browsing old books

continual learning is requisite with application and exertion
always by day argument and by night repetition
piety, asceticism, worship and reverence,
without these, all acquisitions are wondrous vain. 

 

Protected: The end of an era

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the consistency of religion

One of the more fascinating  aspects of the history of religion is to study the consistency of religion – how religious beliefs and practices remained similar throughout the centuries, across different lands and cultures.

It can be really inspiring as a Muslim to see how Muslims centuries ago struggled and strove to uphold their beliefs, especially when they did so in the face of issues we grapple with today.

For a class I’m taking, I’ve had to read on Muslim travels and encounters with Europe before colonial times. Of the many peculiar issues these ambassadors faced in European lands was the issue of meeting/interacting with European women. In his book Europe through Arab Eyes 1578-1727, Nabil Matar (who’s done some wonderful work on these and other topics in the premodern period) mentions several interesting points.

While Europeans often viewed travel to infidel lands as a means of escaping societal norms and indulging themselves in ways not possible back home, Maghribi Muslims would be preoccupied precisely on how to maintain their principles whilst in Europe. They viewed it instead as a “difficult challenge.”

They would also write about how they had to forcibly resist getting seduced by European women, and escape from their plots. Whenever they did meet the women of their hosts, they would not even name them in their writings because the women had become “haraam” to everyone else, “not only physically but also imaginatively.” For them, their relationship with these women “was the index of their moral rectitude and obedience to Islam.”

One European mentioned how Moroccan ambassadors at a royal banquet “dranke a little Milk and Water, but not a drop of Wine… [and] did not looke about not stare on the Ladys, or expresse the least surprize, but with a Courtly negligence in pace, Countenance, & whole behaviour, answering onely to such questions as were asked, with a greate deal of Wit & Gallantrie.”

This is not to say they were all complete angels: an associate once fell in love with an English girl,  but he was made to marry her before they went further.

In any case, there’s much more to be said about this subject. Of course, women were just one aspect of their encounters. The (long) debates these ambassadors had with their Christian counterparts, among other aspects, are also really fascinating.

 

1st world vs 3rd world countries

Comparisons like these are so amusing. It can be quite a challenge for foreigners to find something good to say about Third World countries beyond culture.

Also, the description of altruistic US foreign policy – beautiful.

knowing, understanding,

Looking past those misleading moments of friendship and companionship, those cascades of love, laughter, and rich debates – what really connects you with the world around you? Is it the so-called amiability of human nature; the cruel need for survival and interaction; or perhaps the desire to fight boredom and fear with the bluntest of knives?

If in the deepest recesses of your soul, you can barely come to grips about yourself, if you can barely understand your own totality of existence, how then can you claim to understand anyone else?

The human heart has more sides to it than the human body; yet, at face value, thinking through our eyes, we accept, and we imagine that we understand. We see only a few fleeting shards and pieces, small, unconnected fragments bound in time, space, and an-ever transforming human heart that is not in any way obligated to follow any lines of consistency, predictability, or expectation.

But that is life. Where humans catch a glimpse, and think they know it all. Even as they hide bursting hearts with stoic faces, and bursting faces with stoic hearts.

We can only attempt to know an individual – not to understand.

We can only attempt to know life – not understand.

Hence, we shouldn’t demand to rationalize and understand everything about God – we should only try to find Him.

stifling revolution

I think the argument below is pretty sound… I’d also connect it with the political structure, in that a market economy plus a democracy = little chance for revolution. I believe I’ve bought into theories which argue that democracies ipso facto do impede all-out revolutions.

It’s genius way of creating illusions and keeping power.

Because it is abstract and depoliticized, the market cannot be attacked and overthrown. Due to the nature of its operation, even conflicts deriving from the market’s operation cannot easily be articulated into political issues. In market economies, buyers and sellers of all commodities, including human labor, are considered free and equal, and as such, enter “voluntarily” into contracts of their own choosing. For such economic actors, the market appears to be a set of conditions within which they must work. Furthermore, actors in markets are numerous and highly decentralized and thus difficult to attack and challenge… Finally, the market regularly causes misfortune for certain capitalists, adding to the illusion that the system itself is impartial and that individual decisions and actions determine one’s life chances. Hence, market systems may obscure the social origins of human suffering and injustice. As a result, adversely affected groups and individuals may end up blaming themselves or other victims for their misfortune and suffering. 

- Misagh Parsa, Social Origins of the Iranian Revolution

secularism

Secularism as a tool for facilitating universal hegemony. Fascinating.

The West is still grappling with a contradiction that has structured it ever since the onset of modernity. For although it did not have exclusive rights over the idea of universality, the West alone shifted the debate outside the field of religion to construct a secular universal from which it drew the principle of equality. Having thereby created the possibility of converting universal principles into rights in the real world, the West has subsequently never ceased to limit their field of application.

The paradox of the West lies in its ability to produce universals, to raise them to the level of absolutes, and to violate in an extraordinarily systematic way the principles it derives from them, while still feeling the need to develop theoretical justifications for those violations.

- Sophie Bessis, Western Supremacy: the Triumph of an Idea?