Beyond Manichean Poetics: Towards a New Form of Syllogistic Thinking

• Published in: International journal (Toronto) 2004-10, Vol.59 (4), p.886-892
• Main Author: Ahmed, Ali Jimale
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Anecdotes; Branches; Couchiching Institute on Public Affairs 73rd Annual Conference; Epistemology; Modernity; Muslims; Poetics; Religious fundamentalism; Terminology; Weaving; Yams
• ISSN: 0020-7020; 2052-465X
• DOI: 10.1177/002070200405900412

A man is seen on stage looking for something in a well-lit spot. A policeman joins the man, and asks him what it is he is looking for. "The key to my house," he answers. The policeman then joins in the search. After a while and with no key in sight, the policeman asks, "Are you sure you lost it here?" "No," says the man, and pointing to a dark corner of the stage: "Over there." Bewildered, the policeman then asks the man, "Then why are you looking for it here?" "There is no light over there," says the man. We are indeed in a wonderland. To explore the contours of this land, let me seek help from an unlikely source, the vice president of my adopted country, the venerable Dick Cheney. In an article entitled "Whither Cheney," Inter Press Service writer Jim Lobe talks of a Christmas card purportedly sent by the Cheney family to close friends and supporters. The card reads, "And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without His aid?"2 The card gives a religious interpretation to the war in Iraq and beyond. It seems to suggest that the war effort has God's blessing. To quote from Bob Dylan, "You never ask questions/ When God's on your side." Ironically, Cheney's purported words differ little from those of his Islamist opponents. They, too, believe in an omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent God. The Qur'an tells us: The story underlines the importance of transcending the prison house of constricting assumptions. It introduces a new way of looking at things by endowing a dog and several inanimate objects with the power of speech. Yet the power of the erstwhile "mute" to speak renders the humans in the story speechless. How do they validate or give legitimacy to their experiences when there is no linguistic possibility to render those experiences in human terms? The human characters in the story find themselves in an unenviable situation: before them is a chief unwilling to give credence to their story; behind them, the talking miracles. The chief calls their experience "nonsense." It is an experience, he intimates, that has the potential to fragment, to usher in communal rupture. Yet the story is silent on a crucial piece of information: the chief's reaction to the words of the stool, his own stool. (The stool in the story refers to the royal stool, the symbol of authority in Asante tradition.) Did the chief hear the stool speak up? Did he understand its words? Indeterminate endings force audiences to