Alan > Recent Status Updates

Excellent story telling. A joy to read this!

This was slow going at first. I've been surprised by the fantasy elements and the language so far. Thinking that this would make a good movie!

Slowly reading this one over the past year. Difficult.

Hoyland is a careful academic and a measured writer (not that I don't enjoy a good polemic from time to time). Really enjoying this so far.

Very romantic adventure story from a bygone era...

Brutal and yet still beautiful and romantic.

Every time I open this book I am transported to twelfth-century Baghdad.

Loving this so far. A refreshingly unpretentious account of average peoples' lives in tenth-century Baghdad. Can't wait to read the other reviews. Would be $100 that traditional Muslims don't like this book.

"There are many reasons to read Plato, among them the beauty and plasticity of his thought and the delightful character of Socrates, but surely one of the best reasons to read him is to be horrified. Read The Republic, putative wellspring of Western values, and you find that once you look past the glittering facade of Plato's rhetoric you are face to face with the ethic of the totalitarian regime." —p. 31

Holy shit.

"A very dangerous principle is now being established as a social right: Thou shalt not hurt others with words." —p. 4

Wow. Considering that this book was written in 1993, the clarity with which the author describes the attacks on free speech was prescient. The "woke" era of illiberal discourse in America seems to be in full force now. This book is needed more than ever.

We have just learned of Cædmon, the seventh-century English layman who was called into the service of God by a spirit in the night. He proceeds to utter mysteriously beautiful poetry about said god in his native tongue (English). A story so remarkably similar to that of the Prophet Muhammad's own call to prophethood—and pre-dating the Sirah–Maghazi tradition of Ibn Ishaq—that it warrants more research!

"The most curious passage in the letter is its exhortation to the emperor to embrace Islam, warning that if he does not, he "will fall into the sin of the arisiyyin ['alayka ithm al-arisiyyin]." ― p. 194–195

A fascinating discussion of the language in Muhammad's purported letter to the Roman emperor Heraclius. The word «الأريسيِّين» seems to have come from Christian Palestinian Aramaic «arīsīn» or "tenants".

Fascinating discussion of the "sirah maghazi" literary tradition in early Islamic history. All the things we "know" about Muhammad's life come from orally transmitted stories by his followers. It wasn't until nearly 100 years after Muhammad's death that these stories began to be written down. None of the original works survive.

So far I've learned that the Christian apostle Peter is regarded as having been given the keys to the "kingdom of heaven" by Jesus (see the book of Matthew 16:13) and that a similar motif is attributed to Muhammad: he allegedly possesses the "keys to Paradise" (mafātīḥ al-janna). Curious...

The discussion so far is very academic and I find the author's writing style a bit terse. I'll keep reading for now.

"From the sīrah-maghāzī literature, we learn mostly about how Muslims of the eight and ninth centuries C.E. wished Muhammad to be known and how they used their constructed images of him to forge their own confessional and sectarian identities, but perhaps not much else." —p. 3

I think I'm going to like this book.

Khaled Hosseini is clearly a gifted story teller. In And the Mountains Echoed I find myself wishing that he would stick to the core story a little bit more. It feels like he's getting sidetracked on tangents of tangents...

Excellent story telling. There are currently a few different stories over several decades being interleaved and I'm not sure how they will come together yet.

As I expected: completely engrossing from page 1.

Ibn al-Arabi explains that all the waters of the earth come from under the Rock in Jerusalem. The Rock is unique, he says, in that it is not bound to anything on earth and is held miraculously from above. ― p. 188

Hah! Ibn al-Arabi is a renowned twelfth century Islamic philosopher, but apparently not a reliable observer of the physical world (or just high on hallucinogenic mushrooms when he visited Jerusalem?).