I am assisting in editing a work celebrating a Pentecostal pastor. I refine and expand the introductory paragraph using ideas derived from the Islamic mystic Ibn Arabi and the Western magician Aleister Crowley.
The writer likes the manner in which their own ideas have been made more luminous through the referencing of those other great masters.
This work, however, is a celebratory piece by a devotee of the same denomination as the Christian leader being celebrated, a denomination for which identification with an Islamic mystic would be out of bounds or disturbing and for whom a magician would be anathema as an agent of Satan, even more so when that magician is the controversial Aleister Crowley, who, in defiance of his Christian upbringing, styled himself the Beast 666, the manifestation of the Devil in the Biblical Book of Revelations, and was critical in the development of Western sex magic, using sex in pursuing magical goals, he being bisexual, and his homosexual and heterosexual activity being significant to his magical career, a pioneer in the invocation of the Goetic demons from Abramelin's celebrated Book of Solomon the King, and invocator of the demon Choronzon, in order to understand the conditions of the realm of reality the entity represented, a pioneer in the forms of Satanic and demonic magic that came after him, along with divine centred magic, a relentless experimenter master whose religious thought is often sublime.
Can a devotee quote such figures as Arabi and Crowley in correlation with the vision of a fundamentalist Christian priest, particularly "Uncle Al" as he is fondly called by Bill Whitcomb in The Magician's Companion in dedicating that book to the one whose name is inseparable from the Western magical tradition?
It would seem the use of the ideas will go forward without referencing where the ideas are coming from. Is that honest? The ideas work so well in the context, its difficult to excise them or to consider replacing them.
The writers of the 5th July 2017 Guardian, Nigeria essay on the humanities scholar , "Abiola Irele: Literary Critic in the Sands of Time", opened the summations on Irele by various scholars by quoting my characterization of the multiply unified master:
"His ideas, it is noted, 'composed of numerous, intricately interlinked concepts, yet suggesting depths of possibility of which the superstructure realized by the expressed ideations are but the exposure to light of a complex foundation which may yield to careful study".
Why was my name not mentioned as the creator of those exquisite lines? Do the writers of the Irele Guardian essay have any idea of the years of learning and practice of writing it took me to be able to craft such a sentence on Irele? In the best prose writing, non-fiction and fiction, like that of Abiola Irele himself, every word, the relationships of meaning and rhythm between each word, of various levels of difference of sense and structure between choices of diction, every punctuation mark, is considered with the same gravitas as in the most compressed poetry, that exquisitely concise verbal form.
Not only did such weighing of possibilities go into the composition of those lines quoted in the Guardian essay, lines which may have emerged without significant obvious effort, the cognitive and creative matrix that made them possible already developed across time, ready to be invoked in the right circumstances, the sentence would have been carefully scrutinized across various parameters before being published.
I wrote a comment at the Guardian site, informing the writers that quote came from my essay "Abiola Irele and Negritude Aesthetics: Rhythm as a Metaphysical Principle: Transcultural and Scientific Implications", providing links to the various platforms of its publication: academia.edu, Scribd ( Dec 21, 2015 ), Facebook (10th Dec.2015) and Blogger (Dec.20.2015), leaving out various Yahoo and Google groups to which I had distributed the essay.
I returned to the site to find my comment was no longer there and neither had I been given credit for my formulation deemed good enough to open scholarly summations of the great at Abiola Irele but the writers of the essay did not think I should be given credit for such a fine piece, while they quoted and painstakingly credited by their names "Prof. Dan Izevbaye", described as "The erudite scholar", "Denja Abdullahi, president of Association of Nigerian Authors", "Prof. Remi Raji", and "Prof. Oke Ndibe".
Did that omission come about because the crafter of that quote that opened the essay rich with quoted summations that constitute half of the essay is not "Prof. Something" nor "President of...", that his words are understood as good enough to quote but their writer is not worthy of being acknowledged as the creator, his name being replaced by "it is noted"?
Wetin I do una?", I asked the writers in Nigerian pidgin, " What offence have I committed against you?", in my comment which has disappeared from the site.
Now that I have aerated that issue, realising the intimacy of a challenge I encounter in referencing Arabi from the 13th century and Crowley from the 20th, I see my mind has resolved that Arabi and Crowley must be given credit for their ideas in the essay I am editing. The chances that those reading the work on the Pentecostal pastor will recognise the formulations in question as coming from these masters is not high since the audiences for Islamic mysticism, Western magic and Nigerian Pentecostalism are likely to be significantly diverse and the statements adapted from Arabi and Crowley's ideas may be passable as general formulations, but in my heart I know the truth.
Those ideas are seared into me with the force of inspiration.
So, how should I do it?
Am I bold enough to do it?
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