Tile mosaic panel detail, Safavid dynasty (1501–1722), Philadelphia Museum of Art.
In the 1990s, the New York City Metropolitan Transit Authority began putting poems up in the ad spaces of subway cars as part of the civic arts program Poetry in Motion. One of the first ones I remember seeing was an Inuit creation myth, translated by Edward Field:
Magic Words
In the very earliest time,
when both people and animals lived on earth,
a person could become an animal if he wanted to
and an animal could become a human being.
Sometimes they were people
and sometimes animals
and there was no difference.
All spoke the same language.
That was the time when words were like magic.
The human mind had mysterious powers.
A word spoken by chance
might have strange consequences.
It would suddenly come alive
and what people wanted to happen could happen–
all you had to do was say it.
Nobody could explain this:
That's the way it was.
This plainspoken tale, with its paradoxical ability to conjure a world without boundaries between the workaday and the transcendent, was galvanizing to me. Reading it on the subway on my way to work, I felt as if it opened a brief passage to that mythical, primordial realm where all things were one.
“The time when words were like magic” is a time that Western youth are desperate to recreate, as they are desperate, too, to stave off the fact that they will be compelled to leave it. The pro-Gaza encampments that have cropped up at universities across the United States are a demonstration of this great need for magic, beauty, and enchantment. You can see it in the footage of massed U.C.L.A. students prostrating themselves toward Mecca — students who are almost certainly not Muslim, since Islam discourages men and women from praying together.
Some observers see these displays as proof, at best, of the protesters’ ignorance, and at worst of their cynicism. But I think the mass prayers are something different: a performance of this lost generation’s spiritual hunger. It’s quite possible that some of these students have never prayed before, much less in a group, and thus the sense of unity and shared purpose that corporate worship facilitates may be a joyful revelation, one which I am loathe to begrudge them.
And I hope it is. I hope their hearts are touched by the Divine. It’s true that, if these thoroughly Western college kids truly understood Islam, they might find its millenarian prophecies bizarre and its sexual ethics repugnant; still, they deserve the opportunity to draw closer to God — don’t we all? So perhaps this worship, performative though it may be, is sincerely expressive of yearning, and that God will reward it.
These students are not alone in their turn towards Mecca. In the days after 10/7, Islam emerged as an attractive spiritual option for some unlikely and very online young converts.
They include the billionaire Communist revolutionary Fergie Chambers, who “took shahada” earlier this year — i.e. professed Islam:
And indeed, Islam has a beautiful, austere logic to it that must be highly attractive to a generation for whom everything has been not only permitted, but even encouraged. It’s noteworthy in this context that the simple spiritual symmetry of Islam has also appealed to generations of Americans schooled in chaos and confronting the deprivations of hard time.
But the drift toward Islam among student protesters lacks the brutal context of captivity that spurs the prison convert. Instead, the students’ Islam is buoyed by the communal ecstasy of uniting with others in a Dionysian action that they know is doomed to fail. The tragic inevitability — the universities won’t divest, and they will face serious discipline — makes the evanescence of the encampments all the sweeter and more intense.
As a young woman in the Gaza encampment at Cal Poly Humboldt explained:
I know [that] every single person here, whether or not they know my face or my name, has my back, and I know that I have theirs. The sense of love and community here is just magic. It’s incredible. It’s something that I never want to lose, and I’m so, so grateful to call this place home.
The encampments are places outside of time, worlds of enchantment, young adult re-imaginings of the wonderful children’s book Roxaboxen, astory of children coming together to transform the everyday cast-off objects littering a patch of Arizona scrub into a whole civilization. In Roxaboxen, as in the university encampments,
A word spoken by chance
might have strange consequences.
It would suddenly come alive
and what people wanted to happen could happen–
all you had to do was say it.
Nobody could explain this:
That's the way it was.
The introduction of group Muslim prayer into these worlds of childhood magic is incongruous, for the stern ethos of Hamas’s Sunni Islam stands in stark opposition to the late-adolescent joy of springtime encampments.
Giulietta Masina as Cabiria in The Nights of Cabiria (1957)
Watching the UCLA students prostrate themselves, I couldn’t help thinking of Fellini’s great 1957 film The Nights of Cabiria, about a Roman prostitute who masks her yearning for transcendence beneath a cartoonish cynicism. There’s a scene where the title character goes with some fellow streetwalkers to visit a shrine at which Our Lady is said to have appeared, and Cabiria’s desperate straining towards a new life is palpable in her fervid prayers.
Afterwards, however, Cabiria is disillusioned when she observes that neither her own life nor those of her friends have been changed. She has mistaken symbol for substance.
The yearning of the student protesters — for magic, transcendence, and community — is likewise palpable. It’s unfortunate that they’re seeking those things in nihilism and anti-Semitism, the socialism of fools. Their encampments are being cleared as I write this, and they will be cast out of their improvised Roxaboxens without having accomplished their ostensible goals, and most likely without their degrees either. This is a brutal way to have to leave the enchanted world behind.
Wow. You have such deep empathy for the protesting youths. I don't think I could ever have spotted the yearning for the transcendent in the encampments. And the Roxaboxen link is profound as is one to the Nights of Cabiria.
While I sympathize with their desire to be part of something both transcendent and communal, I don't have a lot of sympathy for these kids getting these consequences. Most of them probably haven't EVER experienced actual consequences in their entire life. Yes, this is a sucky introduction, but play stupid games, win stupid prizes. We could probably, unfortunately, say the same about our culture at large though. These campus things seem to be super charged microcosms of broader trends.