Thanksgiving was overshadowed by the terrible news that Kian is facing further charges of spying issued by a special new security court controlled by the Revolutionary Guards.   The International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran statement makes it clear why this is so frightening:

The Campaign fears for the health and safety of Tajbakhsh in view of recent judicial proceedings in dissidents’ cases that have contravened Iranian law.

On 11 November, Ehsan Fattahian, a Kurdish activist, was executed even though a lower court had sentenced him to 10 years in prison. The appeals court added the charge of Moharebeh, or “enmity towards God,” and issued the death sentence for Fattahian.  Iranian law explicitly forbids appeals courts from increasing a lower court’s sentence. New charges against Tajbakhsh signal that a similar extrajudicial process maybe underway.

Tajbakhsh has been denied access to an independent lawyer and the authorities have restricted his legal representation to a court appointed lawyer, Houshang Azhari.

The Campaign called on the Iranian judiciary to immediately release Tajbakhsh and all other dissidents and activists who have been unfairly persecuted and prosecuted. The Campaign also expressed serious concerns that the Revolutionary Guards appear to be taking over judicial organs and manipulating them to permit extrajudicial detentions and sentences.

Ehsan Fattahian was one of several Kurdish activists who have been recently sentenced to death (including Zeynab Jelalian, see petition here)–they are particularly vulnerable given their minority status and limited international support and awareness.

It is becoming harder and harder to understand what kind of game is being played now–Gary Sick offers some analysis here, and here–only that Kian, who is innocent of the charges leveled against him, is at the mercy of an increasingly capricious and unpredictable regime.  Maziar Bahari’s account of his 118-day imprisonment in Evin is deeply upsetting to read, not only for the details of the harsh treatment he suffered, but because of the evidence he provides that the Guards are mired in such a degree of paranoia that they believe their own propaganda; that everything from the Daily Show to a trip to New Jersey becomes incontrovertible evidence of conspiracy.  I am so glad Maziar is free and safe–but it’s impossible to read of his joy at the birth of his daughter shortly after his release, and not think of Kian, too, sending a joyful email under very similar circumstances in 2007, joking that his newborn daughter had been “released from solitary confinement” inside his wife.  Except he was in Tehran, not London, and his ordeal was not over.

Please sign the petition if you haven’t yet done so.  As Maziar makes clear in his article, keeping international attention focused on these cases is probably the most useful thing we can do to help.

Update: More from Nivedita Menon at Kafila here.

Sepoy dug up an excellent German nursery rhyme about (Turkish) coffee, so here’s a visual–from this summer’s Ramazan fair in Sultanahmet.  I’m intrigued by the implication, in said ditty, that consuming too much of this dangerous drink might just turn one Muslim.  Perhaps it explain the sadly liberal & unAmerican tendencies of Seattle-Portland-San Francisco axis.

Now, consider a situation where thousands of people displaced from one part of an island, losing their properties, homes, animals, land, and personal belongings, and leaving behind their neighbours, co-villagers, colleagues, and friends from the other community, find themselves elsewhere (north), allocated spaces, land, and homes to use, own, and inhabit, properties just abandoned by the other community, which had fled from the invading army in the opposite (southward) direction. Two ethnically defined communities have been separated from one another with borders patrolled by armies on either side, not allowed to visit the other part of the island, each other, or their natal villages and towns for three decades, with access across the border banned. (Turkish-Cypriot refugees were mostly allocated Greek-Cypriot houses, land, and belongings by the Turkish-Cypriot administration in the north.) Consider these refugees using, inhabiting, employing, and interacting with spaces and properties left behind by the former community (Greek-Cypriots) during the war. Living in the village of members of the other community officially construed as ‘the enemy’. What is left of social relations with the other community is the other community’s objects. What remains, as well, is the memory of a sociality which included the other community in the recent past. Relations with the other community persist in the imagination through interactions and dealings with their abandoned properties, spaces, and belongings.

–Yael Navaro-Yashin, “Affective Spaces, Melancholic Objects: Ruination and the Production of Anthropological Knowledge,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 15: 1-18.

Consider what it might mean to ask these questions of other islands, or of a whole city, a city whose citizens may or may not live with the “memory of a sociality which included the other community in the recent past.” Consider it after every expulsion, after every partition, after 1915, 1923, 1955.

(Photo: a ruined Greek church on the island of Ayvalık Cunda where the Gulf of Edremit meets the Aegean Sea; the loudspeakers on its walls broadcast the azan, and the Turkish flag flies beyond just its arches.  July 2009.)

This artwork (by the Brooklyn-based street artist Swoon, I’m guessing) appeared recently in my neighborhood.  I make detours on my walkabouts to visit her.

Booker-prize winner Michael Ondaatje’s preferred medium is 8½-by-11-inch Muji brand lined notebooks. He completes the first three or four drafts by hand, sometimes literally cutting and pasting passages and whole chapters with scissors and tape. Some of his notebooks have pages with four layers underneath.

When he’s in the middle of a novel, Colum McCann sometimes prints out a chapter or two in large font, staples it together like a book, and takes it to Central Park. He finds a quiet bench and pretends he’s reading a book by someone else.

(more)

“There ain’t no voting no more–just protest voting.” – some dude who walked into my friend N’s polling place this morning.

[UPDATE: THT offers a handy NYC Mayoral Voting Guide, with supplementary photos.  I'd like to echo his admiration for the musically-enhanced website of the Rent Is Too Damn High party candidate, Jimmy McMillan.]

For my fellow New Yorkers, I can only repeat Gawker (!?)–Don’t Vote for Bloomberg.  Read the whole anti-endorsement, but here are some highlights:

For all the talk of Bloomberg the power-player who at least gets things done without worrying about the unions and special interests, he’s been unable to win any political battle with anyone he couldn’t literally buy off.

[...]

His record on housing, like his record on nearly everything having to do with the outer boroughs and poverty and human beings who make less than $100,000 a year, has been a ridiculous disgrace. His entire philosophy of development solving everything turned out to be precisely, 100% wrong.

[...]

Bloomberg deserves to be run out of town on an inadequately funded public rail line for the 2004 GOP convention alone. Remember that ridiculous farce? No, of course not, no one does, besides the thousands of people improperly spied on, arrested, harassed, and detained by the NYPD. All of this was completely illegal. No heads rolled.

One more special bonus factoid: New York leads the world in marijuana arrests! Specifically, marijuana arrests of black people!

And he is personally a jerk. He is a thin-skinned, unpleasant, sanctimonious asshole. His company is being sued for a culture of sexual discrimination that plaintiffs say Bloomberg himself contributed to. He is a tremendous dick to reporters whenever he gets cranky. He is fucking race-baiting with Rudy Giuliani again, because why not?

Don’t vote for him.  I’m not sure who to vote for, because I’m not exactly a fan of the Democratic candidate.  But if you’re going to protest vote, protest against the plutocrat with the city press in his pocket who flies away to play golf in Bermuda each weekend while the rest of us deal with weekend subway service disruptions.  And I haven’t even mentioned the most personal (all politics is local) reason for my antipathy to the mayor: his shady attempts to bully the EPA over the potential Gowanus Superfund designation.

Also, for my people back in WA: vote YES on Referendum 71 (to stop right-wing assholes from taking away domestic partnership rights recently granted to queer families, and NO on state idiot Tim Eyman’s latest initiative (1033).

Happy Election Day.  Fingers crossed for Maine.

While we are on the subject of mosques, here’s one closer to (this) home: one day the other week, after breakfast with friends in Sunset Park, and I set out on a circuit through the neighborhood’s groceries (Chinese, Vietnamese, Turkish, Mexican, Gujarati….)  I lingered a long time in Birlik Market, at Eighth Avenue and 60th Street, over jars of sour-cherry jam and packaged mantı, but more to listen than to shop:  the woman working the counter that day was Chinese, but the old men in the back aisles were bickering in Turkish, and I hovered nearby, letting the sound wash over my ears.

A few steps up the block, women pushing strollers were spilling out of the Fatih mosque after Friday prayers.  The mosque constitutes the center of a half-block Turkish knot in the center of Brooklyn’s Chinatown, with a shop selling nazar boncukları and Kütahya tiles and clothing on one side, and the market plus a restaurant on the other, with one of those all-purpose travel agency/tax accountancy/translation service businesses that sprout up in immigrant neighborhoods all over New York.  I’d wondered about the provenance of this Turkish outpost, and googling, found a quasi-answer on Google Books: the mosque, it turns out, used to be a cinema.  According to Barbara Daly Metcalf,

The Turkish mosque was originally a movie theater, designed, as many American movie houses have been, as a Hollywood amalgam of Orientalist-Moorish-Arabesque fantasies. The conversion of the movie house into a mosque reclaims the Orientalist style, invests it with new meaning, and literally reorients the building.

(Making Muslim Space in North America and Europe, p. 210-11.)

Perhaps one of these days, I’ll ask if I can go take photos inside this one, too.  In the meantime, if you missed Aman Ali and Bassam Tariq’s 30 Mosques in 3o Days project this past Ramadan, it’s a fascinating exploration of faith (and food) in New York City mosques, although the pair didn’t make it to any of the Turkish ones this time.  Maybe next year.

The late-afternoon light was complicit in the act of calligraphy, but the shadows threatened to rewrite the holy book.

The good people at qarrtsiluni have published a series of photographs I took this summer (of Arabic calligraphy on the walls of the Eski Cami in Edirne) in their “Words of Power” issue.  Their virtual pages have hosted a number of artists and writers I greatly admire, and it’s an honor to get to play in their sandbox.

This is not the post I wanted to return to this space with. A week ago, I heard the wonderful news that Maziar Bahari had been released from Evin Prison and was en route to London (where his partner is about to give birth to their first child). His release gave us great hope that Kian’s might follow.

Instead, on Tuesday, I found out that Kian has been sentenced to a prison term of 15 years, on the patently ridiculous trumped-up charges that he was involved in orchestrating the post-election protests (which he did not take part in) as part of some sort of international NGO/CIA conspiracy (which does not exist).  The NYT’s Lede blog linked to extensive material on the case, including an excerpt from Negar Azimi’s 2007 piece on the Bush administration’s disastrous “democracy promotion” fund for Iran (which was the provided the original pretext for Iran’s persecution of scholars and NGO staff like Kian and Haleh Esfandiari, both vocal critics of the Bush administration and its policies toward Iran).  Haleh–who was imprisoned with Kian in 2007, and returned to the US after their release–has written a post for the New York Review of Books about his sentence.  Kian’s friend Karim Sadjadpour has just published a story in Foreign Policy magazine.

This news is devastating, even more so because Kian was only a few weeks away from leaving Iran to take up the offer of a visiting professorship at Columbia University. He was supposed to be here, in New York, by now.  (Here is a video from the dean of Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, calling for Kian’s release, and speaking about his place in our academic community.)  I am thinking of the last time we met–over coffee and lemon cake at Columbus Circle, during one of his quiet trips abroad after his release–and of how he talked about all the books he was planning to write.  I am thinking about the pictures he showed me of his baby daughter, born just weeks after his release from Evin in 2007, who turned two this month.

There are petitions to sign (the new Free Kian site has links).  But his case is now tangled up in international politics–some suggest the sentence may be intended to make him a bargaining chip in US-Iran negotiations–and I am not sure what else we can do, save make noise, make it clear that he is not forgotten, that we will keep watching and waiting until he is back home with his family again, and they are free to go as they wish.

The other night, at a gathering of friends who come together from time to time to read aloud to one another, I shared a short piece he wrote for an Amnesty India publication about his first imprisonment, in 2007: “May I Take a Book With Me?” In it, he writes,

Books also helped open my cell to the world outside.  I must have seemed mad to request deliveries from Amazon, shipped to Paris, couriered to Bahar, then relayed to me through the prison system. But imagining a worldwide network of booksellers, all in motion to bring a book to me, was exhilarating and reassuring. I ordered a book by a French writer I had met at the New School years before, and felt in touch with my former colleagues there. In a footnote, I saw the name of a Polish intellectual I knew, and again felt less anonymous. The penciled margin notes in a book given to me by a friend took me to a cool hill station in Pakistan. If I was thinking of all of them, maybe they were thinking of me.

We are thinking of him still.