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By moving ourselves away from arguments only about capitalism's unremitting brutality, we see that violence was inherent to liberalism. It resided in liberalism's reformism, its claims to modernity, its promises of freedom, and its notion of the law. … The perennial problem of liberalism and violence [… is] embedded in the nation's contemporary racial issues as well as those of other Western liberal democracies.

Absolute banger

Absolute banger

Math hurts my simple brain

I am indescribably bored

TL;DR: Law schools in the Medieval Islamic Empires were organized as charitable trusts rather than in the Western style of Universities organized as corporations

Gotta love scholarship from the 70s/80s where theres no argument and the author is just listing facts for 300 pages

Pre-modern history is so boring, my Lord. The entire thing is just power struggles and “x ruler had a cousin in y place so be was forced to place z relative as his heir.” Like please, I do not care. This whole book so far has just been war or the balancing of power dynamics within the empire.

Ive finally got to the last third of the book which is actually looking interesting

Very boring

Ali should have been the first caliph

I have finally got to the part where she starts talking about theology. Yes, the first 100 pages are all her describing her methodology. Yes, it was great.

Mr Said was a very intelligent man

It appears that I have been duped into reading literary criticism

“[Orientalism] at one and the same time [works] to characterize the Orient as alien and to incorporate it schematically on a theatrical stage whose audience, manager, and actors are for Europe, and only for Europe”

Also, this has made me realize I cant stand the writing style that English as a discipline creates

We’re giving this another attempt

There has been 0 theology so far. Chapter 1 is just dense philosophy of text/reading.

I love it

"To reduce what Islam is, conceptually, to what Islam has been, historically, or is in the process of becoming, would be to fail to recognise its religious quality: the relationship to the divine; the transcendent ele-ment. Indeed, Islamic truth must necessarily transcend Islamic actuality."

In all my reading of dry academic books, I have never come across someone that uses as extensive a vocabulary as this author. Like no way you know what “polysemic” means without googling it; even google thought it was a typo

White Germans are insane people.

Big part of the book is analyzing the export-import thesis of antisemitism (which is apparently the accepted theory amongst German antisemitism experts) that Germany spread antisemitism to muslims during colonialism then after WW2 Germany got rid of all its antisemitism but then the pesky muslim migrants brought back the original antisemitism that Germany originally gave to them

Im very sad this is the last volume in the series

Im very sad this is the last volume in the series

Im very sad this is the last volume in the series

One really important small thing that really illustrates the bigger issues: colonial education would teach people about European flowers but not African flowers and plant. Great illustration of how colonial education operated as a means of trying to make African people identify more with Europe

Something this book is making me realize is that, ontop of the social tyranny that colonialism wrought, the formal colonial period in Africa from the 1880s-1960s was essentially the violent imposition of European oriented trade routes and the violent destruction of traditional trade routes in Africa.

Often we look at the effects of colonialism nationally but it completely reshaped the socioeconomic reality of Africa

I just gave an update but this chapter is a banger

“If you are not in a position to commit your entire life to scholarship, what is your primary duty? Your primary duty is to take God's words not at face value, but at rational value. When God says that we are empowered to pursue al-tayyibat […] , your charge, as a lay muslim, is to embody God's message while being anchored in reason and rationality.”

“Islam is an empowerment of liberation, but not "liberation" in the sense of indulging in the hedonistic. Not the liberation of following the principle of "do as you will." In the empowerment of Islam, it is not
"do as you will" but rather "do what is good, what is fundamentally moral, what is truly beautiful, and steer away from its opposite."

Just some light Christmas Eve reading