Calligraphy

An  online story around Pakistan’s top diplomat in Canada has been circulating on facebook.
Newspapers and magazines, including Foreign Policy and The Atlantic, posted the news on their websites that originated in blogs, alleging that Akbar Zeb was denied entry to Saudi Arabia because of what has been called his “porn star” name, which in Arabic could mean ‘‘the Greatest Penis’‘.

Zeb’s name, perfectly innocuous in his native Urdu, is Persian in origin.

زیب pronounced Zeeb, in Farsi and Zeib in Dari means the attribution of Beauty, like Aurang Zeeb the Moghul Ruler, but written as  زب it has quite another meaning in Arabic, if pronounced as Zob.

But Zeb says the entire thing is a nonsense. “It must be someone playing a practical joke because I’ve never been appointed to Saudi Arabia and they’ve never asked for my agreement. It’s a prank that someone’s playing on the Internet.”

The news initially appeared on several blogs and then variations of the story started appearing in online posts in news sources such as the Jerusalem Post, National Review, The Atlantic Online and Foreign Policy.

When I read this I thought, rather uncharitably, it serves him right.

Had he spelt his name as Zeeb (like in Farsi) no one would have read Zeb for Zob!

We Iranians are always puzzled by the Anglo-Indian system of transliteration, the one used by Zeb, which transliterates شیر Sheer (lion, or tiger in Afghanistan) as Sher, but  گِل Gel (mud) becomes Gil and Del becomes Dil. In other words they use the ‘kasr’ as the letter ‘i’ and the letter Ya becomes ‘e’.

It is as if the Glaswegian accent were to be set as the standard for international English; causing incomprehension and mayhem everywhere.

But the whole thing reminded me of a foot-note, recounted by an acquaintance Jason Elliot, in his book ‘Mirrors of the Unseen’ about the presentation of the Greek Ambassador to Tehran, Kyriakos, to the court of Reza Shah.

‘Kir’ in Persian is the male organ and ‘Kos’ the female. Ya means ’or’.

‘Well?‘ demanded the outraged Shah from a stammering chamberlain. ’Which is he? – kir ya kos? If he has not made up his mind throw him out!’

Diplomatic relations between Greece and Iran were severed the same day.  (Mirrors of the Unseen, Journeys in Iran, by Jason Elliot, P. 400).

Unlike the Zeb story, this story, I believe is not apocryphal.  A better illustration of the illiterate Shah’s  ignorance and cruelty,  I cannot imagine.

Een ham meegozarad, it said.

I put it up in the edit suite.

Nima came in and in that authoritarian tone that we have come to know and love, said it was wrong. It should be Een neez bogzarad. I said it was the Afghan version, he looked unconvinced.

Then Adel noticed it two days later.

He said tentatively: Is it not wrong and should it not be Een neez bogzarad?

I said it was the Afghan version, he looked confused.

I heard that Amir Payvar had come to do a voice over. He had said why is this funny, should it not be a bit different, etc. etc.

I thought to myself, This Too Will Pass.

The calligraphy was made on the Maryam software by a Scottish friend. He was referring to a story by Attar in Idries Shah’s book, The Way of the Sufi. It describes a King who was a bit bi-polar and went from sadness and depression to madness and elation with catastrophic results, as he was entrusted with running a kingdom. So he asked his courtiers for something that would stabilise his mood. The courtiers went off racking their brains but could not think of anything  but then they noticed that someone had scrawled in the dust with their finger a legend. They wrote this on a ring and gave it to the king to wear. Whenever he had a mood swing he would look at the ring and see that it had inscribed on it:

”This Too Will Pass”.

The Farsi speaking friend, who made the calligraphy above, actually found a ring with this motto on it in Kabul, in the 1970’s,and he testifies to its effectiveness. Needless to say that the wording on that ring was closer to the Attar original, Een HamMeegozarad, and not the modern Iranian version, Een neez bogzarad!

You may have seen what Meir Javedanfar, the Iranian born Israeli analyst, wrote in the Guardian last week . Not only is Mahmoud  Ahamadinejad not a former Jew, but his mother is a Sayyeda, i.e. descendant of the prophet and member of the prestigious Hashemite clan.

This business about  Ahmadinejad’s mother being a Sayyeda… it reminds me of the story of The Magic Box in  Idries Shah’s book The Way of the Sufi,

[It is related by Attar of Nishapur, that] a man once wanted to sell a rough carpet and he made a public offer of it in the street.  The first man he showed it said:

‘This is a coarse carpet and very worn.’

And he bought it cheaply. Then the buyer stood up and said to another who was walking along:

‘Here is a carpet soft as silk, none is like it.’

A Sufi who was passing by had listened to the buying and the attempted selling of one and the same carpet with two different discriptions.

The Sufi said to the carpet seller:

‘Please, carpet-man, put me in your magic box, which can turn a rough carpet into a smooth one, perhaps a nothing into a jewel!.

When this chappy first appeared the Iranian media told us he was the son of a blacksmith and of humble working class roots. That was the big deal: why can’t the son of a blacksmith be President?

Now they have changed some of the detail. (Father is no longer a blacksmith. Grandfather was a weaver, the voice from Tel Aviv tells us). Before he was a nobody of dubious origins- but since he went into the Magic Box of political power, he has become a Sayyed and Royalty.

From Meir Javedanfar’s tone, I gather  that Ahmadinejad is right now Israel’s greatest asset. By playing up to the “Existential Threat” scenario, he allows Israel to conduct business as usual. A Moussavi victory would have been a nightmare for the Israelis and their allies. As long as there is an Existential Threat, Israel can have a License to kill as well as receive tens of Billions in aid, plus every other imaginable perk that a nation could get. Without the Existential Threat, it would have to come clean about its 250 Nuclear Warheads and open up Dimona, stop building settlements, give back the Golan Heights and forgo getting more US aid than all the rest of the world put together, and the massive donations to the Likud party from 50 million American evangelists might also slow up a bit.

Perhaps Meir  should tell the Israelis that they could make Ahmadinejad an honorary Jew after all, and save him a burial place on the Mount of Olives next to that other veteran of Iran-Israel relations, Robert Maxwell, while they are at it.

Someone was asking why I had added a clip from Bani Sadr regarding the 1988 shooting down of the Iran Air Flight 655 on my Facebook page. The Americans had given a medal to the guy who had pulled the trigger.

Reason was I wanted to bring up the context for the escalation of violence; i.e. Lockerbie.

Bani Sadr had then gone on to say that the Iranians had paid a Palestinian group $10 million to bring down an American passenger plane.

The other day I read that the policewoman in charge of the operation that killed Jean Charles de Menezes has been promoted to a top job looking after the Royal Family. Lord knows how this makes his family feel.

I am not going to go into why de Menezes was killed, or if he knew anything about 7/7 which might have been the result of a conspiracy.

But there was a conspiracy around Lockerbie, and the investigative journalists who dung around it, like Allan Francovich who made the Maltese Double Cross came to a sticky end.

Create consent and silence people with medals and promotions but if that does not work then give them a nerve agent that evaporates and leaves no mark.

There is a calligraphy on the cover of the book ‘The Sufis’ which is in the shape of a boat. You have to turn it round to see it.
It is an illustration of the way calligraphy is used to produce figurative images.
Today I have received an invite from Iranian Business School Project for a ticketed dinner to mark the launch of their project.
It has a piece of calligraphy on the front of the card, in what appears to be the shape of an erect penis.

Is it a private joke by the designer who was not paid properly, or are the sponsors of the event having a laugh after they have screwed the great and the good of the Iranian community for the £130 tickets?