How can one not be intoxicated when listening to Um Kulthum ? You don't need alcohol, hashish, uppers or downers...just listen to her voice.
How can one not hold onto intoxication, when everything around you is being banned ?
In Iraq, they have banned alcohol, in the South, and in Baghdad except in the Green Zone. You need to keep the pimps and whores happy there.
You see, the problem with banning alcohol is that every Iraqi will tell you, that not only we were the first to press dates to make Arak or Raki, and that we were the first to invent beer, from Sumerian times...but that all the poets and thinkers from Abbasid times until the new Safavids landed, used to enjoy a drink or two. How do you think Poetry flourished ?
(notice how the word Uruk and Arak, Iraqi and Raki are closely related)
And there is an added problem here...that those who are doing the banning, the Shiite Mullahs from Iran and their Iraqi followers, are known to be the heaviest drinkers...
It is a known fact that the whiskey and Arak bottles appear after the last prayer of the day, the evening prayer...Ya'nee they finish their sermons and the drinking starts.
But you see, now, with the new morality of the new Iraq, this is forbidden in public...I say in public because trust me, a good deal of those motherfucker hypocrites still drink...
And those who don't drink, have substituted opium instead. Like the Jaysh Al-Mahdi of Muqtada Al-Sadr. That too is a well known fact -- those thugs were/are under the effect.
The new morality of the new Iraq encourages Opium trading with Iran at the highest echelons, but forbids alcohol. I wrote a post about that on my other blog.
The new morality of the new Iraq forbids and murders women who go out without a veil and wear a little make up, but encourages prostitutes in the Green Zone.
The new morality of the new Iraq forbids and murders gays but allows paedophile trafficking rings that trade in Iraqi children.
The new morality of the new Iraq is strict on adultery with honor killings on the rise, but leaves rapists on the loose...
The new morality of the new Iraq is the morality of criminals, of the corrupt and the depraved, the morality of the hypocrites...
The new morality of the new Iraq is a carbon copy of the "morality" of Iran and America.
As for me, I shall continue in my intoxication...with Umm Kulthum, before they ban her too.
Intoxication is my new form of Resistance.
Yalla, come and get intoxicated with me...
A short piece from a long song. Al Atlal - The Ruins.
The Ruins, how appropriate.
I will copy the translation for this bit only as sung. The rest of the poem can be read HERE.
Had love seen two as intoxicated as us?
So much hope we had built up around us
And we walked in the moonlit path, joy skipping along ahead of us
And we laughed like two children together
And we ran and raced our shadows
And we became aware after the euphoria and woke up
If only we did not awaken...
If only we did not awaken...Indeed.
For those who have mastered the art of Sama'a , the art of listening, you will see how each word is enacted by her magical voice, you will see how she has mastered and lives the art...the art of intoxication.
Youtube : Robert Dominkovic, november 2008.
