Up the Creek:
Crossing Cultures: Transcending History

Fatima al Fahri, Founder of al-Qarawiyin University; Fez, Morocco
Courtesy of 1001 Inventions

In the spring and summer of 2006, Executive Editor Kim Nagy and I interviewed a group of scientists, architects, artists and writers who had gathered to create installations representing their work in an interactive park called Quark Park on a vacant lot in the heart of Princeton, New Jersey. One of the participants was molecular biologist Paul Schimmel whose work was cited by Nature Magazine as one of the developments that launched the Human Genome Project.

Nagy sat down with Schimmel in an installation constructed by sculptor Robert Canon –  fragments of mirrors suspended from a lattice and etched in tiny letters symbolizing the genetic code, the fragments flickering sunlight and random patterns against white walls.

There, Schimmel talked about the origin, unpredictability, and connectedness of all life forms. And how research and discovery requires collaboration between scientists, poets, and artists across cultures.

Our meeting with Dr. Schimmel led to another meeting with his daughter Katherine Schimmel-Baki, now Director of Global Partnerships for Wild River Review, whose dissertation at Harvard College centered around the Adhan, the Muslim Call to Prayer, specifically in Cairo, Egypt.  At the time, I was in the process of researching and co-writing a book about my travels in Turkey; and Kim and I were interested in the growth of Sufism as expressed by the mystic and poet, Jellaludin Rumi. We soon learned that Katherine’s aunt Annemarie Schimmel was one of the world’s foremost Islamic scholars and an expert on Sufism.

In a post 9/11 world, our shared experience compelled us to tell a different story than what was being presented in most of the mainstream press. And so, we began regular coverage of stories centered in the Middle and Near East; and Katherine began her ongoing series, The Mystic Pen, featuring her aunt’s last semester of lectures at Harvard University.

In the global community of the Internet, the series came to the attention of Yassir Salem and the team who created 1001 Inventions – Muslim Heritage in our World, which is how we journeyed to the New York Hall of Science in Queens to visit the interactive exhibition that has traveled from Istanbul to London, and now the U.S. 

1001 Inventions highlights how science is and has been a global endeavor, how during the Dark Ages in Europe, a flowering was occurring throughout the Muslim world.

We recently spoke with Dr. Margaret Honey, CEO of the New York Hall of Science about the exhibition and science in general, how expanding our knowledge of science and its history can contribute to a vibrant educational future. 

In 2009, through our work with the PEN American Center’s annual festival of literature, PEN WORLD VOICES, we attended the Arthur Miller Freedom to Write Lecture honoring Nawal el Saadawi, who, today at 80 years old has become a voice for the independence movement in Egypt.

As a young girl, Saadawi was circumcised. (According to Saadawi, 97% of Egyptian woman are genitally mutilated.) But her parents believed in education for girls – a rarity at the time – and had dreams that she would become a doctor. And so she went to medical school.

“Writers should study science,” she says. “I learned and wrote about bone and got to see the heart and the light of the flesh. Seeing death every day helped me link death to life. There is no separation between the physical and the spiritual. And we must remember that there is no safe place.  I can have a car accident. I think that death and life are one and to be afraid of death is the major reason writers don’t put down on the page what they really think.”

In, The Forgotten Children of Abraham, Katherine Schimmel-Baki interviews John L. Esposito, Professor of Religion and International Affairs and of Islamic Studies at Georgetown University, who says,  “It is difficult today to appreciate how much the religious landscape of America and our awareness of Islam and the Muslim world has changed since the late 1960s. In less than forty years Islam and Muslim politics have moved from nowhere to everywhere, from obscurity to center stage in international politics, media coverage and our neighborhoods, schools and the workplace. This all stands in stark contrast with the demographics and expectations in America in the mid-twentieth century.”

Cultural Anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson speaks with WRR correspondent and author of the Ask the Philosopher column, Bill Cole-Kiernan, about a new stage of life she calls Adulthood II.

Bateson, 70, the daughter of philosopher Gregory Bateson and cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead, currently serves as a Visiting Scholar at the Center on Aging & Work/Workplace Flexibility at Boston College.

There are many jokes about the “natural alliance” between grandchildren and grandparents,” she says. “Why not strengthen that alliance and make it politically effective? Younger adults are often under too much pressure to think beyond next week’s demands, while teenagers and children feel that they have no voice. 

In her novel, Blood Grip, Constance Rose Sparrow traces her family’s history back to her great-grandmother Rose’s West-African Yoruba ancestry.

“Some 50 years ago, my Virginia-bred mother, Cleoria Coleman Sparrow, did something straight out of West Africa,” says Sparrow. “The moment a certain visitor left the house, my mother swept from where he had last stood all the way out to the street.

“Why’d you do that?” I said.  “The floor’s clean.”

“To get rid of his presence so he won’t come back.

That sweeping was a legacy from the Yoruba religion and sister traditions like Vodun(Voodoo), Akan, Palo and Santeria that crossed the Atlantic with the slave trade.

My mother was reared, in part, by my great-grandmother, Rose Wilson Ware, or Maw, born into slavery in Spotsylvania County, Virginia.  She lived from about 1851 to 1964, 113 years, and passed on some ways that echoed West Africa to my mother: the reliance on plant medicine, a gift of prescience and an ability to sense spirits.

Contributing Editor, Joseph Glantz, returns with his series Interviews with the Famously Departed, and profiles playwright George Bernard Shaw.

Shaw was born July 26, 1856, in Dublin, Ireland, and died in England on November 2, 1950. Shaw wrote sixty plays dealing with social problems but used humor as a means to lighten the message. He was a noted socialist. His play “Pygmalion” was made into the musical, My Fair Lady.

According to Shaw, “the worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that’s the essence of inhumanity.” (The Devil’s Disciple, Act II; 1901)

Cultural Philosopher and Thinking Otherwise columnist William Irwin Thompson turns to poetry and an iPad to make sense of our era. In his poem, On Reading The Penguin Book of English Verse on my iPad and Exercise Bike, Thompson writes of his own Irish heritage with an eye toward Fatima al Fahri, Annemarie Schimmel, Nawal el Saadawi and Mary Catherine Bateson, women whose stories must be part of a 21st century canon.

Here too are the Irish women poets.
It’s now not only Heaney and Longley,
Kinsella, Carson, Mahon and Muldoon,
but Eiléan Ní Cuhuilleanáin,
Eavan Boland, Nualla Ní Dhomhnaill.
We Yanks also have those touched by Brigid.
Why should only the men be vatic bards
when there are wild sybils the gods ride hard?