Omar Farahat at Brill:

Khurram Hussain’s Islam as Critique: Sayyid Ahmad Khan and the Challenge of Modernity is an important and highly original book. At one level, the book is a fresh reading of some of Sayyid Aḥmad Khān’s (d. 1898) most profound intellectual contributions. At another, more important (at least for this reader) level, the book is an elaborate set of reflections on the place of Islam in the West and the place of (the study of) Islamic thought in modernity. The book’s offerings are daring and original, and the style is engaging. There are, inevitably, given the ambition of the project’s claims and the size of the book, areas in which one wishes the book offered a fuller discussion. Similarly, given the bold and very timely nature of the arguments, there are many venues that call for engagement to which we can and should respond. Thus, the book is obvious interest to scholars of South Asian Islam, Islamic thought, and broadly anyone concerned with the crises of modernity and alternative ways of being in the world, which, ideally, should be everyone.

The book advances two primary sets of claims. The first pertains the properly contextualized reading of Khān’s thought as a response to the loss of Muslim sovereignty and identity in the subcontinent following the disastrous events of the mid-nineteenth century. Focusing on one major philosophical question after another, Hussain consistently shows that Khān’s project was an effort to piece together a coherent and viable identity and way of being in the world that systematically eschewed radical or idealized reactions.

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Dilworth et al in American Scientist:

It is perhaps no surprise that such changes in the behavior of human beings, labeled a hyperkeystone species by biologists Boris Worm and Robert Paine, would be detectable in the natural world. Enforced human immobility and the shutdown of carbon intensive industrial operations have silenced human noise and improved air quality; emboldened wildlife to openly roam cities and giant pandas to mate in shuttered zoos; and, after setting new highs in each of the past two years, greenhouse gas emissions are now projected by the International Energy Agency (IEA) to drop by 8 percent this year.

Even though these outcomes show nature’s resilience, they are accompanied by the loss of many human lives. Violent economic and social upheaval are not prerequisites for the mitigation of climate change. Rather, our work on sustainability and climate change is motivated by a desire to improve the human condition through the design of a carbon-neutral circular economy that simultaneously builds economic, natural, and social capital. We do not want to confuse the consequences of a temporary pause in consumer economies with the structural changes needed to avoid the most devastating effects of climate change. That goal requires a similar reduction in greenhouse gas emissions (about 7.6 percent) every year between 2020 and 2030, and that reduction must be accompanied by equally ambitious efforts to promote social justice and equity. UN Secretary General António Guterres could have been discussing COVID-19 when he pointed out that solutions to the climate crisis that do not benefit everybody will lead to the “survival of the richest.”

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Terry Hartle in The Christian Science Monitor:

The long era of European imperialism started in the 15th century but it was roughly 400 years before the land grab turned to Africa. As late as 1870, outsiders controlled only about 10 percent of the continent. But then a confluence of forces opened the door: The need for raw materials, the demand for new markets for finished goods, and medical advances that made it possible for Europeans to survive in the tropics. By the 1880s, the “Scramble for Africa” had begun. At the heart of this rapacious quest was the Congo River in equatorial Africa and its enormous, almost impenetrable, rain forest. Today, this part of Africa includes the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Republic of the Congo, Gabon, Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea and the Central African Republic. In “Land of Tears: The Exploration and Exploitation of Equatorial Africa,” Yale University Professor Robert Harms deftly and authoritatively recounts the region’s compelling, fascinating, appalling, and tragic history.

He organizes the story around three colorful men working for three different rulers. The first was Hamid bin Muhammad (known as Tippu Tip after the sound made by his guns) who swore allegiance to the sultan of Zanzibar, created the Manyema Empire (also described in the book as the Arab Zone) and later transferred his allegiance to the Belgians. Then there was Henry Morton Stanley, a professional adventurer and journalist who went to Africa on behalf of the New York Herald to search for the British explorer David Livingstone. He quickly found Livingstone and then followed the Congo River downstream until he reached the Atlantic, a journey that took roughly eight months and included more than 30 violent encounters with the inhabitants.

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Moshe Behar in Contending Modernities:

“Game changer” is a concept that involves individuals, tactics, strategies, and more. As such, it saturates the mind of every losing player, team, and/or party; a player who is winning a game, let alone decisively, is rarely interested in a game changer. In the hazardous Israel/Palestine playing-field, the issue may well be more complex or counterintuitive. That is so not because the losing collectivity is somehow uninterested in a game changer (Palestinians are interested); it is because the leadership of the winning Israeli collectivity has convinced itself, perhaps paranoidly, that the “game” is not yet over and that it still needs to settle on what the endgame is. I wish to suggest here that annexation-cum-apartheid may not be this endgame.

A significant development—possibly even a game changer—has been three years in the making, and is led by a group of American-Israeli policy makers linked to Israel’s “Block of the Faithful” settler movement. The development reached an important point in Washington, D.C. in January 2020 when Donald Trump’s administration introduced a 181 page plan entitled “Peace to Prosperity”—colloquially referred to as “the Trump Peace Deal” or “the deal of the century.”

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Adam Shatz in the LRB:

In July​ 1999, the writer Joe Wood vanished while attending a conference of journalists of colour in Seattle. He was 34, a brilliant essayist, ferocious in his critiques of racism – not least as he experienced it in the ‘liberal’ publishing world. The last time we met, a week before his trip to Seattle, he was wearing a Malcolm X cap and carrying a well-worn copy of William Gaddis’s novel The Recognitions. On 8 July, after a breakfast with the Democratic presidential candidate and former basketball star Bill Bradley, Joe went to Mount Rainier to do some birdwatching. He never returned. The most likely explanation is that he fell down a ravine and lost consciousness (he had a heart condition), but Washington is a very white state, and some of his friends and family suspected racist foul play. At the time I doubted this; now I’m not so sure. One of his friends told a reporter that he hadn’t packed any provisions because he was only ‘going out for a couple hours ... sort of like going to Central Park’.

I thought of Joe when I read about Christian Cooper, the black birdwatcher who crossed paths with a white woman and her dog in Central Park on the morning of 25 May, the same day George Floyd was killed when a police officer in Minneapolis knelt on his neck for nine minutes. There are ‘white spaces’ in Central Park, and the Ramble, a wooded area popular with birdwatchers, is one of them. Cooper is 57 – almost exactly the age Joe would have been – a Harvard graduate, a member of the Audubon Society and a civil rights activist. He politely asked the woman to put her dog on a lead, as is required in the park. She refused and grew increasingly aggressive, eventually calling the police to report that ‘there’s an African American man ... threatening me.’ As W.E.B. Du Bois wrote in a 1932 essay for the Crisis: ‘Nothing in the world is easier in the United States than to accuse a black man of crime.’

The same could be said today, more than half a century after the end of legal segregation.

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Over at Macro Musings:

Michael Tomasky in the New York Review of Books:

It’s hard for any politician to make the mental admissions to oneself required to end a presidential campaign; for a candidate like Sanders, who called for political revolution and seemed to have victory so near that he was surely daydreaming about the list of speakers at his convention, I imagine it was particularly hard. The struggle to accept defeat extends to supporters—perhaps doubly so with some of Sanders’s strongest supporters, who vocally detest the Democratic Party, people who call themselves liberals, Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, Barack Obama, and basically anyone who isn’t Sanders (or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez).

But even as some of his supporters were digging in their heels, scrambling to knock Biden out, Sanders himself was suing for peace. Faiz Shakir, Sanders’s well-regarded campaign manager, told me that, as the senator ended his campaign, he made clear that cooperation would be the order of the day. “Senator Sanders asked me and [longtime adviser Jeff] Weaver to reach out to our Biden friends and see what would be available if we were to bring these worlds together,” Shakir said.

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James Brooke-Smith in Aeon:

Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Émile; or On Education (1762) is perhaps the most influential work on education written in the modern world. Rousseau’s advocacy of learning via direct experience and creative play inspired the Swiss educational reformer Johann Pestalozzi, the German educator Friedrich Fröbel and the kindergarten movement. His stress on the training of the body as well as the mind was the forerunner of the mania for organised sports that swept English boarding schools in the 19th century and inspired Baron Pierre de Coubertin to found the modern Olympic Games in 1896. His observation that children develop via a series of clearly demarcated stages, each with its own unique cognitive and emotional capacities, underpinned the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget’s theories of child psychology in the 1920s. And his insistence on the value of learning in nature lies in the background of today’s Forest School movement.

And yet Rousseau referred to his text as ‘less an educational treatise than a visionary’s reveries about education’. Émile is a thought experiment, in which the philosopher imagines a system of education designed to protect the natural unity of his pupil’s consciousness from the ills of civilisation. Rousseau was renowned for being optimistic about human nature. In the primeval forests of our species’ infancy, mankind was solitary, happy and good – a zen-like noble savage who lived entirely for himself and in the present moment. It was only over time, Rousseau argued, as social bonds were extended and civilisation grew more complex, that this original unity was disturbed.

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Peter Nicholas in The Atlantic:

One person who’s unlikely to fall ill at Donald Trump’s Tulsa rally is Donald Trump. When jubilant supporters peel off their masks and whoop their approval as he torches Joe Biden, rest assured that the president will be a safe distance from any pathogens spat into the air. It’s the crowd that’s at the most risk. Trump’s arrival at the BOK Center on Saturday plunks him into the safest of spaces. Security measures will minimize his exposure to the coronavirus. Adoring crowds will gratify a craving for recognition. Attention paid to his first rally in three months could give his flagging campaign a needed jolt. Tulsa, then, amounts to a salve for a president who needs one.

Someone’s bound to get sick, as Trump knows. Rallies posed public-health dangers when he called them off in March, and not much has changed since. At least two members of his coronavirus task force, Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx, have privately cautioned him that large crowds are a vehicle for transmitting the disease, said an administration official who, like others I talked with for this story, requested anonymity in order to speak candidly. Even Trump conceded in an interview with The Wall Street Journal that some people watching his performance might contract the virus—“a very small percentage.”

Anyone who catches the disease will have sacrificed their health for the televised illusion that Trump is in control, the virus is in retreat, and the country is back to normal, when in fact cases are hitting record highs in Oklahoma and elsewhere and millions of people are out of work. Trump’s team is expecting the 19,000-seat arena to be full, a campaign spokesperson told me, with attendees packed shoulder to shoulder. They’ll be getting temperature checks at the door, and the campaign will offer masks. But many will likely decline, taking cues from a president who refuses to wear a mask in public or acknowledge either his own vulnerability or the epic crisis that happened on his watch.

Of course, Trump has that luxury.

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Emily Bazelon in The New York Times:

On Memorial Day, the police in Minneapolis killed George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man. Three officers stood by or assisted as a fourth, Derek Chauvin, pressed his knee into Floyd’s neck for more than eight minutes. Floyd said he could not breathe and then became unresponsive. His death has touched off the largest and most sustained round of protests the country has seen since the 1960s, as well as demonstrations around the world. The killing has also prompted renewed calls to address brutality, racial disparities and impunity in American policing — and beyond that, to change the conditions that burden black and Latino communities.

The search for transformation has a long and halting history. In 1967, the Kerner Commission, appointed by President Lyndon B. Johnson to investigate the causes of uprisings and rioting that year, recommended ways to improve the relationship between the police and black communities, but in the end it entrenched law enforcement as a means of social control. “Neighborhood police stations were installed inside public-housing projects in the very spaces vacated by community-action programs,” writes the Yale historian Elizabeth Hinton, author of “From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime.” In 1992, after the acquittals of three Los Angeles police officers who savagely beat Rodney King on camera, unrest erupted in the city. The police were ill prepared, and more than 50 people died. In 1994, Congress gave the Justice Department the authority to investigate a pattern or practice of policing that violated civil rights protections.

Since 2013, the Black Lives Matter movement has made police violence a pressing national and local issue and helped lead to the election of officials — including the district attorneys in several major metropolitan areas — who have tried to make the police more accountable for misconduct and sought to decrease incarceration. The killing of George Floyd in police custody shows how far the country has to go; the resulting protests have pushed the Minneapolis City Council to take the previously unthinkable step of pledging to dismantle its Police Department. But what does that mean, and what should other cities do? We brought together five experts and organizers to talk about how to change policing in America in the context of broader concerns about systemic racism and inequality.

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Mi Skin

my skin my cast iron skin my equator skin my cast iron equator skin my skin my scarring skin my grey scarring skin my grey skin my asylum seeker skin my skin my colorblind skin my smoke skin my color smoke skin is burning      my burning skin     my cursed skin my cursed skin      is burning      my skin my prayer skin my prayer marshmallow skin my cloud marshmallow skin my burning cloud skin my skin my marshmallow     skin is burning     my skin my unreeled skin bare my bare unreeled skin my capitulate skin my skin my blues skin my limpid skin my limpid blues skin my skin my blues is burning skin & my skin  is a home      my rust skin      my skin rusts      my rust skin      is burning

oxidizes

my skin oxidizes my neutral skin my black neutral skin my pinched off black neutral skin      is burning      my picked skin my dry skin my dry skin      is burning      my matured skin my matured skin is laundered skin my laundered skin is skin my becoming skin my malleable becoming skin my language skin      is malleable      my skin      is burning     my miracle skin my annotation skin my annotation miracle skin my mirror skin my splinter skin my mirror splinter skin my magic conjuring skin my #blackboymagic skin my black skin is conjuring skin and boys are  burning

by Dean Bowen
from: Bokman
publisher: Jurgen Maas, Amsterdam, 2018
translation: Dean Bowen
first published on Poetry International, 2020

Original, after “Read More”

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Olivia Laing at The Guardian:

Towards the end of the last century, there was a spate of haunted London novels, by Iain Sinclair, Peter Ackroyd and Chris Petit among others. Broadly psychogeographic in nature, they featured middle-aged men washed up on the outer reaches of the Thames, part of the detritus of a city ravaged by Thatcherism. In 1989, the science fiction writer M John Harrison took this mood and drove it out of London, crash-landing in the Yorkshire hills with the magnificently unsettling Climbers, a novel about an unhappy exile named Mike struggling to keep his footing among a group of temerarious local climbers.

Harrison described this real, gritty world with the same precise and estranging fluency with which he has more often mapped galactic space, using the dense idiolect of climbing to make atmosphere and geology resonate on an emotional, interior level.

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Parul Seghal at the NYT:

Anonymity comes for us all soon enough, but it has encroached with mystifying speed upon the French writer Hervé Guibert, who died at 36 in 1991. His work has been strangely neglected in the Anglophone world, never mind its innovation and historical importance, its breathtaking indiscretion, tenderness and gore. How can an artist so original, so thrillingly indifferent to convention and the tyranny of good taste — let alone one so prescient — remain untranslated and unread?

Happily his extensive, idiosyncratic body of work is being slowly exhumed, and freshly translated. His journals are now available in English, along with his memoirs, including “Crazy for Vincent,” an account of his obsession with a young skateboarder, mostly straight, who served as his reluctant muse.

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Justin E. H. Smith in his own blog:

For Hegel, the Greek miracle lay in the separating out of mythology and philosophy, so that the articulation of questions about, say, the nature of time, could be addressed in a universal idiom that would not presuppose the existence of Chronos as a divine personification of time. For the ancient Persians, by contrast, to use Hegel’s own example, reflection on the nature of time could only proceed through culturally embedded narratives inseparable from religion and lore.

Thus for Hegel only those expressions of philosophy that descend from the Greeks have any claim to universality, and thus only these expressions deserve to be exported from their place of origin throughout the world. This 19th-century Europeanisation of philosophy  witnessed the destruction of millennia-old disciplinary divisions in India and China, notably, as newly subjugated institutions of learning rushed to model their curricula on those of European universities, creating neologisms for “philosophy” where these had not existed before.

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Michael Lucibella at the website of the American Physical Society:

Albert Einstein changed our view of the universe in 1915 when he published the general theory of relativity, in which he set forth the notion of a four-dimensional spacetime that warps and curves in response to mass or energy. The geometric foundation for his work was laid some 60 years earlier, with the work of a German mathematician named Georg Friedrich Bernhard Riemann.

Born in what is now the Federal Republic of Germany in 1826, Riemann was the second of six children of a Lutheran pastor, who taught his son until he turned ten. The young Riemann was shy and nervous, but gifted in mathematics–so much so that while attending high school in Hannover, his knowledge sometimes surpassed that of his teachers. In 1846, his father scraped together sufficient funds to send his son to the University of Göttingen, where Riemann initially intended to study theology so that he could help support his family. But then he attended lectures by Carl Friedrich Gauss and Moritz Stern, who inspired him to switch his studies. With his parents’ blessing, Riemann transferred to the University of Berlin the following year, studying under some of the most prominent mathematicians of his time.

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