Gavin,
    Ah, but don't you know that the Devil invented history just to confound
us? I plead poetic license at any rate.
    "Ah, Mephistopheles, I'll burn my books." MARLOWE
    "Ana'l-haqq" ("I am the Real") HALLAJ

Charlie



> From: Francis Gavin <[log in to unmask]>
> Reply-To: - Ezra Pound discussion list of the University of Maine
> <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Sat, 14 Jan 2006 02:50:33 -0700
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Big "G" and the orthodox heresy /Re: Pound panel(s) at the ALA?
> 
> And a neat trick too, Charlie, since Hallaj was executed by Mutawwakil in
> Baghdad in 922 and Avicenna wasn't born until 980. Hallaj, like Servitus was
> also burned alive, not hanged.
> 
> Apparently despite all the serene comforts of Sufism,  Hallaj did not die
> well. There is a lineage out of all of that too -- Christians weren't burned
> alive for heresy until after the Crusades were well under way and they got
> to see the Muslims execute their heretics that way.
> 
> Kind of like the way the Romans admired crucifixion so much they just had to
> steal it from the Carthaginians. Borges once suggested that god created the
> Punic wars just so the Romans would adopt crucifixion and be his instrument
> of suicide some two centuries later -- a narrowing down of the notion that
> god created the world just so he'd have a place to kill himself. And if that
> ain't heresy, I don't know what is.
> 
> GAVIN
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> on 1/13/06 5:15 AM, Charles Moyer at [log in to unmask] wrote:
> 
> 
>> Avicenna's main work, PHILOSOPHIA ORIENTALIS, in which he may have clarified
>> his rationalizations for big "G" further is lost, probably the last copy was
>> used to light the fire that burned Michael Servitus or kicked out from under
>> the feet of the hanging Mansur ibn al-Hallaj.