Archive for July 4th, 2013
How Alice in Wonderland Was Born? And the real Alice…
I didn’t read Lewis Carroll “Alice in Wonderland”
I didn’t see the movie, or any version of it, till now.
I had refused to take advantage of a free entrance to Disney Land in California when I was 26 of age, on the ground that this is for kids.
Until I visited the smaller version of Disney in Orlando 20 years later, and enjoyed it far more than the kids.
I am under the strong impression that I’ll give this book priority, if I stumble on the book.
Maria Popova posted in Brain pickings “Meet the Real Alice: How the Story of Alice in Wonderland Was Born“
“What is the use of a book without pictures or conversations!” thought Alice
On July 4, 1862, a young mathematician by the name of Charles Dodgson, better-known as Lewis Carroll, boarded a boat with a small group, setting out from Oxford to the nearby town of Godstow, where the group was to have tea on the river bank.
The party consisted of Carroll, his friend Reverend Robinson Duckworth, and the three little sisters of Carroll’s good friend Harry Liddell — Edith (age 8), Alice (age 10), and Lorina (age 13).
Entrusted with entertaining the young ladies, Dodgson fancied a story about a whimsical world full of fantastical characters, and named his protagonist Alice. So taken was Alice Liddell with the story that she asked Dodgson to write it down for her, which he did when he soon sent her a manuscript under the title of Alice’s Adventures Under Ground.
Historian Martin Gardner writes in The Annotated Alice (public library), originally published in 1960 and revised in a definite edition in 1999:
A long procession of charming little girls (we know today that they were charming from their photographs) skipped through Carroll’s life, but none ever took the place of his first love, Alice Liddell. ‘I have had some scores of child-friends since your time,’ he wrote to her after her marriage, ‘but they have been quite a different thing.’
The manuscript made its way to George MacDonald, and idol of Dodgson’s, who had the perfect litmus test for the story’s merit: He read it to his own children, who single-mindedly loved it.
Encouraged, Dodgson revised the story for publication, retitling it to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and adding the now-famous scene of the Mad Hatter’s tea party and the character of the Cheshire Cat for a grand total nearly twice as long as the manuscript he’d originally sent to Alice Liddell.
In 1865, John Tenniel illustrated the story and it was published in its earliest version. Gardner recounts this curious anecdote of the collaboration:
Tenniel’s pictures of Alice are not pictures of Alice Liddell, who had dark hair cut short with straight bangs across her forehead. Carroll sent Tenniel a photograph of Mary Hilton Badcock, another child-friend, recommending that he use her for a model, but whether Tenniel accepted that advice is a matter of dispute. That he did not is strongly suggested by these lines from a letter Carroll wrote sometime after both Alice books had been published…
‘Mr. Tenniel is the only artist, who has drawn for me, who has resolutely refused to use a model, and declared he no more need one than I should need a multiplication table to work a mathematical problem! I venture to think that he was mistaken and that for want of a model, he drew several pictures of ‘Alice’ entirely out of proportion — head decidedly too large and feet decidedly too small.’
For more Alice gold, see:
- Alice in Wonderland and Philosophy — seventeen contemporary thinkers examine the Lewis Carroll classic through the lens of philosophy, exploring subjects as diverse as drugs, dreams, logic, gender, perception, escapism, and what the Red Queen can teach us about nuclear strategy
- Salvador Dalí’s rare Alice in Wonderland illustrations — a hidden treasure circa 1969
- Alice in Wonderland pop-up adaptation — a feat of design and paper engineering
- Alice in Wonderland as a subway map
- Yayoi Kusama’s illustrations of Alice — Japan’s most prominent contemporary artist takes on the Carroll classic
- Leonard Wisegard’s stunning 1949 illustrations of Alice — a vibrant mid-century homage to Wonderland
No to Sunni version of Wilayat Fakeeh in Egypt
Mohammad Morsi has been deposed by a military and mass protest that lasted more than a week. He had fled from prison two years ago as Mubarak was sacked.
Cartoon showing Morsi sleeping by Mubarak, and Mubarak telling him “Close your eyes and do as I did”
The extremist Supreme Guide murshid of the Moslem Brotherhood, Mohammad Badi3, is detained, along with 300 its cadres.
All the religious TV channels are temporary suspended.
Within a year, the elected president Morsi acted as if the executive branch for the Supreme Guide in all the critical political decisions.
Morsi quickly wrote a constitution to the Brotherhood dictates, alienated the Constitutional Supreme Court, dismissed the Prosecutor General, and broke diplomatic relation with Syria at the instigation of Mohammad Badi3.
During an entire year, Morsi demonstrated to the Egyptian that Egypt has substituted its political system to an Iranian Wilayat Fakeeh, the Sunni version and ruled by the imams and clerics of the Moslem Brotherhood.
It is to be noted that Iran took advantage of 8 years of protracted war with Iraq of Saddam Hussein to manage a transition to a Wilayat Fakeeh orientation.
Morsi wanted this transition to be done within a year, and with no war to back this emergency situation.
As millions of protesters converged on the streets of Egypt on June 30 to peacefully and boisterously demand the downfall of Egypt’s first elected president Mohammed Morsi, deadly clashes broke out in several spots across the volatile nation. Around midnight, the Muslim Brotherhood’s international headquarters, located in Cairo’s upscale Moqattam district, was in flames.
As massive clouds of smoke blew out of the iconic Guidance Bureau of the worldwide organization, the movement’s disciplined, listen-and-obey youth continued to fire live ammunition at the assaulters. No more Brotherhood reinforcements arrived at the burning headquarters, and armored vehicles of the Interior Ministry stood watching from a distance, a clear message that the police would no longer protect the ruling clique.
Eight anti-Morsi protesters were killed by live bullets, mostly to the head and neck, and more than 35 were wounded by live rounds and birdshot.
Calls for blood donations to the battle-neighboring hospital continued to circulate social media websites for hours. How the Muslim Brotherhood fighters evacuated their positions remains unknown, but one of them was caught by protesters trying to escape and was brutally stripped naked and stabbed before reaching the police station in critical condition.
Certain that the office-turned-barracks had been abandoned after hours of deadly fighting, opposition attackers and random angry passersby raided the building, and looted everything they came across. Stacks of confidential Muslim Brotherhood documents were photographed and set free to virally circulate the Internet. One document listed millions of dollars of financial gifts and grants made by Qatar’s Prime Minster, Emir Hamad Bin Jassim Al-Thani, to top Brotherhood and Morsi administration officers.
The authenticity of the document was never confirmed but the incident was definitely reminiscent of raiding the clandestine fortress of Hosni Mubarak’s State Security in March 2011; the freshly obtained Muslim Brotherhood leaks will virally spread for weeks.
Surprisingly, thousands of devoted Brotherhood members holding their sit-in a few miles away didn’t mobilize to protect their sabotaged minaret. Top officials like Khairat El-Shater, the organization’s most influential financier and deputy chairman, did not order their subservient youth to march in defense of either Islamic Sharia or political legitimacy, as they once did in December 2012 when they attacked an opposition sit-in at the east Cairo presidential palace, leaving a dozen protesters dead.
“They are in a state of shock, serious and unprecedented shock,” a sacked Muslim Brotherhood official who worked with both Morsi and El-Shater told Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity.
“They underestimated June 30, but it turned out to be a surprising blow that paralyzed their plans,” said the source who insisted on hiding his identity fearing Brotherhood retaliation amid the ongoing instability. “After months of undermining the opposition and people, no one could imagine the numbers and momentum of protests, and accordingly no one had a backup plan.”
The former Brotherhood official says the movement fears a disastrous post-Morsi future. “They will be hunted down and sent back to prison, by law for crimes committed during Morsi’s year in power, or in a state of lawlessness that the country will turn a blind eye on because of widespread and apparent hatred. They are coming to realize that they will reap what they sowed.”
“The developments were too fast, so that they didn’t have a chance to flee the country, like Mubarak’s officials who jumped ship early in January 2011,” the source said. “The military and police apparently locked Egypt up and Islamists are now on a turf that definitely doesn’t belong to them anymore, despite Morsi, who is now in a palace that doesn’t obey him, more of a temporary lock-up.”
Such anti-Morsi developments are not only limited to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.
The powerfully strategized, multibillion-dollar organization with its deep-rooted divisions in almost every country in the Arab and Islamic world and its worldwide businesses, either official or clandestine, is not fighting for Egypt’s presidential seat: It is fighting for an 8-decade global legacy that will imminently suffer the aftershocks of the popular quake jolting its murshid’s [supreme guide’s] historical fortress in Cairo.
“This is a major element in the Brotherhood’s calculation and this is their greater battle,” retired Col. Khaled Okasha, a security analyst and former head of North Sinai’s Civil Defense Department of the Interior Ministry, told Al-Monitor.
“The Egypt command, which is the only global command, has always been the source of power to all sub-divisions in other countries,” added Okasha. “If the Supreme Guide and his Cairo bureau are hit hard by Morsi’s downfall and all of the current situation’s political and social consequences, they will become nothing but a counselor to the international divisions that will then start working independently according to their pure domestic circumstances.”
“Egypt’s presidency, the biggest win in the Brotherhood’s history and the recently yet internationally recognized political umbrella for the Brotherhood worldwide, will be gone with Morsi leaving office.”
Okasha disputed that Morsi and his Islamist cronies will suffer exceptional oppressive measures after their much anticipated ouster. “Such exceptional oppression requires a decades-strong dictatorship like Mubarak’s, which you cannot build in a few weeks. That dictatorship was brought down in January 2011.”
“This orchestrated fear is mostly Morsi’s last card to maintain his supporters’ morale. The Brotherhood is leading a smear campaign against every scenario involving Morsi’s downfall.”
Okasha believes that, legally, the Muslim Brotherhood officers including Morsi, in case of his resignation, will stand dozens of trials that could extend for years, a scene very similar to Hosni Mubarak, his sons and regime members.
Over the past week, unconfirmed reports of Egypt’s Islamist figures on travel ban lists and Qatar demanding the departure of Youssef Al-Qaradawi, the influential Muslim Brotherhood cleric, have shed some light on repercussions that might possibly hunt the Muslim Brotherhood wherever they are.
The Gaza Strip’s Hamas Movement, the closest of the Middle East offshoots to the command in Egypt, stands first in the line after Morsi and the Guidance Bureau, and is desperately trying to avoid the looming domino effect.
“Hamas’s popularity in Gaza and Egypt continues to sink because of their shameless interference in defense of the Muslim Brotherhood and Morsi and creating animosities with almost every non-Islamist power in Egypt. In addition to politics, the relations between the peoples of Egypt and Gaza were negatively impacted,” said Ahmed Ban, a researcher of Islamist movements who heads the Political and Social Movements Unit at the independent Nile Center for Strategic Studies.
“Hamas should hastily apologize to the Egyptian people and attempt fixing what it broke by interference in Egypt, if that’s possible, and if the situation worsens, it could be a start to the gradual end of Hamas’ rule over Gaza,” Ban told Al-Monitor.
“Moreover, the 80-year cartel imposed by Egyptians on the global Supreme Guidance in Cairo and the Guidance Council will be ended, possibly moved to another country, and accordingly limiting the majority of direct supply, political endorsement and the post-January 2011 refuge for Hamas.”
Signs of Hamas’ worsening situation have also surfaced in the past week.
On June 30, Egypt’s military deployed tanks at the Gaza border; the first appearance of Egyptian tank divisions in Sinai’s military-free Zone C since the Israeli withdrawal in 1982.
The exceptional deployment was ordered by the military shutting down the underground Rafah tunnels feeding Hamas’ armed militias with weapons and other logistics, and it coincided with the arrest of three different groups of Hamas armed members in different locations around Cairo on the same day, one the detained groups occupied an apartment close to the destroyed Brotherhood Cairo headquarters.
“They are in the heart of the Muslim Brotherhood’s battle to defend what remains of their temple, a battle viewed by Hamas as their own,” said Okasha, the retired colonel. “Morsi and the Brotherhood’s rule was a special, unprecedented win for Hamas, I don’t think they will rethink their position and withdraw from the scene at such a critical moment.”
As soon as the Egyptian military stepped in and declared a 48-hour ultimatum for Morsi to satisfy national demands, the sacked Muslim Brotherhood member reached out to Al-Monitor.
“The military just opened a less disastrous exit for Morsi, but he won’t take it,” the source said. “The Muslim Brotherhood is too blind to realize how weak its cards have become.”
Hours later, a presidential statement rebuffed the military’s clear warning.
Mohannad Sabry is an Egyptian journalist based in Cairo. He has written for McClatchy Newspapers and The Washington Times, served as managing editor of Global Post’s reporting fellowship Covering the Revolution, in Cairo, and contributed to its special reports “Tahrir Square” and “Egypt: The Military, the People.” On Twitter: @mmsabry
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