worms.
I was also inspired by the Hashasheens, a literary reference I heard before I went to India from Mick Jagger’s character in the film “Performance”. A 12th century cult which used "macho” monotheism, hashish and the notion that “Nothing is real, and everything is permitted,” they came to be called Assassins, since they were also suicide hit men. Indeed, they terrorized Central Asia and the Middle East for centuries, using misinformation and roleplaying, much like today’s conspiracy theorists, and exaggerated violence, much like today’s radical Islamists.
After driving with Mac into the mountains of Pakistan to buy hash—, $1 a pound—near where bin Laden was assassinated, we crossed India to the hippie haven of Goa, for three-months vacationing and hash vending on the beach. The trip took a hard turn, however, after I got hepatitis and was robbed, but the ideas and inspiration kept in flooding in. So I staggered on, journeying through Rajasthan, Benares and Kathmandu, and returning to the West through the Afghan desert in the summer of ‘73.
And I continued journey after I returned, exploring Arab, Islamic, Persian, Turkish and Indian culture. Despite being Jewish, my half-adopted culture fit in fine with the multiculturalism of Manhattan and San Francisco, where I moved, although it did take me years to decipher what I experienced.
Everything changed after 9/11. I felt obliged to speak up for Arab and Muslim liberals, artists and Sufis, since so few in the media or elsewhere, including on the left or in Islam, were doing so. My “Art Fatwa” (October, 2001), “East Actually Does Meet West” poster (2001), and essay, “What Happened to the Sufis of the Middle East?” (2004), didn't earn much acclaim, but those pieces remain central to my oeuvre and a testimony to the benefits of a journey to the East.
In fact, it was only after 9/11 that my professional studies started, as I raided the book shelves of the Afghan grocery stores of Fremont, California, buttonholed Sufi teachers at retreats and bought every last Sufi book at the world-renown Moe’s Books in Berkeley. After satiating myself on their insightful poetry and advanced philosophy, I tackled the Sufi’s little known history.
I also inhaled Arab scholarship, from the famous Palestinian-American Columbia professor, Edward Said, who lived two blocks from my New York apartment, to Fatema Mernissi, the brilliant Sorbonne-educated Moroccan, and Richard Burton, the 19th century English explorer turned Sufi. If you want a literary magic carpet ride to race you from Arabia’s first poet-prince, Imruʾ al-Qais, to “1,001 Arabian Nights”, I recommend the monumental “Night & Horses & the Desert: An Anthology of Classical Arabic Literature”, edited by Robert Irwin.
What happened to the Sufis of the Middle East after 9/11 became the big mystery I had to solve, both to honor progressive Muslims but also my life work in the realm of Abstract Arabic. I made some startling discoveries, notably that the Sufis saved Islam three times—in al-Ghazali’s theology, after the Mongol devastation, and again in the Sufi Golden Ages—but they couldn't repeat that after 9/11. They feared the fury of the fundamentalists, who had been riding out of the Saudi Arabian desert since the 18th century and killing them.
And now we have the Hashasheens reborn as Hamas, also deeply devoted to the suicide strike. Indeed, Hamas perpetrated hundreds of suicide bombings during the Second Intifada (2000-05) and pushed their entire community onto the chopping block on October 7th.
I am from a refugee family, and I stand with all refugees, but only their right to a safe haven and citizenship not return, which would be insane for the 100 million refugees since WWII. Tragically, the radical Islamists made Israel a religious issue not a land swap between the 750,000 Palestinian and 900,000 Jewish refugees of 1948. And they besmirched the Palestinian cause by slaughtering Sufis, women, artists and Christians as well as Jews. Indeed, the Mufti of Jerusalem al-Husseini directed his thugs to murder many members of the liberal Nashashibi family in the 1930s and spent World War Two in Berlin lobbying for the Holocaust, including plans to set up a death camp in Palestine.
Nevertheless, Muslim and Arab liberalism started with Muhammad. It flowered with the massive Sufi movements, which fostered golden ages in Baghdad, Persia, India, Turkey, Morocco, Timbuktu and elsewhere. It gained power in the 20th century, typified by Said, Mernissi and the Partisan of the Nude artists but also the enormous Arab Spring protests, a dozen years ago.
Yes, the Israel Defense Force had to become brutal after 75 years of existential war with their neighbors, although statistically they remain one of the most pacifist armies on record. Meanwhile, the fact that so many educated, liberal and leftist Americans and Europeans support radical Islamists, at the expense of the Sufis, artists, Christians and women, not to mention Jews, suggests they are unfamiliar with Arab poetry, Sufi philosophy, Partisan of the Nude art or my “Art Fatwa.”
The Middle East is home to the oldest societies on earth, making them some of the most corrupt on earth. Reducing corruption is the radical Islamists’ main virtue, which endears them to impoverished and traumatized Arabs and Muslims. But monotheism means we're all equal, created by one god, which also requires democracy, so we can all worship in our preferred manner. Indeed, we’re already one scabrous, digitally-connected, world constituency, voting with our feet, if not at the ballot box.
So you tell me: will we follow the Islam of the Sufis or the Hashasheens? Posted on Dec 26, 2023 - 02:01 AM
