In the Koran, there are no camels ...

[Dave Monroe]

But, memory suddenly triggered by a scrap of an old
post of kai's here I'd printed out last week, I'd
actually logged in to post this ...

"Gibbon observes that in the Arabian book par
excellence, in the Koran, there are no camels; I
believe if there were any doubt as to the authenticity
of the Koran, this absence of camels would be
sufficient to prove it is an Arabian work.  It was
written by Mohammed, and Mohammed, as an Arab, had no
reason to know that camels were especially Arabian;
for him they were a part of reality, he had no reason
to emphasize them; on the other hand, the first thing
a falsifier, a tourist, an Arab nationalist would do
is have a surfeit of camels, caravans of camels, on
every page; but Mohammed, as an Arab, was unconcerned:
he knew he could be an Arab without camels."

Jorge Luis Borges, "The Argentine Writer and
Tradition" (1934)

Not having any of the various Borges anthologies this
essay is collected in, had to cobble this passage
together from a couple of sites ...

http://www.themodernword.com/borges/borges_quotes.html

http://muse.tau.ac.il/maslool/intro-contracted.html

But if anybody can find the complete text (I'm in a
bit of a rush here), let us know.  But strangely
enough, this came up most recently for me in ...

Abbas, Ackbar.  Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics
   of Disappearance.  Mpls: U of Minn P, 1997.

http://www.uchicago.edu/research/jnl-pub-cult/current/abbas.html

... which I mention only to make the observation that,
whereas for some memory is like a database, or an
encyclopedia, or a card catalogue or somesuch, for me,
it's rather more like a minefield ...



__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Get personalized email addresses from Yahoo! Mail
http://personal.mail.yahoo.com/