Lo! A philomath's field notes & yearnings
From Wikipedia’s personalized Year in Review for me:
You spent 22,629 minutes reading 12,427 articles in 2025. We estimate that puts you in the top 5% of Wikipedia readers globally. The average person reads 335 articles a year.
Yeah, I’m a fan. But my plan for next year is more emphasis on books and my to-be-read stack (actually six, which I’ll write about some other time, maybe).
I finished the first chapter of Shahab Ahmed’s What is Islam, where he lays out the need for a rethinking what should be considered Islam (for the academy and as a theoretical-object), introduces his Balkans-to-Bengal complex, and presents six questions that he expands on in the book before concluding with a chapter synthesizing all of the work into his reconceptualization.
There are so many things that interest me about it. For starters, it’s practically an encyclopedia for modern scholarship on Islam, Sufism, and the sharī’ah.
It’s also a confirmation from someone outside myself (with my internal biases of my race, class, and experiences) that accepts questioning our modern conceptualization of Islam, which almost totally emphasizes the juridical aspects while relegating the mystical or simply the less orthodox aspects and histories, as valid and worthwhile. Here’s one quote from page 125:
Given that modern man is, to a historically unprecedented degree, homo juridicus, it is hardly surprising that the leitmotif of Muslim modernism of every stripe is the assertion of the unilateral normative supremacy of something called sharī’ah identified with law—whether that sharī’ah/law be in some pristine or reformed condition. It is striking that so much of the discourse of modern reformist Muslims—who have, for the most part, received the norms of modernity second-hand and by the forces of arms and coercive administration of European colonialism—about (what is) Islam has been about rethinking the Islamic state by rethinking Islamic law, and not about rethinking theology, philosophy, ethics, poetics, and Sufism as a hermeneutical means to modern Islamic norms. The relative lack of concern on the part of even the most self-consciously critical modern Muslims to re-think or re-form normative Islam in terms of theology, philosophy, and ethics—let alone Sufism and poetics—is one of the most peculiar, but also symptomatic, elements of Muslim modernity as modernity.
But in regards to this post, it just makes me ache for Istanbul, Bursa, and Konya; the mosques, the narrow streets filled with cafes, the tram running through İstiklal Caddesi, Rūmī‘s mausoleum, the bookstores. It was the first vacation that Patricia and I took together during one Christmas break from school. Here’s a few of the many photos I took from December 2014.
I took this photo of Masjid Sultanahmet’s entrance with an iPhone 5S and it blew my mind.
When I went to pray, I was dazzled by the stained glass and inscriptions all over and the illumination from the lights overhead. In Mauritania and Sierra Leone, mosques are a nondescript affair with hardly any decoration to them.
I can’t remember the name of this neighborhood but it was close to the Bosphorus bridge.
So many museums. In the Turkish and Islamic Arts Museum, I learned much more about the major and minor dynasties; the Rāshidūn, the Umayyads, the Abbasids, the Fatimids, the Almoravids, and the Almohads.
On Christmas Day, we were in Konya, the adopted hometown of the Persian poet Jalāl ad-Dīn Rūmī. I felt we were the only western tourists there at the time. The museum and mawlana’s mausoleum were free that day. After, I went to the noon prayer at the adjacent mosque. It was under construction and covered in a blue tarpaulin but the rugs and chandelier were still very nice.
After taking the train back to Istanbul, we visited the Grand Bazaar. Walking anywhere in Istanbul was so pleasant, though cold. Coming from the climate of the Saharan edge of Nouakchott, it was a bit of a shock.
I can’t remember the street but this one with bookstores everywhere was pretty special. Most of it in Turkish and Arabic, I actually purchased two books in a different bookstore in Fatih. Both were histories:
It’s hard to know if and when I’ll return to Istanbul. While a few bombings occurred later in the next year, at the peak of the so-called Islamic State, now traveling seems so far away in our new age of pandemic. But I remember it fondly and that will have to do for now.
I thought the quarantine would allow me to read more books than I have. Old habits of only starting longer books, or becoming distracted by articles or tweets, die hard.
But having Deleted Twitter™ (once again) and consciously making time to read every night before bed, I finished Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed yesterday.
And I loved it.
A good friend of mine gave me his copy when I was last in California two years ago and it’s been with me since, yet sitting. On a recent FaceTime call, where we inevitably discuss all that’s interesting to us in a hodge-podge of rapid-fire questions, quips, and segues of politics, culture, history, etc., he mentioned he had reread it. I vaguely knew the premise;
170 years after a group of anarchists settled a capitalistic planet’s moon after a successful revolution and absolutely no interplanetary contact, one comes back.
As usual, whenever I make time for fiction, the stories that draw me in occasionally have more profound thoughts than some dense book of theory or history.
What do social relations look like in a planet where there is no government, no currency, no prisons, no law? Where everyone consciously chooses what to do but with the awareness of themselves as part of one social organism, scrappily making a life out of a planet with very little natural resources?
Le Guin’s imagination and the big ideas in the book were much more interesting to me than how she wrote them. The book oscillates between the Shevek’s (the protagonist and Anarres’ most brilliant physicist) life on his native Anarres and after he lands on Urras.
The story was good, but for me, the book’s what-if scenario drew me in the most. What if there was a successful anti-capitalist social revolution? What if the victors win concessions, like almost two centuries of uninterrupted peace?
“We have nothing but our freedom. We have nothing to give you but your own freedom. We have no law but the single principle of mutual aid between individuals. We have no government but the single principle of free association. We have no states, no nations, no presidents, no premiers, no chiefs, no generals, no bosses, no bankers, no landlords, no wages, no charity, no police, no soldiers, no wars. Nor do we have much else. We are sharers, not owners. We are not prosperous. None of us is rich. None of us is powerful. If it is Anarres you want, if it is the future you seek, then I tell you that you must come to it with empty hands. You must come to it alone, and naked, as the child comes into the world, into his future, without any past, without any property, wholly dependent on other people for his life. You cannot take what you have not given, and you must give yourself. You cannot buy the Revolution. You cannot make the Revolution. You can only be the Revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.” — Shevek
The end of the book was easily my favorite part. A mass demonstration, the consequences of when popular unrest meets the ruling class, a meeting and conversation with another planet’s ambassador, and a revolution inside a revolutionary state.
I sped through the last forty or so pages to catch my friend on FaceTime and discuss it. In our long-winded way, he touched on the book, the moment, and everything else that we fancied. Then he dropped another recommendation; *Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Years of Rice and Salt. Another author who I’m aware of yet have never made the time for. This one is an alternative history if the Black Death had wiped out most of Europe and speculating on the last 700 years if Islam and Buddhism were the major poles of power on Earth.
I think I might just go to him for every fiction recommendation.
But first, Murray Bookchin’s The Next Revolution: Popular Assemblies and the Promise of Direct Democracy.
Micro.blog’s photo challenge for today is love.
We know that there is no help for us but from one another, that no hand will save us if we do not reach out our hand. And the hand that you reach out is empty, as mine is. You have nothing. You possess nothing. You own nothing. You are free. All you have is what you are, and what you give. — Ursula Le Guin
For most of “Starship Troopers,” humanity, in every possible facet, gets its ass kicked. A culture that reveres and communicates exclusively through violence—a culture very much like one that responds to peaceful protests with indiscriminate police brutality, or whose pandemic strategy is to “dominate” an unreasoning virus—keeps running up against its own self-imposed limitations. Once again, the present has caught up to Verhoeven’s acid vision of the future. It’s not a realization that anyone in the film can articulate, or seemingly even process, but the failure is plain: society has left itself a single solution to every problem, and it doesn’t work. Donald Trump didn’t empty American politics of everything but violence; he’s just what was left afterward. He is more an emblem of American defeat than its author. The world of “Starship Troopers” aligns with our moment in its wastefulness and brutality, and most of all in being so helplessly recursive.