الذاكرة memorY Palaces قصور

الذاكرة memorY Palaces قصور

Yunus Abdallah Wesley  //  !

 
Dec 15 / 11:40am

DEATH to king Lig-myi rhya of ŹAṄ-ŹUṄ!

DEATH to king Lig-myi rhya of the land of ŹAṄ-ŹUṄ! 
a Smiting-Sister SAD MAR KAR and
Bodhisattva-Bully SROṄ BTSAN SGAMPO
serial cosmolography!!

Soon after Sroṅ btsan sgampo's sister,
   Sad mar kar,
was married to
   Lig-myi rhya,
       the king of Źaṅ-źuṅ,
an opportunity for intrigue presented itself;

   she led her unsuspecting husband into an ambush
       in which he was killed
       and his army defeated.

With this victory, Sroṅ btsan sgampo
   became the master
       of the high Tibetan Plateau.

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Dec 15 / 7:51am

Announcing the Taha Talks this spring, my presentations of exam readings once or twice weekly.

The Taha Talks will funnel my readings of historiographical, philosophical, and esoteric books into a forum of feedback and teaching with my colleagues. My *very best* reading, study and memory of books and their authors comes from those books I've presented on or responded to in a paper. Presenting and leading discussion for an hour on the books I've read that week is THE best test of competent, fluid learning I've encountered. And by now I've presented enough to know it's a solid skill my graduate colleagues and instructors value in my scholarship. So come one, come all!

By way of example of the kind of learning that presenting to fellow seminarists has stamped on me, here is a bit recounted from the work of spring 2008. That I can write this off the cuff and revise as needed to address concerns of history or criticism, that's testimony to the fear of looking dumb in front of my toughest prof and the best seminar yet, my gold standard set by "Heresy as a Historical Problem (Christianity, Islam, and Judaism)."

***

Gershom Scholem, Sabbatai Ṣevi: the Mystical Messiah, in which Scholem raids hundreds of manuscripts, newspapers, broadsheets and archives for the very idiosyncratic kabbalist Sabbatai, the enigma at the center of the largest post-Christian Messianic movement. 

Scholem seeks one segment of a dialectic operating throughout literate Jewish history and as a civilization: commentary on the Torah with attendant legal and education practices, and the attraction to visionary states achieved through alternate reading techniques and ascetic practice. Scholem seems to think this duo of ir/reason, in/toxication as a civilizational motor within the Judaism of the exile. The two theses crash into each other in various ways up until modernity mutates the original binary.
 
Messianic movements are the biggest and most violent such crises. A synthetic clash between building up God's text, Torah-Talmud one argument at a time; or astrally projecting through Hebrew letters and words into the mansions within the heavenly palace: these are both strong strong wine. 

Sabbatai Sevi kicked off the biggest Messianic movement since the destruction of the Temple, and this he did through the medium of Lurianic mysticism, the hot hot hot spirituality of the 16th and 17th centuries CE. The wildfire spread by the speed of the mails, postal networks across Mediterranean shipping and early European state postal services. So yeah, modernism and the magical, just my bag.

Debate on the legal, normative, societal disciplines we bunch together as "religion and culture," a people's total "way of life" in some time frame, BANGS UP against its antithesis mysticism. Scholem follows a number of other Western scholars, protestant and secular Jewish, in identifying Gnosticism and Neoplatonism as formative but ALIEN influences on Judaean peoples across the Second Temple diaspora, across the Hellenistic world which at that time was awash in a great variety of religio-magical systems long since grab-bagged as "Gnostic," as I'll rant at you some other time. Sounds fun no?!

***

The audience indented: the graduate students and faculty among my colleagues peers and friends from the Graduate Division of Religion, Comparative Literature, and English departments.

These shall insha'allah occur in the Emory library lounges (nice dealies transported straight out of the "Friends" universe of airy windows, shades, high tables and chairs, PCs all around, and a whomping big TV as monitor).

The Taha Talks! 

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Dec 13 / 12:33am

that old wiki magic

بسمه تعالى
"Non-educated" is, in any case, an unusual form; the normal term is "uneducated." [citation needed]

'Cause somebody ELSE can find a dictionary citation; I've assuaged my beef with all creation ever so briefly. Yr hmbl editor OUT YO

Primarily this is to playfully *mock* wikipedia writing and layout. Entries are in perpetual mid-edit and in perpetual abandonment. But there is a textual power in the open-ended edit: the wiki magic. The growth of an entry, or its refinement, follows the massed moments of transaction between interested readers and the state of the text: the individual editors "weigh in" and increase the mass and complexity of the text.

It's that lack of an authorial, editorial voice clamping down on the *duration* of the entry, or on the mind-numbing enumeration of detail, that gives so many wikipedia articles the tone of a bright 8 year old child telling you everything she knows about oceanography.

But the power of the wiki as instrument of knowledge lies, too, in the web of connections to other articles. This web of connection was previously *implicit* in all canons and intertexts. Now HTML greases the wheels of traffic down the galleries, halls and side rooms of an architecture of knowledge (this is the MEMORY PALACE figure I'm so fond of). Those links from any given substance word to any other entry speeds you along the connections drawn by previous generations of thinkers, up til the time of the last edit.

So I'm finding the wikipedia entry as a *style* is yet in development as a medium of knowledge and as an instrument of learning. That development has some pretty silly moments!

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Sep 17 / 4:33pm

Bodhisattvas of the Forest and the Formation of the Mahāyāna

بسمه تعالى

Bodhisattvas of the Forest and the Formation of the Mahāyāna: A Study and Translation of the Rāṣṭrapālaparipṛcchā-sūtra
Daniel Boucher. U. Hawai'i Press, Honolulu, 2008

"How I learned to stop worrying and love unicode fonts where diacriticked letters match the rest of 'em"


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Aug 21 / 3:26am

Tschaï

بسمه تعالى

Jack Vance; Li-An, Jean-David Moran
Le Cycle de Tschaï
Le Chasch
Le Wankh
Le Dirdir
Le Pnume

Reith and the Pnume-girl!

Le sigh! Eight volumes of Jack Vance's sprawling Planet of Adventure stories done in classy French BD, only 12.90 euros each; that's something like USD 131 at the moment, plus shipping. Maybe in addition to textual Sufi studies I can start doing Weird Fiction and Despised Genre studies, and get grants to buy European funny-books.

 

Li-An's visualization of the alien Pnume, oldest inhabitants of the planet Tschaï, pretty closely matches Barlowe's in his Guide to Extraterrestrials, that encyclopedia of well-conceived fictional aliens; if Li-An's not cribbing, it's a testament to Vance's abilities as a writer.

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Aug 13 / 10:28pm

On Reading, in Byatt's Possession: a Romance

بسمه تعالى

It is possible for a writer to make, or remake at least, for a reader, the primary pleasures of eating, or drinking, or looking on, or sex. Novels have their obligatory tour-de-force, the green-flecked gold omelette aux fines herbes, melting into buttery formlessness and tasting of summer, or the creamy human haunch, firm and warm, curved back to reveal a hot hollow, a crisping hair or two, the glimpsed sex. They do not habitually elaborate on the equally intense pleasure of reading. There are obvious reasons for this, the most obvious being the regressive nature of the pleasure, a mise-en-abîme even, where words draw attention to the power and delight of words, and so on ad infinitum, thus making the imagination experience something papery and dry, narcissistic and yet disagreeably distanced, without the immediacy of sexual moisture or the scented garnet glow of good burgundy. And yet, natures such as Roland's are at their most alert and heady when reading is violently yet steadily alive. (What an amazing word 'heady' is, en passant, suggesting both acute sensuous alertness and its opposite, the pleasure of the brain as opposed to the viscera--though each is implicated in the other, as we know very well, with both, when they are working.)

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Aug 12 / 9:23am

Back!

بسمه تعالى

A summer without blogging, a summer of regrets & self-recriminations every time I see my own signature in email or on a couple of forums! At an end, insha'allah!

In between gallumphing gulfs of joblessness, I have been translating the section on zāhid (ascetic) Shaqīq al-Balkhī from the Hiylat al-Awliyā', a vast hagiographical collection.

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Apr 27 / 11:02pm

Feisal Abdul Rauf and Charles Taylor's Secularities

بسمه تعالى

A theoretical hook! My kingdom for a theoretical hook! Not that I've got a kingdom, mind. 

I've been itching to put Charles Taylor's model of secularity to work in my project for Islamic Modernism, but have failed to see how until now. Taylor, in A Secular Age, lays out that secularism is not the absence of religious belief but an active presence in modern hearts and minds. Too, it is not a single thing, but at least three things:
  • Secularity 1, the displacement of religion from the public sphere (which required the notion of a "public sphere").
  • Secularity 2, the removal of the sources of belief in religion through the development of a notion of nature and human identity separate from religion.
  • Secularity 3, Taylor's particular baby, is the coexistence of religion, non-religion, and idiosyncratic beliefs in a sort of marketplace. I'm a sci-fi-reading Sufic Sunni Muslim, you're a Rainbow Gathering hippie-orthodox Jew, she's an Objectivist atheist and Neo-Rosicrucian; we come by our beliefs, guardedly respect the right of others to have them, and all hold our beliefs cautiously and self-consciously, as we are aware of the many alternatives.
Secularity in all three forms is rooted in a dialectic whose articulation and evolution is particular to not "The West," that splendid euphemism, but to western European Latin Christianity and its successor societies. Taylor calls this dialectic "reform" (possibly "Reform"), and it consists of a drive based in Christianity and Hellenistic philosophy to improve oneself and one's society morally, to extend the opportunities of that improvement broadly across the population. Taylor, a Catholic, a Hegelian, and a Foucauldian, sees this dialectic operating at cross-purposes with the basic civilizational drive to tidy things up for the productive classes, to consolidate power, to extend power, so Reform is no simple progressivism. The intellectual force to extend morality through education, civic life, philosophical and religious opportunities and so on, has been the motor of movements from medieval Rhineland mysticism to the Enlightenment and beyond, not neglecting "The Reformation" itself. 

Skipping a few steps in his vast and delicious argument, the forms of secularity are not the necessary outcome of History and Progress. They are historically situated responses to a whole slew of developments extending life, liberty, property, education, etc., across more and more of the population of western Europe, its colonies, and by-blows. Europe, now. Taylor's very clear he's working on a model of secularity basically operating in Europe, the Americas, Australia, etc. Those secularities and their associated disciplines and manifestations certainly operate across the rest of the planet, so long and so deeply within Europe's shadow, but the non-European civilizational roots of the acceptance of secularity across Asia, Africa, indigenous America, etc., differ from the European roots. Reform is not a Latin Christian heirloom by any inherent measure, but its articulation and historical development are specific. 

To continue developing when I'm more awake tomorrow:
  • Muslims in immigrant lands: Muslims in the West, converts and immigrants and the 2nd generation.
  • Age of Authenticity, self-conscious Islam and naive Islam, in the west and abroad.
  • Abdul Rauf's attempts to articulate an Age of Authenticity Islam for a secularity 3 population
  • KEY: Disconnect between sec3 and Muslim roots
  • KEY: Difficulty of connecting sec3/Authenticity narrative with tradition when the articulation of civilizational dialectics in Islam differs from the Latin West
  • (and we can speculate about the Arab world, West Africa, the Persian world and South Asia, and Southeast Asia as spheres of Islamic civilization comparable to the Latin West, the Greek East, and the African-Asian churches)
  • between traditionalism and modernity
  • Shari'a and fiqh: law or ethos? how related?
  • millet-multiculturalism, the vision of Cordoba, and the problems of pluralism

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Apr 13 / 10:44am

CSM: Bush nostalgia in the Middle East?

Can Obama erase 'Bush nostalgia' in the Middle East?

By Shadi Hamid 

The Christian Science Monitor, April 12, 2010
http://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/Opinion/2010/0412/Can-Obama-erase-Bush-nostalgia-in-the-Middle-East

While President Obama’s domestic position has been strengthened considerably by the passage of health-care reform, there is nothing – yet – to suggest global support for American foreign policy will follow suit. Outside the US, there is a sense of “Bush nostalgia,” including in a rather unlikely place – the Middle East.
...

For liberals long disillusioned with the narrowness of US-Mideast policy, it may be worth recalling that the “Arab spring” – when a number of Arab countries experienced democratic opportunities – was not a figment of the conservative mind. It was real. I remember the weekend of Dec. 12, 2004, when 30 of us participated in a workshop for Arab reformers in Amman, Jordan. At the end, one of the organizers, Radwan Masmoudi, gathered the group and told us there was now an unprecedented window of opportunity to push for democracy. If we let it pass, he warned, it may not come again.

After Islamist groups registered electoral victories across the region, the Bush administration quickly reversed course and buried its “freedom agenda.” The year 2005 became America’s lost moment in the Middle East. But that it was lost is different from not happening at all; something remarkable had, in fact, occurred. Discussing the Bush administration’s pro-democracy efforts in Egypt, leading Islamist reformer Abdel Monem Abul Futouh explained to me, “Everyone knows it … we benefited, everyone benefited, and the Egyptian people benefited.” That feeling of possibility is difficult to find in the Arab world today.

...

Filed under  //  middle east   politics   repost  

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