"Bruce Sterling - My Rihla" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sterling Bruce)

His interpreter laughed, for the shabby young
man was a powerful sheik of the fityan. "The fityans
were corporations of unmarried young men representing
generally the artisan classes of Anatolian towns . . .
The code of conduct and initiation ceremonies were
fo

unded on a set of standards and values that went by
the name of futuwwa . . . referring in concept to the
Muslim ideal of the `youth' (fata) as the exemplary
expression of the qualities of nobility, honesty,
loyalty and courage. The brothers of the fityan were
expected to lead lives approaching these ideal
qualities, including demonstrations of generous
hospitality to visiting strangers . . . By the
thirteenth or fourteenth centuries, the fityan
associations existed in probably every Anatolian town
of any size. In an era of political upheaval and
fragmentation . . . the fityan were filling a crucial
civic function of helping to maintain urban
cohesiveness . . ."
Far from humble poverty, Ibn Battuta found his
medieval youth-culture hosts occupying a fine downtown
lodge crammed with pricey Byzantine rugs and Iraqi
glassware. The lads were dressed to the nines in long
cloaks, boots, knife-decked cummerbunds and snazzy
white bonnets with pointed white peaks two feet high.
"They brought in a great banquet, with fruits and
sweetmeats, after which they began their singing and
dancing." He was "greatly astonished at their
generosity and innate nobility."
No more so, perhaps, than myself and my Canadian
caravan companion when we found ourselves in a
retrofitted nineteenth-century stove factory downtown
in The Hague. Now a filmhouse, it was crammed with
young Dutch media-devotees in the current
multinational fityan get-up of black jeans and funny
haircuts. Their code of conduct was founded in a set
of standards and values that goes by the name of
"cool." Six hundred years from now, the names of Mark
Pauline, Laurie Anderson and Jean Baudrillard may mean
little, but at the moment they are the stuff of a
Sufi-like mystical bond.
We gave them a few names and second-hand
homilies: Mandelbrot, ART-MATRIX, _Amygdala_, Jaron
Lanier, Ryoichiro Debuchi--with addresses and fax
numbers. We are pagans, of course, and we have video
screens; but basically little happened that would hav

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