My Babbling Brain

امروز برزیل به غنای ده نفره در جام جهانی فوتبال نوجوانان باخت و حذف شد.

قبل از مسابقه، روی برد برزیل شرط بستم ولی بازی که شروع شد، دیدم خیلی ضیعفه. با این وجود وقتی غنا ده نفره شد، قدری امیدوار شدم.

اما وقتی غنا همون اوایل نیمه دوم گل زد، فوری رفتم روی غنا شرط گذاشتم، با این که ریسک مساوی و باطل شدن شرطم هم بالا بود.

اگه این باخت رو کنار ناکامی اخیر والیبال نوجوانان و زنان برزیل بذارین و یه یادی هم از قهرمانی ایتالیا در جام جهانی فوتبال کنین، می بینین برزیل دیگه سلطان نیست.

جدا تا دیر نشده، دوستان آبادانی باید به فکر پرچم تازه ای برای تیم فوتبالشون باشن!

اولین روز تنیس اوپن آمریکا به خیر گذشت. یعنی ستاره ها غافلگیر نشدند و به ما شرط بندها ضد حال نزدند، ولی شرط بندی روی آدمهایی مثل راجر فدرر و خواهران ویلیامز یا ژوستین انن خیلی گرون تموم می شه.

مثلا اگه بخواین روی برد فدرر مقابل یه حریف گمنام شرط ببندین، بایستی هفتصد و پنجاه پوند بذارین وسط تا آخرش فقط یه پوند گیرتون بیاد. چه بسا هم طرف ببازه و این همه پول خاکستر بشه.

حالا اگه روی برد حریف جویای نام فدرر شرط بخوابونین، به ازای هر پوند، فقط بیست و دو پوند نصیبتون می شه. من که نمی فهمم این چه تناسبیه!

تنها راه پول درآوردن از این مسابقه های بزرگ اینه که اولا بطور زنده شرط ببندین و بعد بذارین طرف یکی دو امتیاز یا گیم بگیره، اون وقت روی این که ست اول رو مثلا سرنا ویلیامز می بره شرط بذارین.

سرنا ویلیامز بر خلاف خواهرش ونوس مسابقه اول رو خیلی ضعیف برد. تا دلتون بخواد خطا داشت و مقادیری هم به حاجی کنزینگتون ضرر زد. ولی ایشالا خدا واسه خواهرش بسازه. عجب خانوم نجیب و پولسازیه!

از حالا می خوام در مورد سرگرمی تازه ام بنویسم: شرط بندی. دو هفته است که آنلاین شرط می بندم. از فوتبال گرفته تا والیبال زنان و اسبدوانی. برد و باخت داره ولی هیجانش از دنبال کردن بازیهای سیاسی بیشتره.

Miles Levin was determined to have his say in life, even with cancer ravaging his young body.

So when he died Sunday, six days before his 19th birthday, he had blogged a lifetime of thoughts and dreams, words that somehow pierced through cyberspace and moved tens of thousands of readers to respond.

He isn’t the only person to have written about a dying man’s journey, but his wit and wisdom and choice of words, captured the imagination of his readers.

His wisdom was sought by parents of dying children, those recovering from the brink of death, even ordinary people captivated by his enjoyment of life in the face of death.

I love life

On earth, among the pines and the fig trees

But I can’t reach it, so I took aim

With the last thing that belonged to me.

Mahmoud Darwish

Source: Freedom Next Time by John Pilger

*Shias had failed to dominate the Islamic world theologically or politically and had faced the pains and perils of marginality. The modern state showed a path forward that was free of baggage of their religious identity. In Iran nationalism did not have these connotations , because Shias were a majority but where Shias were a minority or ruled by Sunnis, nationalism appealed to them in the same way that inclusive ideologies attract minorities. The promise however proved to be illusory as the modern states grew increasingly authoritarian. The promise of the modern state has eluded them as secular nationalism has been colonized from within by Sunni hegemony.

Ibn Taymiya (d. 1328) saw the Shia as the enemy within, guilty of polluting Islam… The surge of extremist Sunnism that troubles the Muslim world and hence the globe today is unimaginable without this one long-dead jurist. He saw worldly success as the most obvious measure of God’s favor.

The depth of Shia anger at Palestinians and Arab nationalism became evident in 1982, when the Shia greeted the invading Israeli army as liberators, with flowers and open arms. “Palestinians had been expanding in disturbing ways” and it was time for the Lebanese scene to free itself from the burden of the Palestinian program,” argued Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah.

Abol-Gasem al-Khoi saw velayat-e-faqih as an innovation with no support in Shia theology or law. He showed his disdain by sending the shah an agate ring along with a special prayer at the height of the Iranian revolution in late 1978.

No other country in the Muslim world is so rife with intellectual fervor and cultural experimentation at all levels of society and in no place in the Muslim world is modernity and its various cultural, political and economic instruments examined as seriously and thoroughly as in Iran. The cultural dynamism of the country will also be a force that will define the Shia revival.

For Mesbah-Yazd, Qom’s mission is no longer just to produce Shia men of learning but to produce the country’s political and bureaucratic elite-the guardians of the revolution.

*The Shia Revival by Vali Nasr

*Faith and identity converge in this (Shia and Sunni) conflict, and their combined power goes a long way toward explaining why, despite the periods of coexistence, the struggle has lasted so long and retains such urgency and significance. It is not just a hoary religious dispute, a fossilized set-piece from the early years of Islam’s unfolding, but a contemporary clash of identities. It is paradoxically, a very old, very modern conflict.

The dominant political values of the old Middle East are a decades-old vintage of Arab nationalism. The new Middle East coming fitfully into being is defined in equal parts by the identity of Shias.

Ultimately the character of the region will be decided in the crucible of Shia revival and the Sunni response to it.

Ashura’s powerful focus on sorrow and pageantry has a parallel in Catholic Lenten rituals, such as the Holy Week and Good Friday “Way of the Cross” processions and Passion plays. Even the more extreme practices of some of the Shias resemble rituals such as the Penitententes, a lay Catholic brotherhood originally formed on the Iberian Peninsula.

If Sunnism is about law, Shiism is about rituals, passion and drama. Before there was Shia law, there was Shia piety, which defines believers above and beyond law. The current excessive legal-mindedness of Iran’s ayatollahs is in some ways a “Sunnification” of Shiism.

*The Shia Revival by Vali Nasr

Novels are implicitly pluralistic.

In The Curtain, Milan Kundera argues that the special virtue of the novel lies in its ability to part “the magic curtain, woven of legends,” that hangs between us and the ordinary world. If Cervantes rent the curtain that separate us from the prose of the ordinary life, Kafka tore it down. After Kafka, according to Kundera, the novel entered a realm where reality could “never correspond to people’s idea of it;” from now on, the novel would be a constant witness to the “unavoidable relativism of human truths.”

One of the great virtues of the novel, according to J M Coetzee, is to teach us that there is no perfect way of carving up the world or recounting stories. This is a lesson that bears on politics as well, counting against political aspiration that arises from nationality, identity or tribal loyalty.

As novelists know well, fantasies generate realities. Mario Vargas Losa

An article in Prospect by Jonathan Ree