PAGE TURNERS; PIECES OF WRITTEN HISTORY
521 words
27 January 2008
Bangkok Post
O5
English
(c) 2008
The secrets of Wat Si Chum in Sukhothai are tackled in new book
KRITTIYA WONGTAVAVIMARN
Past Lives of the Buddha - Wat Si Chum - Art, Architecture and Inscriptions describes the unique character and value of Wat Si Chum, one of the main monastic sites located northwest of Sukhothai and outside the city wall.
Wat Si Chum has been an object of fascination for several generations of scholars. The large mondop - a largely unadorned masonry cube with no windows and a single entrance - which dominates the site has no exact replica elsewhere in Sukhothai, Si Satchanalai or Kamphaeng Phet. The plain exterior, however, conceals mysteries: When was this unique structure built - by whom and why? Why was the site chosen? Was the temple ever completed or is it unfinished? If the latter is the case, why was it left unfinished?
The size of its Buddha image is exceptional and its captioned jataka (former lives of Gautama Buddha) carvings are as unique as its interior corridors and stairways.
Sukhothai Inscription No. 2, as the inscriptions have been named, found inside a staircase, has confronted epigraphists with insoluble difficulties. Many doubts remain unsolved: What is the significance of the 86 inscribed stone reliefs depicting jatakas, which are among the earliest surviving examples of Thai figural and narrative art, and are inscribed with one of the earliest series of inscriptions in the Thai language? How many jatakas did the founders of the temple intend to depict? Why are the jataka slabs placed where they are? Is this their original position?
The puzzles it poses have generated lively and sometimes acrimonious debate. But to date no sustained study of its art, design and inscriptions has been attempted. This book presents the latest evidence and proposes a new interpretation with the first-ever English translation of the inscriptions and photographs of the reliefs supplemented by 19th-century jataka paintings from Wat Khrua Wan in Bangkok.
It also includes essays on all aspects of the temple and a discussion of the significance of jatakas in international Buddhist literature, art and ideology.
The book devoted to Wat Si Chum is the first multidisciplinary study to advance knowledge of the ancient Kingdom and to inspire similar studies of other monuments to the understanding of the complex culture of Sukhothai.
A Sanskrit and Pali scholar, Peter Skilling edited this book with four other scholars: Pattaratorn Chirapravati, a historian of Southeast Asian art and now assistant professor of Asian art and director of the Asian Studies Programme at California State University; Pierre Pichard, an architect with L'Ecole Francaise d'Extreme-Orient for over 30 years; Prapod Assavavirulhakarn, assistant professor and head of the Department of Eastern Languages at Chulalongkorn University; and Santi Pakdeekham, a lecturer in the Department of Thai and Oriental Languages at Srinakarinwirot University.
Past Lives of the Buddha -- Wat Si Chum _ Art, Architecture and Inscriptions
Edited by Peter Skilling, Pattaratorn Chirapravati, Pierre Pichard, Prapod Assavavirulhakarn and Santi Pakdeekham
River Books, 296 pages with 390 colour illustrations and 30 plans and maps.
2,550 baht at all leading book shops.
ISBN 978-9749863459
Saturday, January 26, 2008
Thursday, January 17, 2008
The Clash - Samuel Huntington
Book Review Desk; SECT7
The Clash
By FOUAD AJAMI
1272 words
6 January 2008
The New York Times
Late Edition - Final
10
English
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company. All Rights Reserved.
It would have been unlike Samuel P. Huntington to say ''I told you so'' after 9/11. He is too austere and serious a man, with a legendary career as arguably the most influential and original political scientist of the last half century -- always swimming against the current of prevailing opinion.
In the 1990s, first in an article in the magazine Foreign Affairs, then in a book published in 1996 under the title ''The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order,'' he had come forth with a thesis that ran counter to the zeitgeist of the era and its euphoria about globalization and a ''borderless'' world. After the cold war, he wrote, there would be a ''clash of civilizations.'' Soil and blood and cultural loyalties would claim, and define, the world of states.
Huntington's cartography was drawn with a sharp pencil. It was ''The West and the Rest'': the West standing alone, and eight civilizations dividing the rest -- Latin American, African, Islamic, Sinic, Hindu, Orthodox, Buddhist and Japanese. And in this post-cold-war world, Islamic civilization would re-emerge as a nemesis to the West. Huntington put the matter in stark terms: ''The relations between Islam and Christianity, both Orthodox and Western, have often been stormy. Each has been the other's Other. The 20th-century conflict between liberal democracy and Marxist-Leninism is only a fleeting and superficial historical phenomenon compared to the continuing and deeply conflictual relation between Islam and Christianity.''
Those 19 young Arabs who struck America on 9/11 were to give Huntington more of history's compliance than he could ever have imagined. He had written of a ''youth bulge'' unsettling Muslim societies, and young Arabs and Muslims were now the shock-troops of a new radicalism. Their rise had overwhelmed the order in their homelands and had spilled into non-Muslim societies along the borders between Muslims and other peoples. Islam had grown assertive and belligerent; the ideologies of Westernization that had dominated the histories of Turkey, Iran and the Arab world, as well as South Asia, had faded; ''indigenization'' had become the order of the day in societies whose nationalisms once sought to emulate the ways of the West.
Rather than Westernizing their societies, Islamic lands had developed a powerful consensus in favor of Islamizing modernity. There was no ''universal civilization,'' Huntington had observed; this was only the pretense of what he called ''Davos culture,'' consisting of a thin layer of technocrats and academics and businessmen who gather annually at that watering hole of the global elite in Switzerland.
In Huntington's unsparing view, culture is underpinned and defined by power. The West had once been pre-eminent and militarily dominant, and the first generation of third-world nationalists had sought to fashion their world in the image of the West. But Western dominion had cracked, Huntington said. Demography best told the story: where more than 40 percent of the world population was ''under the political control'' of Western civilization in the year 1900, that share had declined to about 15 percent in 1990, and is set to come down to 10 percent by the year 2025. Conversely, Islam's share had risen from 4 percent in 1900 to 13 percent in 1990, and could be as high as 19 percent by 2025.
It is not pretty at the frontiers between societies with dwindling populations -- Western Europe being one example, Russia another -- and those with young people making claims on the world. Huntington saw this gathering storm. Those young people of the densely populated North African states who have been risking all for a journey across the Strait of Gibraltar walk right out of his pages.
Shortly after the appearance of the article that seeded the book, Foreign Affairs magazine called upon a group of writers to respond to Huntington's thesis. I was assigned the lead critique. I wrote my response with appreciation, but I wagered on modernization, on the system the West had put in place. ''The things and ways that the West took to 'the rest,''' I wrote, ''have become the ways of the world. The secular idea, the state system and the balance of power, pop culture jumping tariff walls and barriers, the state as an instrument of welfare, all these have been internalized in the remotest places. We have stirred up the very storms into which we now ride.'' I had questioned Huntington's suggestion that civilizations could be found ''whole and intact, watertight under an eternal sky.'' Furrows, I observed, run across civilizations, and the modernist consensus would hold in places like India, Egypt and Turkey.
Huntington had written that the Turks -- rejecting Mecca, and rejected by Brussels -- would head toward Tashkent, choosing a pan-Turkic world. My faith was invested in the official Westernizing creed of Kemalism that Mustafa Kemal Ataturk had bequeathed his country. ''What, however, if Turkey redefined itself?'' Huntington asked. ''At some point, Turkey could be ready to give up its frustrating and humiliating role as a beggar pleading for membership in the West and to resume its much more impressive and elevated historical role as the principal Islamic interlocutor and antagonist of the West.''
Nearly 15 years on, Huntington's thesis about a civilizational clash seems more compelling to me than the critique I provided at that time. In recent years, for example, the edifice of Kemalism has come under assault, and Turkey has now elected an Islamist to the presidency in open defiance of the military-bureaucratic elite. There has come that ''redefinition'' that Huntington prophesied. To be sure, the verdict may not be quite as straightforward as he foresaw. The Islamists have prevailed, but their desired destination, or so they tell us, is still Brussels: in that European shelter, the Islamists shrewdly hope they can find protection against the power of the military.
''I'll teach you differences,'' Kent says to Lear's servant. And Huntington had the integrity and the foresight to see the falseness of a borderless world, a world without differences. (He is one of two great intellectual figures who peered into the heart of things and were not taken in by globalism's conceit, Bernard Lewis being the other.)
I still harbor doubts about whether the radical Islamists knocking at the gates of Europe, or assaulting it from within, are the bearers of a whole civilization. They flee the burning grounds of Islam, but carry the fire with them. They are ''nowhere men,'' children of the frontier between Islam and the West, belonging to neither. If anything, they are a testament to the failure of modern Islam to provide for its own and to hold the fidelities of the young.
More ominously perhaps, there ran through Huntington's pages an anxiety about the will and the coherence of the West -- openly stated at times, made by allusions throughout. The ramparts of the West are not carefully monitored and defended, Huntington feared. Islam will remain Islam, he worried, but it is ''dubious'' whether the West will remain true to itself and its mission. Clearly, commerce has not delivered us out of history's passions, the World Wide Web has not cast aside blood and kin and faith. It is no fault of Samuel Huntington's that we have not heeded his darker, and possibly truer, vision.
PHOTO (PHOTOGRAPH BY LYNSEY ADDARIO FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)
Fouad Ajami is a professor of Middle Eastern studies at the School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University, and the author, most recently, of ''The Foreigner's Gift.''
The Clash
By FOUAD AJAMI
1272 words
6 January 2008
The New York Times
Late Edition - Final
10
English
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company. All Rights Reserved.
It would have been unlike Samuel P. Huntington to say ''I told you so'' after 9/11. He is too austere and serious a man, with a legendary career as arguably the most influential and original political scientist of the last half century -- always swimming against the current of prevailing opinion.
In the 1990s, first in an article in the magazine Foreign Affairs, then in a book published in 1996 under the title ''The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order,'' he had come forth with a thesis that ran counter to the zeitgeist of the era and its euphoria about globalization and a ''borderless'' world. After the cold war, he wrote, there would be a ''clash of civilizations.'' Soil and blood and cultural loyalties would claim, and define, the world of states.
Huntington's cartography was drawn with a sharp pencil. It was ''The West and the Rest'': the West standing alone, and eight civilizations dividing the rest -- Latin American, African, Islamic, Sinic, Hindu, Orthodox, Buddhist and Japanese. And in this post-cold-war world, Islamic civilization would re-emerge as a nemesis to the West. Huntington put the matter in stark terms: ''The relations between Islam and Christianity, both Orthodox and Western, have often been stormy. Each has been the other's Other. The 20th-century conflict between liberal democracy and Marxist-Leninism is only a fleeting and superficial historical phenomenon compared to the continuing and deeply conflictual relation between Islam and Christianity.''
Those 19 young Arabs who struck America on 9/11 were to give Huntington more of history's compliance than he could ever have imagined. He had written of a ''youth bulge'' unsettling Muslim societies, and young Arabs and Muslims were now the shock-troops of a new radicalism. Their rise had overwhelmed the order in their homelands and had spilled into non-Muslim societies along the borders between Muslims and other peoples. Islam had grown assertive and belligerent; the ideologies of Westernization that had dominated the histories of Turkey, Iran and the Arab world, as well as South Asia, had faded; ''indigenization'' had become the order of the day in societies whose nationalisms once sought to emulate the ways of the West.
Rather than Westernizing their societies, Islamic lands had developed a powerful consensus in favor of Islamizing modernity. There was no ''universal civilization,'' Huntington had observed; this was only the pretense of what he called ''Davos culture,'' consisting of a thin layer of technocrats and academics and businessmen who gather annually at that watering hole of the global elite in Switzerland.
In Huntington's unsparing view, culture is underpinned and defined by power. The West had once been pre-eminent and militarily dominant, and the first generation of third-world nationalists had sought to fashion their world in the image of the West. But Western dominion had cracked, Huntington said. Demography best told the story: where more than 40 percent of the world population was ''under the political control'' of Western civilization in the year 1900, that share had declined to about 15 percent in 1990, and is set to come down to 10 percent by the year 2025. Conversely, Islam's share had risen from 4 percent in 1900 to 13 percent in 1990, and could be as high as 19 percent by 2025.
It is not pretty at the frontiers between societies with dwindling populations -- Western Europe being one example, Russia another -- and those with young people making claims on the world. Huntington saw this gathering storm. Those young people of the densely populated North African states who have been risking all for a journey across the Strait of Gibraltar walk right out of his pages.
Shortly after the appearance of the article that seeded the book, Foreign Affairs magazine called upon a group of writers to respond to Huntington's thesis. I was assigned the lead critique. I wrote my response with appreciation, but I wagered on modernization, on the system the West had put in place. ''The things and ways that the West took to 'the rest,''' I wrote, ''have become the ways of the world. The secular idea, the state system and the balance of power, pop culture jumping tariff walls and barriers, the state as an instrument of welfare, all these have been internalized in the remotest places. We have stirred up the very storms into which we now ride.'' I had questioned Huntington's suggestion that civilizations could be found ''whole and intact, watertight under an eternal sky.'' Furrows, I observed, run across civilizations, and the modernist consensus would hold in places like India, Egypt and Turkey.
Huntington had written that the Turks -- rejecting Mecca, and rejected by Brussels -- would head toward Tashkent, choosing a pan-Turkic world. My faith was invested in the official Westernizing creed of Kemalism that Mustafa Kemal Ataturk had bequeathed his country. ''What, however, if Turkey redefined itself?'' Huntington asked. ''At some point, Turkey could be ready to give up its frustrating and humiliating role as a beggar pleading for membership in the West and to resume its much more impressive and elevated historical role as the principal Islamic interlocutor and antagonist of the West.''
Nearly 15 years on, Huntington's thesis about a civilizational clash seems more compelling to me than the critique I provided at that time. In recent years, for example, the edifice of Kemalism has come under assault, and Turkey has now elected an Islamist to the presidency in open defiance of the military-bureaucratic elite. There has come that ''redefinition'' that Huntington prophesied. To be sure, the verdict may not be quite as straightforward as he foresaw. The Islamists have prevailed, but their desired destination, or so they tell us, is still Brussels: in that European shelter, the Islamists shrewdly hope they can find protection against the power of the military.
''I'll teach you differences,'' Kent says to Lear's servant. And Huntington had the integrity and the foresight to see the falseness of a borderless world, a world without differences. (He is one of two great intellectual figures who peered into the heart of things and were not taken in by globalism's conceit, Bernard Lewis being the other.)
I still harbor doubts about whether the radical Islamists knocking at the gates of Europe, or assaulting it from within, are the bearers of a whole civilization. They flee the burning grounds of Islam, but carry the fire with them. They are ''nowhere men,'' children of the frontier between Islam and the West, belonging to neither. If anything, they are a testament to the failure of modern Islam to provide for its own and to hold the fidelities of the young.
More ominously perhaps, there ran through Huntington's pages an anxiety about the will and the coherence of the West -- openly stated at times, made by allusions throughout. The ramparts of the West are not carefully monitored and defended, Huntington feared. Islam will remain Islam, he worried, but it is ''dubious'' whether the West will remain true to itself and its mission. Clearly, commerce has not delivered us out of history's passions, the World Wide Web has not cast aside blood and kin and faith. It is no fault of Samuel Huntington's that we have not heeded his darker, and possibly truer, vision.
PHOTO (PHOTOGRAPH BY LYNSEY ADDARIO FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)
Fouad Ajami is a professor of Middle Eastern studies at the School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University, and the author, most recently, of ''The Foreigner's Gift.''
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