The Dish

Amena Bakr takes note of a new phenomenon on the hajj:

It’s one of the biggest trends taking over the social media world, and now during the annual Muslim hajj pilgrimage visitors to the holy sites can’t resist the urge to take a selfie. Between calls for forgiveness from God, the word “selfie” echoes through the white marble halls inside the Grand Mosque in Mecca where pilgrims walk around the Kaaba, the black-clad cube towards which the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims face to pray,

“I’m taking a selfie with Kaaba behind me to post on my Facebook so my family and friends can see me. That’s the way we communicate these days – no need to call,” said Mehmet Dawoud, a Turkish student. To many, selfies are just another way to preserve the memory of being in a holy site and also share the experience in the trendiest of ways with loved ones. “Selfies are just a way to make the memory last in the coolest possible way. Hajj is always seen as something very serious and for older people. Selfies make it cool again,” said Amir Marouf, a 30-year-old Egyptian architect.

Antoinette Lattouf ties the trend to to the Saudi government’s decision to allow cell phones at the Holy Mosque. But John Bowman raises an eyebrow, noting that the most widely read article about the “craze” was published before the Hajj even started :

Can #Hajjselfie beat the #OscarSelfie in Retweets ? Lets RT this To infinity #Muslim and say #mashAllah pic.twitter.com/WQANJ5m8Hh

— Somalia Pundit (@SomPundit) April 30, 2014

Here’s now it happened. Saudi photographer Jameel Musleh posted [the above] selfie to Twitter in April. The pilgrims shown in the photo may have been on the lesser pilgrimage, the umrah, that can be performed at any time of year, says Fareed Amin, the president of the Islamic Institute of Toronto. This photo has been retweeted and reposted thousands of times.One Twitter user dubbed it the #selfieoftheyear. Another tried to get the photo more retweets than Ellen DeGeneres’s Oscar selfie. This may be where the hashtag and name #HajjSelfie originated.

The meme was persistent enough that last week, ArabNews.com wrote an article ahead of the hajj, quoting Islamic studies teachers and scholars who advised against “photography without a legitimate reason.” The story used the above umrah photo was illustration. “The Prophet (peace be upon him) when he went for Haj, he said: O Allah, I ask of you a pilgrimage that contains no boasting or showing of. Taking such selfies and videos defy the wish of our Prophet,” said scholar Sheikh Assim Al-Hakeem in that article. This led to a discussion among Muslims on social media. The Twitter account @MuslimMatters put the question to its followers.

What do you think of the #hajj selfie? Ruins tranquility or a sign of the times?

— Muslim Matters (@MuslimMatters) September 30, 2014

When Buzzfeed got a hold of the story, it became Muslim Pilgrims Are Taking “Hajj Selfies” And Clerics Are Not Happy. “‘Selfie fever’ has taken over the hajj,” they wrote, proclaiming it a “craze” before it even occurred.

Meanwhile, Boer Deng looks into another way new media is engaging with ancient tradition:

The prototype for a new app, Mecca 3D, was released this summer, and lets users explore a true-to-scale digital rendition of the Mosque at Mecca. It has been downloaded about 80,000 times on Android and iOS, according to its creator, Bilal Chbib.* He hopes to add interactive lessons and to integrate the program with Oculus Rift, a virtual reality simulator. Going on a technologically mediated pilgrimage might resemble the experience of a flight simulator. “You can never substitute the place where the Prophet stood,” as Chbib says. But virtual participation in religious activities can still give people an authentic experience, though of a different sort. Krystina Derrickson, an Islamic scholar, writes of visiting Mecca in the virtual world program Second Life: “When my ‘avatar’ visits the Mosque, I feel compelled to take off my avatar’s shoes,” she says, “because, really, it’s me visiting that Mosque.” The Mosque is not real, but that does not mean it lacks “a rather noticeable social and cultural reality.” Derrickson thinks that this gives it and other digital religious spaces a kind of “ambiguous” sacredness.

(Photo: Muslim pilgrims pose for a selfie during the Jamarat ritual, the stoning of Satan, in Mina near the holy city of Mecca, on October 4, 2014. Pilgrims pelt pillars symbolizing the devil with pebbles to show their defiance on the third day of the hajj as Muslims worldwide mark the Eid al-Adha or the Feast of the Sacrifice, marking the end of the hajj pilgrimage to Mecca and commemorating Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son Ismail on God’s command in the holy city of Mecca. By Mohammed Al-Shaikh/AFP/Getty Images)

Like previous critics, Michelle Orange emphasizes the role of grace in Marilynne Robinson’s new novel, Lila:

Robinson’s genius is for making indistinguishable the highest ends of faith and fiction, evoking in her characters and her readers the paradox by which an individual, enlarged by the grace of God, or art, acquires selfhood in acquiring a sense of the world beyond the self—the sublime apprehension that other people exist.

Which is to say that Robinson’s animating theme—grace—is also central to her genius. Described as “a sort of ecstatic fire that takes things down to essentials,” grace is evidenced in both the particular and the abstract: as laughter, a beloved face or voice, or as “playing catch in a hot street . . . leaping after a high throw and that wonderful collaboration of the whole body with itself”; but also in forgetting “all the tedious particulars,” in feeling the presence of a “mortal and immortal being.” “A character is really the sense of a character,” Robinson has written, and hers suggest, above the particulars, how the mysteries of grace persist in human beings, those wanting creatures who move Ames with their incandescence, the presence “shaped around ‘I’ like a flame on a wick, emanating itself in grief and guilt and joy and whatever else.”

Wyatt Mason focuses on how Robinson’s characters approach self-understanding:

She documents how Lila’s mind changes, not owing to the efforts of some external force but out of a righteous need of her own: to understand her husband, to speak his language, to forge a language of her own that will be spoken with, to, and for him and for them.

One of the book’s most telling passages involves watching Lila’s mind as she sits in her house, pregnant, reading the Book of Job, registering the lines and considering them. The act of reading the Bible as high drama may seem unlikely, but through it, Robinson has managed to portray how a mind with no religiosity might meet a book Robinson loves fiercely and, in its pages, find a road to a self that learns a new language: her own language. As it turns out, there is extraordinary drama in the story of how we learn to speak to ourselves.

In a recent interview, Robinson addressed this connection between faith and language:

As you write, do you draw on language found in your faith? What are the strengths of religious language, or what are the limitations of language when it comes to talking about faith and belief?

Language is limited in its nature. It’s like consciousness itself. It’s defective, and you can push at it. You can make it do things you wouldn’t have known it can do. One of the things that is a benefit to me is that, because I have been interested in a particular theology, it makes a coherent language. It’s internally self-referential, in a way. This could be true of anyone who is deeply acquainted with any tradition. This particular tradition was very verbal, so you have a very rich literature that pushes the articulation of certain basic ideas.

We have anxiety about differences. We are different, anyway, so we might as well calm down about it. But one of the things that we have to do is understand that within the system that is anyone’s difference is incredibly enabling. It means people before me have pondered the response to death. People before me have pondered the reality of time in different dialects. This is beautiful. This is not a thing to be anxious about. For my own Calvinistic purposes, I would like to see the tradition that I speak from re-animated, fleshed out. It’s human, it’s experience. Only religion fully realizes the arc of human life, and so much beautiful thought has gone into this over our eons of time.

Recent Dish on Lila here.

A new Viagra ad, which features a woman breathily imploring viewers to talk to their doctors about the drug, prompts Ian Crouch to consider a history of advertising for E.D. drugs:

[A]lthough the ad is essentially a come-on by a beautiful woman, it is refreshingly frank about sex, which means that it is markedly better than past ads that relied on silly or crass innuendo: Levitra’s football-through-the-tire-swing ad; Viagra’s “We Are the Champions” mass male celebration; Cialis’s adjacent his-and-her bathtubs. The rare exception  is the first television commercial Viagra ever ran, which turns out also to have been the brand’s best, featuring the former Senator and Republican Presidential candidate Bob Dole. That ad, which looks rather oddly like a campaign spot, became a punch line, mocked later by even Dole himself. But, watching it now, it seems far more forthright, honest, and even dignified than the ads that followed. Dole makes note of the ways in which the subject might make viewers uncomfortable, but he tells the audience, basically, to grow up: “You know, it’s a little embarrassing to talk about E.D., but it’s so important to millions of men and their partners, that I decided to talk about it publicly.” It was a little embarrassing; that was the point. In the intervening years, Viagra steered away from talking much about sex in its TV ads: its most recent campaign had showed ruggedly capable men at work, and alone.

The new ad, however, gets remarkably specific.

The problem under review is “not just getting an erection but keeping it”—the woman says this twice in less than a minute. The suggestion is that male sexual performance isn’t an all-or-nothing proposition but something that exists on a continuum—and it implies that men could be performing better. In another context, this plain talk about erections might have been the beginning of a more comprehensive, and truly honest, discussion about sex: it might have included the psychological and relational aspects of sexual experience; it could have suggested to men that sex wasn’t a sporting event, and that it need not be judged in terms of wins and losses; and it might have included the voices of real women. Here, the solution to a complicated issue remains simple: get yourself a prescription.

Recent Dish on Viagra here.