Electromagnetic

Friendship is not an event. If it were, I would have lost you long ago.

Humanity is a tree: women are the roots, men the branches, love and mercy between them, children their fruit.

Sometimes acquisition is deprivation and deprivation is acquisition.

The discussion [a previous chapter] shows that there is clearly an Islamicate imagination, a depiction of a culture where the Muslim figure is in the centre of the world while God is also present, not just in Sufi shrines and sacred objects, but also has agency and can cause miracles to occur. Even when Muslims appear in ‘non-religious’ films, they are shown as religious and often devout figures, who belong to this world. The complex relationships between the communities are often alluded to in the films. Hindus are shown to be respectful to Islamicate culture and even to worship at Muslim shrines. Muslims can pay their respects to Hinduism, and some Muslim rulers were known for giving grants to Hindu temples, but they cannot worship the images.
     The media have played a major part in forming this Islamicate imagination, of image, text and music, drawing from sources as diverse as Mughal art to Parsi theatre and chromolithographs to popular stories. The Islamicate films have built on these images and created their own representations of beauty, architecture, religiosity and music. The figure of the courtesan has been central to this and now every courtesan’s song and dance will have to reflect this world, where even a Hindu, such as Chandramukhi in Devdas (2002, dir. Sanjay Lella Bhansali), has to present herself as part of this culture. The beauty and elegance of the ‘lost world’ of Lucknow is contrasted with a supposed Hindu - and colonial -lack of refinement.

Dwyer, Rachel. “Filming the Gods: Religion and Indian Cinema” in The Religion and Film Reader. Ed. by Jolyon Mitchell and S. Brent Plate. New York and London: Routledge, 2007, pp. 140-41.

Ishmael my brother,
How long shall we fight each other?
My brother from times bygone,
My brother - Hagar’s son,
My brother, the wandering one.
One angel was sent to us both,
One angel watched over our growth -
There in the wilderness, death threatening through thirst,
I a sacrifice on the altar, Sarah’s first.
Ishmael my brother, hear my plea:
It was the angel who tied thee to me …
Time is running out, put hatred to sleep,
Shoulder to shoulder, let’s water our sheep.

By Israeli poet Shin Shalom. In Forms of Prayer edited by J. Magonet and L. Blue. London: RSGB, 1985, III, p. 891. Quoted in “Abraham from a Jewish Perspective” by Sybil Sheridan found in Abraham’s Children: Jews, Christians and Muslims in Conversation edited by Norman Solomon, Richard Harries and Tim Winter. London: T&T Clark, 2006.

An orphan is not one without a father but one without knowledge.

Ala Kassay, 1426.

I just watched a video [linked below] of Abdal-Hakim Murad’s lecture at the recent Radical Middle Way project event “Globalised Before Globalisation: The Forgotten History of the Muslim Trader” delivered at Canary Wharf, London, on May 7, 2008 [Khan Dera Films, approx. 20 minutes].

Murad discusses economic dimensions of the sirah or life of Nabi Muhammad (peace be upon him). He conceives of the sirah as a tale of two cities: Mecca and Medina and explores how the hijra or migration of the Nabi from Mecca to Medina can be understood not only in terms of a theological and political shift but an economic shift as well. I think Murad’s talk is an insightful comment on a much neglected aspect of the biography of the Nabi. The way he links his point to the greater consequences of modern economics is creative. One of the most difficult aspects of this lecture for me is Murad’s observation about why more relatively wealthy white people do not become Muslim as frequently as poor black and brown people in Europe and other parts of the world, especially North America. Acknowledging factors like racism as barriers, he goes further to suggest that since God is with the broken-hearted, people who tend to come from socio-economic backgrounds that encourage complacency and maintenance of the status-quo of the establishment are less receptive to embracing the transformative path that Islam represents because doing so would threaten to burst their bubbles of advantage: economic, intellectual, and otherwise. This lecture also features one of Murad’s lighter moments as he mischievously imitates the accent of an Indian telemarketer before a crowd of predominantly younger British professionals (many of South Asian heritage), evoking laughter as he tries to drive home the point that we live in a society in which the evidence of the great (and increasing) socio-economic disparity between the wealthy north and poor south is often thinly concealed but just enough so that we do not bother to examine it or actually do anything about it.

Watch the lecture at the Radical Middle Way website here.

This is the Scotch Mist version of “All I Need” by Radiohead from their 2007 album In Rainbows.

Although he [Kindi, d. ca. 870] accepts that we perceive visible forms, he is always neutral about the mechanism by which we perceive them* [Footnote 19: Consider, for example, this passage from On First Philosophy: "our perception through the senses, upon direct contact (mubashara) of sense with its object is not in time" (AR 106.8). Here al-Kindi's statement is consistent with Aristotle, but emphasizes only the fact that sensation is through contact, which as previously mentioned is common to all ancient theories of vision. By the same token, al-Kindi does not try to bring together the Aristotelian doctrine of visible forms with his extramissionist mechanics]. Nowhere does al-Kindi imply that we must perceive forms through some sort of intromission view. In any case, al-Kindi may, like modern scholars, have been troubled by Aristotle’s own inconsistency on the question of the mechanism of vision. In the Meteorology and De Caelo he adopts an extramission theory like that of Plato, Euclid and al-Kindi* [Footnote 20: ... ]. Still, it is clear that [Kindi's] De Aspectibus considers and rejects an identifiably Aristotelian theory of vision. 
     Al-Kindi’s fidelity to Euclid is also less than complete. De Aspectibus diverges from the Optics on a number of points. This is done more in a spirit of charity than criticism: al-Kindi says in De Aspectibus, Prop. 11, II. 79-81, that we should not be eager to attribute error to a figure like Euclid, but instead “we should think well of him and shift what he says to the right path (convertamus eius sermonem ad semitam bonam).” In the rest of this section I want to present three such shifts:
     (A) Euclid presents visual rays as one-dimensional lines emitted to form a cone. Al-Kindi argues that the rays must in fact be three-dimensional.
     (B) Euclid also believed that as the lines emitted from the eye spread out, there will be gaps between them; this is why we do not see things clearly when they are far away. Al-Kindi denies this, and holds that the visual cone is continuous.
     (C) Finally there is the aforementioned account of how light is propagated: along straight lines, but having an instantaneous effect over the whole extent of its path (in other words, light does not travel).    

Adamson, Peter. “Vision, Light and Color in al-Kindi, Ptolemy and the Ancient Commentators” in Arabic Sciences and Philosophy. Vol. 16, No. 2, September 2006, pp. 213-14 [Note: I have left out Adamson's diacritics].

     Secularism…has become an ideology that holds that there is nothing higher in the universe than we. Many of its victims have not only believed this, but have even felt it. Some, to the devastation also of their neighbours, have even begun to live in terms of it. In a milder version, even if one feels that there is more to human life and to the world than objectively appears, yet one is not allowed to think it. Especially, one is not allowed to think it publicly. Most people do feel it, except that growing number of the alienated and despairing, for whom the world and especially their own lives are bleak.
     This brings us to the secular-religion polarity. As remarked, ’secularism’ began as anti-religious, tacitly meaning anti-Christian and anti-Jewish. Thus we come to the ‘religious’ issue in our topic. Let us note first of all that it was the rise of the secular movement in the West that led to the development of the concept of a ‘religion’ and of the adjective ‘religious’. ‘Religion’ as the name of a particular system of ideas, practices, outlooks and institutions was not merely a Western term, and a recent one, but also a secularist one. The notion of secularism inherently presupposes something called ‘religion’ from which it advocates that we should be free. If there were no religion, there would and could be no concept ’secularism’. Similarly, however, though this fact has been less clearly noticed, if there were no secularism there would be and could be no concept ‘religion’. The term ‘religion’ was developed by secularists in order to belittle it.
     ‘Religion’ is a secular concept.

Smith, Wilfred Cantwell. Modern Culture from a Comparative Perspective. Edited by John W. Burbidge. Albany, New York: SUNY Press, 1997, pp. 72-73.

Rigour of Moses, Ahmad’s mercy,
Beauty of Jesus, heralds all.
In Adam’s heirs no controversy,
Call for change, don’t change the call!

Abdal-Hakim Murad, Contentions 12, no. 86.