OK, so back to the photo-essay format:
You should be able to see here the full, pathetic and rather disturbing spectacle of a baboon, chained, smoking a pipe and being displayed for sale. In fact, the scene pictured above is not too far away from the spot where Adam had his life-changing encounter with the goat, which was mentioned in
another blog post. Animal welfare is not a subject I pretend to either know much about, or care too much for, but this kind of treatment of a high-order primate is in another league; to better deal with the rage in my mind, I allowed myself to think to another, more leisurely baboon who lived in my region of the world.
The story is told, my good friends, that Yezid ben Muawiya, the King of Syria and Caliph to all Muslims, a man of opulence remembered for his drinking binges more than anything else, kept a baboon with him at all times while receiving visitors at his
Diwan. Ambassadors from the Byzantine Empire, local notables of the tribesmen of the Syrian desert and cityfolk of the Levantine Mediterranean coast, Quraishites from the Arabian peninsula and Shi'ite petitioners would seek the Caliph out for his wisdom only to be met by a baboon wearing layers of silk robes and throwing about pieces of monkey feaces at the astonished guests of the Successor to the Prophet of God, the Prince of the Faithful.
Yezid, who was Muslim in name only, would protest that the ape was, in fact, a Prince of the tribe of Israel, but that God had turned him into a baboon as a punishment for the sins of his people, as had been put down in the now-famous passages of the Koran. The hapless ape, mindless to the storms about to engulf his Umayyad sponsors and caretakers, became a hate figure of the oppressed, conquered non-Arab peoples in the newly Muslim realm, particularly the Persians. In short, we can call him, for the purposes of this post, "the Sunni Arab Baboon". My thesis is that the Sunni Arab Baboon is alive and well today, and is in fact exerting an influence on international affairs.
Now, let's suppose the Sunni Arab Baboon lives on one side of a pond. On the other side of the pond, divided by natural geography but united by a common ancestry and sharing a future, is a rather more inventive chimpanzee. The baboon and the chimpanzee have had a bad time sharing the area; the chimp was enslaved by the baboon, so then it tried to cunningly get all the baboon's tribe to be more chimp than the chimps themselves. All of this confusion led to trouble to no end in the division of shiny rocks between the chimps and baboons, which they use mostly to throw at each other but also to sell to tourists who take the shape of Neandertaals, a much larger, smellier and more brutish class of ape.
Let's suppose that the chimps decide that they're better off selling all their shiny igenous stones and using a new kind of fire-power they get from other materials for all the things they used to use the rocks for at home (firing the stoves, make cosmetics, etc). The Neandertaals know this, and they themselves have found the fire-power very useful in myriad ways, for example the way studying the fire-power improves their educational systems, makes them more productive, frees them up for other things, etc. They just don't want the chimps to get it, because they fear it will allow them to move up in the world and begin to challenge all the other apes, even the baboons, whom the Neandertaals never liked but--since the baboons are good for the neandertaals' business--need to keep happy.
Deep down inside, the baboons know that the chimps having fire-power is no skin off their noses, but then the chimps always looked down their noses at the baboons. Just find a chimp and tell him he looks like a baboon, and you'll see what I mean. The baboons, far more clever than outside appearances or even past behaviour suggest, know, in fact that the chimps might one day be persuaded to share the fire-power's gains, helping them, too, evolve and grow. The baboons are narrow-minded and short-sighted however, especially the big Chief Baboons, and so they will side with the neandertaals attacking the chimps on the other side of the pond, and possibly do some of the attacking themselves, given half the chance.
The moral of the story: We might not like Iran too much, but we'll be bloody baboons if we're not on their side.
