Thursday, September 05, 2013

From the "What a Name!" Department...

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/04/Hadji-Mural_by_Lanceray.jpg/250px-Hadji-Mural_by_Lanceray.jpg

Heather Hadjistavropoulos

Dr. Hadjistavropoulos, we are told on the University of Regina website, holds a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the University of British Columbia and is a registered doctoral psychologist in Saskatchewan, Canada. She joined the University full-time in 2001 and is currently a Professor of Psychology & Director of Clinical Training. Prior to working at the University, she was Section Head for Clinical Outcomes Research in the Regina Qu'Appelle Health Region.

Dr. Hadjistavropoulos founded the Psychology Training Clinic at the University of Regina, and received a Canada Innovation Foundation grant to develop a state of the art Clinical Health Psychology Area for teaching, research and practice at the University of Regina.

What's remarkable about the name is that it reflects a monstrous hybrid of Muslim and Greek Christian.  A hadji is a person who has made the pilgrimage (Hajj) to Mecca.  The "stavro-" segment of her name signifies the Greek word for "cross" (stauros), and the "-poulos" means in Greek "son of" or "child of".

Meanwhile, as we all know, "Heather" is an English name, though coined relatively recently, apparently (the 19th century perhaps), it stems from the flower by the same name, which in turn stems from the heath whence those pagani of the wastes of the countryside in various parts of Europe tended to remain uncouth in their resistance to the civilizing force of Christianization.  The eponymous heathen would come to denote an "infidel" of sorts, and often was used in medieval times to denote the Mohammedan.  Of course, in these latter days, "Heather" has come to be an unremarkably fashionable name for bourgeois white girls (dipping into a subculture -- namely, of the Goth ennui and anomie exemplified in the movie Heathers -- of that same bourgeoisie).

The juxtaposition of such an airheaded California name to that hideous surname would be merely amusing, were it not indicative of an ongoing anti-civilizational process of the Hijra (another H word from that religion from Hell) of stealth jihad.  One assumes it's her married name; and while she looks as white as Wonder Bread, her husband (with the similarly unmuslim name "Thomas") has just a soupçon of the southeast Mediterranean in his otherwise ruggedly handsome white looks, and one wonders what confluence, or clash, of Ottoman and Christian occurred in his heritage; for as sure as any scientific law, any hybrid of Turkish/Muslim and Greek must have its sordid and sad underbelly.

P.S.:  Googling the name "Hadjistavropoulos" and "Islam", I didn't find anything damning, but I did find a reference list for some unremarkable academic journal article in the field of Psychology, which happened to include the following doozy:

Ghorbani, N., Watson, P. J., & Khan, Z. H. (2007). Theoretical, empirical, and potential ideological dimensions of using Western conceptualizations to measure Muslim religious commitments: Journal of Muslim Mental Health Vol 2(2) Fal-Win 2007, 113-131. 

It is highly unlikely this journal is examining the subject as I futuristically fantasized in a Hesperado essay long ago (Islam as a psychological disorder--in the year 2158).

1 comment:

1389 said...

Eastern Christians occasionally used "hadji" as a title to denote a Christian who had made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem.

Not a good idea to use that word, I know...