The Light Verse

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pentecost might be the right holiday for asking this simple question: Can Christians, or even agnostics, be touched by verses of the Holy Qur’an? Yes, they can (we are not in Obama’s campaign here). Some years ago, when I had just moved to Kuwait, which is a very conservative Islamic country, I got a gift from my brother, Navid Kermani’s doctoral thesis about the beauty of the Qur’an. Its main topic (on a bit more than 500 pages) was, in particular, what Muslims know as i‛ğāz, meaning the miracle of the supernatural beauty of their Holy Book. I am quite convinced that he (my brother) has not read it, but on me it had a profound effect. It is, of course, a scientific text but easy to read and of admirably persuasive power. The effect was twofold. I first became interested in the Qur’an, and even religion at large. And then I detected that I am not really religious. The holy book I am more familiar with, the Bible, obviously lacks beauty and poetry, and Kermani, a German-Iranian orientalist, novelist, and journalist who is living in Cologne, is a master of explaining that particular (if you want) deficiency of the Book of the Books (I would still disagree spontaneously for certain parts, for example, the Sermon on the Mount, Matth 5-7. But being nearly overwhelmed by revolutionary ethics is somewhat different from being immensely touched by pure beauty).

Kermani comes to the (my) point on page 122 when he portrays, and tries to interpret, the famous Light Verse (Q24:35): 

“God is the Light of the heavens and the earth.

The parable of His light is, as it were, that of a niche containing a lamp;

the lamp is [enclosed] in glass,

the glass [shining] like a radiant star:

[a lamp] lit from a blessed tree -

an olive-tree that is neither of the east nor of the west

the oil whereof [is so bright that it] would give light [of itself] even though fire had not touched it:

Light upon Light!

God guides unto His light him that wills [to be guided];

and [to this end] God propounds parables unto men,

since God [alone] has full knowledge of all things.”

Ayat An-Nur is named after this verse, although the remaining revelations deal with completely different issues. Indeed, when I tried to get a comment from a dear Muslim friend on it, she became angry, for obvious reasons. But I only wanted some opinions about this special, mysterious, paragraph, in particular this “neither of the East nor of the West”. The English translation (here by Mohamed Asad) is, as all translations of, what is believed by Muslims, God’s words, insufficient.

As I learned later, especially this most famous verse in the Qur’an has guided so many mystics on their spiritual journeys!

Published first at Salmiya.

The Long Way

That the small but oil-rich state in the northwestern corner of the Persian Gulf has recently elected four female MPs in parliamentary elections has seemingly pushed Kuwait again into a forerunner position among its Arabic neighbors, in particular largely retarded Saudi-Arabia. However, the tiny democratic achievements are at risk due to continuous outrageous reactions of six notorious Islamists in the parliament, namely Faisal Al-Mislem, Waleed Al-Tabtabaie, Dhaifallah BuRamiah, Jamaan Al-Harbash, Mohammed Hayef and Mubarak Al-Walaan. As we read in the Kuwaiti newspaper Al Watan Daily, they threaten to “walk out of the swearing-in ceremony of the two female MPs if they do not wear the hijab while taking the oath of office.” They even met to “discuss the legal procedures to be initiated against Aseel Al-Awadi and Rola Dashti for violating the Election Law which states that female candidates must stick to Islamic dress code during elections.”

It is definitely a long way until democratic values will eventually reach even the Arab world. Islamists will sooner or later vanish anyway. It is, however, a great shame that the same troublemakers of the former parliament are again abusing their largely serving role as ‘parliamentarians’ when intimidating others about an absurd issue, wearing hijab, or Islamic headscarf, whether it is inside or outside of Kuwait’s nice parliament building.

New Concerns

Somewhat surprised by North Korea’s dictator Kim Jong Il proud announcement of a (this time probably) successful test of a nuclear bomb, the Obama administration’s main concern still seems to be Iran’s nuclear program. The Committee on Foreign Relations of the U.S. Senate chaired, since January 2009, by former presidential candidate John F. Kerry has submitted earlier this month its report, Iran: Where We Are Today. Apart from a short briefing on the history of the issue, Kerry and his Committee are giving also some interesting, albeit inconclusive, advice.

Obviously the committee is looking forward to direct bilateral talks between the United States and Iran, the first time in three decades, thus contradicting a recent claim by Washington Post’s Kenneth R. Timmerman that the U.S. had 28 high-level diplomatic encounters with Iran since November 2001. After G. W. Bush had put Iran on his infamous axis of evil in his State of the Union address of January 29, 2002, when an Iranian exile dissident group had disclosed the existence of a covert uranium enrichment facility at Natanz and a heavy water facility at Arak in August 2002, and particularly after the election of the incumbent president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad diplomatic efforts of the USA and European negotiators U.K., France and Germany had ended in a stalemate. While Iran might have stopped its military nuclear program in fall of 2003, its uranium enrichment efforts, allegedly aiming for civil purposes have, since then accelerated, resulting in a cat-and-mouse game with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) which is still going on today.

Kerry’s Committee Report clearly states that, as a signatory of the nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT), “Iran has the right to enrich uranium for civilian uses. But its secret nuclear activities, which date back to at least 1987, violated its safeguards agreement with the IAEA to declare and allow inspections of all nuclear-related sites. The United States, and later the Europeans, argued that Iran’s deception meant it should forfeit its right to enrich, a position likely to be up for negotiation in talks with Iran” [my emphasis].

One of the most controversial issues is the “strong circumstantial case for military involvement, which may or may not have stopped when the weaponization work ended in late 2003. Potentially damning evidence surfaced in 2004 when U.S. intelligence obtained a laptop computer that it said had come from an Iranian engineer. The computer contained thousands of pages of data on tests of high explosives and designs for a missile capable of carrying a nuclear warhead. It also contained videos of what were described as secret workshops around Iran where the weapons work was supposedly carried out.” The IAEA refers to these documents in official reports as “alleged studies”. Iranian officials denounce them as fakes. The Kerry report concedes here that “[s]enior UN officials and foreign intelligence officials who have seen many of the documents told the committee staff that it is impossible to rule out an elaborate intelligence ruse” [my emphasis].

The two alternatives detailed by the Committee’s report, namely either Iran’s potential “breakout options”, a momentous step following North Korea which expelled IAEA inspectors, or covert, so far unknown (or at least un-declassified), enrichment facilities independent of the Natanz both seem rather unrealistic. The former would most probably entail in an immediate attack by Israel or even the U.S. At least the unclassified portion of the National Intelligence Estimate released in December 2007 states that the intelligence community believes that Iran might use a covert facility to enrich low-enriched to weapons-grade uranium.

But how to proceed from here? Understanding the motivations for the Iranian nuclear program by the Obama administration is crucial. Kerry’s report mentions prestige, the investment of tens of millions of dollars in the program, already endured hardships due to international sanctions and, more recently, “concerns focused on tough rhetoric from [former] President George W. Bush and fears of a U.S. invasion, particularly in the months after the start of the war in Iraq in March 2003.”

“In one scenario [of a diplomatic approach], Iran would freeze enrichment at current levels while its parliament ratifies the Additional Protocol, which allows the IAEA to make more intrusive inspections on short notice. Side agreements might be required to establish an even tighter safeguards regime at Natanz, sometimes officials at the IAEA refer to as “Additional Protocol Plus.” Iran also could be required to ratify the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which prohibits nuclear weapon testing.

“A second approach would take a tougher stance, requiring Iran to relinquish all rights to enrichment and close down Natanz and related facilities. Proponents of this view argue that Iran cannot be trusted because of its long history of concealing nuclear activities and they do not trust the spotty record of the IAEA when it comes to identifying clandestine nuclear programs.” The latter seems not to lead out of the deadlock. Thus, Kerry’s report states that “[t]he ultimate solution to the conundrum of Iran’s nuclear ambitions is not technical, but political. In testimony before the committee during two days of public hearings on Iran in early March, Karim Sadjadpour, an associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, contended that the nuclear dispute must be viewed as a symptom of the broader mistrust between the U.S. and Iran, not as an underlying cause of the tension” [my emphasis].

Israel’s recent demands of a deadline for possible diplomatic efforts may complicate the issue. “Some analysts argue that setting an advance time table for progress in talks is a recipe for failure. Their argument is that it will take time for the United States to assure Iran that it cannot afford the price of acquiring a nuclear arsenal and that Washington recognizes Tehran as an influential regional player. For others, however, time is more critical because of Iran’s progress toward nuclear weapons capacity. They contend that Iran should understand either privately or publicly, that substantive progress on negotiations must occur within a specific time frame or Iran’s failure to abide by the UN Security Council resolutions will trigger significant new sanction.” The latter has evidently not lead to any progress.

The Foreign Relations Committee concludes that “[a] few years ago, the United States and its allies thought they could stop Iran’s nuclear ambitions short of mastering the enrichment process. Iran has crossed that line and now expects the international community to put the stamp of legitimacy on its activities as part of any talks. This would be a highly controversial concession, even if it came with strings attached. The toughest inspection regime and fullest disclosure by Iran about the likely military aspects of its program might not ease the anxieties of the Israeli government and some of Iran’s neighbors. In fact, coming clean about the military aspects of its program, even if they are in the past, may increase distrust among Iran’s neighbors. Despite the potential problems of permitting Iran to continue enriching in defiance of the UN Security Council, the administration has indicated that it is willing to begin talks with Iran without demanding a suspension of enrichment, according to senior State Department officials” [my emphasis].

The optimism may be premature. Today’s nuclear test in North Korea is definitely a serious backlash for the expected new diplomatic initiatives of the Obama administration.

Euphemisms

Only minutes after President Obama’s speech at the U.S. National Archives in Washington on closing down Guantánamo prison camp what he called a “misguided experiment”, former vice president Dick Cheney denounced the decision saying it came “without deliberation and no plan.” A large part of Cheney’s speech at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, a neocon think tank, deals with recent euphemisms used in the Global War on Terror, a term, the Obama administration has abandoned. The now prescribed terminology is “overseas contingency operations”.

“In the event of another attack on America, the Homeland Security Department assures us it will be ready for this, quote, ‘man-made disaster’ – never mind that the whole Department was created for the purpose of protecting Americans from terrorist attack.

“In the category of euphemisms, the prizewinning entry would be a recent editorial in a familiar newspaper that referred to terrorists we’ve captured as, quote, ‘abducted.’ Here we have ruthless enemies of this country, stopped in their tracks by brave operatives in the service of America, and a major editorial page makes them sound like they were kidnap victims at random on their way to the movies.

“Another term out there that slipped into the discussion is the notion that American interrogation practices were a ‘recruitment tool’ for the enemy. On this theory, by the questioning of killers, we supposedly fallen short of our own values. This recruitment theory has become something of a mantra lately, including from the President himself. And after a familiar fashion, it excuses the violent and blames America for the evil that others do. It’s another version of that same old refrain from the Left, ‘We brought it on ourselves.’”

It was, of course, the former Bush administration, where Cheney had been the vice president, which had introduced some of the most unjustified euphemisms and exaggerations after 9-11. Has there ever been a Global War on Terrorism? Or had it rather been a modern crusade? Enhanced interrogation techniques are torture, what else? Enemy combatants? A term coined to deprive prisoners of war of their Geneva Conventions rights. The use of these euphemisms has destroyed America’s reputation as a democracy, and that might be more devastating and longer lasting than the 9-11 attacks eight years ago.

Cheney mentions also alleged effectiveness of CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques.

“Maybe you’ve heard that when we captured KSM [Khalid Sheikh Muhammed, reportedly the principal architect of the 9-11 attacks], he said he would talk as soon as he got to New York City and saw his lawyer. But like many critics of interrogations, he clearly misunderstood the business at hand. American personnel were not there to commence an elaborate legal proceeding, but to extract information from him before al-Qaeda could strike again and kill more of our people.”

Khaled Sheikh Mohammed had been waterboarded 183 times. A list of his confessions can be found at Wikipedia:

• The February 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York City

• A failed “shoe bomber” operation

• The October 2003 attack in Kuwait

• The nightclub bombing in Bali, Indonesia

• A plan for a “second wave” of attacks on major U.S. landmarks after the 9-11 attacks, including the Library Tower in Los Angeles, the Sears Tower in Chicago, the Plaza Bank Building in Seattle and the Empire State Building in New York

• Plots to attack oil tankers and U.S. naval ships in the Straits of Hormuz, the Straits of Gibraltar and Singapore

• A plan to blow up the Panama Canal

• Plans to assassinate Jimmy Carter

• A plot to blow up suspension bridges in New York City

• A plan to destroy the Sears Tower in Chicago with burning fuel trucks

• Plans to “destroy” Heathrow Airport, Canary Wharf and Big Ben in London

• A planned attack on “many” nightclubs in Thailand

• A plot targeting the New York Stock Exchange and other U.S. financial targets

• A plan to destroy buildings in Eilat, Israel

• Plans to destroy U.S. embassies in Indonesia, Australia and Japan in 2002

• Plots to destroy Israeli embassies in India, Azerbaijan, the Philippines and Australia

• Surveying and financing an attack on an Israeli El-Al flight from Bangkok

• Sending several “mujahideen” into Israel to survey “strategic targets” with the intention of attacking them

• The November 2002 suicide bombing of a hotel in Mombasa, Kenya

• The failed attempt to shoot down an Israeli passenger jet leaving Mombasa airport in Kenya

• Plans to attack U.S. targets in South Korea

• Providing financial support for a plan to attack U.S., British and Jewish targets in Turkey

• Surveillance of U.S. nuclear power plants in order to attack them

• A plot to attack NATO’s headquarters in Europe

• Planning and surveillance in a 1995 plan (the “Bojinka Operation”) to bomb 12 American passenger jets

• The planned assassination attempt against then-U.S. President Bill Clinton during a mid-1990s trip to the Philippines

• “Shared responsibility” for a plot to kill Pope John Paul II

• Plans to assassinate Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf

• An attempt to attack a U.S. oil company in Sumatra, Indonesia, “owned by the Jewish former [U.S.] Secretary of State Henry Kissinger”

• The beheading of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl

As regards the final item on this very long list, Kahlid’s confession led lawyers of Daniel Pearl’s alleged killer, Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh (the man who, according to Benazir Bhutto in her infamous interview with David Frost in November 2007 “had murdered Osama bin Laden”) appeal of their client’s death sentence.

Did Cheney ever read George Orwell’s Nineteen-Eighty-Four? Did it inspire him? Does he remember the character Emmanuel Goldstein?

Interreligious Incompetence

Celebrated German-Iranian scholar of Islamic Sciences, novelist, essayist and journalist Navid Kermani was denied Hesse’s highest cultural award, the Kulturpreis. As he tells us, he was second choice anyway after Professor Fuad Sezgin, Director of the Institute of Arabic-Islamic Sciences at Frankfurt University, who had been nominated first, had already declined; allegedly because of some statements made by Salomon Korn, Vice President of the Central Council of Jews in Germany and another laureate, on Israel’s war in Gaza.

After Kermani had accepted the award, definitely too quickly but bona fide, the other two awardees, Karl Cardinal Lehmann and the former President of the Protestant Church of Hesse-Nassau Peter Steinacker declined next, owing to Kermani. Allegedly, because he (Kermani) had described his emotions when contemplating a painting of the crucified Christ by Guido Reni (d. 1642) in such a positive way that one indeed may doubt his good Muslim faith. However, of course is the crucifix the main reason for the schism in monotheism. Of course must Muslims consider worshipping the crucified Christ as idolatry. This is THE DIFFERENCE. What one faction considers the holiest expression of piety is for the other pure blasphemy. By definition.

Nothing is wrong with the decisions of these honorable men, except the insistence on fundamentalist religious dogmas and childish bossiness. One might advise these ignoble laureates to scrutinize their own level of tolerance first before frivolously accepting awards which they might not really deserve.

 

See also on this blog

Almost a Revelation. Some thoughts after reading Navid Kermani’s Der Schrecken Gottes.

Kuwaiti Women Power

In the third parliamentary election within only three years, four women have won seats in the Kuwaiti parliament yesterday. Women have fought successfully for their voting rights in 2005. I remember with much sympathy the women of Kuwait demonstrating in front of the parliament when inside lawmakers eventually agreed to give them the right to vote. When I congratulated some of my female Kuwaiti colleagues, open-minded and westernized, well-educated young women, they argued, however, that the right to vote may only strengthen the influence of the Islamists in the country. The paradox may be explained as follows. Very traditional Kuwaiti family fathers have, of course, up to four wives and plenty of grown-up but still unmarried daughters who, in all likelihood, will vote what the householder prefers: one man, several votes.

In the following parliamentary election in 2006, and two years later when the parliament had untimely been dissolved by the Amir of Kuwait, His Highness Sheikh Sabah Al Ahmed, women failed to win seats in the very much male-dominated Islamic country. Now they eventually succeeded. Congratulations to former Minister of Health Massouma al-Mubarak, Salwa al Jassar and liberal candidates Aseel Awadhi and Rola Dashti!

The widely perceived retardation of scientific, cultural and human rights development in many if not most Islamic countries may be due to an important fact. In rapidly growing societies with population growth rates of between 3 and 5%, countries are soon evolving into, well, boys’ countries. The testosterone factor of the frequently unemployed, unmarried into their thirties and therefore profoundly unsatisfied young men, who have, if at least realistic, little hope for change, are running the society at the low-level, while male-dominated administrations try to keep this power under control only by restricting normal civil rights.

A typical example of a boys’ country is, of course, Saudi-Arabia. Despite undisputable rights for equal education women in Iran suffer from a mainly male-dominated and completely outdated interpretation of Shari’a family law. In particular, women rights movements there are brutally suppressed. Boys’ countries are undemocratic.

Yesterday’s Kuwait election is a flicker of hope after the previous very much annoying legislative period.

 

See also on this blog

They’ll Never Forget. A Kuwaiti dentist who created the infamous Incubator Lie after Saddam’s troops had invaded the small oil-rich Gulf country in 1990.

Another crisis. Islamists in the parliament do not act for the sake of democracy.

President Obama’s U-turn

One of the few Jewish survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto is Germany’s main literary critic, or “Pope of German letters”, Marcel Reich-Ranicki. In his remarkable biography “The Author of Himself: The Life of Marcel Reich-Ranicki” (Princeton University Press 2001), he described in his own unpretentious way the incredible situation of the people in the Ghetto and his and his young wife Tosia’s miraculous escape from hell (Umschlagplatz) only minutes before being deported to the gas chambers of Treblinka’s extermination camp. Reading this is both thrilling and mortifying. The industrial perfection of genocide, the Holocaust of Jews and others will forever, at least for the coming generations, be the inhumane stain on Germany and Germans. The crime of the century (the 20^th) is not comparable with anything else although I painfully remember anti-Semitic sentiments of former colleagues in the Middle East that it is; I respect their opinion but do not share: Gaza must not yet be compared with the Warsaw Ghetto, of course [1].

What is more amazing with Marcel Reich-Ranicki’s biography is his deep love for his and all the Jews’ German tormentors’ literature and composed music . Is it a sort of love-and-hate relationship? Does he want to prove that human bestiality and striving for the highest cultural achievements does not exclude each other? Has he forgiven “the” (or some) Germans or is he paying back when publicly delivering his often harsh judgments on hopefuls in the literature business [2]?

What does this have to do with hope and change and yes we can? President Obama has slipped up a second time yesterday, after pardoning CIA agents last month for having applied torture-like, so-called enhanced, interrogation techniques to detainees in the war on terror. In a 180-degree U-turn he now tries to prevent the release of dozens of photographs taken in prison and camps outside Abu Ghuraib which might show the world public the notorious abuse of detainees. His generals in Afghanistan and Iraq may have convinced him that further anti-American sentiments may cost U.S. citizens their lives. 

The last culprits of Nazi Germany, such as notorious John Demjanjuk, will vanish soon. It sometimes takes many decades, but it is hoped that truth will be unearthed sooner or later anyway. Even as regards the crimes or alleged crimes by the former U.S. administration.

 

Notes

[1] The reality of the Warsaw Ghetto, as described by Reich-Ranicki, is not even comparable with the description of a world falling apart in Paul Auster’s “In the Country of Last Things”, an author who had rightfully been praised by Reich-Ranicki.

[2] I have met Professor Reich-Ranicki once, so far. It must have been about at that time when he was correcting the page proofs of his biography. He was a patient in the hospital where I was working at that time, but I had not been his doctor. It was interesting that he mistook me as “his” doctor, and so I had the opportunity to chat a bit with him until he noticed his misconception. He won’t remember the short encounter but for me it was moment I won’t forget easily: his strong and unbroken personality, but a bit different from his sometimes, well, arguable televised appearances.

 

See also on this blog

Schicksalstag. How Germans try to deal with November 9.

Election

The Guardian Council of the Iranian Islamic theocracy has just started screening of 475 electoral hopefuls who have signed-up for the June 12 presidential election. The winner is already known, the incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. There is no other choice for the Iranian people. Despite considerable domestic criticism which I have noticed during my recent visit of Iran from mainly upper-class Iranians, in particular of his amateurish economic policies (but the global economic crisis has not only hit Iran), support from those who won’t have anything to loose is unbowed. And they are the majority in the country anyway.

Ahmadinejad, whose adversary G. W. Bush has vanished in the meantime from the scene, has effectively used these four years of confrontation to establish the country as a middle power not only in the Middle East. His dauntless, provocative demeanor has made him the new hero among the mainly uneducated, unemployed, young and disunsatisfied, predominantly male, Muslims. A sudden defeat would fall short of his unquestionable achievements for the country. Iran has not (yet) been attacked either by Israel or the U.S. for its ambitious uranium enrichment program, which anybody considers as being designed for the development of nuclear weapons. President Obama, ensnared in the flagrant torture scandal of the former U.S. administration, has even stretched a hand toward the country provided it unclenches its fist. Israel, after the recent Gaza War and with its hardliners in its new cabinet, seems to be internationally more isolated than ever.

No, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei can’t help but only endorse “his” president Ahmadinejad. And when he is going to do that, he will be elected. Such are things in dictatorships. Sorry, but there seems to be no hope for the Iranian people.

Darb-i Imam

The small Darb-i Imam shrine (1453) about 300 meters west of the Great Mosque may in fact be one of the gems of Timurid architecture in Esfahan. The site is rather hidden in the labyrinthine lanes of the northern part of the old city of Esfahan [1].  

The shrine consists of a funerary complex [2] with courtyards, shrine structures, and a small cemetery. During the centuries it had been steadily reconstructed and repaired, especially in the early and late 17^th century. Characteristic are the two closely spaced domes, one bulbous with beautiful arabesques and one more slender with floral decoration, on high drums with highly stylized calligraphy.

Its pishtaq, or porch, contains several exquisite mosaics made of glazed tiles. Some of them are said to be created by Sayyid Mahmud-I Naqash, who has also decorated the southern iwan and the celebrated Timurid gate on Esfahan’s Masjed-e Jomeh.

What has recently attracted more interest are the geometric patterns made of black glazed and unglazed terracotta pieces in several spandrels and a porch next to the mentioned main pishtaq.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It had been suggested that they represent the so far only discovered example of an almost perfect Penrose tiling which had been created 500 years before their description in the West [3]. In their meticulous reconstruction using the famous “kite-and-dart” type of Penrose tiling, Peter J. Lu and Paul J. Steinhardt very much focus on a spandrel which in fact matches almost perfectly with a Penrose tiling [4].

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What makes this tiling so unique may be the subdivision rule painstakingly elaborated by Lu and Steinhardt:

“Perhaps the most striking innovation arising from the application of girih tiles was the use of self-similarity transformation (the subdivision of large girih tiles into smaller ones) to create overlapping patterns at two different length scales, in which each pattern is generated by the same girih tile shapes.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It has been questioned whether the pattern on the spandrel is really self-similar. The difference between the large and small scales is very big. In their analysis, Lu and Steinhardt create the spandrel itself by four large length scale decagons and two bowties, while the small scale consists of three girih tiles, the decagon, the bowtie and the elongated hexagon. So, where is the large-scale elongated hexagon [5]? Can it be that it has been overlooked?

 

The pattern is in fact aperiodic. There is only one small-scale area in the whole spandrel which resembles the large-scale pattern: in the upper right corner. The area with the corresponding (yellow) borders of the small-scale spandrel is shown in the picture below. Here, a part of the (green) elongated hexagon shows in the lower corner.

Thus, the large-scale spandrel may be reconstructed in a different way, shown below. Although the bold blue lines do not exactly fit, the reconstruction here seems to support the concept of self-similarity and aperiodicity of the tiling on this particular spandrel of the Darb-i Imam[6].

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Notes

[1] The historical city with its huge bazaar had been cut by Kh. Abdorrazaqq into two halves some 40 years ago in an attempt of urbanization.

[2] The complex contains the tombs of two descendants of Imam Ali from Safavid times, Ibrahim Tabatabai and Zain al-Abedin Ali.

[3] Penrose himself had been inspired by Johannes Kepler’s Harmonices Mundi (1619), where he constructed tilings around regular pentagons which can be extended into Penrose tilings. Pentilings, i.e. arrangements of regular pentagons in the plane in which each pentagon makes edge-to-edge contact with two, three, four, or five neighbors, thereby sharing vertices in such a way that no gaps large enough to contain another pentagon are left in the array, have even been described by Albrecht Dürer in 1525.

[4] In the supporting online material for their article in Science, Lu and Steinhardt (2007) have suggested, based on a more than 40-year-old photograph that the tiling on the western iwan of Esfahan’s Friday mosque can be subdivided in the same way as that on the Darb-i Imam. Meanwhile, it has been shown that the patterns are different and that the one on the Friday mosque contains, in addition to a decagon, an elongated hexagon and a bowtie, a fourth girih tile, a rhomb (see an illustration of the girih tiles here). The pattern is, in addition, periodic, similar as the pattern on the Gonbad-e Qabud in Maraghah, which had been constructed in fact 250 years earlier.

[5] While Lu and Steinhardt had elaborated only a subdivision of a decagon and a bowtie by smaller-scale decagons, elongated hexagons and bowties (see below), P. R. Cromwell has recently presented a corresponding subdivision of the hexagon.

[6] Respective spandrels can be found everywhere in Esfahan, not only on the Darb-i Imam. They seem to have been very popular during Safavid times.

Swine Flu

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Egypt had experienced several deaths caused by the highly virulent H5N1 (“birds’ flu”) virus. However, culling pigs might be the most stupid action in fighting the developing pandemic. No pig has so far been infected by the H1N1 virus. It is a human virus. When the Egyptian government had ordered the other day slaughtering all 400’000 pigs in the country this should in fact be regarded a hostile and discriminating act of inhumanity against the some 500’000 Christians in the country. While pigs are considered unclean by most Muslims so are to one degree or the other the other “People of the Book” as well.

The Egyptian government has promised to pay compensation for the culling which is said to be a preventive measure for avoiding any panic among the Muslim majority in the country. One has to ask the question, what does panic mean here, anew pogroms among Christians? Education of the masses might be a better investvent in the future of any Muslim country. Pigs are not less clean than other animals. Not to talk about human beings.

 

See also on this blog

The book review of Daniel Tsadik’s study about anti-Semitism in 19^th century’s Iran.