“the entire question of power, violence, and politics started intriguing me when i tried to locate power in the islamic worldview, during the time i was writing my dissertation. soon after, i began to take up the challenges of foucault and habermas and to study the whole idea of power, authority, and discourse in a muslim context. for a while, i had thought that the relationship of deconstruction to the kinds of radical hermeneutics found in saints, from meister eckhardt to ibn al-arabi, would be promising. there is a certain initial, formal interrelation between what sufis do to deconstruct texts, and what the post-modernists and post-structuralists are doing. this interrelationship is somewhat superficial and i have since dropped the entire enterprise, convinced of the sufficiency of classical discourses developed in islam.”

- eric winkel, islam and the living law: the ibn al-arabi[an] approach (karachi: oxford university press, 1997), vii.

i don’t think that’s the end of the story, of course. but there’s a common thread in all these things i’m reading, cautioning against the easy equivalencing i find myself prone to.

“it is still true that europeans and americans quail at the thought of bodily functions that signify, that are not ‘merely biological’, as we conceive them to be. in a prominent anthropologist’s review of a certain recently translated islamic text we may measure the discomfort of scholars by the author’s distressed references to the section on purity regulations, where he cannot refrain from repeated reference to sodomized camels. he portrays the work as ‘theo-porn and coarse savagery,’ and its author as one ‘who gives…loving thought to the varieties of sweat, excrement, and penetration,’ and as ‘the scholastic and implacable solon of bathroom etiquette.’ the work reviewed, though badly translated, is a fairly ordinary popular handbook of islamic law. the parts that so distress ernst gellner are standard fare in most manuals of islamic law (fiqh). and the section in question – on purification (taharah) – is always the first section in a fiqh book, much as ritual purification is the preliminary to most acts of islamic practice. yet the commonplace for so many religious traditions repels the westerner – even so experienced a student of things islamic as gellner. the greater number of what we consider to be life’s most private acts are for muslims (as well as orthodox jews, for instance) ritually and therefore religiously significant. consequently these acts are discussed as in the sources as often and as comfortably as any other islamic ritual.”

ha.

Man, those JibJab guys crack me up.

lara – i’m going to ask you to walk me through the bonnefoy article sometime. also, remind me to show you the manicom translation i mentioned.
one-trick ponies get things done.

“Precisely because, for him, being is nature to which one cannot add, Mallarmé must reject the place where one lives because it cuts nature off. And one can safely say that he must have turned with interest under these conditions towards words, as they enable that which we conceive, but which fails to exist effectively, to re-form itself. The words would be – or so one might think, that “région où vivre,” that could not be found elsewhere.” (Bonnefoy, 1977: 11)

I am such a one-trick pony these days.

Seriously, though–I like! I assume this applies to Hebrew, too… Ah, all good things are indeed Semitic!

Fathima beats me to everything. In response, I will stick out my tongue, and point it in the general direction of Toronto. Take that Fathima! Ha ha!