by Sabyn Javeri Jillani

In April 2020, Arundhati Roy wrote in the Financial Times, “Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine the world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.”

Her words reminded me of the state of Barzakh, the transitory stage between this world and the next. Separating the living from the hereafter, it’s often described as a veil or a bridge between death and resurrection. The Sufi philosopher Al Ghazali described it as a place where souls are suspended in time, neither in hell nor heaven, resembling the Catholic theological state of limbo. It is a similar state that I find myself in as I write this, despite the fact that the new year started off on a hopeful note.

But can a change of date really shake off the turmoil and confusion of last year? 2020 was an year of loss for so many of us. The world events around me seemed to reflect my inner state as I too experienced a deep sense of personal loss. There was a kind of implausible horror that encircled most of us as streets became empty and touch disappeared from our vocabulary. The withdrawal of the world reflected the inertia we felt inside as life came to a grinding halt. I mourned with the rest of the world, the loss of an era. Although the optimists amongst us reminded us that, ‘endings are new beginnings’, it was hard not to think of the pandemic as the ‘beginning of the end’. Read more »

Text by David Oates
Artwork by Alex Hirsch

1. “A more perfect union.” The Founders expressed a breezy confidence, didn’t they? As if such a thing were possible – the distant states cohered into a nation; the various occupants working it all out. Loyal. Collaborative. Taking part in the common welfare. While remaining, of course, individual and autonomous and free, free, free. (Certain restrictions applied.)

I’m a child of the sixties but have kept a wary distance from virtually all forms of organized groupiness, togetherness, or even (alas) belonging. I’m a curious observer, though.

2. Planetary Ecology. The modern environmental movement based itself on the analogy of the organism: we were really one big animal. “We” meaning all of nature (Gaia), or an ecosystem, or a human community. It worked on various levels! Lewis Thomas, one of our gurus, held up the example of a critter that was disunified cells, squiggling around individualistically (“voting straight Republican” he quipped). . . until something signalled them and they joined together as one, “solid as a trout”! That this exemplary organism was slime mold did not strike us, in the sixties, as funny. Decades later, our sliminess seems way less promising.

Now our planetary health teeters on a terrifying brink and the message of connectedness seems more compelling than ever. Biologically, we are interwoven in increasingly obvious ways we still can’t seem to accept. Read more »

Photo taken from a train window going from Brixen to Franzensfeste in the South Tyrol in January of 2020, back when the prospect of traveling by rail did not make one nervous.

by Claire Chambers

I recently edited an anthology about food from Muslim South Asia. Published by Pan Macmillan in India as Desi Delicacies, the book’s first half is made up of life writing essays, while the second half comprises short stories. To give a taste of the volume, it opens with Bina Shah’s virtuosic Foreword: Appetizer. In it, the author of Before She Sleeps reflects on food’s alchemical ability ‘to prolong life and […] turn base materials into noble ones’. This book, as Shah intimates, abounds with orphans, widows, and divorcees, and memories of the departed make particular repasts taste all the sweeter.

My own love for South Asian Muslim culture, literature, and food was ignited by my year off before university. This is something I touch on in my Introduction: Food in the Time of Corona, which started life as a 3QD blog post. I spent that year in the mid-1990s teaching in Mardan and Peshawar, in the northwestern Pakistani region of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. I celebrated my eighteenth birthday there, and it genuinely was a coming of age. The year set me on a course of reading and writing on the topic of South Asian Muslim literature which I have pursued with hardly any interruptions ever since. Along the way, I’ve been lucky enough to get to know some astounding authors, many of whom were gracious enough to contribute to this anthology.

The first piece in Part One: Essays is The Homesick Restaurant, an autobiographical fragment by Nadeem Aslam, one of the best-known Pakistani writers. The piece features a kachnar flower and a long-lost relative, and packs the punch of deggi mirch chilli powder in fewer than a thousand words. Really, it just has to be savoured. Read more »

by Muneeza Shamsie

This year, 26 January marks the fifth death anniversary, of Sahabzada M. Yaqub-Khan (1920-2016), my uncle. To me it seems as if it was yesterday. He was my mother’s youngest brother and her only sibling in Pakistan. The bond between them was so close that I cannot remember a time, when he was not integral to my family life. To my younger sister, Naushaba (now Naushaba Hasnain) and me, he was always ‘Mamou’. I have no idea when Mamou and I first met. He was a prisoner-of-war at the time I was born in Lahore. As I grew up I was told by my parents never to ask him about his POW years because it was such a dreadful experience.  I learnt in time, that he had been captured in Egypt (at Bir Hachim after the Battle of Tobruk) and he escaped in Italy with two fellow officers – the future Commander in Chiefs of the Pakistan and Indian armies respectively, Generals Yahya Khan and Kumaramangalam – but they had been recaptured. Mamou was then moved to a concentration camp in Germany. He had utilized those years to learn languages: French, German, Italian and Russian. Afterwards he was sent to England to convalesce. There he was often mistaken for his second cousin, the Nawab of Pataudi, the famous cricketer.  The resemblance was so uncanny that two generations later, my daughter Kamila chanced upon a photograph in a book on cricket history. She did a double take and thought ‘What is Yaqub Nana doing here?’

My first conscious memory of Mamou revolves around the unsolved mystery of Fuzzy Wuzzy Kitten, my favourite book. This had big pictures of kitten in a lovely soft, velvety material. Possibly Mamou used to read it to me. One day the book disappeared.  For some reason I thought that he was responsible. He would often tease me – and ask with a big grin – until I was quite grown up. “Who took Fuzzy Wuzzy Kitten?”  I would point to him. He would go into peals of laughter. And I still don’t know what happened to Fuzzy Wuzzy Kitten. Read more »

Sydney Cain. Refutations (Tricksters In Pools), 2020.

Graphite, charcoal and pigment on paper.

More here, here, and here.

by Joan Harvey 

I always knew that we couldn’t Make America Great Again without Sarah Palin. So when she retreated to Alaska to be with John Galt and all the others who shrugged because they were tired of holding up the Lib-tards and their socialist laziness, I figured we were on the path to becoming Venezuela. Sure, Donald Trump, the greatest president since Abe Lincoln and probably tied with George Washington for second, was in office, but he couldn’t do it alone. This country has so many Lib-tards and blue-state welfare queens that without someone like Sarah Palin, our country was due for collapse.

So I took things into my own hands. Have you read The Secret? You have to read it! It’s about using the energy of the universe to get what you really, truly, deeply want to make your life AWESOME! The book says to make a vision board with some magazines and glitter and rubber cement, because the universe needs pictures to help it know what you want. Well, I knew I couldn’t make a vision board (you know I don’t mess with that girly shit) so I got my old lady Darla to make one. Right in the middle of that vision board, Darla pasted Sarah Palin. And then she surrounded her with the other Palins: Todd, and Trig, and Track, and Sailor, and Bristol, and Plumber. And then we pasted on the text of the Second Amendment, and pictures of some friends totally armed to protect ourselves from Antifa and BLM. Guys that could keep America Great and Free! And we waited, and we prayed, and we let ourselves be open to the universe.

And that’s when Lauren Boebert walked into our life as if she had walked right off our vision board! Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Charlie Huenemann

I think it is fair to say that we usually see science and magic as opposed to one another. In science we make bold hypotheses, subject them to rigorous testing against experience, and tentatively accept whatever survives the testing as true – pending future revisions and challenges, of course. But in magic we just believe what we want to be true, and then we demonstrate irrational exuberance when our beliefs are borne out by experience, and in other cases we explain away the falsifications in one way or another. Science means letting what nature does shape what we believe, while magic means framing our interpretations of experience so that we can keep on believing what feels groovy.

But this belief – that we can clearly distinguish between magic and science – turns out itself to be an instance of framing our interpretations so as to allow us to keep on believing something that makes us feel good. In other words, the relation between magic and science is far more complicated, and magic is not so easily brushed aside.

“Science”, as we use the term, is a relative newcomer on the scene. “Scientia”, meaning expert knowledge, is Latin, but using it or its cognates to refer to a special method of acquiring knowledge – especially one that involves microscopes, telescopes, and test tubes – is a much later innovation. What has always been around, ever since we started jabbering, has been an interest in understanding how nature works, usually conjoined with our practical interest in prediction and control. Call that interest “natural knowledge”. Read more »

Ardor

after Iqbal

Her seduction keeps him fluid as mercury
Has she taught him the rules of passion?

Restless, he finds comfort yearning
Is she his eternal flame?

Is he a lover of ancient beauty?
She, small Sinai; he, small Moses

His search for illumination —
An insect longing for light

By Rafiq Kathwari. His new collection of poems, My Mother’s Scribe, is available here and here and here.

by Mike O’Brien

I don’t always make great decisions, but swearing off political commentary two months ago was a really, really good one.

Ahem.

As I stated two columns ago, I’ve been wanting to write more about ecological ethics, and more specifically about ethical obligations across species. Last month I laid out my criticisms of animal rights. In summary, rights discourse is a language game, and humans are the only animals on Earth who can play it. Not to say that we can’t articulate a case for treating animals well using a language of rights; this is indeed the most effective path to legal protection at the moment. But we say something nonsensical when we articulate that case, which may or may not matter in the grand scheme of things.

For my next trick, I’d like to take on ethical naturalism, and similar presuppositions about where morality comes from. Ethical naturalism is basically the idea that moral rightness and wrongness is a natural fact, and can be discovered by observing natural facts. Read more »

Doormat on my balcony with a fresh sprinkling of snow a couple of days ago.

by Peter Wells

Let me recommend a New Year resolution, in case you don’t have one yet: Be nicer to people you disagree with.

I’ve been moved to make this recommendation by my recent reading of The Guardian, a British centre-left newspaper. It has disappointed me.

This is sad, for I agree with the general tenor of The Guardian’s views, oscillating, as I do, between the Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats. What is more, The Guardian has allowed me to read its columns free of charge. But increasingly I note that in its attempts to express its views more forcibly, it has begun to resort to vilification. Read more »