The three portions of Becoming Brigham that are available as of today can all be viewed at becomingbrigham.com. I encourage you to go there and, if you haven’t already done so, to subscribe to the series — for which, of course, there is no charge.
Tomorrow’s installment of Becoming Brigham — Episode 4 — features Matt Grow, the Managing Director of the Church History Department of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Salt Lake City. (To me, one of the great things about this project is the enthusiastic cooperation and help that it has received from the historians at Church headquarters.) And, by the way, a teaser for Episode 4 is already accessible here.
The attacks continue on Elder Clark G. Gilbert, who was called this past week to the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. See, for example, this article from Jana Riess: “New LDS apostle expected to be a strident culture warrior and doctrinal watchdog: — His ascent indicates the church may be doubling down on doctrinal conformity, especially around marriage and family.”
His principal offense appears to emerge from his efforts to ensure that the Church’s schools remain aligned with the Church’ s principles, values, and mission. Which is a real issue, as may be discerned by analogy in this article from the well-known sociologist Christian Smith: “Why I’m Done with Notre Dame”
I was really pleased to see this news story a few days ago: “An historic Sunday: Idaho congregation becomes first Swahili ward in the United States: ‘God is a God of miracles. Now we are a ward, and I am so happy.’”
Many, many years back, I decided that I wanted to learn Swahili. So I bought a Teach Yourself Swahili book. And then, decades ago while we were living in Cairo, an opportunity arose to join a really inexpensive tour of Kenya that had been organized for members of the faculty at Cairo American College, where my wife was teaching. So we scraped together our pennies — I was a graduate student at the time, and I hadn’t yet learned in 1980 how to corruptly charge all of my travel and dining and lodging to the Interpreter Foundation, which wouldn’t be founded for another thirty-two years — and we spent Christmas and New Year’s down there.
We had an absolutely wonderful time. We loved Kenya, and I always imagined that I would get back fairly soon. But I never have.
One of my priorities when we arrived in Nairobi was to go to a Christian bookstore there and buy a Swahili Bible as a tool for helping me to learn the language. I did so, and I bought my Bible.
Unfortunately, life intervened and my Swahili stalled and has now largely left me. It’s a fascinating language, though, and maybe I’ll still get to it, someday. Unlike any other language that I’ve toyed with, Swahili comes from the Bantu linguistic family. Very different. Structurally intriguing. Moreover, approximately 40% of Swahili vocabulary consists of loanwords from Arabic, including the name of the language itself (سَوَاحِلي sawāḥilī, which is a plural adjectival form of an Arabic word meaning “of the coasts”).
Amusingly, the Christian bookstore that I visited in Nairobi had a relatively large selection of anti-Mormon books and tracts. Two shelves’ worth, as I recall. I was actually rather flattered because, at that time — only a couple of years after the 1978 revelation on priesthood — I reckoned that there were probably more titles on those shelves than there were Latter-day Saints in all of East Africa. Things have changed since then. Elder Joseph W. Sitati, a native of Kenya, served in the First Quorum of the Seventy from 2009 until 2022, and other Black African General Authorities are currently serving from Botswana, Ghana, the Ivory Coast, Nigeria, and Zimbabwe. And, among the several Latter-day Saint temples in Africa, one stands in Nairobi.
Last night, we watched The Thief of Bagdad (1940) with a Third-Generation Unit. A Second-Generation Unit describes having watched the film on multiple occasions during its childhood but, curiously, neither I nor my wife remembers having ever seen the movie before. (That actually surprised me; I really thought that I had seen it.) I liked it surprisingly well. It’s a pretty free fantasia loosely inspired by the Alf Layla wa Layla (the so-called “Arabian Nights”) but, at one point, some of the dialogue with the genii was pretty much word-for-word out of the original tales. I liked the score from Miklós Rózsa, which was occasionally reminiscent of his subsequent music for Ben Hur, which I love. The set design was fun, as well, and very eclectic, and the color, for such an early film, was quite rich. Certain scenes were obviously modeled on the Mosque of Aḥmad ibn Ṭūlūn in Cairo, while others drew upon Persian mosque architecture, upon Indian architecture, and even upon statues of the Buddha. Some of the landscapes — the Grand Canyon, Monument Valley, Bryce Canyon, and the Painted Desert — were familiar places in Utah and Arizona.
It was amusing, too, to see Conrad Veidt as the evil sorcerer and usurper Jaffar; two years later, he would portray Major Strasser in the great Bogart/Bergman film Casablanca (1942). (Unfortunately, he died in 1943 at the age of only fifty.) The movie’s influence upon Disney’s Aladdin is manifest in Jaffar’s name and character and in the name of the hero’s sidekick, Abu. It’s possible that The Thief of Bagdad is responsible for having created the weird historical slander against the real historical figure Jaʽfar al-Barmakī (d. AD 803) that has made him a (literally) cartoon villain. The historical record depicts Jaʽfar, rather, as the great (and apparently reasonably decent and honorable) vizier to the illustrious ‘Abbasid caliph Hārūn al-Rashīd (d. AD 809). In the Arabian Nights, too, Ja‘far appears as a protagonist and, often, as the caliph’s companion in clandestine adventures.
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