Image: Abbasid Caliphate capital of Baghdad, late 8th Century, the first city with over 1 million residents and the centre of science, culture, philosophy, and invention during the Islamic Golden Age.
G’Day,
How was your week?
I have a confession to make. Since March, when being stuck in one’s house became the norm, I’ve been meaning to pick up books and read. However, with the need to look and apply for jobs, then doing said jobs, and all the anxiety and distractions from the news, it wasn’t until this week that I picked up a book to read. I read and listen to a lot of texts daily, of course, but ye olde paperback has begun to evade me.
Thank goodness for my friend, Chloe, who, after last week’s newsletter about other histories, recommended Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes by Tamim Ansary. I reserved it at my library and went to pick it up through their contactless system on Tuesday. I’m just over halfway through (slow reader), but it is a very exciting, approachable read.
Besides adding Abbasid-era Baghdad to my list of places to visit in a time machine, the book has clarified what is meant by cultural traditions infiltrating Islamic doctrine and not the other way around. Basically, like in any religion, time and geography alter the original messages, as does the society that adopts them.
Reading about the origins of a religion, I’ve thought about how political opinions in ‘The Culture Wars’ online reflect the same rhetoric as the ones espoused a thousand years ago. Popular tweets are Qur’anic verses. Emphatic statements on How To Live Your Best Life or Why A Thing Is Bad on the internet are just new ways of finding consensus, a litmus test on the social mores of the time. When two sides double down on their point of view, a schism forms and we end up with heretics or heathens, depending where your opponent’s ideas or identity started from.
This, it seems, is a deeply held human trait: a separation of ‘us’ from ‘them’. A dichotomy is formed between this ‘othering’ and the practice of seeing all people as equals. The boundaries move all the time. In Muslim history, it went from a rejection of other Abrahamic religions, to a tolerance, to a line drawn between the theists and the atheists. Among Muslims, empires expanded and shrunk with little to no acceptance of heresy, to emperors actively revelling in new ways to find enlightenment.
Another time-honoured human trait is to exploit this tendency to distance ourselves from each other. Shock jocks, politicians, Murdoch press — it’s nothing new. More insidious are the authors who expound on an opinion and/or methodology in books that find an audience ready to have their biases confirmed. From self-help to hard-right, the audacity to have all the answers or the willingness to be the one to spout controversy is what sells. We have Brene Brown or Mark Manson, Milo Yiannopolous or Ben Shapiro, the mid-eleventh century had Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazali.
Ghazali was very smart. But with that came the belief he knew more than most others. His first tome was called The Aims of the Philosophers and it elucidated Greek philosophy so well that the book was popular both inside and outside the Muslim world. However, Ghazali hadn’t written it to celebrate Aristotle. He wanted to show he understood their logic and rhetoric intimately, but that the Greeks, and the Muslim philosophers who used their debate techniques, were, ultimately, tricksters. His smug follow-up was called The Incoherence of the Philosophers, which unpicked the premises he, and the Greeks, had established in his first book.
You can probably see the connection between this and the “alternative facts” of today’s conspiracy theorists and science deniers. Or even in the way that critical thinking is vilified by governments who see continued power in a populous who just believes what they’re told. One of Ghazali’s main arguments rejected causality. He believed God made things happen regardless of our involvement. If we lit a match to light a candle, it was actually God who lit the candle. If our pollution changes the air, God changed the air. Sound familiar?
Here’s an excerpt about Ghazali I just have to share:
“Some [people] already regarded reason as dangerous trickery leading only to chaos, and Ghazali gave such people the ammunition they needed to look respectable, and even smart while they were denouncing philosophy and reason.
In the years that followed, more and more people turned in the direction. The assumption that many shades of gray exist in ethical and moral matters allows people to adopt thousands of idiosyncratic positions, no two people having exactly the same set of beliefs, but in times of turmoil, people lose their taste for subtleties and their tolerance for ambiguity. Doctrines that assert unambiguous rules promote social solidarity because they enable people to cohere around shared beliefs, and when no one knows what tomorrow may bring, people prefer to clump together.”
Destiny Disrupted — Tamim Ansary
Enter anti vaxxers and the “it’s just a flu, why is everyone making a big deal about it” crowd during a pandemic. Enter the “climate change is a hoax” crowd during a climate emergency.
Anyway, that’s the tip of that iceberg and I might delve into how this populist thought culture has always been with us some other time.
Other things of interest:
Where Billionaires Hide From Coronavirus:
The Girl From Ipanema is a Far Weirder Song Than You Thought. This is a fascinating examination of the music structure of one of the most recognisable tunes, and the 2nd most recorded song of all time.
Here are two videos from Erik Singer, one of the best linguistics communicators. One on tongue twisters and the other on common speech pet peeves.
And in honour of the title of this newsletter, a behind-the-scenes look at Shirley Bassey recording the ‘History Repeating’ video. It’s so 90s BBC, from the voiceover to the fashion and the documentary style. What a legend.
Thanks again for reading. If you have some top picks for places to visit in a time machine, let me know. Again, you can open this newsletter on a separate page by clicking the button below.
Until next week!