How Pakistan lost the names of god....

A poignant article in Kashmir Monitor tells of when the name of God in Pakistan became Allah. And includes this quote from author Mohammed Hanif:

Author Mohamed Hanif, in his celebrated debut novel, A Case of Exploding Mangoes, says it best: “…All God’s names were slowly deleted from the national memory as if a wind had swept the land and blown them away. Innocuous, intimate names: Persian Khuda which had always been handy for ghazal poets as it rhymed with most of the operative verbs; Rab, which poor people invoked in their hour of distress; Maula, which Sufis shouted in their hashish sessions. Allah had given Himself ninety-nine names. His people had improvised many more. But all these names slowly started to disappear: from official stationary, from Friday sermons, from newspaper editorials, from mothers’ prayers, from greeting cards, from official memos, from the lips of television quiz show hosts, from children’s storybooks, from lovers’ songs, from court orders, from habeas corpus applications, from inter-school debating competitions, from road inauguration speeches, from memorial services, from cricket players’ curses; even from beggars’ begging pleas.”

So much is lost when religious orthodoxy - Islam in this case - destroys folklore. The efrits die, rakhshasa stop prowling, the fairies vanish, and the green god disappears back into his mossy home in the heart of the wood. In Pakistan, the diversity of our appeal to the spirit world is no longer. And the world is poorer.

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How I lost god and found Dungeons and Dragons

The other day I bumped into this article entitled 'How we won the war on Dungeons & Dragons'. It was about the excitement generated by Christian conservative groups in the USA about the role playing game:

My best friend got kicked out of Catholic school for playing D&D, which we counted as a win because it meant she could come to our shitty public school and play D&D with us. Outside our southern California town, however, D&D players weren't getting off so easily. They were ostracized by their peers, kicked out of public schools, and sent to glorified reeducation camps by parents who feared their children were about to start sacrificing babies to Lolth the spider demon.

An awful deal of fuss and bother (not to mention damage) created by a game. And the children so mistreated by schools and parents had no defence against the "Dungeons and Dragons is just devil worship" line - they were just kids playing a game.

We didn't have quite the same problem in the UK. Our Christianity is altogether more calm and moderate and, while there were some who complained (we saw them rise again like some form of undead when the Harry Potter books were published), they were few and far between. As far as I know there weren't any kids kicked out of school or sent to bizarre indoctrination camps to expunge the influence of devil worship or the glorification of witchcraft.

What I do know is that Dungeons & Dragons changed my life. I'd had a pretty orthodox catholic upbringing, I'd learnt the catechism, I attended mass faithfully and I thought I got the religion malarkey. But what I'd never done in all this certainty and absolutism is consider the meaning of good and evil, tried to understand what these terms we gaily bandy about actually mean. Much of the religious discussion about evil, for all its invoking of demons and condemnation of magic, is more precisely about actions - outputs, if you prefer. Evil is defined as doing things that 'we' (the religion in question) disapprove of.

So I arrive at university and get stuck into playing Dungeons & Dragons. And, because it is inherent to the game, we talk about this:

This is the D&D 'alignment chart' and it's really important if you play the game. Since it's a role playing game you have to try and play your character in character (we used to hate the sort of game playing where player interaction was shoved aside for the sake of vast armouries of magical goodies). And this means that, if your character is evil, you need to understand what evil means. Not in terms of actions but in the context of feelings, motivations and behaviours - at least enough to make the game fun.

We spent hours discussing, for example, what 'chaotic neutral' meant - was it a sort of carefreeness on steroids or something more profound, more religious. A rejection of order - the Dice Man of the fantasy world?  The answer doesn't matter, what mattered was that we talked about good, evil, the meaning of law and how these could be personal. It was a far better moral education than the platitudes of RE at school or the banalities of the typical catholic homily.

If you want to live a good life, it has to be on the basis of understanding what that means. You can get out the book and read the (often contradictory) guidance from the ancients or else you can work it out from first principles. And the D&D alignment chart seems to me a good place to start - it tells me that executing the adulteress for her sin may be lawful but it is probably evil at the same time and that saving that adulteress - however sinful she may be - is a chaotic act but also an act of goodness.

Religion told me none of these things. I learnt that god is good and the devil is bad. And that if I follow the rules I will live forever. I learnt nothing about what all this meant, about whether there's a devil or whether that god is all he's cracked up to be.

This doesn't make me an atheist. Nor does my favourite D&D creation, a neutral evil mage called Tim with a withered hand, make me evil. And I don't want to make out that fantasy role playing is the route to salvation - unless your idea of salvation is spending 30 hours clearing out one of Chris Barlow's slightly manic dungeons.

But for me, playing Dungeons & Dragons, taught me more about good and evil than all the priests and brothers who'd taught me about god. And, although I didn't realise it at the time, those months in 1979 were when I lost god and found Dungeons and Dragons.

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Well I guess someone had to....

...which I guess makes up for the rest of the world!

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Wednesday Whimsy: "Away in the Manger" and the spirit of Christmas

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Whether it’s the choir stalls of a fine cathedral, the nativity at a school in the rough end of town or a family gathered round a piano (or more likely these days an on screen karaoke) there is one carol we all know…whether we’re five or ninety five - “Away in a Manger”. It’s the first one we learn (fighting it out with “Little Donkey” for that privilege) and the simplest and easiest to learn.

For me it sums up everything about Christmas – yes there’s the God stuff but, as importantly, there’s the sense of wonder, anticipation and excitement we see in the faces of children (and old softies like me).

Now some grumpy humbugs want to portray our modern Christmas as an unwarranted and excessive festival of consumption. Every year some self-appointed guardian of the “real Christmas” pops up to lecture us on how all that eating, drinking, partying and spending isn’t what it’s all about – we should instead be all puritanically frowny about the sins of the world.

Not me. I love our modern Christmas with all the over-the-top kitsch, the tear-jerking movies, the schmaltzy music, the excessive lights and the over-eating (especially the over-eating). It is the great celebration of all the things – good, bad, highbrow and lowbrow, Christian and secular – that define our culture. And, for me, “Away in a Manager” with its plodding melody, it’s slightly maudlin lyrics and its simplistic message is part of that culture.

Oh, and "Away in a Manger" is guaranteed to make me cry – every time!

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