Toluu

Martyn's Blog

interpretations of places, books, and other texts

Plotinus on WalkingAugust 31

Plotinus is nothing if not an intricate thinker, so it strikes me as odd that his philosophy sets so little value on the process of thinking. It is somewhat paradoxical, but though reason is necessary for human beings, it is a sign of being stuck in a low place. The more human beings ascend to Intellect, the more thinking can be left behind. This comes up all over the place in his Enneads...

Lessons of the French RamadanAugust 30

A couple of weeks back I came across this story via someone I follow on Twitter (I can't recall who). The story is about the serial misuse of a satirical blog on the topic of French president Nicholas Sarkozy's response to Ramadan. The blog was humorous, with an Onion-style citation of Sarkozy urging French Muslims to maintain their French identity and continue to have coffee and croissants at 8am for breakfast "like all other French people do." This would conflict with the rule that a Muslim must abstain from all food and drink during daylight hours for Ramadan.

Sectarian Patriotism at Glenn Beck’s “Restoring Honor” RallyAugust 29

Beck goes on to call attention to God's work through Moses ("a guy with a stick who was talking to a burning bush"). The Hebrew prophets are there in the overt call to national repentance, the charge of sinfulness, and the summoning of God as the historical actor. Add to that the potent use of sacred history as a metaphor for the present. Beck is hardly the first person to apply this kind of prophetic message to the United States (Puritans perfected the "Jeremiad" and I grew up in the Evangelical community which routinely spoke like this), but to hear it from a big media personality like Beck is bracing.

World Literature and TranslationAugust 27

The book What Is World Literature? by David Damrosch is a rare book that examines this process of reading distant texts. Most important is that he frames the issue not as "great books" but as an issue of circulation and translation.

Arabic Lives of al-Maqrizi, pt. 1August 25

The most important biographical note on al-Maqrizi in English is without doubt Nasser Rabbat's essay "Who Was al-Maqrizi? A Biographical Sketch" from Mamluk Studies Review 7/2 (2003), pgs. 1-19. The essay explains what we know about the life of al-Maqrizi and takes up for special investigation some of the outstanding issues, such as his supposed relation to the Fatimid caliphs or the issue of his associations with Islamic legal schools. This information is interesting, but it provides little in the way of personal details that might allow us to know the person al-Maqrizi.