6.32: The Original Omelas: The Case of the Animals vs. Man

 

Trials and Tribulations

 

I’m not a vegetarian. It’s just another one of my moral failings. I eat almost no red meat, anymore, reserving my evening carnivorous activities to birds and fish. They’re simultaneously better for my health, a little better for the environment, . . . and to be honest, I guess I think of them as a little dumber than red-meated critters. It’s just another level of consciousness I have not sufficiently examined.

I confess I’ve staged no covert operations to free young calves from their paralyzing enclosures that keep the veal tender. I haven’t disrupted the Japanese practice of driving dolphins into slaughter coves, though I saw a documentary on it. And I haven’t even protested outside of a Sea World park anywhere. One branch of my family even owned a small egg ranch in the 1970s and I witnessed the conditions for the 12,000 chickens there. I don’t know how much they could even comprehend of their condition; I mean, after all, they’ve known nothing else. And then I read:

“It has been afraid too long to feel any fear now.”

and

“It is too degraded and ignorant to know any real joy.”

Both, of course, from Le Guin’s Omelas story. 

You and I, we’ve been talking for a few weeks–well, several months–now, about suffering and injustice and our own capacity to resist, to hold ourselves accountable. But we’ve never supposed that someone, somewhere, might try to hold us responsible for a systemic injustice in the world whether we choose to or not. 

More, I want to take us back to one of the earliest pieces of literature we’ll talk about on this journey, one which has quietly worked to influence our own cultural habitus over 1000 years later. And it’s one that confronts a broader, even larger, question, than we’ve dared consider so far. To get there, we’ll need to visit a secret philosophical society in Iraq during the Islamic Golden Age. And we’ll need to listen in on a trial, a lawsuit actually, which may or may not find us all quite guilty. 

 

 

Intro Theme

 

This is Literary Nomads, where we wander through literature and language, near and far.

I’m Steve Chisnell, and I didn’t even get a court summons. How can I be held in contempt?

10th Century Courtrooms

 

Now my guess is that most of us have not read this little tale. It’s full title is The Case of the Animals versus Man Before the King of the Jinn, and it’s actually an epistle–basically, a letter— from an enormous encyclopedia written by a group called the Ikhwān al-Safā’. We can translate their name to The Brethren of Purity, but their Arabic name is not so difficult for English speakers that I think we need to do that.

The tale is fairly short, though you’re likely to find it with so many footnotes and surrounding essays that it’s often packaged as a book far too expensive to merit the cost. I’ve found a link in a website to a downloadable version and the link is in the Show Notes. (Note to Self: Make room in a future episode for an extended rant against the cost of supposedly scholarly or academic presses and what they do to bar the underclass from literacy.)

But to the text and the Ikhwān al-Safā’. I don’t often spend a lot of time with historical context, but here I think it may prove important to us. In the 900s CE, this secret group was active in Basra, Iraq, the country’s enormous port city, true today for its industry and oil, but in ancient times The Thousand and One Nights had it as the beginning of the journey of Sinbad the Sailor a century or two before today’s text, It was the Abassid Caliphate, a time that most historians call the Islamic Golden Age.

Well, more specifically still, it was called the “Shi’ite Century” or the “Iranian intermezzo” because the Abbasid Caliph at the time was more symbolic than actual power because Persia had military control as Shia power grew. 

A lot of people and power were moving about in that time, nomadic movements carrying literature and ideas–quite fitting for us to think about—and Basra was a center for the gatherings of people, a center for translations of wisdom: Greek philosophy, Indian mathematics, Persian literature, all woven into Islamic thought and faith. 

Well, it was at least amongst the Ikhwān al-Safā’. They weren’t Sunni, necessarily–maybe a branch of Shi’a thought—but most likely were a kind of trans-sectarian group, one that believed in the intersection of all wisdoms as speaking the true wisdom, and frankly, that wasn’t always the most popular idea when religions were arguing for the divine order. 

The concept we’re talking about here is syncretism, a bringing together and merging of all the ideas they could find. We’ll see that in a moment. But, politically and theologically vulnerable for believing in welcoming all truths, they were a secret group. Because they collectively authored their Rasā’il Ikhwān al-Ṣafā’, their kind of encyclopedia which basically means The Epistles of the Brethren of Purity, we can understand that this anonymity was a kind of survival strategy for them. They brought foreign wisdom into Islamic theology–syncretism—and this was the same as attempting to replace divine revelation with human reason. 

Most people, they thought, were mentally trapped on a level of literal understanding of the world, kind of like our two-dimensional Flatlanders a couple of episodes ago. The young craftsmen were pure of soul, perhaps, but naive of complexity. It was not until one became an elder political leader that a worldly wisdom set in. But this, too, was quite limited. Older kings began, perhaps to have a sense of divine law and philosophy, but only the most studied prophets of a lifetime’s work could appreciate the “true reality.” They kept themselves apart from politics and worldly behavior that might never understand their spiritual insights.

And it is in this scene where the 22nd of the likely 52 total epistles appears for us. The Case of the Animals versus Man Before the King of the Jinn. Now I’ll offer you its points as we make our way through here, but overall, here’s the set-up:

Humans, shipwrecked on a beautiful pure island, decide to stay there and immediately begin enslaving the local animals. The animals flee and they petition the local King, a Jinn named Bīwarāsp, to call for justice. What results is a massive cross-species legal battle. 

Now just a note on Jinn which will remind many of us of fairy tale genie, and that’s a problem. In Islamic lore, the Jinn are a species of beings who lived sometimes on a different plane but were still accountable to God. Stories across the ages vary their features and character, but they were not unusual or super-magical or anything but an actual free will species that had their own societies. And the King of Jinn Bīwarāsp ruled this island. For us, what may be most important is that he has no stake in our trial. He’s not an animal and he’s not a human, so we have an absolutely impartial and wise judge before us.

So let’s get this trial going.

When confronted by the accusations of slavery and harsh punishments, the humans immediately admit it. Their argument is not what they’ve done, but that they are the masters, exceptional. The King says to prove it, and they reply:

“Our fair form, erect stature, upright carriage, and keen senses, our subtle powers of discrimination, our sharp minds and superior intellects all show that we are the masters and they, our slaves”. 

Yeah, and I’m betting this argument played as well then as it does for us now, even though I hear my non-vegetarian excuses hiding in there. 

And of course I hear them there, right? Maybe we all do. And that’s in part because, until a few weeks ago, I hadn’t read this. What I have read? A lifetime of stories and curriculum based upon Aristotle. And what does Aristotle tell us? Well, in his Politics, Book I, he makes three points fairly clear when it comes to human superiority:

1. First, animals are incapable of human reason. They can’t form a moral community to tell what is just and unjust, what’s useful and what isn’t. Their intellect and language don’t measure up.
2. More, he says this enslavement is completely natural. The “lower is for the sake of the higher.” The soul rules the body because it is superior to it. The master rules the slave. And “domestic animals are better off when ruled by man, for then they are preserved.” It’s for their own good.
3. Finally, Aristotle makes the point that Nature is a perfect system of design. Everything is here for a purpose. Plants were made for animals to eat; animals were made for humans to use. 

There’s no reason to walk away from this Omelas, our humans are arguing, because this is how the universe is built. Will it surprise us much if we find these arguments in The Case of the Animals versus Man? Greek civilization had met Persia long before Aristotle, and Aristotle lived 1200 years before the Ikhwān al-Safā’. As we’ll see, they’ve brought together a number of classical arguments from all kinds of sources.

And, to me, these arguments resonate with a kind of sense. Even if I can cognitively reason them away, my behavior speaks differently. I’ve raised my voice in anger to a dog or cat because they were in the way of what I was doing; their needs were unimportant and besides, silent. And I certainly understand that those same animals would likely not fare so well in the wild: they need me, as so many Humane Society commercials tell me over and over again with sad “adopt me” music. And I don’t pretend to understand how the entire cosmos is of perfect design, but it’s a feeling far preferable to “Everything is anarchy and chaos.” 

Ethicist Donna Haraway would push back. You might remember her back when we talked about Ishiguro and Star Trek. She’s the one who asked whether we’d all already given up being “natural humans.” We’re part cyborgs, full of artificial and machine parts. Jeez, between that episode and this, I had a doctor shove a cardiac sensor under my skin where it now sits transmitting my biorhythms to some other machines that calculate whatever they want to. I bring it up again here, because whatever natural superiority we might have, we could also argue that our reliance on these technologies kind of defies the old “fair form, erect stature, [and] upright carriage” that the humans argue before the Jinn King. (And please don’t worry about that sensor; I’m fine!)

But Haraway writes in her book The Companion Species Manifesto that this sort of division between humans and animals is as faulty an idea as our division between natural and machine, or here between wild and civilized. It’s hard not to recognize, for instance, that while we have domesticated a dog, the dog has also changed us and our behavior at the same time. She calls this relationship “companion species,” a concept we lose track of far too easily. Haraway asks us if our politics can’t conceive of a “becoming with,” even that our own happiness can be tied to the survival and flourishing of other species.

Okay. I’m getting off track or getting carried away, but…. 

In our Epistle, the humans have put forth their primary argument. And the animals, across a few days of testimony between several of them and several other people, make their case, too. They document in great detail, animal after animal, the abuses. Here is what the ram says, and if you’re a bit squeamish, you may want to fast-forward here 30 seconds, because our authors don’t hold back:

“You would have pitied us, your Majesty, had you seen us as their prisoners, when they seized our smallest kids and lambs and tore them from their dams to steal our milk. They took our young and bound them hand and foot to be slaughtered and skinned, hungry, thirsty, bleating for mercy but unpitied, screaming for help with none to aid them. We saw them slaughtered, flayed, dismembered, disemboweled, their heads, brains, and livers on butchers’ blocks… while we kept silent, not weeping or complaining. For even if we had wept they would not have pitied us. Where then is their mercy?”

These are the arguments that dominate the Epistle. They’re grisly, and it is difficult to justify when put in words like these. Far better, it seems to us, that the ram had continued its mute existence rather than testify to what we plainly do. It’s why most of us listening have never killed an animal; we have the machines of food production do it for us. 

But the humans, strategically, don’t deny any of it. We do these things. The act is committed; all that’s left is to determine if such cruelty is a crime and, if so, why.

Bacon, Extraction Economies, and the Voices of L’inerme

 

So let’s focus now on the parts of the Epistle which are not expansions of these claims and counter-claims, distressing as they are.

Here’s where our Ikhwān al-Safā’ are. They know well the exceptionalism that is the popular way of thinking, how camels and ox and mule are all treated. They also know well the arguments of the Qur’an, which is quoted frequently—actually by both sides—during the trial. So how, then, can they reveal the wisdom beneath this discussion?

Just before the trial begins, they allow us all to eavesdrop on a secret meeting amongst the humans. They’re obviously worried that the Jinn King will free the animals. And they also know how horrible this will be for them. They’d be without milk, without meat, without clothing. One of them says, “Death would be better for us than such a life.” They even worry that the King will ask for proof that they own the animals, and they decide they might lie, and tell him that the documents of proof were “lost in the Flood.” 

Yeah, wow. There’s a lot to say about the fragility of privilege here, but also about this concept: If humans were so superior to animals, why are they here dependent upon them for this sustained superiority, as if their natural selves would be so repugnant that death would be better? But such questions themselves irritate. Better to lie, to pretend that not only is this a matter of human exceptionalism (we are the masters) but that it is a legal matter (though our proof was “lost”). More, all of this is before the trial, so we know their arguments, going in, are not genuine. 

Not to put too fine a point on it, this is probably the purest early articulation of what we’ve been calling the Extraction Economy of Clinical Labor. The real motivation has little to do with cosmos hierarchies, natural reason, or even legal justifications. It is about sacrificing the animals for lifestyle, for comfort, for otium, for privilege. 

And while I brought up Aristotle a few minutes ago who told us that humans are superior conceptually, let me now introduce the famous Francis Bacon who will take Aristotle and turn him into an economy we now better understand. And I’ll bet that Bacon never read about this trial. Some 600 years after the Ikhwān al-Safā’, Bacon formed for most of the West what we call the scientific method. He writes literally that nature must be “put to the rack” to yield her secrets. And for Bacon, it’s not so much Aristotle’s Reason that makes humans superior as it is the animal kingdom’s Utility. In other words, if it can be made useful to us, it is ours. If the rabbit suffers but proves that an eyeliner is okay for humans, then this is a moral imperative. Anything which “enlarges the bounds of Human Empire” is the utilitarian goal. With Bacon, we move beyond any discussions of mere cruelty. The cruelty is part of the human imperative to grow and expand. 

And this is what our little secret meeting is about, too. The humans know they are cruel. They have to prove that they have the right, even the necessity, to be cruel. But what they can’t admit to, what they mustn’t allow to be seen, is their absolute dependency on the suffering animal for their happiness. It must be covered up. That’s why they want to lie about the lost proof of ownership in the first place. 

And let’s call this out plainly, okay? It’s shame. Shame that motivates their desires to make excuses for it. It’s covered up by fictions. 

Ah, and let me take a moment, since I’ve been name-dropping a bit this episode, to drop the name Jacques Derrida in here. I’ve spoken of him in episodes before this journey, but I think he’s valuable here. He was a French philosopher famous for his concept of deconstructionJacques Derrida is a founding voice. Since there is no knowl... More. And I don’t want to get too academic here, so we’ll say this about deconstructionJacques Derrida is a founding voice. Since there is no knowl... More for right now: it is a philosophy of extreme examination, high skepticism, of our language. One of his books, The Animal That Therefore I Am, is worth noting. 

Derrida asks us about that word, “animal”: what produced it, how is it used, why? Somehow, this single simple word is created to contain millions of species–from protoplasms to bald eagles and chimpanzees—all in order for us to mark them, in our vocabulary, as different from us. Yes, I understand the scientific definition, but that use is not nearly so common as the argumentative one: “Just an animal,” as if that explains everything and places us above it. In such a court, we might even say that the humans don’t recognize the animals as plaintiffs. They respond rarely to the animal arguments; at best they offer a kind of stunned silence, even embarrassment. 

And to underscore the artificiality of this distinction, Derrida mentions how embarrassed he is (how many of us are) to be seen by his cat while in his bathroom naked. What’s important for Derrida is that he acknowledges that the animal watches him. It sees him. It’s not just an object or empty-brained creature but something with the subject capacity to observe, to offer a different point of view. He doesn’t, for instance, worry about the toothbrush staring at him. Whether the animal can speak its case or not, it witnesses.

And, after all, just because a creature cannot speak and reason back with the logical syllogisms Aristotle expects, does this make its suffering less real?

And one more connection on all of this that I want to make, one that harkens back to Adrianna Cavarero who we spent some time with back when discussing Poe’s works. You remember: she spoke to us of horrorism, the single-sided physical violence practiced on those who are completely helpless. At the time we talked about it in terms of human cruelties upon civilians, upon children, upon the incapacitated, torture for absolutely no gain. Cavarero uses the Italian term, L’inerme, the unarmed, the helpless, the defenseless. I offer the term, L’inerme, because I think it sometimes helps us take special notice, that it underlines a concept we otherwise skip over. 

Here’s part of the testimony of the Horse from the Epistle:

Your Majesty, had you seen us as their prisoners on the field of battle, bits in our mouths, saddles on our backs, plunging unprotected through clouds of dust, hungry and thirsty, swords in our faces, lances to our chests, and arrows in our throats, awash in blood, you would have had pity on us, O King.

And the testimony of the Donkey:

Your Majesty, had you seen us as prisoners of the sons of Adam, our backs laden with rocks, bricks, earth, wood, iron, and other heavy loads, struggling and straining to go forward, while they stood over us, stick in hand to beat us brutally about the face and back in anger, you would have pitied us and shed tears of sorrow for us, merciful King. Where then are their mercy and compassion?

L’inerme. Our speciesism, this linguistic and psychological blindness to ourselves, which strips our victims of their ontological dignity, turning violence into a normalized, daily industry. 

 

 

Speciesism, Le Guin, and Peter Singer

 

I know I’m bringing in a bunch of folks from all over in this episode, but it’s the first time we’ve had a chance to look at Omelas from this angle. And, too, I think it’s becoming clear (and will become more clear as we move forward), that The Case of the Animals Versus Man lays the groundwork arguments for so much of what we’ve become. 

But I also want to connect dots as we approach some of these final angles on our season’s journey. For instance, I offered us ethicist Peter Singer twice before this season, most recently in discussing replaceability when discussing clones and other sacrifices. Singer asks that if the death of an individual might confer greater positive outcomes on a future, it must be considered worthwhile. Singer acknowledges that there is a sacrifice, even suffering, but that a good utilitarian ethicist will always look to the balance of consequence. But way back in one of the episodes on William James, I pointed out that Singer’s concept of sacrifice is not limited to death. He also makes the point that if the wealthy or privileged were to give up some of their comforts in order to produce a happier and more just society, this would also be a positive outcome. Aha.

So here, at last, we can see one of Singer’s most important points, one he’s quite famous for. In his 1979 book Animal Liberation, Singer popularized the term “speciesism.” And, no surprise, he is not for it. He says rather aggressively, that the capacity for suffering is the only boundary we must consider for moral consideration. In other words, anything that can suffer must be defended, must be considered in this utilitarian balance of consequence. An animal’s suffering must raise the same sort of strenuous mood, of moral outrage, as anyone else. Logically, he argues, it is the same as racism, or sexism, or any other kind of othering discrimination. It’s sentience he’s concerned about, not some arbitrary measure of intelligence, Aristotle.

Now this gets complicated, though, doesn’t it? Morality is not a spreadsheet determination of positive social balance of good. How do we determine this fuzzy line between compassion and calculation? If we stick with the math, a suffering cow that provides good medicine may be a bargain. What about one suffering child? Hmm. Still hanging on to that difference, are we?

Singer is one of the first to give us the understanding of the “factory farm” where cruelty and pain are practiced on an industrial scale. Without him, we might be looking back on the Islamic epistle as a quaint fable. But he unapologetically becomes the voice for today’s animals, giving witness not before a Jinn King, but to all of us. I look in my refrigerator and I see his point.

And, of course, we see singer in Le Guin’s suffering child of Omelas. We call the child an “it” to justify the abuse. We must strip it of anything that looks like dignity. We are still outraged when we read Le Guin. Call the child an “it,” and we’re still horrified. But call the pig a pork chop and we’re not triggered. And why is this? Is it out of habitus? Our conditioning that such an immense and systemic suffering of animals can no longer move us? Must not be questioned?

Remember, too, that this is not the only place where Le Guin has alerted us to these issues. You may think my reach to equate the Suffering Child in Omelas to animals everywhere is a reach. But first, I’ll point out that the rhetorical arguments and language games are identical, as we’ve seen. The dependencies on comforts, upon otium, the evasion modeling, the slippage in vocabulary, the legal and economic excuses, they’re all there. The kid may not be an animal, but the people of Omelas are necessarily comfortable carnivores.

More, Le Guin doesn’t stop with Omelas. In her book The Word for World is Forest, the character of Captain Davidson justifies his extraction of the resources of a planet, and he treats the native people there like “a beetle you have to keep stepping on.”  It’s a trick the humans in our epistle do, too, a kind of “hyper-separation” according to eco-philosopher Val Plumwood. The rhetorical trick is to define the oppressor power as completely the opposite from the oppressed, and that by doing so we justify conquest. Right.

But you, me, and Le Guin also visited her short story “Vaster Than Empires and More Slow” near the beginning of our journey. The giant vegetable planet, too, has a genuine consciousness, just not one that anyone recognizes at all except for Osden. There is no use of Aristotelian logic to prove sentience, let alone superiority. It’s about Osden’s sensitivity, his “unreserved surrender, that left no place for evil” to the planet, his empathic understanding of what is Other to him. Osden rejects the hyper-separation, makes himself a part, a companion species, to the planet.

This is the same demand our animals are making to the humans, an empathetic surrender. The humans several times attempt to cite religious texts in their argument to the Jinn King. The birds offer a rebuttal: they read the will of God directly in nature. “Wherever we turn our face, there is the face of God.” They don’t need to be reminded of the word in writing. 

Just because sentience doesn’t fit our pre-conception of it, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Or that we aren’t accountable to it.

19th Century Crimes

 

I’ve been saving this until the end, because it’s a pretty phenomenal concept around our story. And damned ironic. 

As you might imagine, the animal case in the story is pretty solid, hard to deny, and compelling in its drama. The human case, at best on shaky logical and even spiritual territory, as every argument the humans make from the Torah, the Gospels, or the Qur’an (and they cite all of them) is countered as easily by verses that favor the animals. 

And maybe you’ve read this trial before or you know the ending, but here it is: The Jinn King decides in favor of the humans. The attendant announces:

You have heard, O animals, the explanations of these humans and you have conceded that their arguments are sound.

Wait, what? They did?  How and why? The ending is sudden, inexplicable, even outrageous. 

This? This is the great wisdom owned by the secret society of philosophers, the Ikhwān al-Safā’, that the practice of cruelty will continue? This is the neutral Jinn King’s final judgment? 

And indeed, it seems so.         Or, it has seemed so, at least in the preponderance of translations offered ever since it began to be mass printed. Scholar Katharine Loevy just recently, in 2019, over 1000 years after it was written, demonstrated that a small editorial change occurred at some point in the 19th century printing which so many had read over the past few generations, a reading that you and I can now at last better understand.

Editors of that imperialist Age of Empire made the decision to print the work, but they could not possibly contend with the original ending. And so . . . they changed it. They added a quick paragraph of the King ruling in favor of the humans and compelling the animals to accept the result. 

What, the original was just too disturbing for you guys? A little too “on point?“ Kind of got under your skin, did it? Were you feeling, perhaps, a little shame? And did you still feel shame when you made the change and didn’t tell anyone? That no one signed off on it, kept it all, you know, unaccountable? Trying to make all the readers feel more comfortable in their cruelties? Sanitizing the language, a bit, are we? Can’t have anyone questioning their values! And of course the ironyA "deflection of expectation," where words, situation, or pe... More, isn’t this just what the humans in the tale are doing? Desperately trying to hide their weakness and dependence upon their extraction economies?

Okay, I’ll settle down. A bit. It’s just too absurd and literarily perfect in its metafictional significance. 

And Loevy along with others have since demonstrated that the original 10th century manuscript never has the king justifying the slavery at all. This judgment as written by the anonymous editors never occurred.

But why should we be overly surprised? It isn’t that the 1800s were particularly anxious about the issue of animal rights. That didn’t really become a popular topic until Peter Singer’s book in 1979. So why so hot and bothered to make the change? What are you up to?

I admit, at this point, this is just Steve speculating a bit, but I think by now you’ve seen a lot of dots connected, so I’m going to add a few more in the same overall picture. We’ll color it in together another time.

Chinua Achebe. You remember our Nigerian writer who argued that all writing was either for or against the emperor? That all art is “intimately linked to social responsibility”? Well, here we are in the age of emperors. Of empires. Of European states taking Africa and Asia and South America, laying claim to those inferior civilizations. Here, I’ll offer this comment by Achebe that I don’t think I’ve mentioned before, but seems fitting: When describing how the Igbo people of Nigeria and how much of Africa had been denigrated into physical labor, he said: “You may talk to a horse but you don’t wait for a reply!” Such is the attitude of the slave master. Like our humans hearing the appeal of the island animals, there is little need to listen, let alone respond. The colonizer must practice hyper-separation, must see the native as a “beast of burden” in order to justify empire.

Activist Frantz Fanon of the Caribbean saw it this way. In his book The Wretched of the Earth, he says the colonial world is a “Manichean bifurcation between two different species: master and zoological native.” Same concept, yes? Anything that is not master is resource, slave, a thing to be used, to be turned to use. Animal or person, it makes little difference. All terms which are not “master” are “animal,” a weaponization of the term against human subjects. What did the humans at the trial say about “erect stature,” again?

Fanon was influenced by fellow islander Aimé Césaire who famously equated the work of colonization to “thingification,” what we’ve spoken of several times now, the objectification, the de-humanization, of humanity. Here it is easy to see that this applied to anything the master sees. The new term I prefer is commodification. If it can turned to economic uses, so much the better. What did the humans say should they lose their resources? “Death would be better for us than such a life.”

What we have, I think is an ancient Islamic fable that, when altered as it was in the 19th century, became an original speciesist blueprint for the binary opposition between colonizer and native. Don’t forget, all of our animals were living in peaceful bliss before the human boat landed on their shores. When we strip animals of their ontological dignity, when we turn them into our extraction economy, we are practicing the same horrorism and thingification that empire uses to subjugate nations. And if we can revise our culture stories to fit that habitus, to force the zoological native to consent to its own torture, we are culturally absolved of guilt.

For decades and decades, this tale was studied and argued over, but we had the wrong ending.

Synthesis and Superiority

 

By now, you may believe you know the ending of the original tale, but as I said at the beginning, our secret society proceeded carefully, synthesizing its wisdoms into profound nuance. 

Here’s how it ends. When they bring their final testimony to the court, the humans offer not another conqueror, but a kind of cosmopolitan saint, a syncretic gathering of all of the best of humanity into one body. He is described as

Persian by breeding, Arabian by faith, a ḥanīf (or true believer) by confession, Iraqi in culture, Hebrew in lore, Christian in manner, Damascene in devotion, Greek in science, Indian in discernment, Sufi in intimations, regal in character, masterful in thought, and divine in awareness.

An interesting choice for the humans to finally bring forward. The humans do not win the trial by pointing to their rationality, their dominance, or their great cities. They try to win by pointing to their capacity for sanctity, for virtue, which of course is something they have already fallen far short on, by any measure.

So here comes our saint, who himself offers an opening argument which praises the best of human saints, and then he says finally:

Many have cited their virtues, and preachers in public assemblies have devoted their lives down through the ages to sermons dilating on their merits and their godly ways, without ever reaching the pith of the matter.

And then the text falls silent. There is no more. There is no verdict, no resolution, no pronouncement, no apparent final point, no closure. And no, it’s not because the manuscript is incomplete. The Rasā’il Ikhwān al-Ṣafā’ was distributed in its entirety, and this was Epistle 22 of 52. This was its ending.

We are, my friends, still at a place of uncertainty, of aporia, that moment of unresolvability, where we must ourselves make of the arguments what we will. It’s that interpretive vertigo, and we must learn to sit with it, live with it, reflect with it. Perhaps we have never reached the pith of the matter. Perhaps we are lost, still, in our own hubris. Maybe we need to better understand the voices of animals while they had them. 

But in this story, no one walks away. Not from a child, not from a colonized people, and not from the natural world around us. In this story we face the unrefuted victims of our cruelties. 

And in that, perhaps we find wisdom.

Outro

 

Follow me and find me along with supplements, bonus episodes, resources, newsletters, and still more at Waywords Studio dot com.  That’s Waywords Studio (two s’s in the middle) dot com. Thanks for listening! 

Music for Literary Nomads is by Randon Myles.

Chapter headings by Natalie Harrison and Sarah Skaleski.

Literary Nomads is a production of Waywords Studio. Find me at Waywords Studio on most social media and at Waywords Studio .com.

Bibliography

 

Achebe, Chinua. Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays. Doubleday, 1989.

Aristotle. Politics. Translated by Carnes Lord, University of Chicago Press, 1984.

Bacon, Francis. The New Organon. Edited by Lisa Jardine and Michael Silverthorne, Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Cavarero, Adriana. Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence. Translated by William McCuaig, Columbia University Press, 2009.

Césaire, Aimé. Discourse on Colonialism. Translated by Joan Pinkham, Monthly Review Press, 2000.

Derrida, Jacques. The Animal That Therefore I Am. Edited by Marie-Luise Mallet, translated by David Wills, Fordham University Press, 2008.

Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Richard Philcox, Grove Press, 2004.

Haraway, Donna J. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003.

Ikhwān al-Safā’ (The Brethren of Purity). The Case of the Animals versus Man Before the King of the Jinn. Translated by Lenn E. Goodman and Richard McGregor, Oxford University Press, 2009.

Korsten, Frans-Willem, and Tessa de Zeeuw. “Towards a New Judicial Scene for Humans and Animals.” Law & Literature, vol. 27, no. 1, 2015, pp. 24-43.

Le Guin, Ursula K. “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” The Wind’s Twelve Quarters, Harper & Row, 1975.

Le Guin, Ursula K. The Word for World is Forest. Berkley Books, 1972.

Le Guin, Ursula K. “Vaster Than Empires and More Slow.” The Wind’s Twelve Quarters, Harper & Row, 1975.

Loevy, Katharine. “The Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ’s Animal Accusers: An Islamic Debate on Animal Slavery.” Environmental Philosophy, vol. 16, no. 2, 2019, pp. 319-338.

Plumwood, Val. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. Routledge, 1993.

Singer, Peter. Practical Ethics. 3rd ed., Cambridge University Press, 2011.