"Part carnival, part cartel": that's how my blogfriend Ali Eteraz describes his idea for an alliance of freethinking bloggers. "An alliance of freethinkers" is a bit of an oxymoron, like herding cats, but this is a group bound together, not by agreement, but by mutual respect (often in disagreement) and an aspiration, at least, to original thinking. Left and right bloggers, even when thoughtful, often seem to be advancing and defending ideas that are already made. These bloggers at their best (I'd better not brag; God knows I can be banal with the best of them) are out there front and center, where the lava is just beginning to cool into rich and strange new shapes.
Twice a month, ten of us will offer you a portal into the archive gardens of one another's blogs. If you are tired of stridency and thirsty for poetry; if you like to be surprised -- even startled; if you ever long for a respite from the relentless news-addicted ephemerality of so much of the blogosphere, these bloggers are digging deeper.
Several of them belong to the seething, unknown (to most of us) world of reformist or progressive Islam. You need to know there is such a thing, you need to eavesdrop on them arguing with each other -- arguments that echo those between, say, Catholic traditionalists and progressives, but with even higher life-and-death stakes -- and you need to tap into the fertile gusher of imagination and lyricism that is the Urdu-Persian mind (think Salman Rushdie on acid). Don't think this is exotic or irrelevant to you. It's a through-the-looking-glass likeness of the same struggles that are going on in the West between tradition and postmodernism. It's the same question of how you carry your roots with you into rootlessness. It's no coincidence that I began writing about "spiritual nomads" around the same time that Ali was writing a short-story collection called "Nomad Fatwas."
The name “Nomad Fatwas” carries a double entendre; namely, “no mad fatwas” and the spiritual freedom of intellectual nomadism.
Meet the nomads, writing this time on the topic of "Life" -- an open thread, really:
Ali at Unwilling Self-Negation contributes one of his best, and all-time favorite, posts: I Am a Dark Elf. Sneak-reading R.A. Salvatore's Fantasy Series in mosque instead of the Quran, he found more moral inspiration in the dark elf Drizzt Do'Urden, "a hero [who] struggles with life," than in the boring official hagiography of Mohammed. "Drizzt taught me all I needed to know to be an immigrant in a strange land." If a beloved fantasy figure has ever served as your soul guide, your Virgil, you must read this.
City of Brass muses eloquently in Maximizing Human Potential that "A single human life is a potential revolution." (By his own lights, though, comparing tragedies is always a mistake, I think. If saving one life saves the world entire, as the Talmud says, then how can one loss of life be "worse" than another?)
Avari, who will blow your mind by marrying Tolkien and Scheherezade, writes in Dig Six Feet Down to Paradise that his mother's death has shattered and remade his priorities.
Chapati Mystery will lead you by the hand to smell and taste another world in First Day of Summer.
Feministe -- there is a Next Generation! with irreverence! -- talks about the difficulties of Feminists Finding Love with men who are sweet and hot and sometimes kinda clueless.
Aqoul -- "an Arabic word for 'reasonableness' or 'understanding' that deliciously doubles as a name for the prickly desert shrub, Camel's Thorn" -- is a group blog of global nomads and (un)veiled bad girls who "know" the Middle East in the Biblical sense (i.e. they love it even though it's screwed them). In Saudi Arabia, Lesbianism, and Other Coping Mechan-"isms", Meph, who knows some members of the royal family, gives you a real-life peek behind the veil.
When the chains of tradition are cut it's often old people, tradition's traditional keepers, who fall into the void. We're past masters at quarantining our elders in gray ghettos, but now young Indians in Britain are Outsourcing the Oldies Back Home, says Sunny at Pickled Politics. A special township is being built for them in India called -- agh -- Dignity Lifestyle.
Digitally Arranged, whose declared religion is atheism, muses in God and Poverty on why the developed countries (with the partial exception of the United States) have a much lower rate of religious belief than poor countries.
Sigmund, Carl and Alfred brilliantly diagnose(s) the hitherto-unnamed moral malady of our time, aimlessness, in The Tragedy of the Lost. (Hey, isn't that the opposite of The Purpose Driven Life? And a reason for that book's runaway bestsellerdom?)
Towards God is Our Journey deconstructs a noxious current strain of Islamist imperialist propaganda in Prattle from the Party III. It's the sort of thing, Thabet says in another post, that is "condemned by scholars of the heart."
My own contribution is on the phenomenon of Significant (?) Coincidence -- statistical fluke or signature of the Holy Spirit? -- that, for so many of us nomads, stands in for miracle and answered prayer.
Comments