Part Lion,Part Wolf

(i) Dualisms, Stereotypes, Identity and Change: On Edward W. Said’s Critique of Orientalism

[W]hat began as a political disagreement acquired in the course of time a much wider and deeper character.

The intellectual and academic milieu of the time was also complex. Structuralism, an academic stream of thought that initially emerged within Linguistics, had exerted no small measure of influence within disciplines such as Philosophy, Anthropology as well as Literary Studies. ² In fact, at the time, many intellectuals like Edward Said were struggling to get beyond Structuralism, though not by denying its insights. Structuralism had been quite novel in its day, making plain that a word is not significant in a vacuum; rather its significance arises in relation to other words and cannot be properly understood in isolation. ³ Other streams of thought were in the process of taking shape alongside what became known as Post-Structuralism, namely Post-Modernism and Post-Colonialism. ⁴ After the fact, historians of ideas began elaborating the complex ways Edward Said’s Orientalism constituted an integral chapter in the emergence of these critical intellectual movements. If Structuralism emphasized that one cannot properly define the dark without light, Post-Structuralism taught that dualities such as this are also intellectual traps that break down and point beyond themselves, for example, to the nuances of varying shades, shadows, hues, etc. Modernism had brought with it great unifying discourses that ordered everything below the sun, habitually focusing on a single set of ruling concepts: reason versus unreason, the proletariat versus the bourgeois, the Empire or civilization versus barbarism, and so on. In their basic structure, such discourses are not so different from the time-honoured clash between darkness and light. These more recent permutations of this old discourse as well as the practices they animated and were an integral part of, however, were also breaking down, revealing that reality is always richer, more stubborn and unruly than neat orderly discourses would have it seem.

Edward Said’s Orientalism is very much an integral part of the intellectual movements of its times, namely Post-Structuralism, Post-Modernism and Post-Colonialism, though it was not uncritically a part of any of these intellectual movements. The work teaches its readers to be watchful of discourses built upon dyads, dualities, dualisms and binary thinking in general and therefore to be highly suspicious of such discourses. One such discourse is what Said terms “Orientalism.” His use of this term is eccentric, an example of catachresis. However, before getting more deeply into what Said thought about Orientalism, it is best in this specific context to first discuss what he came to call “imaginary geography.” ⁵ As a critical concept, “imaginary geography” was very much present in his work before he came to repeatedly formulate it using these exact terms. Simplifying, however, with these words, Said aims to get us to realize that land, as well as the people within it, are not a given. Those who represent various lands and peoples do not have a patently obvious, readily available objective reality to work from; rather, representing land and people is largely poetic. To begin with, much like fields of study, lands and peoples are shaped, even constituted, via discourse. ⁶ Representing land and people, this way or that, is to no small extent what makes the lands and peoples represented. Representations shape us, steering us this way or that. Different people will represent different lands and peoples differently for a whole set of different reasons and in accordance with a variety of different interests. These discourses have a weight to them, entrenching habits of mind, affecting how we experience space, place, time and people, including ourselves. It is no small task to attempt to break out of old habits of mind, if only to better understand how and why such old habits took shape to begin with.

One habit of mind that Edward Said wishes the world would break out of is one that organizes by dividing all geographical as well as socio-cultural reality into the tired dualism of East and West. ⁷ Edward Said’s critique of Orientalism hinges on how this way of organizing reality does not serve the interests of all concerned parties. He is especially concerned with the West’s discourse concerning the East, in particular the Islamic East. Not only did Edward Said convincingly point out great injustices within this discourse, he just as importantly makes plain that the West, to no small extent, constructed its self-identity via this largely “imaginary geography.” Said identified a not so large set of ideas that seem to continually reappear throughout the history of Orientalism. The more often these stereotypes emerge, the less likely they are to be called into question and the more likely it is that they will continue to re-emerge unquestioned. This contributes to a rather large set of peoples and places being considered by another as more or less identical, as of the same essential nature, as somehow immune to history, progress and change.

Among the stereotypes Edward Said identifies, a few need to be discussed in the present context. One of these is passion, or rather, excessive forms thereof. According to Edward Said’s reading of the Orientalist archive, the West makes itself seem all the more calm, restrained and reasonable by routinely emphasizing the impassioned, hot-blooded temper of the Islamic Orient. ⁸ This in turn is linked to a corollary of unchecked passion, namely violence. According to Edward Said’s view, Orientalist representations of the non-West all too often seek to emphasize the cruelty of the non-Western character(s). ⁹ Hand-in-hand with an emphasis on the great frequency and degree of violence, is what Max Weber famously calls an “other-worldliness,” suggesting that although bodies may be born, live, fight and die, something far less transitory nevertheless does not change behind or beyond what are mere shadows on the platonic cavern’s walls. This brings us to note that the Orient as changeless, even timeless, is yet another stereotype heavily critiqued by Edward Said. ¹⁰ Here, in considering the “essentially” changeless nature of the East, one may think of Karl Marx’s view of what redeems colonialism: it brings people without history into history, forcing upon people purportedly without history “necessary” changes and the consciousness thereof (see Kennedy, 2003). The last stereotype I would like to note here is that of the Orient as feminine, submissive, as a body for the West to take possession of for the sake of proper utilization. ¹¹ This also belongs to the set of ideas Edward Said saw as an endlessly reoccurring rhetoric that aimed to convince the West that it had a good grasp of its proverbial other, the Orient.

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(ii) Islam, Shi’ism, Society and Justice: Kurban Said’s Ali and Nino, Orientalism and Religion

[O]ne of my descendants will arise and fill the world with justice and equity as it is now filled with injustice and tyranny.

Much of the novella’s genius hinges on contrasting what is believed to be “authentically” Eastern and what Western and deciding how best to move forward with these at least apparent options to choose from. In this, this novella is an inquiry into the dynamics of established as well as emergent identities. ¹⁴ However, this novella is also a rallying cry, in that positions are taken, both for and against a variety of existing and emerging identities. The city of Baku as a living site of synthesis is never too far off in the novella’s background, often figuring in the novella’s very foreground. Ali Khan strongly identifies with the city, especially Baku, his city, if not always with all of its people. ¹⁵

A few key distinctions emerge, however, taking on greater, far more metaphorical qualities than one would initially think. I want to suggest that these are figures via which the distinction of East and West is represented. These figures make East and West seem all the less “imaginary” and all the more concrete, in much the same way that describing actually existing places and actual historical events in the novella contributes to creating the novella’s great sense of realism. ¹⁶ For example, still early in the novella, Ali Khan tells us that acquiring and displaying books is symptomatic of the West. Later, however, we find Seyd Mustapha—a figure in the novella clearly incarnating the tradition-minded, learned Oriental—similarly immersed in many volumes. Nonetheless, in the East, we are told, displaying culture via carpets (especially tapestries on the walls) is deemed better. ¹⁷ These are indeed meant to represent strong contrasts. In the background of Ali Khan’s implied critique of book-fetishism is the Koran, “[t]he Book of God which is a rope stretched from Heaven to Earth.” ¹⁸ According to a faith-bound vision, the Koran is the only book the common man truly needs, thus implying that there exist limits to one’s needs. ¹⁹ The importance of this ascetic reading of Islam will be a theme returned to later in this study. The interwoven quality of the tapestry is also a powerful image, oddly enough not unlike the art-work that silently taught history and doctrine within the walls of European cathedrals during the Middle Ages and early Renaissance. Moreover, for the less Islamicized reader, it may be important to note that during the course of Islamic history, the carpet became a typical location for prayer.

Another distinction that repeatedly emerges within the novella is between forest people on the one hand and, on the other hand, desert people (K. Said, 2000 [1937]: 50–51). ²⁰ The respective qualities Ali Khan and his interlocutors associate with these deserve our critical attention. For Nino, the forest is a source of comfort, whereas for Ali Khan the forest is busy, dark, confusing, denying the eyes the open space required for a proper sense of perspective and security. For Ali Khan, the desert is the opposite. The importance of light, so plentiful in the desert, when it is calm, is emphasized. For Ali Khan, the desert is quite the opposite of the busy and confusing nature of the woods; a calm clarity is for him found in the desert. The desert is described as “simple like the thrust of a sword” (51). Moreover, for him, its most representative inhabitant, the lion, is one with which to identify, even one to emulate. Moreover, the close association between the symbol of the lion and the Persian Empire is clearly made (K. Said, 2000 [1937]: 11).

Similar distinctions emerge concerning technology. The first example concerns modes of transportation. When Ali Khan discusses technologies born of scientific advancement, his discourse is usually ambivalent since these advancements he identifies with the West. Before getting to these examples, however, I would like to draw from among the many intensely political and poetic passages of this novella. Still relatively early within the novella, Nachararyan, the “decent Armenian” who would later become Ali’s rival and victim, makes use of the metaphor of the bridge in discussing Caucasian peoples (K. Said, 2000 [1937]: 86). Many readers may not even think of the bridge as technology and yet it is just this. So old a form of technology is it that it is no longer thought of in these terms. Within a Roman Catholic context, for example, it is shrouded in a deep religiosity; those who know the deeper meaning of key words (such as Pontiff, Pontifex Maximus, etc.) understand. The Pope is understood as both bridge and bridge-builder. ²¹ This kind of figurative language is not foreign to the Islamic imagination either. Of the Prophet’s early years in Medina, the City of the Prophet, Moojan Momen writes: “He [the Prophet Muhammad] was a builder of bridges between the rival factions who lived in Medina” (1985: 5). For Nachararyan, therefore, Caucasian peoples are a dynamic meeting point between worlds, that is to say, such people are themselves living bridges.

This focus on the figure of the bridge may bring to mind the “bridge party” that early on in E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1989 [1924]: 49) helps to get the story’s plot moving. The purpose of the bridge party depicted in Forster’s A Passage is to bring different people together, people who normally might have opted to minimize their contact with one another. Baku, culturally and religiously, is described as something of a bridge party and Ali and Nino does depict the interconnectedness of many different people; the story weaves together Azerbaijani, Georgian, Armenian, Turkish, Russian and Iranian perspectives and realities. In this light, one must observe that in order to properly understand the perception and representation of this location as a meeting place between peoples, one must not simply focus within existing borders but also include what exists beyond them as well, always remembering that past empires (Persian, Turkish and Russian) have expanded to include the location at hand. Then, as now, Azerbaijan was a country with a relatively small population in comparison with some of its larger neighbours. ²² What this land represented then and now in terms of what it could supply in terms of energy (that is, oil, petroleum, natural gas, etc.) is significant. Some still think that one cannot have a party without a cake. In this respect it is important to remember the date and the language of the novella’s publication, remembering also that only a half-decade later, “[i]n September 1942, [Hitler’s] general staff presented him with a giant cake in the shape of the Caucasus. A newsreel of the occasion shows the führer cutting himself the piece with BAKU spelled out in frosting” (Reiss, 2005: xii). It is also symbolically rich that Ali Khan, in the novella’s conclusion, has “made no attempt to escape, but died in the accomplishment of [his] mission” (Lewis, 2004 [1985]: 295). Ali willingly gives up his life on a bridge, valiantly aiming to keep Western invaders from getting deeper into the Orient, using Western technology to block further “westernization.”

When Ali Khan first discusses the “autocar,” namely Nachararyan’s, he highlights how ill adapted these are to the narrow streets of the old inner city, where, at the time, they simply could not pass. He acknowledges the prestige of this novel means of transportation, contrasting it with his own means, a horse-drawn carriage. The train is described, late in the novella, in terms far more negative and in this case far less ambivalently: “The rails were like long snakes, and the train came out of the dark like an evil monster” (2000 [1937]: 271). In stark contrast, when Ali Khan describes the cult surrounding the famed twelve existing Red Gold horses of Karabagh, the prose seems aimed to send the reader to a pastoral seventh heaven. Interestingly, the Red Gold that carries Ali Khan to his fateful final meeting with Nachararyan is not afterwards treated as a mere means of transportation by its rightful owner, Count Melikov. Melikov has the poor mount shot. In effect, the Red Gold suffers the fate some felt should have rightfully befallen Nino, a situation not unlike that of the Biblical Isaac in that an animal here also replaces a human agency. However, not all discourse concerning technology is negative. The best example is from the novella’s final scene. Ali Khan here states: “I went to the bridge, sat behind the machine-gun, and the bullets were gliding through my fingers as if they were rosary beads” (274). Not only does this statement correspond well to what Lewis calls “an almost sacramental cult of weapons” (1993 [1984]: 162), but this statement is made right after Ali Khan tells his compatriots that the whole of the Islamic world is on its way to their aid and yet is unlikely to reach them in time. This statement can only be understood as belonging to a mystical view of what is taking place. Noteworthy is the conflation of the whole of the Islamic community and the nation. The point of including this quotation is to make note of the fact that any tool in the right context, regardless of its origin, becomes an instrument of a divine architecture for the believing agency utilizing it.

The last of the dualisms that need to be included here, as again built upon the East–West distinction, concerns Nino as possibly the most integral of Ali Khan’s representations of the West. ²³ The astute reader will immediately realize that this is an inversion in relation to what was stated earlier concerning the Orientalist stereotypes discerned and critiqued by Edward Said, among these the Orient represented in the West as feminine. According to this view then, for the West, the East is a woman and yet for the East, insofar as we accept Ali Khan’s view of Nino as a representative one, the West is a woman and similarly, woman is understood as an agency similar to that of the West. This apparent paradox accords well with the mystical view that G-d alone is male and all of creation female and yet, this is not what deserves highlighting. Both so-called camps depict the other as feminine.

Now it is important to note some of the reasons why Nino is equated with the West since it is not simply due to her being a woman. She is from a prominent Christian family. She does not wear the veil and has no intention of wearing one. She speaks her mind when she wants to and even also enjoys alcohol. Ample reason, therefore, insofar as the novella’s frames of reference are adopted. It is important to underline that with this dualism in play, the West is easily portrayed as a seductress, as a source of weakness much like Eve is to Adam in the traditional Biblical Genesis account. Another point that deserves consideration concerning this East–West/female–male dualism is that, at the time and in this specific context, having a story about a young Muslim woman and a young Christian man would for many have been far beyond what was socially acceptable. This fact may also have influenced the author’s choice of subject matter. The foregoing points simply aim to make plain just how important certain dualisms are within the novella, how much of the novella’s subject matter is these very dualisms. Stating this does not on its own diminish their hold on the mind even though this is where the form of criticism Edward Said propounded would like to lead us. ²⁴

Earlier I enumerated and briefly examined three key Orientalist stereotypes, namely, the impassioned, the violent, and due in part to an “other-worldly” orientation, the impervious to change. I would like to return to these, now concerned with the novella. Ali Khan tells us that only “religion, politics, and business” should be discussed openly anywhere, in any company (67). By his own criteria then, his story is not one that should be discussed because it is “a love story,” that is, for many it is like war, part religion, part politics, part business, and yet beyond all of these. It being a love story, one that begins with young love, the reader is privy to passion, not all of it perfectly channelled at first, nor all of the time. An impassioned love story matches the first of the stereotypes here examined, namely “sensuality,” one of the words Said uses in drawing the contours of this set of associated ideas he calls “Orientalism,” “sensuality” being a word used in describing the attraction of both minds and bodies toward the body. Ali Khan dearly loves the young Georgian princess, Nino Kippiani, and yet struggles with his nagging feeling that this love represents giving in to a supposedly rival religio-cultural bloc. His reservations concerning the good social standing of this love are in due course overcome, in part because of his own feelings, though also because of what others such as Nachararyan and Seyd Mustapha tell him in support of his union with Nino. However, Nino succumbs to a similar initial temptation, that of remaining closer to her own religio-cultural fold. This leads to one of the novella’s most important violent events, Ali Khan killing his rival. It deserves to be stated that for this, Ali Khan expresses little or no remorse. With the exception of a brief somewhat implied exposition of the Shi’a just war doctrine, the novella is largely devoid of an explicit critique of violence, even though, given the circumstances the novella dramatizes, such a critique would be aptly placed. Concerning Ali Khan’s lack of remorse for killing Nachararyan, a key mitigating point to keep in mind is that in many countries throughout the world at the time, a crime of passion defense was a valid defense, something that has since changed in many legal traditions even though one may legitimately ask oneself if the legal traditions are not prescribing behaviour rather than dealing with human agents as they are. Concerning the overall condoning of violence, however, a few key passages advocate against pushing this charge too far. For example, before the first major battle dramatized within the novella takes place and even before Nachararyan meets his untimely end, at the meeting of elders that Ali Khan’s father requests Ali Khan also attend, the Baha’i character, Musa Nagi, states what is probably the most spiritual vision of peace and universal fraternity of the novella. Thus, the follower of the Bāb spoke:

The Russians are killing the Turks, the Turks are killing the Armenians, the Armenians would like to kill us, and we the Russians. Is this good? […] But what use is a school when what is taught there is nonsense, and what use is a hospital if it is the body only that is healed there, and the soul is forgotten? Our soul strives to go to God. But each nation believes they have a God all to themselves, and he is the one and only God. But I believe it is the same God who made himself known through the voices of all sages. Therefore I worship Christ and Confucius, Buddha and Mohammed. We all come from one God, and through Bab we shall all return to him. Men should be told there is no Black and no White, for Black is White and White is Black. So my advice is this: let us not do anything that might hurt anybody anywhere in the world, for we are part of each soul, and each soul is part of us. (2000 [1937]: 141)

Some readers may wish to say the contrary, that much of the novella glorifies marshal valour. This would align it with very old traditions and much more traditional literary forms. ²⁷ To some readers it may seem to be going further still. In the following I only take up a few illustrative examples. Other examples could be selected since they also deserve further discussion. For example, Ali Khan senses that his father thinks he is a “degenerate” because, like Arjuna of the Bhagavad-Gita, he initially has no wish to “rush into battle, did not thirst for the blood of his enemies, did not want to see tears in their eyes” (76), or because of how he sees the spreading “lust for war” (77) and describes this in terms of “the blood lust of the Orient” awakening (79), etc. This said, when Ali Khan is about to kill Nachararyan he likens himself to the wolf (151). ²⁸ At its most basic, the wolf is a symbol for that which is savage, for something that cannot be tamed, remaining forever wild. In this context, however, Ali Khan is in part contrasting himself with Nachararyan, who “learned boxing in Europe.” In this respect, Ali Khan believes that he “can only go mad like the desert wolf.” ²⁹ Later, he describes his “grip” as that of “the grey wolf” (151). Moreover, the blood-feud is presented early in the novella as the foundation of a justice-seeking social order (68–69). A recurrent theme is that of a people’s sword having rusted. ³⁰ The successful campaigns Ali Khan’s ancestors led are continually represented in idealistic terms. For example, Nadir Shah’s campaign against the Mughal Sultanate of Delhi is evoked repeatedly, always as a source of pride (e.g., K. Said, 2000 [1937]: 150). However, if one adopts a Delhiwala’s perspective, one can then see that the assault on Delhi by Nadir Shah’s forces was no more glorious than the assault on Baku by Russian forces. ³¹ Again then, in representing violence as something rather ennobling, the novella matches this standard Orientalist stereotype.

In discussing the last of the three Orientalist stereotypes I enumerated earlier, I will be going a little further. Changelessness is in fact a quality many have taken to be a product of religion. In this respect, Joseph L. Blau writes:

… every living religion is perennially changing, adapting its principles, its practices, its rituals, its beliefs, and its theology to meet the needs of the varying times and places in which its adherents live. Each living religion must change thus, if it is to continue to have relevance to the lives of those who accept it. But, although it is constantly changing, each religion must seem to be as unchanging as possible, for though we want our religions to be always relevant, we also want them to serve as our link to the past, the root of our sense of continuity. Most of the time, therefore, changes in religions take place slowly, almost imperceptibly. From time to time, however, in the history of every religion, the conditions under which its adherents live change so rapidly and so radically that the changes in the religion must come with shocking rapidity. (1966 [1964]: viii)

Continuing on the theme of religion as a means of masking changes that are otherwise impossible to tolerate without this religious masking, Mircea Eliade not only focuses on how religious traditions both create and routinely re-create mythic time, that is, a sense of time that is experientially different from what one may call “mere” history, he also focuses on how these traditions create a sense of centredness in space, namely by creating a focus on an axis mundi. ³² Through certain cyclical religious observances a community is forever linked to a specific and highly significant time and place. Therefore, in effect, discussing the “forever changeless” stereotype leads one to discuss the relative religiosity and secularity of the novella. In space, the novella proves more secular than in time. In space, although Ali Khan is well aware that Baku is in a large constellation of important cities, including Tehran, Tiflis, Moscow, Delhi, Berlin, Stockholm, Paris, and so forth, Baku remains his touchstone. After fighting for his city once, he later returns to again fight for it even though this in the end spells his disappearing from the visible world. In time, then, and even though he does not jump at the first opportunity, the novella does end in a very Shi’a fashion: Ali Khan is rewarded with the heroic and meaningful death of a martyr. A reader aware of the Shi’a mythic frame of reference that Ali Khan has been drawing attention to from the novella’s early chapters cannot miss this. ³³ This is a part of the masking of change alluded to in various ways earlier. The Platonism of this religious ontology should also be emphasized. True being is made via becoming a link in a chain, through active participation, tying one in with the community’s foundational event(s). The end of Ali and Nino is a renewal of Shi’a mythic time, a somewhat secularized form of the passion and fall of the community’s foundational figures. For Ali Khan, Baku becomes a new Kerbela. The author chose to finish the novella in this way—a tragic ending and yet one glorifying bravery in the service of defending a people’s rightful place in the world—in order to create a parallelism between “secular” and religious history, late (i.e., more contemporary) history and early history, between an Ali of modern times and the archetypal Husayn. ³⁴

Just as for Ali Khan no woman is ever compared to Nino, just as he could not opt out of avenging his honour when he felt called upon to, he also gives the reader no sense that he felt he could rightfully avoid the battle that takes his life in the novella’s final scene. In these examples one touches upon some of the fatalism that permeates much of the main character’s outlook, and in this also he conforms to the Orientalist stereotypes thus far examined. Much like Nietzschean “Amor Fati,” in this, it is imagined that nothing could be changed. The largely pervasive sense of fatalism may even lead one to think of the fatalist mindset (read: Orientalized mindset) as being more akin to backgammon than it is to chess, more about fate and chance than about strategy and real choices seeking viable outcomes.

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Conclusion

Don’t go,

but if you must, take my soul with you.

The novella is rather self-consciously a matter of keeping a memory, like a fire, alive. The memory is that of a people struggling from within—for example, with diversity and dizzyingly rapid patterns of social change—and from without—with military incursion aimed at establishing foreign domination. The novella was written about, as well as during, such conditions. Keeping this in mind enables one to understand why passion, violence and a good measure of fatalism are central themes. One needs passion to keep memory, like a fire, burning brightly. Armed resistance to foreign rule has often been deemed a lesser evil than a people’s memory fading away into oblivion. Often collective memory and the people itself are conflated in our thinking and not always without good reason; the health of one often spells the health of the other. When such matters are deemed pressing, a people’s survival possibly being at stake, violent themes come to dominate the imaginations of many otherwise harmless souls. An awareness of Caucasian history, broadly speaking, allows one to bring to mind a long succession of different great regional powers. Fatalism in the novella’s worldview is not wholly unlike saying: “we have seen this before and this too shall pass; although difficult to imagine in practical terms, independence will return.” To a significant extent, though not without exception, history has proven the justice that does inhere within this perspective.

As we have seen, and in conclusion, this brief yet powerful book is built upon dualisms that it also contributes to consolidating, namely that there is something fundamentally distinct that sets East apart from West, that they are different like a desert is from a forest, like an animal is different from a machine, etc. Classic Orientalist stereotypes are clearly present. The novella concerns passion that leads to violence, and demonstrates that regardless of mountains of wisdom and learning, there is something about these events that conforms to laws or a will that humans seem unable to easily change or escape.

An entirely new essay would deserve to be written about an interesting correspondence that I can only briefly outline here in concluding, opening up this brief study toward other horizons. As stated earlier, this is no mere afterthought in that it points to the fact that these three Orientalist stereotypes may be understood as belonging to deep identity-generating springs and that therefore, the way out of the so-called Orientalist frame of reference is not such a simple affair as typically imagined. The “Three Poisons” that hold the Buddhist Wheel of Life together, symbolically represented as a rooster, a snake and a pig, respectively stand in for lust, anger, and ignorance. All three of these “totemic” animals can be viewed as dangerous. If one thinks of St Anthony Abbot’s familiar or of Piglet from A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner, one is unlikely to see this and yet if one imagines the wild boars of ancient Greek mythology, maybe the best example being the one that spells the demise of Venus’ beloved, the beautiful youthful Adonis, one will imagine it more accurately. Coq fights are clearly violent affairs and the venom of poisonous snakes has claimed innumerable lives, both human and non-human. Interestingly, however, some depictions of the Wheel have the dove represent what the rooster does in other representations (see Lowenstein, 1996: 30–31). This alters one’s perception of the Wheel’s teaching to some degree.

In Houston Smith and Philip Novak’s Buddhism, lust (rooster/dove) and anger (snake) are rendered respectively as craving and aversion. Elsewhere one can also find greed equated with lust or craving, hatred equated with anger or aversion, and stupidity or delusion equated with ignorance (pig). About ignorance specifically, Smith and Novak write: “Ignorance here is not lack of formal education, but rather lack of insight into anatta (no-self, no-soul) […]. For Buddhists, delusion about what we really are is the ‘original sin,’ the error that leads to personalities built of craving and aversion—the warp and woof of suffering” (2003: 203). Another author writes: “it is attachment to the mental monolithic I that fuels fear and craving” (K. Smith, 1981: 64). In this sense then, it is the pig that makes itself and/or something the axis mundi and therefore in so doing generates the precondition of and for both the rooster and the snake. In this, one observes core dimensions of a far reaching critique of idolatry, a form of criticism very central within the Islamic tradition as well. This brings one to consider if Muhammad’s refusal to also destroy the Kaaba at Mecca and abolish practices such as Hajj is not, from a Buddhist point of view, an example of “skillful means”: his world may not then be (and much of it is not now) ready to live without any literal religious points of reference in space and time, ergo, the refusal to destroy the Kaaba at Mecca and related annual practices like Hajj; or it may prove best to understand this as an example of the “Middle Path”: to destroy all axis mundi-like phenomena would be excessive; to radically minimize the current number and radically limit the possibility of further proliferation was not a radical aim but rather a moderate one. Again concerning the attachment to axis mundi-like phenomena, Kendra Smith writes: “Only when a person sees through the working of his mental apparatus can he see through these tight fortifications” (1981: 66) and that “any self-image,” something that is at least implicitly, if not explicitly based on an “attachment to the mental monolithic I,” will “capture attention and extinguish naturalness and balance” (67). Similarly concerned with what takes place once the poisons are identified and transcended, Smith and Novak write that as “[t]he three poisons […] begin to evaporate, […] we see that things were not as we had supposed. Indeed, suppositions of whatsoever sort begin to vanish, to be replaced by direct perception” (2003: 49). ³⁷

The “Three Poisons” correspond surprisingly well with the three Orientalist stereotypes examined in the foregoing study. They also correspond well with three key concepts of the Jain religious tradition, namely aparigraha (non-grasping), ahimsa (non-violence), and anekantavada (non-absolutism). ³⁸ Although they are here expressed negatively, these are nevertheless, arguably the positive flipsides of the Three Poisons, the antidotes to these poisons. Again within a Buddhist worldview, once the Three Poisons are eliminated, nothing holds the Wheel together. This is a negative expression of what Nirvana is. ³⁹ I have not included this all too briefly developed comparison simply in order to critique the three Orientalist stereotypes examined in this essay. One level of this critique is straight forward, that is to say, these are some of the heuristics of the alternative life-ways proposed by religious traditions such as Buddhism and Jainism. As the reader may have noticed as well, I have also tried to present examples from early Islamic history and teaching, threaded throughout this essay, that also do not conform with the three Orientalism stereotypes here examined. The comparison formulated here with the Buddhist Wheel of Life is also a way of underlining the fact that within the Orient there exist longstanding traditions that, as I have just mentioned, aim to open human beings to ways of life that attempt to control passion and violence through the self-transformation of human agents. ⁴⁰ This critique, however, has its limits. Within traditions such as these, and here I mean Buddhism and Jainism more specifically, the traditions themselves recognize that only the ascetics’ life is ideally suited to maximize the limitation of passion and violence, more fully altering the human agencies on such a path toward liberation. It is in this sense that R. Williams writes:

… in general it may be said that where the monk is excessive, since his life is the negation of compromise, moderation must be the keynote of existence for the householder whose life is rooted in compromise.

In his every action the householder is beset by the unintentional evil which he provokes in his daily work. (1983 [1963]: xxi–xxii)

Its relevance undiminished, a novella such as this will continue to be read for generations. This seems clear. However, it is important to ask ourselves certain key questions: how and why we read this novella, in what spirit and to what end …? These are critical questions, which the work of critics such as Edward Said specifically and post-colonial critics generally may inform with important insights in order to guide generations of new readers.

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