Elizaveta Butakova

Monastery, south of France: in case of fire, open for public shelter;

doors currently closed, in case of forest fire.

Dorothy Feaver

Platres, Cyprus. Walls to keep you out or in?

Background: byzantine dome.

Foreground: steps to the skies.

Elizaveta Butakova

Blue police box, Grosvenor Square, London.

The telephone that never rings.

Dorothy Feaver

Look,

silence.

Elizaveta Butakova

Up / down.

Elizaveta Butakova

Dorothy Feaver

The Buddha Machine project is about faith, duplication and dissemination, the same issues central to Richard Dawkins’ concept of the meme as outlined in his 1976 bestseller The Selfish Gene. Although at the time Dawkins wasn’t yet posterboy for a queasily image-conscious, humanistic strain of atheism, he nevertheless illustrates his point about memes’ capacity to “paristize [the] brain” with the example of “the meme for, say, ‘belief in life after death,’” which “is actually realized physically, millions of tomes over, as a structure in the nervous systems of individual men [sic] the world over.” Even abstract and airy memes require material means of transmission and storage –vibrating air molecules conveying phonemes from larynx to ear for example, or wax cylinders or blu-ray discs. Chiefly though, memes need people. Just as gods require worshippers, so memes need (to be) thought.

Since 1976 Dawkins’ neologism has thriven, colonising countless acres of neural tissue. In order to do so – and like any successful organism – it has had to adapt. Circa web 2.0, ‘meme’ has come to denote any catchphrase, image, video or trope that ‘goes viral.’ Inevitably, the term has become somewhat blurred and bleached. But the fear and resentment Dawkins articulates regarding memes’ psychically co-optive capacity abides, finding echoes in, say, the outrage of fans exposed to ‘spoilers’ before they’ve had the chance to see a movie or the half-joking horror of commenters who complain of not being able to ‘unsee’ ‘Two Girls One Cup.’

Ouroboros eating its own tail

George Sieg argued in a recent issue of Collapse (get your pdf version here) that horror, like awe – and like faith – is peculiar to humans.This is because horror requires self-consciousness. In fact, it both promotes and feeds on self-consciousness; the horrible only becomes more so the more we think about it. The scene in Herzog’s Grizzly Manwhere the director listens to a recording of Tim Treadwell being dismembered before advising Treadwell’s ex-girlfriend never to play the tape vividly illustrates the ability of recorded media to rewire us, turning viewers into players – doomed to relive/replay the moment of revelation over and over again, on an endless loop.

This scenario represents the nightmarish flipside of the ideal of ceaseless prayer, of the one-track mind the true believer aims to cultivate (a mindset according to which the Buddha Machine’s nine-track hard drive becomes something to aspire to). This isn’t to say we should forget about faith, however. After all, seen from the right angle, faith constitutes the ability to draw more from a text, an idea, an object or a person than is ‘really’ there, to care more about it/them than might appear appropriate.** And in a culture of cynicism and scarcity, where cowardice masquerades as pragmatism, that makes it an indispensable resource.



*essentially, of course, it was the complexity and the systematicity of Catholicism’s God/worshipper interface that the first Protestants had beef with, believing that the telling of Rosaries and the prescription of however many ‘Hail Marys’ etc. made for a machinic sort of faith

**as an example – and to cite a book that touches on the topic of ceaseless prayer – I love Salinger’s Franny & Zooey, and in no way resent the proportion of my neural real estate it takes up or the consequent way it can tinge and inflect what I think. And – as much as advertisers might try to leverage this sort of love – I love the way hardcore DJs made tracks vehicles for movie quotations, memic units they cared enough about to want to log and transmit in a new format.

There’s plenty of music too:  you can expect Brooklynites speaking in tongues, girlish heartbreak and an excerpt from Boredoms’ monumental ‘Seadrum.’ If you’re feeling equal to the full 23 minute version then that’s linked to on the right, as are a slew of other faith-related tracks, including Skullflower’s feedback-heavy ‘In the Depth of the Stagnant Pond,’ which is meant to induce auditory hallucinations – kind of like Blake’s seeing angels thronging a Peckham tree maybe.  For what you’re about to receive may whichsoever deity you prefer (might I suggest Glaucon?) make you truly thankful.

Subscribe on iTunes

Spotify Playlist [link to spotify]

• Patti Smith Group – Hymn
• Diamanda Galas – Ain’t No Grave Can Hold My Body Down
• The Shangri-Las – You Cheated, You Lied
• Gang Gang Dance – Glory in Itself/Egyptian
• Cocteau Twins – Fifty-fifty Clown
• Prince – Temptation
• Leonard Cohen – Story of Isaac
• Skullflower – Black Wind
• AGF – If You
• Salem – Water
• Boredoms – Seadrum

by Jacinta Nandi

I am having an argument with my Berlin friend Marianne about Kopftuchtürkinnen, aka Headscarf-Turkish-Girls.
“And then,” drawls Marianne sarcastically, “this, like, Kopftuchtürkin gave me a leaflet about human rights in Iran. And I looked at her, and I thought: am I meant to take this seriously? From you? From a woman with so little sense of self that she would cover her hair? Just so she won’t get, like, raped? Do me a favour!”
Marianne is my oldest friend in Berlin. She is also the most feminist person I know. She could eat Germaine Greer for breakfast, eat her and spit her out and then piss on her naked body. Stuff like that. And if there’s one thing Marianne hates, it’s Kopftuchtürkinnen.
“You don’t think they have the right to wear a headscarf?” I ask her politely.
“They have the right. They have the right to come here, and do what they want. Marry who they want, cook what they want. But they don’t have the right to be taken seriously, Jacinta. You put the headscarf on – to protect you from rape – and you dehumanize yourself – you willingly dehumanize yourself. Fine. I respect that, I respect your religion, I respect your right to submit to your religion. But do I respect you as a person? No. Do I respect you as a woman? Hell, no. Do I respect you as a feminist? Huh!”
Marianne lights a cigarette, and I look at her thoughtfully. She’s very articulate, Marianne, and my German’s not so hot. Sometimes I think it will never be hot enough to argue with her.
“But it’s only a bit of cloth…..” I say.
“It’s a bit of cloth which is worn to protect against rape!” Marianne spits at me, in outrage. “It’s a bit of cloth which is worn to take away a woman’s humanity It’s a symbol of female submission!”
“But what about nuns?” I say. “What about high heels? You can be a feminist nun, you can be a feminist in high heels.”
“You’re being facetious, Jacinta,” says Marianne in a warning voice. When Marianne says the word facetious I know she is about to start quoting philosophers at me, and once that happens I will have lost the argument forever. So I get in quickly.
“What about a lesbian, with a shaved head? Isn’t she protecting herself from rape? What about foundation? Isn’t that dehumanizing? Don’t we all walk around, looking like shop mannequins, looking like porcelain dolls? I am not saying girls in headscarves look good – they look shit, mostly, especially when they’re wearing black ones with half their foreheads covered up. I am not saying wearing a headscarf is a feminist statement. That is not what I am saying.”
“Not even you are stupid enough to think that,” acknowledges Marianne affectionately.
“But we have freedom in the West. The freedom to dye your hair red or green, to shave it off, to wear a mini-skirt or a dress up like a big hot-dog. That’s what freedom means. And if some people want to use this freedom to cover up their hair – and look shit, I’ll give you that. To look shit, and be hot in the summer, and slightly marginalized by society – how can we say, oh, no, sorry? Dress up like a robot if you want to – put a pineapple on your head if you want to – have tattoos all over your face if you want to – but please. Don’t wrap a bit of cloth round your head so men can’t see your hair. The freedom ends there.”
“Because it’s a religious symbol.”
“I thought it was an anti-rape device.”
“Jacinta…..” Marianne is really pissed off by now, I can tell. “You’re not allowed to teach school with a pineapple on your head anyways.”
“They let nuns teach school. Isn’t that funny nun’s nursey headscarf thingie also a religious symbol?”
“Yes,” concedes Marianne reluctantly. “Okay, so we ban the silly nuns, too. Problem solved. I don’t want nuns teaching my kids, anyhow. They’re all virgins, for fuck’s sake!”
“But if I don’t wear it as a religious symbol – if I’m just a trendy Prenz’l Berg mum having a bad hair day – headscarves are allowed?”
“Yes, because this is not religious.”
“But not all Muslim girls wear them, so they’re not religious either.”
Marianne sighs. “I can’t decide whether you’re being deliberately stupid or not,” she says.
“It’s just a bit of cloth,” I say. “Maybe it’s a religious symbol for them – but for us, it’s just a bit of cloth. Maybe their dads are forcing them, maybe it’s a conscious decision they’ve made. Either way, we force them to take it off – we force them to show us their hair. Let me see your hair, darling! And what do we get out of it? No-one ever got forced to be free.”
“What about when they dress up in that silly beehive outfit?” Marianne snaps. “You’d let them into school dressed up like they’re about to go into a lot of beehives and rescue some bees?”
Now it is my turn to concede something reluctantly. “Nah, I mean, you really can’t go into school dressed up in that shit,” I say. “But a bit of cloth on your head, man. There is a difference.”

Stigmitization and discrimination

The thing is, when Berliners talk about Kopftücher, they don’t mean just any old headscarf. Uh-uh. They don’t mean, for example, the kind worn by trendy Prenzlauer Berg mums, old Russian grannies or really scary pirates.
They’re talking about headscarves worn by Muslim women dressing in hijab. Modestly. Most Muslim girls living in Berlin do not interpret hijab as forcing them to wear a headscarf. But the ones who do  encounter a hell of a lot of discrimination.

Coz the sad fact is that headscarf-wearers are thoroughly discriminated against in Berlin. The neutrality law of 2005 means that Kopftuchtürkinnen are not allowed to work in public service – you will never see a Berlin policewoman, bus-driver or schoolteacher with a bit of black cloth on her head.
And last year a Hartz-IV recipient of Arabic origin was told by her case-worker that she would have her welfare reduced if she refused to take off her headscarf permanently. The argument? No employer would employ a headscarf-wearer, so therefore, with her head covered, she could not be said to be looking for work seriously. Although her appeal was eventually upheld, and the Job Centre apologized profusely, the incident neatly underlines the stigmatisation which confronts headscarf wearers every day.
It was exactly this stigmitization and discrimination that the Antidiskriminierungsstelle, the Berlin Equal Opportunities Commission, tried to address in a brochure brought out in July 2008. The pamphlet simply described the discrimination felt by women in headscarves – when looking for work or accomodation, for example. Although it revealed nothing incredibly surprising, it caused a furore when it was published. Women’s rights activists like Seyran Ates und Serap Cileli queued up to attack the brochure. “The pamphlet doesn’t mention anywhere that Muslim women who don’t wear a headscarf get discriminated against by headscarf wearers,” Ates told the Tagesspiegel newspaper. In Alice Schwarzer’s feminist magazine Emma, the position was clear: “The headscarf is a political symbol – and should and must be banned!”
But the headscarf-wearing girls of Neukölln don’t seem to be bothered much by this discrimination. “What do you mean, discriminated against? You mean like people look at you funny?” Nuray, 17, an A-Level student wrinkles her nose. “It’s true, if you go outside Neukölln or Kreuzberg, people look at you funny, they give you dirty looks. But that doesn’t bother me. I know why I’m doing it – I know I’m clean.”

“Wearing a headscarf is actually about female empowerment,” argues Layla, an older girl, a university student. “I cover myself, and make it impossible for people to judge me on my looks, on my attractiveness. What kind of liberation is it, to have the freedom to walk down the street, and get “checked out” by all men? When I wear a headscarf, I’m safe from all that.”

“But it’s the negative attitude from German society,” says Layla’s fellow student, Banu,a young Turkish woman who doesn’t wear a headscarf, “this tough, hardline attitude, really disapproving – it’s that which is turning the headscarf into a political statement, and not a religious symbol. So wearing a headscarf is a true act of rebellion.”

A bit of cloth

Nobody likes to see girls covering themselves up. They look shit. Women in headscarves generally look unattractive. You have to study their faces before you can tell whether you would like to have sex with them or not. Somehow they all look the same. They don’t look nice. The sight of girls in headscarves – young girls in headscarves, on the U-Bahn, giggling over their mobile phones – is a slightly disturbing, mildly depressing one.

But we have to be honest. Why do we get so upset about young Turkish teenagers, while we remain so chilled-out about all the nuns? When was the last time you got upset by a nun on the bus? What is the difference? Okay, there are fewer nuns around than Kopftuchtürkinnen but that’s not the main difference. The main difference is something-else entirely. We don’t want to fuck nuns. We are not rejected by their headscarf. The hair they are hiding underneath is grey and coarse, not black and glossy. For, the truth is, the headscarf is not really a religious symbol. Really it is just a sexual symbol. And all it says, is: “I do not want to fuck white men. I want to have a Muslim boyfriend. I am not available. Leave me alone, okay?”

Nowhere is this more apparent than in Neukölln, Berlin’s most Turkish district, where headscarf-wearing fifteen-year-olds flit around in wonderbras, skin-tight polo jumpers and figure-hugging white jeans. The headscarf is not protection against rape, it is just a protection against come-ons.

The headscarf is not a religious symbol. By banning it, we turn it into a political one. Actually, all it is is a bit of cloth some girls wrap round their heads. And we achieve nothing by making them take it off -we don’t even make ourselves feel any better.  True freedom can only come when women decide to take their headscarves off FOR themselves.  Don’t let’s confuse sour grapes with women’s liberation.

Sitting in his makeshift office, big-bellied Birol Ucan has developed an ebullient optimism for addressing the media. This attitude is probably necessary for the press-spokesman of an obscure Arab organisation building a new mosque in Berlin. “We thought this room would make a good hairdresser’s,” he says, indicating the waist-high power sockets and the plumbing in the wall beside us. “We don’t have a tenant yet, but it’s cheaper to install fixtures in advance.” This potential barbershop is one of the shop-fronts being installed on the ground floor of the shiny new Maschari Center currently being built by the Islamic group Al-Habash next to Görlitzer Bahnhof in Kreuzberg, Berlin.

Standing up, Ucan leads me along a glass corridor behind the retail spaces (soon to be a grocery store and a café, he promises) to the lobby, which, with its revolving door, wall-to-wall tiling and reception desk, would suit any mid-range hotel chain. “Looks nice, doesn’t it?” Ucan remarks, before swinging a flabby arm towards the mosque itself, where a couple of builders look up from their circular saws in a cloud of fine building dust. “Mecca is that way,” he points to a large alcove taking up one corner of the hall. The mosque will host Sunni services, in Turkish and Arabic, despite Al-Habash’s Arab origin.

The majority of Kreuzberg’s Muslims are Turkish Sunni, but Al-Habash is an eccentric presence in the Islamic world. One of the few Islamic groups without a militia or a declared enmity to Israel, it is sometimes seen in the West as a peaceful influence in the Lebanon, its home country. But Al-Habash is ostracised by orthodox Muslims, who regard its mixture of Sunni and Shia doctrine and its idiosyncratic interpretation of the Qur’an as blasphemous.

There are six more floors above Birol and me, with various large function rooms – “for funerals or weddings” – and a roof terrace. Like most of the new mosques being built in Germany, this is a multi-functional community centre as much as a house of worship.

Parallel societies

Germans have recently started grumbling publicly about the construction of these large, more visible new mosques all over their country. There has been talk of “creeping Islamisation” and the creation of “parallel societies”. The increasingly open insinuation is that shadowy Islamic groups with unaccounted-for wealth are bankrolling gaudy, unnecessary buildings in order to consciously colonise innocent, secular German communities. Even the multi-functionalism of these buildings is seen as an attempt to draw Muslims away from the influence of western society. It is portrayed as nothing less than a conspiracy against the principles of Germany’s social democracy.

Ucan is aware of the prejudices, and takes unprovoked pains to point out that his mosque will strive to lead young Muslims away from radical groups, “who are, unfortunately, also active in Berlin.” Anxiously heading off the expected criticisms, he talks of the German lessons that will be offered here and the architecture that is meant to blend with the Wilhelmine house next door.

This fretful reassurance is surprising, seeing that an unusual tolerance had settled over this development. Where mosques in Cologne, Hamburg and in the Berlin suburb of Pankow have provoked citizens’ initiatives and street demonstrations, this one has been allowed to quietly edge towards completion. That kind of alarmist reaction has been noticeably muted, confined to a few complaints at public meetings.

Perhaps this relative harmony is linked to the new immigrant wealth blossoming in this corner of Kreuzberg. Kreuzberg is getting richer. English, French and Spanish voices are mushrooming under the café-awnings, independent art galleries have elbowed room between Turkish bakeries and plastic-goods stores, and the odour of tapas and sushi now mingles with the smell of kebab grease.

And there are new up-market cafés where the bread has an airy Italian texture, and the brie is not from Aldi. The encroaching gentrification of Kreuzberg is evident everywhere, and while the tight Turkish community that has been dominant here since the seventies is breaking up a little, it is not disappearing. More and more of these new quiche-and-parma cafés are run by Turkish gastronomic entrepreneurs, whose success is based on second or third generation wealth. The new cosmopolitan artists may be bringing money into Kreuzberg, but they are spending more than they are making.

Poor artists and Turks with a living

Ahmet Iyidirli, former SPD candidate for Kreuzberg-Friedrichshain and a Berliner since 1975, links this to the artist’s usual economic instability – “In the last few years, a lot of young creative people have come to Kreuzberg, but that doesn’t mean that these people always earn money. This group is dependent on the general economic situation, which at the moment is insecure.”

But this creative community is increasingly being swelled by young people of Turkish origin who have lived in Berlin all their lives. Kadir Karabulut is a 28-year-old businessman and student who owns a café called Park only a block from the Maschari Center. Opened this spring, Park has been trying to lure Kreuzberg’s citizens with exclusive food, jazz trios and reasonable prices. He has an American girlfriend and is in the middle of an MA thesis in Jewish studies.

Kreuzberg can boast relative success in its integration. Indeed, at least two German attitudes have been successfully adopted by Ahmet and Kadir. First, a weird distrust of something called “multi-kulti romanticism” – both believe that cultural assimilation is necessary for society, and that any other opinion is liberal naivety. Secondly, both suggested that religion is inherently an obstacle to integration. The new mosque round the corner attracts suspicion among many Turks. As Kadir put it, “What bothers me is when Green-voters tolerate very reactionary things in the middle of their society – like imams banning girls from sport lessons at school.” So if you scratch the veneer of this well-integrated district of Berlin, you find some discontented muttering, if more from the secular Turks than the bohemian Germans.

When Ahmet Iyidirli heard how eager Birol Ucan had been to deny Al-Habash’s radical tendencies, he responded, every inch the German bourgeois, “So he should be.”

A slightly different version of this article originally appeared on the website The Local in July 2008.