--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "authfriend" <jst...@...> wrote: > > --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "WillyTex" <willytex@> wrote: > > > > authfriend: > > > Not surprsingly, this is yet another falsehood > > > designed to smear Rauf and his project: > > > Now obviously, these are Muslim historians > > > writing two-to-three-hundred years after > > > the events they describe... > > I did not write the last three lines above, as you > know. You imported them and pretended you were > quoting me. > > As you also know, the notion that the name "Cordoba" > is somehow incendiary is false. > > "Imam Feisal says he chose 'Cordoba' in recollection > of a time when the rest of Europe had sunk into the > Dark Ages but Muslims, Jews and Christians created an > oasis of art, culture and science."
Some months ago I watched a most inspiring program on Cordoba by art historian Andrew Graham-Dixon (The Art of Spain). Unfortunately I don't think it's easy to watch outside the UK. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b008wthr I say "inspiring" as it gave an intimation of a "better life", an idea of what an "age of enlightenment" might look like: a comfortable marriage of religion, philosophy, science, learning, sensual and aesthetic pleasure, and religious and social tolerance. I don't know if it was all true, or just over-sold by Graham- Dixon. But I found it really impressive! >From a review: "When the invading Moors - the Arabs and Berbers of north Africa - took Córdoba in 711, they made it into one of the great cities of the world. In the congenial environment of Andalusia they created a culture that could also encompass the other two peoples "of the book", Christians and Jews, with a rare degree of enlightenment. They made every aspect of life - eating, drinking, bathing - into a work of art, and had a deep commitment to learning. Their grasp of mathematics overflowed spectacularly into the intricate patterns that filled every inch of their most splendid buildings. The motivation was religious - to avoid the representation of God or living beings - and the combination of ornate decoration with water-filled gardens at the Alhambra palace in Granada came close to creating the illusion that paradise, the garden that awaits the righteous, can be made on Earth." http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2008/jan/31/art By the by, he also visited the church of levitating nun Teresa of Ávila in the series. >From Wiki: ...the ascent of the soul in four stages (The Autobiography Chs. 10-22): The first, or "mental prayer", is that of devout contemplation or concentration, the withdrawal of the soul from without and specially the devout observance of the passion of Christ and penitence (Autobiography 11.20). The second is the "prayer of quiet", in which at least the human will is lost in that of God by virtue of a charismatic, supernatural state given of God, while the other faculties, such as memory, reason, and imagination, are not yet secure from worldly distraction. While a partial distraction is due to outer performances such as repetition of prayers and writing down spiritual things, yet the prevailing state is one of quietude (Autobiography 14.1). The "devotion of union" is not only a supernatural but an essentially ecstatic state. Here there is also an absorption of the reason in God, and only the memory and imagination are left to ramble. This state is characterized by a blissful peace, a sweet slumber of at least the higher soul faculties, a conscious rapture in the love of God. The fourth is the "devotion of ecstasy or rapture," a passive state, in which the consciousness of being in the body disappears (2 Corinthians 12:2-3). Sense activity ceases; memory and imagination are also absorbed in God or intoxicated. Body and spirit are in the throes of a sweet, happy pain, alternating between a fearful fiery glow, a complete impotence and unconsciousness, and a spell of strangulation, intermitted sometimes by such an ecstatic flight that the body is literally lifted into space. This after half an hour is followed by a reactionary relaxation of a few hours in a swoon-like weakness, attended by a negation of all the faculties in the union with God. From this the subject awakens in tears; it is the climax of mystical experience, productive of the trance. (Indeed, she was said to have been observed levitating during Mass on more than one occasion.)
