I have been able to work somewhat consistently since July, and by that I mean “real” work, not routine but creative work: writing code, or articles, or designing things.

Since I have seen these mistakenly quoted on the Internet:

I have never been an Azhar University researcher or student: I was completing its PhD curriculum on my own. This was just in order to show people “I have done my homework”. The curriculum didn’t actually contain much that was new or interesting to me, and I am more interested in working on unsolved problems (like the one mentioned below), instead of routine learning. I may still get back to going through the rest of it, Allah knows.

My about page: I add or remove things from it according to my thinking at the present moment, but I do not deny anything that has already been on there, and it can all be deduced from the rest of my site. Right now there’s basically nothing in it because whatever I had on there seemed like self-flattery.

Parler de soi, c’est se louer.

To speak of oneself is to praise oneself.1

And no matter what I say about myself, it will not make a person lacking in sufficient background knowledge and critical thinking ability to take me more seriously. I am not a photogenic Islamic Internet personality and I don’t plan to be one.

My lack of updates for some years: Since 2019 I have barely been able to get any (creative) work done, and so I couldn’t do anything on this website. I have seen some Internet posts say this is because I had depression or even mental illness.

I don’t deny that I suffer from depression (which I have probably mentioned a number of times on this website), and that since 2016 I have probably never looked forward to waking up alive the next day, but my troubles started long before that.

I have a number of health conditions, and almost every day since 2012, and more especially since 2014, has been a struggle to be able to work, or even just to feel “ok”. Almost every morning I wake up feeling sick. No one knows why. My life has been one of seeing doctors, trying endless medicines and supplements, and finding dozens of solutions that seemed to work for a few days and then suddenly stopped working.

I never know if the next day I will be able to work or not. I have to steal time form my conditions to be able to do any work at all, and I do not know if this is going to change.

However, it seems that getting COVID-19 five to seven times in a row may have had something to do with my total loss of ability to work starting from December 2019 (around the time of the real start of the COVD pandemic).

My most important work this year might be my essay (not yet published) on reconciling God’s “eternity” or “timelessness” with the fact that we experience time. Or one might call it reconciling sequency (the fact that things happen one after another) with simultaneity (the fact of the “at-the-same-time-ness” of all events from God’s perspective), words I like that are from Ursula Le Guin’s novel The Dispossessed. This is what the scientist Shevek works to achieve in Ursu Le Guin’s novel, which I happened to read in 2024. I had on idea I had been busy, on and off, trying to do what is in some sense the same thing. Unfortunately my theory cannot lead to the creation of an ansibel (a faster-than-light communication device) like Shevek’s does.2

One interesting and completely unexpected result was that my theory solves time paradoxes: can a computer with infinite storage and processing power calculate all the digits of pi, which are known to be infinite? The answer is it cannot, because God and the universe operate according to sequency, and the paradox creates a classic unreachable code path situation. But this will all be made clear in the essay once I actually finish writing it.

The essay, which has grown to 14,000 words (one third the length of a typical novel), will make these matters clear, once I finish writing and rewriting it a dozen times.

I have been mostly busy these months updating my sites and correcting, updating and expanding articles. My main project right now is the new, mobile-friendly version of The Arabic Lexicon that I have been working on since mid-September. This could have been a quick job except that I am not satisfied unless I bring every vision to life, whether it is making back-end improvements to the search system, adding new features, making the UI and features more logical and easier to use, or spending too much time on the visual design. InshaAllah soon I will get to adding new dictionaries to it, especially the Hans Wehr, which every other person on the Internet seems to bring up as being missing when my site is mentioned.

I have added a great deal of additional detail to my controversial article:

Hawramis are Not Kurds: On the different origins of Kurds, Hawramis and Zaza People