MJJG 24-33 -

[Raphael Saltwood]

The Nook book has a footnote on pg 15

“Mu’tafikah - According to the Koran, inhabitants of the ruined cities where Lot’s people had lived. I call the inhabitants “Mu’tafikah” because just as the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah

were the Bohemians of their day, Berbelang and his gang are the Bohemians of the 1920s Manhattan.”


While the serendipitous sound of the word didn’t make it *less​* likely for him to use, he didn’t make it up:

https://books.google.com/books?id=t-bBAwAAQBAJ&pg=PR13&lpg=PR13&dq=meaning+of+tafikah+arabic&source=bl&ots=I3DQtM7CWD&sig=ACfU3U0old7s2N0CfjKRfVrY1NpXAxd3Zg&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjRmP-j-ZftAhXXTTABHfOpACcQ6AEwDnoECAcQAQ#v=onepage&q=meaning%20of%20tafikah%20arabic&f=false

“Al Mu’tafikah” - overthrown cities


This prompts a slew of questions:

1) how interested was Mr Reed in the Koran - enough to read it in Arabic? Big dialogue coming up at the rent party including Koran commentary.

2) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lot_in_Islam

Slightly different take as noted in article.

3) by linking the Mu’tafikah with the Sodomites and Gomorreans (?) and both with the Bohemians, is he disparaging them? Or - since he seems to be sympathetic - is condemnation of the “cities of the plain” not part of his program?


Spoiler alert - sort of - in MJ,

It’s probably important that

monotheism is (like the excluded middle) bad sh*t






Becky wrote:

In the book, Berbalang is the head of the “Mu’tafikah”which is busily trying to liberate cultural artifacts from museums and centres of “Art Detention” in order to return them to their originating cultures.

Best I can think is that Mu’tafikah is a slang deterioration of “mutha-f’ker.”

Apparently within Mu’tafikah, Berbelang represents the Black race, Thor Wintergreen represents the White race , Yellow Jack is a Chinese American and Jose Fuentes is a Mayan seaman.  They are all part of Mu’tafikah.  (More references are coming up.)

Becky


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