Obama, Muslims, Moors, Briffault

Alvar Sunol

Walker Percy, in THE MOVIEGOER, describes an experience of time-and-place/being dislocation (not unpleasant) familiar to many persons. Binx Bolling sits in a theater watching a movie the setting of which is the theater's neighborhood in New Orleans. Our art gallery (Magpie, child of Loudeac Tile Studio) is on Dryad Road, Athene (near Acadamae Avenue), perhaps twenty steps from Guido's Grill, in the book I was reading, there, today. BEEN DOWN SO LONG IT LOOKS LIKE UP TO ME - Richard Farina, Ithaca, Johnny's Big Red Grill, et seq. Today, young Obama extolled in Egypt the merits and glory of the Muslim world, a point that Robert Briffault made ceaselessly ceaselessly ceaselessly in his career as a cultural anthropologist, novelist, and scholar. If there were a thousand souls listening to my thoughts, they would, over the years, have heard me aching and trying to quote Briffault:

It was under the influence of the Arabian and Moorish revival of culture, and not in the fifteenth century, that the real Renaissance took place. Spain, not Italy, was the cradle of the rebirth of Europe. After steadily sinking lower and lower into barbarism, it had reached the darkest depths of ignorance and degradation when the cities of the Saracenic world, Baghdad, Cairo, Córdoba, Toledo, were growing centres of civilization and intellectual activity. It was there that the new life arose which was to grow into a new phase of human evolution. From the time when the influence of their culture made itself felt, began the stirring of a new life.