WEBVTT - Part Two: Isabelle Eberhardt: The Genderbending Vagabond 0:00:01.200 --> 0:00:03.360 Hello, and welcome to Cool People Did Cool Stuff, the 0:00:03.400 --> 0:00:05.960 podcast that doesn't have a tagline because the tagline is 0:00:06.000 --> 0:00:09.200 in the title. I'm your host. Margaret Keljoy with me 0:00:09.240 --> 0:00:12.319 today is an absolutely fantastic musician, the one and only 0:00:12.440 --> 0:00:16.599 Julie Holland. Julie, how are you? I am utterly thrilled 0:00:16.800 --> 0:00:20.280 to be here with you. Yeah, I'm glad you're here. 0:00:21.680 --> 0:00:24.360 Our producer Sophie, who is better known for her work 0:00:24.480 --> 0:00:26.000 as a dog mom to one of the two best 0:00:26.040 --> 0:00:27.440 dogs in the world. So are I three best dogs 0:00:27.480 --> 0:00:35.240 in the world? Anderson Huh, yep, that's Sophie. No notes. Yeah, Julian, 0:00:35.320 --> 0:00:38.480 What's I wrote in the script? Do you have any pets? 0:00:38.520 --> 0:00:40.559 But before we started, we we made this clear, but 0:00:40.600 --> 0:00:42.880 do you want to introduce the listeners to your pet? 0:00:44.479 --> 0:00:47.800 The dog? The dog in my life is His name 0:00:47.880 --> 0:00:51.360 is Jocko. He's not named after Jocko Pastorius. He's named 0:00:51.400 --> 0:00:57.240 after the werewolf cartoon character that Michael Hurley has drawn 0:00:58.360 --> 0:01:03.000 for a number of decades. He's that Jocko. I do 0:01:03.080 --> 0:01:05.520 not know either Jocko. So it was like it was like, 0:01:05.560 --> 0:01:07.680 Margaret's not gonna go any of that. But that's great. 0:01:11.760 --> 0:01:14.920 He's a nice dog though I'm very, very very handsome boy. 0:01:16.240 --> 0:01:21.559 He's very beautiful. I love him and our audio engineers Ian. 0:01:21.720 --> 0:01:23.440 Our theme music was written for us by a woman. 0:01:24.680 --> 0:01:27.360 This episode is part two of a two part series 0:01:27.560 --> 0:01:30.560 is about ever Heart a k Ahmad Sadi. If you 0:01:30.560 --> 0:01:32.920 haven't listened to part one, not only will none of 0:01:32.959 --> 0:01:36.319 this makes sense, but I will be personally not not mad, 0:01:36.440 --> 0:01:40.000 just disappointed. I really thought we'd raised you better than that. 0:01:41.640 --> 0:01:45.000 Ah where we last left her hero, she just fled 0:01:45.040 --> 0:01:47.000 Algeria because she may or may not have hit a 0:01:47.000 --> 0:01:49.520 cop with a sword. She goes back to the villa. 0:01:50.240 --> 0:01:52.880 Dad is despondent but the death of his long term partner, 0:01:52.880 --> 0:01:54.920 which is a reasonable position for him to be in, 0:01:56.520 --> 0:01:59.440 and then her brother Vladimir has an even worse time 0:02:00.680 --> 0:02:05.600 because his trader brother Nicholas tries to abduct him. His 0:02:05.720 --> 0:02:08.120 brother with a bunch of Russian spies shows up and says, 0:02:08.160 --> 0:02:10.400 I own you body and soul, and you're coming with me, 0:02:11.960 --> 0:02:15.600 and Vladimir refuses. He wants to hang out with at 0:02:15.600 --> 0:02:19.680 the villa and work on cactuses. That's super scary and 0:02:19.680 --> 0:02:21.600 it's kind of he's kind of broken by the experience. 0:02:21.639 --> 0:02:24.920 He starts losing track of what's happening. He just sobs 0:02:24.919 --> 0:02:27.560 in his room until one day, not too long after, 0:02:28.240 --> 0:02:30.280 he decides to get a head start on Sylvia Plath 0:02:30.480 --> 0:02:32.400 and puts his head in the guess oven and dies. 0:02:33.320 --> 0:02:36.520 Her father Doubly despondent writes a letter to a friend saying, 0:02:36.639 --> 0:02:40.160 my cactiphile is dead because Vladimir was the kid who 0:02:40.240 --> 0:02:46.160 took after his dad's love of cactuses or dads. And 0:02:46.200 --> 0:02:48.000 she's alone in the villa now and she's caring for 0:02:48.080 --> 0:02:51.400 alien and aging father. It is not nice times. She 0:02:51.440 --> 0:02:53.799 almost marries this like Turkish diplomat guy, but he gets 0:02:53.840 --> 0:02:55.880 really needy and started acting like he owns her. So 0:02:55.960 --> 0:02:59.160 she's like, no, I'm good, I'm not marrying you. And 0:02:59.200 --> 0:03:02.800 her dad is real his throat cancer from the smoking. 0:03:02.840 --> 0:03:04.679 I don't know if you knew this, but smoking is 0:03:04.720 --> 0:03:07.320 actually not good for you. It's actually bad for your health. 0:03:08.120 --> 0:03:10.200 Despite all of the cigarette ads that we run on 0:03:10.280 --> 0:03:16.079 this show, I don't think we get cigaretted at the 0:03:16.240 --> 0:03:22.080 idea of getting cancer back in those days is so terrifying. Yeah, 0:03:22.280 --> 0:03:28.360 I mean it's ter it's terrifying now. Yeah. Yeah, So 0:03:28.400 --> 0:03:31.080 he gets his affairs in order, like, he arranges money 0:03:31.080 --> 0:03:33.320 as best as he can for his his remaining kids, 0:03:33.360 --> 0:03:36.320 the two who aren't traders, and he leaves really detailed 0:03:36.360 --> 0:03:39.640 instructions for how to take care of his cactuses, and 0:03:39.680 --> 0:03:42.600 then he dies of throat cancer. Some people say that 0:03:42.640 --> 0:03:45.400 Isabelle poisoned him, but if she did, which I don't 0:03:45.400 --> 0:03:48.000 think is true, it was to end his suffering. The 0:03:48.000 --> 0:03:50.360 people at the time who said she poisoned him were 0:03:50.360 --> 0:03:53.360 the Russian siblings who are conspiring against her an anarchy 0:03:53.440 --> 0:03:55.760 dad in order to try and get the money from 0:03:55.760 --> 0:04:02.559 the estate. Basically, yeah, so they're just they're just talking shit. Yeah, yeah, 0:04:02.880 --> 0:04:05.960 And I wouldn't put it past this Russian nihilist to 0:04:06.000 --> 0:04:11.640 be like, isabel bring me my murder pill or whatever, 0:04:11.720 --> 0:04:16.920 you know. I don't know. Yeah, I've had family, friends 0:04:16.920 --> 0:04:25.040 and hospice, and that's that's a not an unlikely story. Yeah, 0:04:25.400 --> 0:04:31.000 so Isabel's like, well, fuck it, back to adventuring. It 0:04:31.160 --> 0:04:33.600 is possible that at this point she steals a hundred 0:04:33.680 --> 0:04:36.120 forty thousand Swiss francs from the villa in order to 0:04:36.200 --> 0:04:38.560 keep keep it from falling into the hands of her 0:04:38.600 --> 0:04:41.560 Russian half siblings. I don't actually think she did, but 0:04:41.600 --> 0:04:43.839 it's like part of what they allege against her, along 0:04:43.839 --> 0:04:46.920 with like poisoning Dad. It's like stealing a hundred forty 0:04:46.960 --> 0:04:50.719 thousand francs or whatever, which I couldn't figure out how 0:04:50.760 --> 0:04:53.320 to convert the modern money. It's a bunch of money. 0:04:54.040 --> 0:04:56.599 So she gets dressed up in her best men's clothes. 0:04:56.640 --> 0:04:59.040 She takes off her tunis the capital Tunisia, which is 0:04:59.080 --> 0:05:01.080 also now a French territory after they stole it from 0:05:01.080 --> 0:05:02.839 the Ottomans who stole from the people who lived there. 0:05:03.960 --> 0:05:05.800 She dives right into hanging out with sales. She does 0:05:05.839 --> 0:05:07.840 what she does best. She gets there, She hangs out 0:05:07.839 --> 0:05:09.560 with sailors. She focks who she wants to funk. She 0:05:09.600 --> 0:05:12.400 does what she wants to do. She dresses as a man, 0:05:12.560 --> 0:05:14.600 and she demands a society view her and treat as 0:05:14.600 --> 0:05:17.000 a man. But she's not actually disguising her sex or 0:05:17.120 --> 0:05:19.480 to use just to use more modern terms for gender. 0:05:20.360 --> 0:05:27.000 And how old is she at this point? Yeah, the 0:05:27.560 --> 0:05:32.120 stuff in her life happens fast. Like at one point 0:05:32.200 --> 0:05:34.320 in this I'm just like, wait, what she's only like 0:05:34.360 --> 0:05:39.520 twenty four? When is her? I don't know anyway, Yeah, 0:05:39.720 --> 0:05:42.359 and she's sort of a trust fund kid like for 0:05:42.360 --> 0:05:44.559 the best possible reason, which is that her dad robbed 0:05:44.560 --> 0:05:48.000 her granddad. But she's still a rich kid who wants 0:05:48.000 --> 0:05:49.640 to go live in a colonial land. So she rents 0:05:49.839 --> 0:05:52.120 a nice house on a hill. She gets a dog 0:05:52.200 --> 0:05:55.440 named a Dale, a black spaniel, and she hires a servant, 0:05:55.440 --> 0:05:58.479 a seventy five year old local woman. And at this 0:05:58.520 --> 0:06:00.600 point she's really just living as a man, at least 0:06:00.640 --> 0:06:03.279 in her public life. See Mahma Sati is his name. 0:06:03.720 --> 0:06:05.200 As far as we could tell, it's not that people 0:06:05.320 --> 0:06:07.520 believe she was a man. It's not like people thought 0:06:07.640 --> 0:06:09.840 she had a dick under her robes. And it gets 0:06:09.839 --> 0:06:11.480 into this ship that like, as we were talking about 0:06:11.480 --> 0:06:14.800 a little bit last time. Generally speaking, the Muslim world 0:06:14.839 --> 0:06:17.120 is a better place to be gender deviant and sexually 0:06:17.120 --> 0:06:19.560 deviant than Europe. For an awful lot of history, including 0:06:19.600 --> 0:06:22.240 probably this period, none of it maps easily to our 0:06:22.240 --> 0:06:25.280 current definitions of sexuality and gender. Europe had its own 0:06:25.279 --> 0:06:29.560 conceptions of the time. Homosexuality and heterosexuality were both coined 0:06:29.560 --> 0:06:32.839 and starting to be understood around this time as codified things. 0:06:33.480 --> 0:06:36.440 The Ottoman Empire had its own thing going on, which 0:06:36.480 --> 0:06:39.440 I think I'm not an expert about this to find 0:06:39.440 --> 0:06:42.560 things more by acts than identity, So like it worked 0:06:42.600 --> 0:06:45.480 for Machma to just be mahmad. She wasn't cross dressing, 0:06:45.520 --> 0:06:48.120 she was just dressing. And within European conceptions, she might 0:06:48.120 --> 0:06:51.960 not have been gay because she was sucking men, possibly exclusively, 0:06:52.000 --> 0:06:53.800 although she did go to Brothels to hang out as 0:06:53.800 --> 0:06:57.880 an observer at various points, whereas the Arab world's time 0:06:57.880 --> 0:06:59.800 and contrast was kind of like, look, I don't want 0:06:59.800 --> 0:07:01.400 to be rude, and she says she's a man, so 0:07:01.440 --> 0:07:03.920 I guess I'll call her a man. This politeness, in 0:07:03.960 --> 0:07:06.159 this attitude of taking people as they asked to be taken, 0:07:06.279 --> 0:07:08.000 it sees her well for the rest of her life, 0:07:08.240 --> 0:07:10.640 which is frankly how my my grandparents generation has tended 0:07:10.640 --> 0:07:12.560 to handle my transness. And I don't know it works 0:07:12.600 --> 0:07:14.880 for me. Sometimes it's nicer than all the like fucking 0:07:14.880 --> 0:07:17.600 around about specifics. If I was going to force her 0:07:17.640 --> 0:07:20.640 into a modern category might be gender fluid historians want 0:07:20.640 --> 0:07:22.600 to work really hard to make her like be actually 0:07:22.720 --> 0:07:24.880 sis by just and just pretending to be a man 0:07:25.000 --> 0:07:27.480 for safety, but that it absolutely goes against what she said. 0:07:27.880 --> 0:07:31.040 But at the same time, she also was not, by 0:07:31.040 --> 0:07:34.440 any modern conception trans masculine or a trans man. She 0:07:34.640 --> 0:07:37.160 referred constantly to herself also as a woman. She would 0:07:37.160 --> 0:07:40.520 refer to herself as both at a regular I don't know, 0:07:40.760 --> 0:07:44.920 whenever she would want to. People also wonder this is 0:07:44.960 --> 0:07:48.000 the promised what types of sex did she have? Segment? 0:07:48.440 --> 0:07:50.680 People also wonder how she never got pregnant. And there 0:07:50.680 --> 0:07:53.160 are two main guests people present. First, she might not 0:07:53.200 --> 0:07:56.720 have been biologically capable. There's like so many I'm not 0:07:56.760 --> 0:08:01.880 even like even ruder than conjecturing about like how she fucked. 0:08:01.920 --> 0:08:05.000 I think it's conjecturing about like her body and how 0:08:05.040 --> 0:08:08.320 it presented and stuff about fertility. So I'm not going 0:08:08.360 --> 0:08:11.200 to get into that. People have various ideas about how 0:08:11.200 --> 0:08:13.480 she didn't have periods maybe or something I don't know whatever. 0:08:13.760 --> 0:08:16.400 Won't get into that. And Second, she might just not 0:08:16.480 --> 0:08:18.520 have been really into penis and vagina sex, like maybe 0:08:18.560 --> 0:08:22.960 PIV wasn't her thing. There's this uh presentation that at 0:08:23.040 --> 0:08:26.360 least was held by at least a historian. I read 0:08:26.440 --> 0:08:29.480 that Anal was very popular in the Muslim world in 0:08:29.520 --> 0:08:33.280 comparison to the European world, because Europe was super fucking 0:08:33.280 --> 0:08:35.960 conservative at that time. I can come up with a 0:08:35.960 --> 0:08:38.199 lot of ways to fuck that don't get you pregnant, 0:08:38.559 --> 0:08:43.880 but that's one of them. Anyway, God bless historians and 0:08:43.920 --> 0:08:46.439 pop historians, every single one of us were sitting around 0:08:46.440 --> 0:08:48.960 and trying to figure out if c. Machmasai liked anal 0:08:53.840 --> 0:08:56.480 you all went away in or should we just move on? Yeah, 0:08:56.520 --> 0:08:59.640 that's the that's their business, and good for her. I 0:08:59.640 --> 0:09:08.400 feel like you said all the words magpie. Yeah. So 0:09:09.320 --> 0:09:11.280 she's running out of money and she fox off from 0:09:11.280 --> 0:09:14.160 Tunisia back to Algeria because she misses the desert. She 0:09:14.280 --> 0:09:17.080 wanders poor as funk around the desert hanging. This is 0:09:17.120 --> 0:09:20.160 like the quintessential thing that she's now going to do 0:09:20.200 --> 0:09:21.760 every now and then for the rest of her life. 0:09:22.000 --> 0:09:24.240 She wanders around, poor as funk around the desert. The 0:09:24.440 --> 0:09:26.840 whole trust fund kid thing is starting to run out 0:09:26.840 --> 0:09:30.080 real fast. She's hanging out with the different tribes there, 0:09:30.120 --> 0:09:33.360 and her passport there is that she's devout. People accept her. 0:09:33.679 --> 0:09:36.800 She stays up late talking about Islam. She becomes probably 0:09:36.840 --> 0:09:39.200 the first European to really wander much of those areas 0:09:39.240 --> 0:09:42.160 on encumbered and accepted because she's not trying to show 0:09:42.200 --> 0:09:45.000 up as an outsider, but as a Muslim, and people 0:09:45.040 --> 0:09:48.720 saw and respected that. It's really fascinating. And this whole 0:09:48.720 --> 0:09:52.480 time she's writing about it for European audience, which is 0:09:52.600 --> 0:09:55.160 like everything about everything about her life. You can see 0:09:55.160 --> 0:09:58.240 in a bunch of different ways. First, she's tying into 0:09:58.240 --> 0:10:00.760 the orientalist fad that's running across Europe and is making 0:10:00.760 --> 0:10:03.679 her money from it. But she's also laying down the 0:10:03.760 --> 0:10:06.600 groundword for an anti colonialism and starting up support for 0:10:06.600 --> 0:10:09.960 seeing these colonized people as people, not as this fantastic other. 0:10:10.760 --> 0:10:13.920 And her relationship with anti colonialism is it's actually more 0:10:13.920 --> 0:10:17.439 consistent than her gender, but not not a lot more consistent. 0:10:18.440 --> 0:10:21.000 She's sucking a drinking and smoking how she's the whole 0:10:21.040 --> 0:10:22.960 time and just living her best life. It sucks up 0:10:22.960 --> 0:10:28.360 her health real bad. And as like a journalist observer role, 0:10:29.000 --> 0:10:32.480 she starts working sometimes with the colonial government. She spends 0:10:32.520 --> 0:10:35.880 two months helping tax collectors go around and rob the locals, 0:10:35.920 --> 0:10:37.880 just to sort of see how it's done, but also 0:10:37.960 --> 0:10:41.360 participating in it directly. It's like her job. They round 0:10:41.400 --> 0:10:43.600 up all the people who haven't paid their taxes and 0:10:43.640 --> 0:10:45.360 they all come into the public square, and she like 0:10:45.480 --> 0:10:48.720 reads off the list of names um as the debtors 0:10:48.800 --> 0:10:51.439 or either imprisoned or forced to give up more of 0:10:51.480 --> 0:10:53.839 their stuff, So we could read her as like an 0:10:53.880 --> 0:10:59.600 embedded journalist or as complicit, right, And I think either 0:10:59.640 --> 0:11:02.360 reading is fair, frankly, and I think it will continue 0:11:02.400 --> 0:11:06.320 to be complicated in a lot of different ways. And 0:11:06.360 --> 0:11:08.640 she goes back and forth between Europe and North Africa 0:11:08.640 --> 0:11:11.359 all the time to check on her remaining brother, Augustine, 0:11:11.920 --> 0:11:15.680 the black sheep, who did the drugs but didn't have fun. 0:11:16.640 --> 0:11:19.280 He's married now his new wife does not like Isabelle 0:11:19.280 --> 0:11:21.880 ever heart. It's like this lady is a bad influence 0:11:21.880 --> 0:11:24.920 on you, which is probably true. And to try and 0:11:24.960 --> 0:11:27.480 sell the old villa, which she still couldn't do because 0:11:27.520 --> 0:11:31.160 of the family conspiracy, is contesting the will and all 0:11:31.160 --> 0:11:35.280 that ship. Everything is falling into ruins, and it's becoming 0:11:35.320 --> 0:11:37.199 a pretty potent symbol of how you can't go back 0:11:37.200 --> 0:11:39.120 to childhood. She writes about this a lot. She like 0:11:39.160 --> 0:11:41.560 goes and sees, you know, her father and her brother's 0:11:41.600 --> 0:11:46.439 grave and things like that. Eventually, the villa sells to 0:11:46.559 --> 0:11:49.520 exactly zero fanfare because lawyer fees and ship means she 0:11:49.559 --> 0:11:52.120 makes negative money off of it. Like in the end, 0:11:52.160 --> 0:11:54.880 she walks away with negative sixty francs from the sale 0:11:54.880 --> 0:12:00.240 of the villa. But then something positive happens in her life. 0:12:01.960 --> 0:12:04.280 She makes her way back to South Algeria, to the desert, 0:12:04.400 --> 0:12:06.880 and for the first time in her life, she falls 0:12:06.880 --> 0:12:10.680 in love. She falls in love with this Algerian soldier 0:12:10.800 --> 0:12:14.360 named slee Men And this is politically messy. He is 0:12:14.400 --> 0:12:16.920 from a family of trader cops, local folks who wore 0:12:17.040 --> 0:12:20.360 high up for the French colonial police, and he himself 0:12:20.480 --> 0:12:25.120 is basically a trader. He's in the French colonial government military, sorry, 0:12:25.440 --> 0:12:29.840 French colonial army. She tries to keep the relationship a secret, 0:12:30.760 --> 0:12:33.040 I think honestly because she doesn't want to be associated 0:12:33.040 --> 0:12:35.320 with the French military. But he like runs around and 0:12:35.320 --> 0:12:37.600 brags to all of his army buddies and so like 0:12:38.120 --> 0:12:41.800 everyone knows, and he's in a cavalry. So every night, 0:12:41.880 --> 0:12:44.080 and it's a very kind of sweet. Every night he 0:12:44.120 --> 0:12:46.840 comes over to her place and with borrowed horses and 0:12:46.880 --> 0:12:48.520 they ride off and make love in the desert and 0:12:48.520 --> 0:12:51.640 then come back at dawn. And then once again she 0:12:51.720 --> 0:12:54.240 keeps calling herself poor. She moves into a big, old 0:12:54.280 --> 0:12:58.120 fancy house in the city allowed that has multiple servants, 0:12:58.600 --> 0:13:02.640 or she gets multi servants of this house. But once 0:13:02.679 --> 0:13:04.960 again I can't tell what to make of this, because 0:13:06.080 --> 0:13:09.280 probably she's just poor by rich European lady standards, not 0:13:09.400 --> 0:13:12.240 by like people who are from these poor colonized places standards. 0:13:12.960 --> 0:13:16.120 But there's this stories about how her and her boyfriend 0:13:16.160 --> 0:13:19.400 and her servants all like together as friends close out 0:13:19.400 --> 0:13:22.120 the bar every night in the area, like are just 0:13:22.200 --> 0:13:25.640 like going out and partying all together, and so this 0:13:25.800 --> 0:13:27.760 like servant thing might have been as much like a 0:13:27.800 --> 0:13:30.120 way to like give her friends like jobs in a 0:13:30.160 --> 0:13:34.640 place to crash and not actually like making them be servant. 0:13:34.960 --> 0:13:38.000 I don't know. It's hard to read it. And part 0:13:38.000 --> 0:13:40.960 of why it's hard to read, right, she has amazing 0:13:41.040 --> 0:13:44.480 security culture left over from her anarchist days, and it's 0:13:44.520 --> 0:13:46.720 why we only know a tiny portion of the political 0:13:46.760 --> 0:13:52.239 intrigue she was part of. She like constantly left politically 0:13:52.240 --> 0:13:54.480 involved figures out of her writing, so she's like writing 0:13:54.480 --> 0:13:57.160 about a bunch of people. If someone there is like 0:13:58.000 --> 0:13:59.680 up to no good in a way she approves of, 0:14:00.120 --> 0:14:04.040 she doesn't write about him. And one colonial administrator, he's 0:14:04.040 --> 0:14:06.000 doing his due diligence about her when she's like comes 0:14:06.040 --> 0:14:09.480 to an area one colonial administrator who's doing his due 0:14:09.520 --> 0:14:11.800 diligence about her and then soon spying on her and 0:14:11.880 --> 0:14:15.440 following her referred to hers still involved actively in the 0:14:15.480 --> 0:14:18.920 socialist and feminist movements um in Europe and I believe 0:14:18.920 --> 0:14:23.240 also in North Africa. So we literally don't know if 0:14:23.240 --> 0:14:25.280 she ever stopped rolling with the anarchists and the socialists 0:14:25.320 --> 0:14:27.400 and show when she had the chance, because she wouldn't 0:14:27.400 --> 0:14:30.480 have written about it if she did. But well into 0:14:30.520 --> 0:14:33.960 being a die hard Muslim who writes only about how 0:14:34.000 --> 0:14:35.880 it Islam is the only thing she'd be willing to 0:14:35.920 --> 0:14:38.640 spill her blood for. She clearly still has some affinity 0:14:38.720 --> 0:14:42.120 for her old revolutionary roots or her other revolutionary roots. 0:14:42.560 --> 0:14:44.920 She writes this one short story, for example, about a 0:14:44.920 --> 0:14:48.360 group of Russian anarchists with one christ who one of 0:14:48.360 --> 0:14:51.520 the anarchists christ like accepts the punishment for all the 0:14:51.560 --> 0:14:54.640 crimes of all of his friends and he's sent into 0:14:54.720 --> 0:14:58.120 Siberia and exile, but he's like not to be pitied 0:14:58.160 --> 0:15:00.560 because he is instead living a holy life as a 0:15:00.560 --> 0:15:04.560 as a martyr, and drawing comparison between anarchism and religion 0:15:04.560 --> 0:15:08.840 and a favorable light, which I feel like kind of 0:15:09.960 --> 0:15:12.600 sums up a lot of how her politics and her 0:15:12.600 --> 0:15:16.000 political understanding is moving. Well. I mean, I even I 0:15:16.000 --> 0:15:19.880 mean I remember like hearing Emma Goldman talk about that 0:15:20.040 --> 0:15:23.640 like like using like religious language. So I mean, I 0:15:23.680 --> 0:15:26.280 just don't I don't understand how you could even say 0:15:26.360 --> 0:15:30.840 certain things without religious language, especially at the time. Yeah, no, totally. 0:15:30.880 --> 0:15:33.560 I mean we we talked about martyrs all the time, right, 0:15:33.680 --> 0:15:41.400 and like that's religious language, you know. Um, But I 0:15:41.440 --> 0:15:46.160 love hearing how the Kurds talk about they're they're martyrs 0:15:46.160 --> 0:15:49.400 like in it, and it seems it seems very secularized 0:15:50.280 --> 0:15:53.400 and it's very like direct and it's not like this 0:15:53.560 --> 0:15:56.320 one guy. It's like everyone who has fallen in defense 0:15:56.320 --> 0:16:00.480 of this area is as a martyr. Yeah. Now it's 0:16:00.520 --> 0:16:07.480 really interesting. I hadn't. Yeah, So she's living possibly a 0:16:07.520 --> 0:16:12.080 double life, not just between being Shamasati and Isabel eleber Heart, 0:16:12.160 --> 0:16:15.080 but between being a colonial reporter and working sometimes with 0:16:15.120 --> 0:16:17.600 the resistance. Or maybe that's what I want her to 0:16:17.600 --> 0:16:19.600 have you been doing, because I always want her to 0:16:19.600 --> 0:16:21.840 be doing the right thing. But none of us do 0:16:21.920 --> 0:16:26.800 the right thing except Sophie and Anderson. So and her 0:16:26.840 --> 0:16:29.480 involvement in anti colonialism is tape ring off at this point. 0:16:30.480 --> 0:16:34.040 Her boyfriend, the imperial stooge of a soldier. He's part 0:16:34.040 --> 0:16:37.000 of this, but she does Okay, I think this actually 0:16:37.040 --> 0:16:41.480 explains it better. He's part of the Sufi Brotherhood, the Kataria, 0:16:41.720 --> 0:16:45.400 the Kadari Brotherhood, and the Sufi's. They're kind of the 0:16:45.840 --> 0:16:49.080 esoteric or mystical side of Islam. The Kataria had been 0:16:49.080 --> 0:16:51.480 around since the eleven hundreds, there may be the oldest order, 0:16:51.520 --> 0:16:54.480 and they're decentralized, with each group determining their own practices. 0:16:54.520 --> 0:16:57.400 For the most part, one of my best friends as 0:16:57.440 --> 0:17:01.800 a Sufi. Okay, awesome, and they're really into the Catteria, 0:17:01.840 --> 0:17:04.160 are really into the personal connection between the person and 0:17:04.280 --> 0:17:06.840 God and are opposed to the large institutions and governments 0:17:06.840 --> 0:17:10.000 and Orthodoxy and all that ship that disconnect people from God. 0:17:10.480 --> 0:17:13.280 It's not a surprise that this child of anarchists ends 0:17:13.359 --> 0:17:19.359 up with them. And for the most part, the Sufi 0:17:19.480 --> 0:17:21.679 orders have been like peace and love throughout history, but 0:17:21.720 --> 0:17:24.440 sometimes you got to get an anti colonialism done. There's 0:17:24.440 --> 0:17:26.520 this guy. I hope he gets his own episode one day, 0:17:26.560 --> 0:17:28.280 because I want to know more about him. Basically I 0:17:28.359 --> 0:17:30.200 like leave these like almost like notes to myself of 0:17:30.280 --> 0:17:31.800 being like I want to know more about this person, 0:17:32.160 --> 0:17:34.640 but since I have to write a new episode every 0:17:34.640 --> 0:17:36.919 single week, I don't write and read any history that 0:17:36.960 --> 0:17:39.840 isn't directly related to what I'm working on. Thank you, 0:17:40.520 --> 0:17:45.200 thank you for your service. Um. This guy's name is 0:17:45.200 --> 0:17:49.080 is Abdalkator and he's the leader of the Kataria at 0:17:49.080 --> 0:17:51.600 the beginning of the French colonial rule, and for years 0:17:52.080 --> 0:17:54.960 he led held a modern military at bay with the 0:17:55.040 --> 0:17:57.960 lusiffiliation of tribes people. They hold huge ton of the 0:17:57.960 --> 0:18:00.600 country for a long ass time. And the whole time 0:18:00.640 --> 0:18:03.640 he did it, he's fucking on it about human rights 0:18:03.680 --> 0:18:07.360 of his Christian enemies. He allows religious freedom for the POWs. 0:18:07.359 --> 0:18:09.240 He goes down in history. Is like basically like the 0:18:09.320 --> 0:18:11.680 guy who was best to the people he captured in war, 0:18:12.440 --> 0:18:16.200 even decades after he lost. He intervened directly at great 0:18:16.200 --> 0:18:19.000 personal risk during an anti Christian riot and the city 0:18:19.000 --> 0:18:22.040 of Damascus, sheltering people in his home with his kids, 0:18:22.119 --> 0:18:25.359 roaming out roaming the streets, saving more people's lives. And 0:18:25.400 --> 0:18:28.080 he wasn't the only Sufi at the forefront of anti colonialism. 0:18:28.080 --> 0:18:30.720 Sufie's were involved all over North Africa and South Asia. 0:18:32.680 --> 0:18:35.600 But this is the leader of the Kataria for a 0:18:35.680 --> 0:18:37.800 huge trunk of the nineteenth century. But by the turn 0:18:37.800 --> 0:18:40.400 of the century, the Katia are in this position where 0:18:40.400 --> 0:18:44.359 they decide that they are begrudgingly accepting French rule because 0:18:44.359 --> 0:18:46.399 they believe that it will be temporary and they just 0:18:46.440 --> 0:18:49.119 have to outlast it, and that being an open revolt 0:18:49.119 --> 0:18:51.560 against it is a bad idea. Yeah, they wanted to 0:18:51.840 --> 0:18:56.239 they wanted to avoid more bloodshed. Yeah. Basically this is 0:18:56.280 --> 0:18:58.639 the attitude that Isabelle is working with two greater and 0:18:58.680 --> 0:19:01.359 lesser degrees for the rest of her life. She's fighting 0:19:01.359 --> 0:19:04.080 for autonomy and holding onto Islam and cultural values while 0:19:04.440 --> 0:19:08.160 without trying to specifically overthrow the French government. And occasionally 0:19:08.200 --> 0:19:10.360 she works to further the French government because a lot 0:19:10.359 --> 0:19:13.199 of times when people want to avoid further bloodshed and 0:19:13.240 --> 0:19:17.440 like seek peace, they do so by working with her enemies, 0:19:17.560 --> 0:19:20.359 you know. Historically, Yeah, I could almost be seen like 0:19:20.440 --> 0:19:24.960 her moving towards a liberal stance. Yeah, and like a 0:19:26.119 --> 0:19:28.240 but it's interesting because she doesn't come across it as 0:19:28.280 --> 0:19:29.879 like she's not getting into it as like this, like 0:19:30.280 --> 0:19:34.640 European liberal woman who has calmed down. She's like learning 0:19:34.680 --> 0:19:38.480 it from this Sufi brotherhood that she joins. Even though 0:19:38.520 --> 0:19:43.720 brotherhood is in the name, the order she joins Kataria 0:19:43.840 --> 0:19:45.960 is open to any Muslim man over the age of eighteen, 0:19:46.359 --> 0:19:48.400 and they know she's not technically a man. They don't care. 0:19:48.680 --> 0:19:50.359 There's a few other women in the ranks of the 0:19:50.359 --> 0:19:52.679 brotherhood at this point, as daughters and widows who have 0:19:52.720 --> 0:19:55.840 inherited some status within the organization. I'm unsure whether other 0:19:55.840 --> 0:19:58.400 women had been directly initiated or whether they had only 0:19:58.440 --> 0:20:01.920 kind of inherited their way in, but so's it's either 0:20:02.720 --> 0:20:04.480 they were like, whatever, we don't care that you're a woman, 0:20:04.560 --> 0:20:05.840 or they're like, what will you car yourself a man? 0:20:05.880 --> 0:20:10.600 So fuck it and so cool, I know. And the 0:20:10.600 --> 0:20:14.520 thing that's unprecedented about her joining isn't her gender, it's 0:20:14.560 --> 0:20:17.840 that she's the European. She doesn't write much about her Sufism. 0:20:17.880 --> 0:20:19.920 It's part of I think this whole security culture thing, 0:20:19.920 --> 0:20:23.400 and that ship was secret, so no one quite knows 0:20:23.400 --> 0:20:25.280 how important it was to her. It was obviously very 0:20:25.280 --> 0:20:28.000 important to her, and she writes about some of it right, 0:20:28.080 --> 0:20:29.959 but it she kind of leaves it out of a 0:20:29.960 --> 0:20:33.040 lot of including her diaries and ship. Have either of 0:20:33.119 --> 0:20:38.240 y'all been to a mosque ever? I have not. My 0:20:38.320 --> 0:20:40.920 Sufi friend took me to the Women's Mosque of America 0:20:41.119 --> 0:20:44.520 and it was like one of the loveliest times I've 0:20:44.560 --> 0:20:47.479 ever had in any kind of religious setting. It was 0:20:47.560 --> 0:20:50.200 so beautiful. And I was raised in a really stupid cult, 0:20:50.240 --> 0:20:55.080 so I hate religious stuff, like even like my parents, 0:20:55.359 --> 0:21:00.200 my poor dumb parents met as as like Joe's witness 0:21:00.560 --> 0:21:03.680 and like I so like I've had to like work 0:21:03.720 --> 0:21:06.840 really hard to like heal from that experience and like 0:21:06.880 --> 0:21:12.359 all this like family trauma around that, and like going 0:21:12.800 --> 0:21:17.960 to the mosque was the loveliest religious experience I've ever had. 0:21:18.000 --> 0:21:20.760 It was called the Women's Mosque of America. Very peaceful, 0:21:20.880 --> 0:21:24.280 beautiful place. There are a lot of women who were 0:21:24.520 --> 0:21:28.159 raised in the Nation of Islam and came back to 0:21:28.600 --> 0:21:32.040 regular Islam, and it was just like it was so 0:21:32.160 --> 0:21:36.439 it was such a diverse environment. It was so it 0:21:36.560 --> 0:21:41.520 was so cool, and it didn't feel religiously to me, 0:21:41.880 --> 0:21:44.440 like it it felt just like people trying to support 0:21:44.440 --> 0:21:49.320 each other in living a good life. Yeah, I mean 0:21:49.359 --> 0:21:51.720 that makes sense. That's like one of the main things 0:21:51.720 --> 0:21:56.800