tree killer, killed by tree

I don’t like to backbite but there are some people who need to be remembered because they were sufficiently bad to stand out despite the centuries of years that separate them from us.  One of them is Mutawakkil (born March 822, Iraq—died December 861).  One of his party pieces was that when he wanted to make merry he would summon his ministers, councillors and functionaries to his presence and let loose a box of scorpions in the assembly and forbid anyone to move.  A real fun kind of guy to have around.  Indeed, when someone was stung he would burst forth in boisterous laughter.

He immediately tore down synagogues and churches in Baghdad.  Then he razed to the ground the famous Islamic shrine of Husayn Ali and did not allow pilgrimages to take place there.  The tomb of Husayn ibn Ali is one of the holiest places for Shias outside of Mecca and Medina.  In case you are thinking why would a Muslim like Mutawakki seek to eradicate such a special place, it has to be remembered he was a Sunni and regarded this shrine as a Shia site.  Such was the hostility towards the Shias that even remembering the death of Husayn Ali, grandson of Muhammad, was not to be tolerated.  Muhammad had clearly indicated that other religious groups like the Christians and Jews should be protected and allowed to practice their religion.  So it is typical of Mutawakkil that he totally ignored this and only a little over two hundred years after the death of Muhammad began to target the Jews and Christians.

 He reversed the tolerant attitude towards Christians and Jews that Muhammad had insisted on, and requiring them to wear distinctive dress. In 850, he decreed that all "people of the book" must wear "honey-coloured" hats and belts, churches and synagogue built "after the advent of Islam were to be destroyed," one-tenth of their property confiscated and government posts were closed to them.

Anyone that Mutawakkil felt had offended him, even prior to his reign, was dealt with cruelly.  The former Vizier was tortured in an iron maiden (don’t ask!).   Even a small accident could be costly.  One of his own military commanders stumbled during a drinking session and fell on the caliph, this was enough to have the commander sent to prison without water, killing him slowly and painfully.

Even the oldest religion in the land was not left immune.  Zoroastrianism, established in the 6th century BC, held in deep respect a Cypress tree in Turshiz, Khurasan.  It had been planted at the time of Zoroaster and was thought to be 1450 years old.  Zoroaster (or else his patron King Gushtasp, i.e. Vishtaspa) had actually planted the tree outside a temple. 

“Doing good to others is not a duty. It is a joy, for it increases your own health and happiness.”

Quote from Zoroaster (c.628 - c.551)

This cypress tree was said to be unique in beauty, height, and size. It was considered one of the wonders of Khurasan.  (In case one doubts the ability of the cypress tree to reach such an age, one need only examine the e-Abarkooh – Abarkooh, in Iran.  This is cypress is 4000 years old. see photo above) Al-Mutawakkil was told about this special tree in Khurasan and was anxious to see it.  Typical of the man he ordered that it be cut down and brought to him!  Naturally, when the people of Khurasan heard of his order there was much uproar and they even offered money for its preservation.  Unfortunately, Mutawakkil was not a man to be turned.  The huge tree of such historical and religious significance was hewn down and transported to Mutawakkil’s palace.  It is suitably ironic that the day it arrived at his palace Mutawakkil was stabbed to death at the hand of one of his slaves. 

The Best of my blog - three years review

It has been three years since I started my blog and I have more than 292 postings in that time.  At last I have had a chance to reflect on which ones were the most popular.  Thanks to technology, exactly how many people viewed each blog is clear.  At times that has become an embarrassment as the figures have been depressingly low.  But certain blogs attracted more than usual traffic and I wondered why?  Surely, there is learning to be had there?  So the research is in.  Here are the facts. The links to the individual blog entries are on the left (clicking on those titles wil take you straight to the story).  My conclusions are given below the table.  Hope you enjoy some that you may  have missed the first time around!

Title	date	View count	What was it about
Dragging my entrails behind me	08/01/2014	130	An account of my total humiliation
Unusual Sunbathers	13/12/2013	225	Unusual take on sunbathing - poem
my take on smoking - a gentle approach to encourage stopping	28/11/2013	209	An anti smoking lesson for school that turned stomachs
Raised Eyebrows and Demented in Dubai	20/07/2013	413	Sleepless in airport and losing it
My father was upset about the library being burned	14/01/2013	653	Childhood misunderstandings of everything
So leaders can be killers and often are	03/12/2012	181	Why leaders are usually worse than us
Old age isn’t a battle, old age is a massacre.	28/09/2012	177	Aging is a bitch
Malta and its underground tunnel s	06/09/2012	719	Malta’s amazing tunnels
Torturing flies, cruelty and making sense of it all	26/05/2012	213	Stopping my son being a killer
My Two Minds	20/05/2012	137	Linguists are lucky
Ain’t I a woman? and The Real Good poems	26/04/2012	103	Poems that speak to me but are not by me
Why do Dogs Eat Shit?	22/02/2012	214	Why we eat shit too
Laura Is A Pig and What Can We Do?	22/01/2012	294	me bullying at school
Trison - a story	17/01/2012	103	How to get pay from a boss
Saturday	14/01/2012	101	Beating the beater with art
short story	11/01/2012	179	Getting thrown out with my Dad

Conclusions

1. I have not written anything of real worth this whole year (nothing that got over a 100 page views) all of the above are from years ago. 
2. Accounts of the burning of the Great Library of Alexander and Malta's tunnels were by far the favourites.  Obviously, I should stick to history and cultural accounts?
3. It has earned me an embarrassingly small amount of money (5.03 euros in three years), but boy have I enjoyed it.

Making Failure An Art Form - or falling with style

I have come to momentous moment in my life. At this stage, when there are no longer children around to focus on it is time to examine oneself with clarity.  To see where I have come from, where exactly I am now and hopefully to look forward to the path ahead. It is a eureka moment indeed to reflect on life. What one has achieved, or hasn’t.  What choices lead to which results. It looks a bit like an underground tube station map. There are main lines along which one has spent a disproportionate amount of energy and time. Then, there are the numerous dead ends. Lines that seem to beckon appealingly but end nowhere. Here are a few.

My unproductive knitting hobby. I never managed to finish single item. I even had a knitting machine with which I wrestled but produced nothing of value.  Looking back at primary school we had to knit a cushion cover. It took an entire year. Those were the days when the whole class would sit obediently knitting in complete silence for an hour a day. Educationalists would hold their heads in outrage at the waste of time it entailed.  The lack of academic content. Question the learning objectives and value of skills acquired. Point out the demanded silence was a form of abuse against talkative young eager minds. But if I'm honest I enjoyed knitting more than almost all my other classes.  There was a meditative silent stillness in the room. Just a click click of needles. You knew the task. The method was straightforward and when you returned to your work you could see visible progress each day. It achieved something. Your brain could find a stillness in the moment.  In the year, I almost finished my cushion cover. My tendency to knit tighter and tighter until the needles could barely get through the stitches meant I had a lot of ripping out and re-doing to do. My cushion cover which started almost a foot wide gradually narrowed down to 2/3 of its original width. This was disappointing but accepted as part of the journey. The knitting class became a metaphor for the rest of life. Sometimes you make a pigs ear out of things and have to go back to fix it. It's okay you get better each time you repeat something. Spotting a slip earlier rather than later helps. Missing a single stitch is not an option. You have to keep each and every one to have success. Don't waste time comparing your cushion cover with others. You'll be devastated by how far ahead they’ve got and what nicer colours they’ve chosen.  

My failed martial arts ability. Fuelled by movies I was convinced that I could get my black belt and go through life confident in every situation. It did make me fitter but I got no further than the yellow belt. That is not something one can boast or swagger about.  The kata were wonderful. I would go to an empty gym near my home and put on a cassette player (yes, that far back) and do the karate moves hypnotically until it felt as meditative as the knitting. I did not like spar fighting. It involves being punched and kicked and I was fearful of both. For some reason I was usually paired with a curly haired tough looking girl who would fight arms flailing like a paddle steamer round and round. It was impossible to block those blows as we been taught in karate and so I'd spend an inordinate amount of the fight running backwards around the mat. Fortunately, she wasn’t fit and usually ran out of steam before she could do me much harm. I learnt a lot. I do not like to be hurt and did not enjoy hurting others. So it was worth all the years of classes and is a somewhat valuable dead-end.

My inability to lose weight. I have kept diaries almost all my life and at the top from the very earliest I have recorded my weight in stones and pounds with despair. I look back at those weights with longing and wonder why on earth I obsessed about it.  If I knew then what I know now, I would have chilled out about being 10 stone. Now I dream of being under 11 stone. Elderly aunts used to say I had big bones, it drove me mad as an adolescent. I reckoned there were big dinosaur girls like me and other tiny fragile girls. I with my big bones obviously belong to the former group. These tiny birdlike aunts belonged to the latter category. I often broke things, handles off doors, cups, even windows and was terrified I might injure these elderly visitors with their matchstick arms, legs and necks. But they were tougher then they seemed and made me feel guilty and awkward. When today, I look at magazine covers of slim women staring out with razor cheekbones at slender bodies, I realise that such shapes are more appreciated than my broader lines. As a tall,sturdy, Yorkshire police woman friend of mine once moaned “if I'm reincarnated, I'm coming back as one of those butterfly women whose cases others have to carry!”  While there is genuine despair at the yearly expansion of quantity, regarding fat, perversely I'm infinitely grateful for being able to haul heavy gas cylinders up flights of stairs. After all quality (strength) trumps quantity (of fat content) every time.

My last dead end is an inner critical voice.   This strident voice has been heard echoing  through the decades. “You'll never pass, achieve or amount to anything!” How many initiatives died a death under the whithering machine gun of its cutting comments. Instead of pressing on to finish that knitting, get that black-belt or lose that weight I succumbed to that sneering tone of derision from within and gave up. If someone else voiced such hurtful jibes I'd respond with righteous contempt. But when that voice comes from deep inside your own brain your heart goes out of any enterprise. So having reflected on the past with clarity, my eureka moment was finding out that every path and turn has been plagued by an unnecessarily negative companion. As a dear friend Eleni announced when she returned from a weeks holiday in Paris with her husband. “He spent the whole time complaining about the price of coffee, bread, train tickets, taxis and the hotel room. As we walked down the Champs-Elysees, he whined about missing his own bed!”  She decided that this was the last holiday she would ever go with him. When I tried to remonstrate with her she became more emphatic.  “I mean it, if he's going to heaven I'm choosing hell. If he is going to Hell then I better be in heaven. In fact, heaven is going anywhere where he is not.” Her exasperation was excessive but she made a point that resonates.  So on careful reflection I’ve decided to be equally callous with my inner critic.  It is not a voice of humility nor does it provide an analytical perspective. It has to go! How to shut it up, is the tricky thing? At least, the direction ahead is clear. I'm excited about the future that could be mine, if like a stubborn nose polyp, this useless vocal appendage can be excised at last. 

Another 300 lost lives in the Med yesterday

There was a disaster off Lampedusi when on the 3^rd of October 2013 over 360 migrants drowned.  By the end of that October over 500 lives were lost off Lampedusi. Such was the international reaction an operation, Mare Nostrum, was initiated which involved boats patrolling the Mediterranean to make sure such huge disasters were prevented.  This initiative managed to save 140,000 lives in a year during its operation.  Unfortunately, on the 1^st Nov 2014 another initiative replaced Mare Nostrum called Frontex Triton.  This receives two thirds the funding of its predecessor.  This at a time when Syria's brutal civil war is pushing a new wave of migrants towards Europe. Their numbers have not only surged, but many asylum seekers in Europe have also fled the conflicts and turmoil in Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq and the Horn of Africa.  The UN's refugee agency, UNHCR, says more migrants are dying because search and rescue efforts have been reduced.  According to Amnesty International,

“With the continued instability in the Middle East, conflicts largest and the deterioration of the situation in Libya, desperate people are seeking safety and refuge in Europe.

As Europe strengthens its land borders, people are being pushed towards more and more dangerous routes through the central Mediterranean. Now more than ever, the EU must ensure collective mechanisms and global search and rescue along the sea route more dangerous the world.”

Questions are being asked whether an organisation, such as Triton, whose mandate is border surveillance, will be able to protect the vulnerable migrants.  Certainly, patrolling closer to the Italian borders, as its intent, will not help those drowning between Malta and the North African coast.  Already 3000 have died attempting the crossing since the start of this year.  Understanding where migrants are fleeing from is important.

A few days ago more boats sank with an estimated loss of live of 300 and this did not even reach the front pages of the media either online or in print.  Being so close in Malta, I was shocked that such a tragic loss of life does even merit appropriate mention in the world’s press.  If you hunt for the item you will find it here, at this link.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-31414009

In a world of increasing turmoil on every front it is possible to be distracted from the tragic suffering happening on Europe’s doorstep.  The policy of averting our eyes or pretending it is not happening does not ameliorate their plight or our moral responsibilities.