"Have I mentioned that, in my Persian class, there's a young person who is half Afghan and half Kashmiri, and he looks just like my idea of angel? He's appropriately named (variously transliterated as Ridwan, Rizwan, Rezwan, Rezvan, etc.), the angel in charge of guarding (Jannah, Paradise), so I hardly need play God and make my own angels. :->"
Stuff like this reminds me of the West's (but especially America's) "Orientalism" craze of the 1910s and 1920s, when the "East" (which then meant everything from Romania eastwrad, but esp. Arabia and Persia) was exoticized, fetishized, held up as glamorous and exciting, as in such popular songs in the US at the time as "Rebecca Came Back from Mecca" (1921) and "Lena the Queen of Palestina." In fact, the lyrics of "Rebecca..." - you could basically substitute Yoshie's name for Rebecca's:
Across the way from where I live there lives a girl and her name is Rebecca, she's twenty three She saw an oriental show and then decided she would go to Mecca across the sea. And so she went one day to Turkey far away, and she lived near the Sultan's den; She stayed just two years, got full of new ideas, and now she's back home again.
Since Rebecca came back from Mecca all day long she keeps on smoking Turkish tobecca; With her veil upon her face, she keeps dancing 'round the place And yesterday her father found her with a Turkish tow'l around her Oh! Oh! Ev'ry one's worried so; They think she's crazy in the dome; She's as bold as Theda Bara, Theda's bare but Becky's barer Since Rebecca came back home.
Theda Bara (an anagram for "Arab Death") was indeed a gorgeous actress -- love all her pictures and photos, personally, once had a pic of her on my bedroom wall; and Rudolf Valentino as an Arab sheikh apparently had the ladies swooning, too. I wonder if our favorite westernized, MR Zine editing, "I'll never concede a point but I'll bog you down in a war of attrition via email with endless refernces I've Googled" editor, Yoshie, is subject to this once-romanticization of "the Orient," too. Just a theory!
-B.
PS. an NPR segment plays selections of all these old romanticist, Orientialist songs on a segment available online here: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1304913