glaenzen

karyn ball, “wanted, dead or distracted: on ressentiment in history, philosphy [sic], and everyday life”, cultural critique 52 (autumn 2002), 249:
in his consideration of temporal experience in augustine’s confessions, paul ricoeur reads book 11 as a lament over man’s distance from god. the eternity of the judeo-christian god is portrayed as a transcendent substance, an [...]

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receiving space

my rumination tonight with the al hikmah speaker series (“this earth was made for us a masjid?: an exercise in metaphor”) is about space and place. zainab asked for my notes. these instead some extended thoughts.
the title gains its first impulse from a fairly well-known tradition (cited in the sahihayn and various other collections of ahadith) in [...]

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foam on the sea

i think we can agree that civilizational thought is one of the more insidious and dangerous aspects of cultural apperception. we are familiar with inside/outside divisions, with exclusionary mechanisms, and can probably go further to say that undoing civilizational identification, as performed by huntington and lewis, is one of the more radical oppositions that should [...]

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loving the beloved

(yes, i took the title from the sunnipath event.)
great was the sorrow in the city of light, as medina was now called. the companions rebuked each other for weeping, but wept themselves. “nor for him do i weep,” said umm ayman, when questioned about her tears. “know i not that he hath gone to that [...]

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credo ut intelligam

i used to think restoring measures existed. somewhere between catharsis and redemption, a saving grace would descend from on high and transport me toward light. less a latter-day rapture than the simple effects of staking a claim in the wilderness, clearing a homestead. erasing the pastoral to attempt a life with crimson geraniums in window-boxes [...]

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here we stand at the end of paths taken

moonlight bright tonight, stars brilliant over winter snow, northern lights spanning the horizon and falling stars diving languid toward the earth as i drove home.
somewhere, thousands of kilometers away, millions of pilgrims stand on the plain of ‘arafah.
labbayk, rabb. despite everything, here i stand.
“we are always the edge of the world” (david manicom)

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echolalia: ash wednesday

now, horrifically, the entendre undercut and slipping upward: here, (a production,) will be the site of its reading. from butler’s “violence, mourning, politics”:
there is losing, as we know, but there is also the transformative effect of loss, and this latter cannot be charted or planned. one can try to choose it, but it may be [...]

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diatribing in the morning

i recently read pervez hoodbhoy’s article in the august 2007 issue of “physics today”, and a followup article in “US news” (this second one is worse, but i’m not going to deal with it). he’s been teaching at quaid-e-azam university in islamabad for the past 34 years, and is best known for repeating goldziher’s doctrine [...]

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transference

questions of translation emerging not only from the previous post but more generally are also directly relevant because the editing project i am now working on is translations of poems, epistles, sermons from the 7th and 8th centuries. and the subtext, backstory, is sometimes difficult to draw out and understand personally, let alone convey in [...]

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06.06.07

everybody loves a good disaster
- stephen fearing
the particular technology was invented by the roman church in the sixteenth century, anticipating the increasing public presence of the ecclesiastical establishment and the introduction of weekly communion, which sacrament was only possible as purified by confession. and so the masses of europe thronged to the confessional-box, that they [...]

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