when you find the love, you find yourself

Bismillah~
Translations taken/paraphrased from Böwering's truly tasty Mystical Vision of Existence in Classical Islam. Sahl al-Tustari's hermeneutic was not textual, though it was systematic: moment by moment repentance, understood as fundamental turning of one's being toward source, that had succeeded many years of arduous asceticism, particularly fasting. He stopped extremes of fasting and continued in continual remembrance. The Qur'an for Tustari calls to the sirr, the secret of the soul where man is in colloquy with Lord and, deeper, Lord alone speaks wordlessly. The tafsir is a notebook of jottings by disciples of their master's responses to Qur'an recitations, possibly ecstatic utterances.

Allah is the light of the heavens and the earth The likeness of His light is as a niche wherein is a lamp the lamp in a glass the glass, as it were, a glittering star kindled from a blessed tree, an olive neither of the east or the west whose oil wellnigh would shine, even if no fire touched it Light upon light Allah guides to His light whom He will and Allah strikes similitudes for humanity and Allah has knowledge of everything	24:35 Ayat al-nur likeness of His light: Light of Muhammad the lamp and glass: his breast and heart like a star: with faith and wisdom shining of the oil: the prophecy of Muhammad would elucidate humanity even without speech or expression
By the white forenoon and the brooding night	93: Duha The spiritual self, and the natural self when it relies calmly on continuous remembrance
...the last shall be better for thee than the first	In the final world, the prais&egrav;d station and intercession is better than prophethood and apostleship in the lower world.
Did He not find thee an orphan and shelter thee?	You were alone, o Prophet, and he sheltered you with your companions.
Did He not find thee erring and guide thee?	He made you aware of the eminent value of your self. He found you erring --incomplete-- in your pure affection; He gave you drink of His affection with the cup of His love, and guided to intimate knowledge of Him.
Did He not find thee needy, and enrich thee?	Your self was bewildered in intimacy with Us; We strengthened it with teh Qur'an and wisdom

بسمه تعالى

anxieties and desires:

finding great employment, not settling for crap jobs, providing for my family, expanding the family to 3+, being able to work and do a phd program in less than 12 years, becoming a professional academic in the reasonable future.

actually, just finding a phd program, praying the UGA religion dept gets its act together & has a phd program for next year, looking at the handful of reasonable programs across the US & Canuckistan and feeling alternately elated, confident, terrified, and depressed. I know German, do I really need French, too?

without a community around me, a supportive community that is, I don't know what my spiritual practice is turning into. not writing my shaykh's teachings, not reading Arabic regularly, not learning more Qur'an, not not not. when can I just be. when can I just be real, alive, present, loved, loving, the love dissolves.

say 'allah' and leave them plunging in their playing

PROVO, UTAH team of physicists from Brigham Young University announced yesterday that they have succeeded in converting a tiny particle of matter into the truth and sanctity of the Book of Mormon.

According to BYU physicists, the new Joseph Smith Particle Accelerator may someday enable Mormons to proselytize "cheaply, cleanly and efficiently."

"This opens up a new world of possibilities for the Church," said Zebulon Calhoun, a particle physicist and Priest of the Melchizedek Order. "We can now conceive of a time in the near future when we will be able to proselytize cheaply, cleanly and efficiently." ( Read more... )

Curriculum - Literature

Literature Seminar
Homer: Iliad, Odyssey
Aeschylus: Agamemnon, Choephoroe, Eumenides
Sophocles: Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone
Euripides: Hippolytus, Bacchae, Electra
Aristophanes: Frogs

Literature Tutorial
Chaucer: Canterbury Tales in Middle English*
Shakespeare: King Lear
Aristotle: Poetics
Selected English lyric poetry

Literature Preceptorial (samples)
Cervantes: Don Quixote
Joyce: Ulysses
Virgil: Aeneid
Eliot: Middlemarch
Dostoevski: The Brothers Karamazov


Curriculum - Politics and Society

...........................................................................

Politics and Society Seminar
Plutarch: Lives: Lycurgus and Solon
Plato: Republic
Aristotle: Politics*
Machiavelli: The Prince
Locke: Second Treatise of Civil Government
Rousseau: On the Origin and Foundations of Inequality
Marx: 1844 Manuscripts*
Tocqueville: Democracy in America*

Politics and Society Tutorial
Aristotle: Nicomachean Ethics*
Thomas Aquinas: Treatise on Law
Hobbes: Leviathan*
Declaration of Independence
U.S. Constitution
Melville: Billy Budd
Federalist Papers*
Selected U.S. Supreme Court Decisions

Politics and Society Preceptorial (samples)
Montesquieu: The Spirit of the Laws
Shakespeare: The history plays
Smith: The Wealth of Nations
Rousseau: Emile
Hegel: The Philosophy of Right


Curriculum - Mathematics and Natural Science

...........................................................................

Mathematics and Natural Science Seminar
Plato: Timaeus *
Lucretius: On the Nature of Things
Aristotle: Physics *
Ptolemy: Almagest *
Galileo: Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems *
Darwin: The Origin of Species *
Freud: Selected Works *

Mathematics and Natural Science Tutorial
Euclid: Elements *
Lobachevsky: The Theory of Parallels *

Mathematics and Natural Science Preceptorial (samples)
On Light: Aristotle, Descartes, Huygens, and Newton
Lavoisier: Elements of Chemistry
Maxwell: Theory of Heat
Bacon: The Principles of Natural Philosophy
Galileo: Two New Sciences


Curriculum - History

...........................................................................

History Seminar
(First-semester students are not eligible to enroll in the history segment)
Herodotus: Histories *
Thucydides: Peloponnesian War *
Livy: Early History of Rome *
Polybius: Histories *
Plutarch: Lives *
Tacitus: Annals *
Tocqueville: The Old Regime and the French Revolution *

History Tutorial
Augustine: The City of God *
Vico: The New Science *
Kant: Idea of a Universal History
Herder: Ideas Toward the Philosophy of the History of Mankind *
Hegel: Philosophy of History *
Marx: The German Ideology
Nietzsche: Uses and Abuses of History for Life
Dilthey: Introduction to the Human Sciences *
Collingwood: The Idea of History *
Strauss: Political Philosophy and History *

History Preceptorial (samples)
Tolstoy: War and Peace
Machiavelli: The Florentine Histories
Weber: The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
Arendt: The Origin of Totalitarianism

Bismillah

Allah is everything; He is the single;
He is the many; He is the Royal We;
He is the We; He is the I;
He is the woman; He is the man.
He uses the language which is right
for each circumstance and for each
person. He does what we need.
Sidi went on to speak of Allah's
Greatness and His Qualities quite
extensively. Then Sidi said that
'Allah appeared for Musa one way, and
for Isa another, and to Ibrahim yet
another way.'


2) Then a chat with Amany (Sidi's
interpreter)...She added the following
'When Allah addresses His being in
singular form it is in intimate
conversation (as with his prophets
and messengers); when in the plural,
as in the 'Royal We' it is to the
people at large. When we find the
use of the word He, in Arabic Huwa
(pronounced Hu), it refers to the
most mystical dimensions of Allah,
those that we as mere mortals cannot
grasp. And the Name Allah includes and
encompasses them all.'

Typically part-time doctorates are spread over five or more years, which can be a long time to balance all the demands on your life.

It is important to think through all your own potential challenges with a part-time doctorate before you embark on it; the following suggestions come from the experience of others who chose the part-time route:

* Make a commitment with yourself to set aside particular chunks of time for your research; Consider setting aside a couple of evenings each week, every other week-end, specific bank holidays etc, when you are ‘unavailable’ for other activities. Some people find it helpful to plan in 6 month blocks, so that they can see ahead to specific time slots
* It can also be helpful to have longer blocks of time – say 3 consecutive days, rather than 1 day every three weeks, as it means you won’t waste time catching up with where you left off
* If possible, choose a research topic that is related to your work. In this way, the transition between the two will feel more natural, and each can feed the other
* Maintain regular contact with your supervisor and research department. It will keep you in touch and be a constant reminder for you
* Ensure that family and work colleagues are aware of your programme, and supportive of it, before you start out

---

You can't beat perfect

Minh Nguyen earned his Ph.D. last fall after an experience that challenges many common assumptions. He completed his coursework and dissertation on communications traffic analysis and interference cancellation for avionic systems in just three years — as a part-time graduate student holding down a full-time engineering job.

...Nguyen tried to weigh the economic cost and the benefits of getting a Ph.D. “Was the degree only for personal satisfaction, or would it help me thrive in my career? I had no answer to that.” The option of keeping his job and going to school part time was intriguing. “I talked to 10 people, however, who all said the same thing: that doing a part-time Ph.D. is impossible.”

...His biggest challenge in pursuing both activities simultaneously was “heavy-duty multi-tasking. I had to balance my workloads between work, school, and family — and each one could be considered a full-time commitment.” His advice for others considering a similar path: “Eliminate the word ‘procrastination’ from your dictionary! If you have a research idea in the middle of the night, get up and work on it immediately. Give it further thought or you might lose important ideas forever. There are many things to distract a part-time Ph.D. student and you must maintain focus.”

Will & Wonderment

( Golden Paths )




( A Rainbow Behind the Lips )



( Pharos )



( Nutter )



( Milk & Honey All the Way Down (a tafsir of Ayat al-Kursi) )



( You'd Never Guess )



( Perfectly Clear at the Time )




( Contrast )




( Re: usedtobe )


( Oh them kids )


( Contrafirmazione )


( Submission )



( Elevator repair )

Admixtures

( Words for things I could never say )



( Who we are )



( Selfping with breath )



( Convergence of strata )



( What we need here is a big dose of plot )



( Strangest dreams )



( Similar whateverthisis (Hellbent on finding all my context) )



( Theta understands itself as such )



( Preview to the 7-part epic "Why I like IRC" )



( Re: sideview to the seven-part epic, "Why I Like IRC" )



( Re: borderline-view of the seven-part epic, "Why I Like IRC" )

Bismillah~

Rescued old writings from the oubliette of archive.org, the only place they still existed to my knowledge. These were written on the scrytch listserv, which theoretically was a forum for a kind of collaborative re-mix writing, where any writing could be used, chewed up, sampled, quoted, re-written, or riffed on by other writers.

Some of the following under 'Admixtures,' which are basically cut-ups à la William Burroughs, use those explicit quotative/remixative techniques. "Preview to the 7-part epic..." has two riffs by other writers, possibly the only times my posts got scrytched.

'Psychophanies' are from dreams, ones that seemed particularly coherent and initiatic.

'Will & Wonderment' are either fictive pieces or meditations. A couple of them are actual stories. This seemed like the main style scrytch went in for as practiced by the best writers on the list. I was particularly inspired by one man whose writings have not been available online for a while. Jorge Luis Borges was the patron saint of scrytch; my ideas were more influenced by Lovecraft, Frank Herbert, William Gibson, transhumanism, and what I was learning about Sufism.

All of this (some of it R-rated) was a way of processing what I was going through in moving from a basically materialist though occultic worldview to a theistic one. I didn't know where I was going, of course, and I was pretty surprised when I got to the point of believing "God is One; all is He; nothing is He."

Psychophanies

( Building on the beach )


( al-Kimia summer camp )


( Poet watches too much tv, driven to absinthe )



( Tree )



( 2nd Tree )



( C. S. Lewis needs his rock )



( Acid mice )



( Only the ends are remembered )



( Self-sharer )



( Things unseen )



( Caligawr )



( Witnesses )



( Peacenix )



( Assorted Dream Insights )

Bismillah!
I went through my previous journal and snagged all the entries of interest. These have now been retconned into this journal.

The new, old entries (calendar years 2002-2005) include entries from my *first* LJ, when I did an exercise like this in 2005! Much shorter, and I may look at that journal again to see if there's more that 2007-me would like to salvage.

2002-me wrote more elaborately, synaesthetic weavings and meanderings of a life in turmoil.

2003, 04, 05-me wrote with lots of exclamation points, alhamdulillah, and pious exclamations! I got married! I was in healing school! I was way into the walking, and still shared my heart on the internet.

I miss some of that. These last two years in grad school, away from tariqah beloveds, have not been great for my deen and my walking. The love, the intensity, the earnestness has dried up. What will I do to regain it?

Writing is projected-self, refracted-self, and I don't want to idealize the first years of my marriage over now. Sh. & I have grown together, I'm smoother, more capable; things were always broken at the Land, I was always mad at somebody for cavalier treatment of Islam in favor of some illusion, and I was just as poor then!

Where is growth, and where is stasis, and where is memory, and where is truth?

Awesome site on women & art in Islam, veils, veiling, the western gaze, orientalism, etc. It seems like undergrad-readable postcolonialism and Muslimah-positive without the chauvinist smugness of a lot of observant male-written material. "The Qur'an freed women. Things today are exactly like they were in the first generation! Hooray for them! Now bring me some tea, habibi."

http://hudson2.skidmore.edu/academics/arthistory/ah369/finalveil.htm

Manufacturer.

US importer.

Bismillah

The Shamstastic Acupuncturific Wife-o-dex 9,000 has a new blog to document her study & exploration of healing.

Chekkitout:

http://five-elements.org/blog/

Bismillah~

"The mission's not over til the reports are written." So it was written in one of my scifi thrillers; so it was this summer.

I organized and facilitated discussion groups between American and Moroccan students at the American Language Center in Marrakech on a University of Georgia "Scholarship of Engagement" grant, as applied for and overseen by my advisor, A. G., Ph.D. The talks were for the purpose of getting to know each other, following a paradigm of "dialogue, not debate." The talks were a success and lead to long conversations among the students after the groups let out.

Right after the last of the five sessions, Dr. G told me to get started on the report. Well, I was right there with the giddy undergrads abroad in wonderland as far as wanting to sit down & write a paper, but I made some notes. That was as far as it went until a couple of weeks ago.

Most of the summer I've been alternating between bouts of good energy in looking for work and days of depression, feeling like an unskilled loser for anything outside of the academy. When I was on, I looked for jobs. When I was not on, I did not feel like writing the report!

Finally, I started to work on it. I talked to Dr. G. and arranged, then broke, a deadline. It was terrible trying to write it. What did I have to say? It happened, it was a success, but now there was this weight of distance upon me. Finally, I got it done and sent it to Dr. G.

He loved it! He told me it would be a big help in getting a bigger grant for a much bigger program, which might mean a job for me down the line. I heard second hand that he couldn't stop talking about the report for three days after I handed it in! I never heard THAT about any of my essays.

Bismillah~

My two night classes (Intro to Western Religions) are going swimmingly. The first seventh, or two weeks, I went over religious patterns & groups in the ancient & classical near east, with special attention to mystery cults & Zoroastrianism, and with side jaunts into Gnosis & Manichaeanism. I've woken up to the fact that I'm more interested in specifics about various such groups now that I'm not sweating over my own degree & have accordingly been charging through the books.

Current reading:

Judaism, Christianity, and Zoroastrianism in Talmudic Babylonia. Jacob Neusner, one of my favorite scholars, even though Rabbinical Judaism is really not my area. I'm amazed by any scholar who's written and edited close to 1,000 books. Anyway, his focus is on the history & social conditions of Jewry in the place that Rabbinical (i.e., Talmudic) Judaism really took off. It was a multi-ethnic society with immigrant Greeks, Babylonians, Aramaeans, Arabs, Jews, Persians, Kurds, and others, with the then-typical Hellenized upper-middle class. The sometimes-zealously Zoroastrian Sasanian empire alternated between bouts of viscious persecution of non-Zoros and heretical Zoros and bouts of coddlings various groups, like Jews and Nestorian Christians. You know those stories about the horrible infidel Persians stealing the Relics of the True Cross from Jerusalem? Well, the officer corps & bureaucracy were full of Nestorians in that war, and THEY did it! This and many other fascinating tidbits.

Sameul Lieu's Manichaeism in the Later Roman Empire and Medieval China and M" in Mesopotamia and the Roman East. Manichae[an]ism was a big deal, the most successful world religion in terms of geographic spread & numbers of adherents after the Big Three Missionary Religions, Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism. It died out at last in China possibly as late as the 1600s. What have I known about it until now? Not a whole lot. More than I'll summarize here, but yikes, I didn't even know the founder Mani had the patronage of one Sassanid emperor, who hoped for a synthesizing religion to unify the diverse subject peoples; or that he was assassinated by Zoroastrian zealotz zhen he lozt the zatronage of za lazer zemperor. Until I read Neusner; I just got these & the ones bellow tonight & have only read the introductions & such. Learn to speed-read, folks, you've no idea how much you can suck down in one evening!

On the same front, Jason BeDuhn's The Manichaean Body in Discipline and Ritual means to deconstruct the scholarly consensus about Manichaean practices & attitudes. He argues that, while there's been huge progress on actual M. texts, they're still interpreted through the lens inherited from Christian polemicists like Iraenus and Augustine. This one has the feeling of the scholar in love with something dead and on the shelf, something unjustly crushed by the unsympathetic boot of time; it's for sure aimed at people who already have more background in this area than I do, so I'm going to read Lieu for a picture from that ol' scholarly consensus. Something about body-hating Manichaeans who believe a monster awakened from God's impersonated wisdom's nightmare and created the earth as a trap for God-reflecting spirits; who had a lowly Auditor grade who couldn't read the books and several layers of Elect who could and couldn't share the secrets with grades below them; etc.

Gnosticism in caveman speech: World bad. Flies, pain, bad smells! Spirit good. Spirit need magic to escape bad world. Seeeeeeecret magic. Must fast and punish body. Then get secrets from priests, go to next level, get more secrets.

Gnosis had a big presence in old Alexandria, as did the Christianity of Athanasius & his school which fed in a major way into the pre-schism Orthodox/Catholic church. Roelof van den Broek's Studies in Gnosticism and Alexandrian Christianity (he leaves out Hermetica, which he addresses at length, too) is supposed to study some of those connections. Obviously Gnosis was not just something from which Orthodox XP could distinguish itself, there are shades and shades and shades of grey in an intellectually-charged religious environment. I like the look of this one, and it's put out by Brill, a very high-caliber publisher I've come to respect.

***

I've got some nice ones on the table from before this evening's spree, but my laptop's about to die.

Bismillah:

This summer:

I have been looking for work, so far unsuccessfully. This is terribly depressing. My fall classes have now started and I have encouragement again from something I'm good at.

Sh. & I moved across town to a newly refurbished, smaller apartment --insha'allah lower power bills! It's darling, cozy, lots of natural light, and a safer neighborhood.

We have had lots of problems with the place, though: weak AC, toilets backing up, etc. The landlord has been helpful, nothing like one of my favorite NYC memories, the dreadful rumors that went around about our red-bearded Hasidic mobster slum-lord.

I breaked recently on only the front wheel of my bike, causing the wheel to stop and the rest of the bike to rotate around it, rotating my face into pavement hard enough to break open skin and subcutaneous fat under my chin. I got a dozen stiches in two layers, one of which is supposed to dissolve inside my body after 45 days.

( Sh. got a disturbing picture of the hole on her camera 'for posterity.' )

A Shadhili bibliography, inspired by ijtihad_alkitab's post.

***Danner, Victor and Thackston, Wheeler M. Ibn 'Ata' Illah: The Book of Wisdom / Kwaja Abdullah Ansari: Intimate Conversations. New York: Paulist Press, 1978 (& later).
A good translation of the core of Shadhili tariqa thought as expressed in literature, the Hikam have become one of the classics of Islamic literature. Anyone who's read my journal knows how highly I regard the Hikam, so I'll stop there. Danner first published his translation in an expensive academic edition; it's out of print but in libraries. The newer edition is revised, has fuller commentary drawn from the traditional secondary literature, and comes with another book by an earlier sufi, in this case an ecstatic Hanbali. Take that, Hanbali-haters!

Darqawi, Mawlay al-ʿArabi al-. The Darqawi Way: Letters from the Shaykh to the Fuqara. Translated by Aisha Bewley. Cambridge: Diwan Press, 1981.
This is not about Imam Abu al-Hassan al-Shadhili himself: these are the powerful letters of a major reviver of the way following in the tariqa. Mawlay al-Darqawi lived in Morocco two hundred years ago & had an enormous movement. Many current Shadhili lines all through the Arabic world come from his movement. Get it from here; it's expensive elsewhere. There's a more widely available, partial translation by Titus Burkhart, that I regard as inferior; some reviewer mentions 'intrusive Masonic vocabulary.'

Douglas, Elmer H. The Mystical Teachings of al-Shadhili: Including his Life, Prayers, Letters,a nd Followers; a translation from the Arabic of Ibn al-Sabbagh's Durrat al-Asrar wa Tuhfat al-Abrar. Albany: State University Press of New York, 1993.
A great resource on the Shaykh, though written in stilted Academickese: a hagiography from not long after his lifetime, with many supplications, sermons, letters, and annecdotes. Missing an index like almost every book in this field.

Durkee, ʿAbdullāh Nūr ad-Dīn. School of the Shādhdhuliyya: Orisons. Alexandria: Daru-l-Kutub, 1991.
Arabic, transliterations & translations of Abu al-Hasan's litanies (=orisons), visualization and energy flow exercises for those rooted in Qur'an and Sunnah, and other devotions of the later order, such as a Thursday night hadrah ceremony from an Egyptian branch. Introduced with 90-some pages of essays on the continuing place of Imam al-Shadhili & reflections on the meanings of his works. There is a newer edition I don't have, available from Shaykh Durkee's site.

Iskandarī, Ibn ʿAṭāʾ Allāh al-. The Key to Salvation: A Sufi Manual of Invocation. Translated and edited by Mary Ann Koury Danner. Cambridge: Islamic Texts Society, 1996.
A manual of dhikr, with a long section of beautiful supplications from minor hadith collections.

***―――. The Subtle Blessings in the Saintly Lives of Abū al-ʿAbbās al-Mursī and His Master Abū al-Ḥasan: Kitāb latāʾif al-minan fī manāqib Abī ’l-ʿAbbās al-Mursī wa shaykhihi Abī ’l-Ḥasan. Translated and edited by Nancy Roberts. Louisville: Fons Vitae, 2005.
I love this book! The third Shadhili shaykh, Ibn Ata Allah, writes about his master Abu al-Abbas, and his master Abu al-Hassan. The love, wisdom, ma'rifah, and uprightness of these men comes through powerfully. An inspired, inspired translation, with interesting appendices on contemp. Egyptian sufi women the author has benefited from.

―――. The Book of Illumination: Kitāb al-tanwīr fī isqāṭ al-tadbīr. Translated by Scott Kugle. Louisville: Fons Vitae, 2005.
Isqat al-tadbir (destruction of self-direction) is Ibn Ata Allah's companion piece to the Hikam: very short, and judge by some commentators to be more worthwhile than many long classics. The title refers to the inclusive mystical virtue of turning away from the self, purifying awareness through the Name, and reliance on Allah; it is a key Shadhili concept. This translation is written in circumlocutions to avoid attaching the pronoun "he" to Allah, and other quirks I can't remember, but AFAIK it's the only version in a European language of a major work.

Conscience is the call from God

Doris Lessing's Idries Shah influenced science fiction.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canopus_in_Argos

Shikasta - A secret history of Earth from the perspective of the advanced Canopus civilization.
The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five - Depicts the influence of a series of cultures on the "zones" that are more or less advanced than their own.
The Sirian Experiments - Focuses, like Shikasta, on the history of Earth, but from the perspective of visitors from Sirius rather than Canopus.
The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 - The story of the civilization on a planet that, due to interstellar changes, is slowly facing extinction, and Canopus's relationship with them.
The Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire - A story of Canopian agents on a less advanced planet; explores hazards of rhetoric.