Before you read

Four pieces this week that, read together, form an odd conversation about who does the invisible labour that sustains a world, and what it costs when that labour is monetised, weaponised, or simply demanded faster than anyone can think. As always, only what has been read is shared here, nothing more. Descriptions this week were generated by my loyal ghulam, Claude, who I suspect has opinions about all four pieces it’s too polite to volunteer.

📚 Short Web Reads #30
A curated set of reads for the curious, the thoughtful, and the quietly implicated.

How Indian doctors paved the way for the country’s most powerful export – trust
Traces a genealogy of Indian soft power that begins not with Bollywood or diplomacy but with decades of NHS night shifts and rural American clinics. The argument is that trust, once built patient by patient, becomes transferable capital, underwriting everything from Y2K outsourcing to the current roster of Fortune 500 CEOs. Now, as Britain and America restrict the pipeline, the piece asks what happens when the original source of that trust dries up.

India: Continuing weapons exports to Israel could risk complicity in ongoing genocide in Gaza – new investigation
Documents nearly 2,600 shipments of arms components from Indian firms to Israeli defence manufacturers since October 2023, naming joint ventures that sit quietly inside larger, more reputable-sounding conglomerates. The report’s real force is procedural: it maps how a state’s silence and a company’s balance sheet can become the same act of complicity under international law.

Against Publication: The Case for Academics to Write Less
An editor’s account of being pressured by a publishing house to raise a journal’s annual output from twenty articles to thirty, regardless of what any of them actually say. The essay names the publication matrix as a discourse that has replaced scholarship with throughput, and dares to imagine universities that simply stop counting.

How Women Shaped Human Evolution Through Food Processing
Reframes the hunting-centred story of human evolution around the far less mythologised work of grinding, soaking, and roasting, done overwhelmingly by women and children at the hearth. The claim is architectural, not sentimental: our smaller teeth, shrunken guts, and expanded brains are the fossil record of someone else’s labour, one that anthropology mostly forgot to look at.

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Before you read

This issue keeps circling a single question: what happens when a discipline mistakes its method for the truth. Self-help mistakes fixing for meaning, denialism mistakes discomfort for evidence, and perennialism mistakes resemblance for revelation. Reading is the odd one out, refusing to die on schedule.

As always, only what’s actually been read gets shared here. Descriptions this week were drafted by my loyal ghulam, Claude, who I suspect enjoys the demotion.

📚 Short Web Reads #29 A curated set of reads for the curious, the thoughtful, and the quietly overprogrammed.

The Self-Help Trap: What 20+ Years of “Optimizing” Has Taught Me Tim Ferriss turns on his own genre, arguing that self-improvement’s founding logic (locate the flaw, then fix it) guarantees the flaw is never fully gone. The piece traces how audience, intention, and unexamined assumption quietly convert growth into a closed loop, and proposes relationships, not the self, as the actual unit of repair.

Text Is (Still) King Adam Mastroianni takes on the “post-literate society” thesis and finds the data far less apocalyptic than the vibes. The essay’s real interest isn’t book sales, though, it’s why serious thought still requires text specifically: no manifesto, revolution, or movement has ever been founded on a podcast.

The Rise of AI Denialism Louis Rosenberg reframes skepticism about AI’s pace and value as the opening stage of a grief process, denial before the loss of “cognitive supremacy” fully registers. Whether or not one buys the framing, the piece is a useful specimen of how technologists narrate resistance to their own conclusions.

Are All Religions the Same? Islam and the False Promise of Perennialism Tom Facchine traces perennialism’s “all paths, one truth” appeal back to its actual origin: post-Reformation European exhaustion with religious war, not ancient esoteric wisdom. The essay’s sharper move is distinguishing legitimate diversity in law from illegitimate diversity in belief, then asking why that distinction gets flattened so easily today.

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Before you read

This week’s four keep circling the same low hum: what survives the center’s indifference, and what gets made only under constraint. A physicist writing from colonial Dacca, a poet insisting poets still do R&D, a metaphor about crabs that refuses to stay a joke, an essay about why your thoughts aren’t real until you’ve wrecked them on paper. As always, only what’s actually been read gets shared here, descriptions courtesy of my loyal ghulam, Claude, who I suspect enjoys this more than he lets on.

📚 Short Web Reads #28 A curated set of reads for the curious, the thoughtful, and the intermittently self-doubting.

Why Satyendra Nath Bose was more than Einstein’s sidekick A historian of science dismantles the tidy version of Bose’s story, the lucky provincial elevated by a great man’s blessing. What emerges instead is a polymath who treated the colonial periphery as intellectual cover: unbound by European orthodoxy precisely because he was excluded from it. The essay’s real argument is about where genius is permitted to originate.

The Poet Is Present Zoë Hitzig interviews Ryan Ruby on his verse history of poetry, which claims poets have always done the discipline’s actual R&D, testing what a medium can hold before anyone else notices the medium has changed. The conversation drifts into authorship, LLMs, and copyright, but the sharper thread is about writing as a technology for staying at the edge of your own century.

Are humans destined to evolve into crabs? Michael Garfield takes carcinization, biology’s running joke about everything eventually becoming crab-shaped, and turns it into a diagnosis. Grids, IDs, currencies, platforms: all of it carapace, all of it convergent. The essay is less about crabs than about what happens when a species starts optimizing itself for a predator it built.

How to think in writing Karlsson’s claim, filtered through Lakatos, is unsettling if you sit with it: an idea you haven’t written down isn’t finished, it just feels finished. Writing doesn’t record thought so much as interrogate it, forcing the fluid confidence of a half-formed notion to harden into something that can crack. Most writing avoids this. His doesn’t.

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My wife kept pushing me to watch it. It is the best show on the planet, well, she didn’t say that, but she might as well have, she and everyone else I met and talked about tv shows and cinema with told me that. Breaking Bad, a tv show that first aired 16 years ago still reigns the charts and the hearts as the best. I had watched a season or two before and dropped it when life got too busy or something, I don’t remember, I just remembered watching till the iconic fly episode, I had forgotten it anyway and now the time had come for me to complete it and this time I experienced my part of that shared cultural catharsis. What my wife and everyone else were saying was true, it is the best tv show out there. Now I was intrigued, why? What makes it so special, why did I sit through the whole 5 seasons and thoroughly enjoy watching it and why did it make me feel like I learned a lot of things about human life from a tv show about a chemistry teacher and his student cooking drugs in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on the southwestern interiors of a country far removed from mine? I mean, surely, the thrilling gripping way the story was told played an important part, Vince Gilligan knows his shit. But there’s something deeper about Breaking Bad that I couldn’t help but pry open and look inside. And I have a Bachelors in English Literature and a Masters in it and am doing a PhD in Cultural Studies, so I clearly have qualifying papers from the state declaring that I am eligible to dissect the show and understand why it is so good. More importantly, I wanted to connect it with the language of Islam, a language which, I believe can help with properly naming and thereby ordering everything, from the abstract world of life before/beyond language to the ordering of life through language (in law and power) and to the minute ethical everydayness of life that is represented in language through literature and art.

Now before I dive into it, I will try to tame the Elephant in the room. How dare I speak about a vulgar American TV show that is about drugs, money and sex along with the holiest text in Islam? Is this Halal or Haram? Aren’t movies and TV Haram? Is this not blasphemous? What has Islam got to do with a TV Show and finally, How does my reading become Islamic?

One by one, Brace yourselves as this can get a bit academic.

How dare I?

Well, bismillah, bi idhnillah wa fadhlihi.

Is this Halal or Haram? Aren’t movies and TV Haram?

I am not a faqih, ie; someone qualified in Islamic Jurisprudence, and this is not a jurisprudential analysis of TV Shows including Breaking Bad. You may refer to the latest fatwas on the matter according to your madahibs and Imams. I am a scholar of literature and I take this as a text for analysis.

Is this not blasphemous?

Well, not if I don’t do or say anything blasphemous, Maadhallah!

What has Islam got to do with a TV Show?

A TV show is a work of mimesis or representation, a carefully constructed mirror image of human life. Human life in a word is desire, and as Anjum notes in a brilliant essay, desire is the driving force of life, and as I emphasise, life itself. What mimetic art (everything between novels, mangas and oral stories to high end Cinema and TV) does, as I mentioned is, it reflects life, not as is, but selectively. It is highly curated not only in matters of plot and narrative focus, but also in terms of how things are represented, what language is used, what camera angle is employed, what narrative technique, what background music, yada yada. Thus Art becomes not only a mirror of desire and subsequently life, but also a space where aspirations of desire are executed or as Anjum says, its altar, or in to borrow MH Abrams, a lamp, one that is fueled by the creator of the representation, with all his anxieties and desires and can and will influence the audience and society at large. Now what does Islam have to do with life? Well, everything. In the words of Shahab Ahmad, Islam is a shared language in which people give meaning to experience in the self, and communicate that meaning to each other in all their variety. The origin of which Ahmad links to the act and text of the Muḥammadan Revelation, which gives a language and through it orders knowledge about the life and world before and beyond revelation, knowledge about ethics and law and forms the everyday dynamic life of Muslims. Now Muslims believe this is the one true language that properly names everything its proper name and hold consensus that the origin of the language of Islam is divine revelation upon the blessed Prophet, peace and blessing upon him.

Now, how does my reading become Islamic?

What I am attempting to do in the following paragraphs is an Adabi reading of Breaking Bad. An Adabi reading is, as Sarah bin Tyeer notes in her work The Well Tempered Reader, a hermeneutical praxis possessing a critical grammar constitutive of the Arabic-Islamic knowledge system and is rooted in the Islamic idea of Muruah or the ideal human being. Through her work, she posits adab as a generative literary, analytical, and cultural framework and a discursive force for analyzing literary acts. The concept Adab, as I have previously used in other essays, drawing from Sheikh Naquib al Attas is not to be confused with this usage, but the connection is not to be dismissed either, the reason for this overlap is that the word adab has undergone a series of positive and cumulative changes from its journey from the pre-Islamic days to the modern day. A historical tracing of which would probably fit better in an academic paper. The important thing to be understood is that these semantic (oo academic word) developments were positively cumulative: adab never entirely shed its older senses as it acquired new ones, and the word came to carry, simultaneously and without contradiction, the meanings of hospitality, moral refinement, education, disciplinary knowledge, and literature (Bin Tyeer, 2024).

But what does this all actually mean?

In the Adab tradition, Breaking Bad and similar stuff would be called a mathal, which can be translated to ‘parable’ but can cover all sorts of stuff from a simple parable of the fox who didn’t get the grapes to a complex tv show with a thousand episodes. Now Bin Tyeer (may Allah bless her and her work) says and I paraphrase her, mathal lies not in its definition but in its function; that any story could become a mathal on the condition that the reader is involved and identifies with its characters and is able to understand, interpret, and apply what was understood. Now Ibn al Muqaffa, who is theee dude of Arab Islamic literature with his work Kalilah wa Dimnah, says, and I quote sparingly from Bin Tyeer, that the whole point of mathal apart from enjoyment (which is also legitimate, he says) is that it is fodder for critical reflection or basar. The point of course becomes that a mathal or your run of the mill tv show, if upon reflection gives you the capacity to perceive the truths of life more clearly and thus help you evaluate evidences rationally and make you capable of acting on this evaluated truth with firmness, congratulations, you are doing Adab of mathal.

In simpler terms, real monkey see other fictional made up monkey fall from a cliff when careless, real monkey learn to not do dumb shit like that and make better choices with his life.

Now, of course, with all this talk and no real stuff y’all will complain. So here is my Adabi reading of this endearing

methamphetamine induced modern mathal, Breaking Bad.

Life is at its core an exploration in human desire. All art by way of representing life represents desire in all its kaleidoscopic multiplicities. What one man desires might not be the other one’s object of desire. Breaking Bad to me, was the perfect envisioning of this multi textured and varied nature of human desire. In the Islamic ontological sense, a human being has three layers: body, mind and soul. One can see that Desire itself is split between these co constituting inseparable parts. Ovamir Anjum, in the article previously mentioned, brings to our attention a crucial distinction that the Qur’an puts forward when talking about desire. The Qur’an uses the words hawa and shahwa to denote desire. Anjum explains that hawa emerges as the desire of the rational mind, where it is the internalization of desire as judgment, idea, or principle that elevates the self’s whims over divine truth and is epistemically and morally corrupting. While shahwa is a natural instinct or natural instinct or appetite, which may be lawful or ruinous depending on its orientation and regulation. A balanced and righteous person in the Islamic sense would be someone whose soul’s yearning (or his true desire of Providence) would be keeping in check and disciplining his hawa and shahwa. But what happens when one ignores the yearning of the soul. What happens to the soul when either of the, two hawa and shahwa are pursued as a way of living.

Now, I believe it was Aristotle in his Poetics that says that a sign that some mimetic representation is better than the other is in how honestly it represents human action and its probable and necessary consequences. Breaking Bad for me, was a mirror posed at the condition of the human soul getting constricted when the desires of the mind and body are pursued instead of the soul’s true yearning. What was enlightening to me when I reflected on my watching of the show with this knowledge is that most of the characters in the show can be separated into two groups where they are either leaning towards hawa (or sins of the rational mind) or towards shahwa (sins of the body). Walter and Jessie being the central characters, where Walter represents hawa and Jessie represents shahwa.

Now, I will begin with Jessie, who is the prisoner of shahwa. I used the word prisoner because the desires and appetites of the body are not sins in and of themselves, but if the mind is weak and fails to discipline it, the shahwa overtakes. Shahwa begins with normal desires and appetites and the more you give into it, the less satisfied you will be and the number you get. This is evident in the character arc of Jessie and Jane, whose drug addiction gets Jane killed, right when they could have had a good life with all the money they made. This pursuit of pleasure if it doesn’t kill you, makes you numb. Nothing in the material world will fill the emptiness of the soul. A poignant scene for this is when Jessie parties in his newly bought house for days on end and feels scared to be left alone with his numb soul. Neither can the desire of the body be satisfied, nor can the numbness of the soul be changed with money. This is why Jessie doesn’t care about his money, he misplaces it, bags of dollars lying in the open, ready to be stolen. Now, what is worse than the numbness of the soul, what is worse than following shahwa? It is the pursuit of hawa, the conscious sin of the rational mind and the corruption of the soul.

What happens to Walter’s soul when he follows his hawa. In the beginning Walter is a normal school teacher with a materially failed life, but otherwise a peaceful life. Then upon him comes tribulations in the form of cancer, and it reminded me of the ayah (2:155) where Allah says that: “We will certainly test you with a touch of fear and famine and loss of property, life, and crops. Give good news to those who patiently endure”. That was Walter’s moment, that was the test of his character. However in a country where getting even an ambulance is a financial risk and where only the ultra rich can afford health care, Walter turns to crime. Now I wouldn’t be a stupid moralist and say that Walter’s sin was that he turned to crime, no. Here the evil is that of a bad political and economic system that forces people into crime. Walter’s sin lies however precisely at the point where he could have stopped, where he had all the money in the world needed to cure himself, and yet he persisted. There begins the transformation of Walter from a dude to the embodiment of the devil himself. Now you may think I am exaggerating with all this moral talk, but look within when you watched the show, there is a point in the show (was Jane’s death for me) at which we stopped rooting for Walter and paused for a second to think, who is this man, I don’t recognize him anymore. This is not the dude from the beginning at all, this is a soul that was corrupted due to him following the desires of his mind. The ayah that comes to my mind is (25:43) from Surah Furqan where Allah SWT asks his beloved Prophet pbuh: Have you seen “˹O Prophet˺ the one who has taken their own desires as their god? Will you then be a keeper over them? Or do you think that most of them listen or understand? They are only like cattle—no, more than that, they are astray from the ˹Right˺ Way!”. The word that Allah SWT uses here for desire is hawa, that of the rational mind, and it is this sort of desire that a man knowingly and in full consciousness submits himself to. Allah’s SWT’s rhetorical question is powerful here, who will be responsible for such a man and his soul but himself. That is what Gus Fring was, an embodiment of rational will, cold, calculated and ruthless, and that is what Walter aspired to be and achieved.

What makes Breaking Bad especially endearing is this accuracy in which the transformation of the soul, through appetite, greed, pride, numbness, and corruption is shown. The show’s plot is a fine tragedy in the strict Aristotelian sense (someone should a reading of that if not done), the direction of the episodes, the editing, and the powerfully moving acting is what makes Breaking Bad a timeless tale about human existence.

References

Poetics. (1996). Poetics (M. Heath, Trans.). Penguin Classics. (Original work composed c. 335 BCE)

Abrams, M. H.. (1953). The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition. Oxford University Press.

Anjum, O. (2025, November 17). Wicked beauty: A ḥāshiya on secular desire. Hashiya. https://hashiya.org/posts/wicked-beauty

Bin Tyeer, Sarah R.. (2025). The Well-Tempered Reader: The Legitimization of Adab in the Arabic Literary Tradition. University of California Press. https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520424982

Al-Attas, Syed Muhammad Naquib. (1980). The Concept of Education in Islam: A Framework for an Islamic Philosophy of Education. Muslim Youth Movement of Malaysia (ABIM).

Ahmed, Shahab. (2016). What Is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic. Princeton University Press.

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Before you read: I’ve been thinking about what it means to hold uncertainty without resolving it. These four reads arrived in a week that didn’t offer easy answers, and I’m sharing them because they didn’t either. As always, only what I’ve actually read makes it here. Descriptions, as ever, were generated by my obedient ghulam, Claude, who has now developed opinions about Francis Weller.

📚 Short Web Reads #27
A curated set of reads for the curious, the thoughtful, and the quietly half-undone.

What a romantic comedy cliché reveals about modern love
A short video essay by Evan Puschak traces the rom-com airport dash from its roots in post-Enlightenment secularization. The argument is modest but pointed: when religion ceased to organize the meaning of ordinary life, romantic love stepped into the vacancy. The airport sprint is not a cliché so much as a displaced rite — the secular equivalent of a prayer answered at the last moment.

Tweet by @itsreallyvivek
A long-form essay thread on what research actually requires versus what it appears to require from the outside. The core argument is practical: most people learn to perform research by mimicking its visible outputs, not by training the underlying skills. Problem selection, taste, tight feedback loops, reading the appendix, writing down what cuts against your theory. Hamming, Feynman, Karpathy, Darwin — the citations are promiscuous, the advice is not.

How to Hold the Darkness: Notes on Living Through Uncertainty
Maria Popova writes through Francis Weller’s essay collection on soul-work during times of collective rupture. The essay is organized around a single counterintuitive claim: that darkness is not an obstacle to meaning but its precondition. Weller’s language draws on Jungian and ecological registers simultaneously — mycelia, ancestors, the anima mundi — and the cumulative effect is something rarer than comfort. It is permission to stay in the difficulty long enough for something to form.

Neanderthals, Genetics, and What the Fossil Record Cannot Say
A science dispatch from the New York Times on new genetic findings that complicate tidy narratives of Neanderthal extinction. The piece sits at a friction point that has long unsettled paleontology: genetics speaks in probabilities and populations, archaeology in objects and places, and the two do not always agree. What emerges is less a story of replacement than one of entanglement — interbreeding, isolated lineages, and a disappearance that was slower and stranger than the textbooks suggest.

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﷽

I know the frustration of trying to think and engage in and about Art and Islam without having to compromise on either one of them. I won’t claim that this hashiya essay solves the problem entirely, but this definitely will help process a lot of things about Islam and Fiction/Narrative Art, moving beyond the jurisprudential categories of halal/haram. This is a starting point for me in discourse to begin the long and hopefully productive journey of thinking about Art and Islam.

Much has been written about Secular Modernity from an Islamic perspective, not many are as precise and scholarly in their intervention as Ovamir Anjum’s essay on Secular Desire and Art, titled “Wicked Beauty: A Hashiya to Secular Desire”. My attempt in engaging with this essay is two fold, one is to popularise this essay in my personal circle and my substack (because everyone I know needs to read it) and to engage with his observations productively, in the fashion of the newly begun journal Hashiya. بإذن الله, I attempt to write a Hashiya for the essay. While I will systematically go through the essay, it will be clear that my major engagements will be in the section about Art and Desire. Since, this is also a humble attempt at reinvigorating the format of Hashiya in a digital/print medium in the English language, the stylistic choices and writing tone is still in the experimental phase.

Before Reading

• The Hashiya follows the Subheadings of the original essay, engaging with each one in the order the author has structured them, therefore my arguments are interspersed and follows the Anjum’s structure, this is a deliberate editorial choice. It’s a long and slow read, but it will be worth it, I promise.

• The main paragraphs are summarised parts of the original argument, followed by the hashiya which indicates deliberate expansions, digital ḥawāshī that intervene rather than merely annotate. The symbol ∆ is used at the beginning of each hashiya to denote the same.

• The tone of this Hashiya is intentionally dialogical, though not in the conventional academic sense. It is better understood as a form of ḥiwār, borrowing the term as employed by Ibrar Bhatt, Othman Barnawi, and Rizwan Ahmad in their paper (Exploring a Sociolinguistics of Islam | Applied Linguistics | Oxford Academic). In their usage, ḥiwār does not denote a formal dialogic methodology but rather a collaborative and reflective mode of intellectual inquiry rooted in Islamic epistemic sensibilities, an engagement marked by ethical seriousness and a shared orientation toward truth. In this spirit, the present Hashiya does not aim to annotate from a critical distance but to think alongside Anjum’s essay: at times affirming, at times extending, and at times probing its implications, yet always operating within the moral architecture the essay presupposes. The ambition, therefore, is not merely commentary but disciplined co-thinking, an exercise in adab within intellectual engagement.

The Orphaning of Desire

Anjum begins with the profound observation that Secular modernity has ruptured the moral grammar of the soul. The modern world has studied and continues to study everything it can about desire, the driving force of life. Anjum rightfully notes: What they fail to grasp is not the hardware of desire, but its meaning. While the comprehension failure of this project is understood by and through the lived experience of people, every day, it’s a minority elite that has capital and hegemony that disciplines our desires and tells us what to desire, despite all of us individually and collectively feeling the emptiness of the pursuit of desire they have set. The analysis of desire, as it becomes clear through his writing, swings between complete reduction of it and avoidance of it, and between full embracing of the self’s each desire, materially possible. The crux of the crisis lies in the neglect of the enduring human quest for divine truth that is deeply rooted in our nature. This neglect, rather than being a neutral or inevitable outcome of modernity, Anjum argues, is a political and cultural project. One that, through its assertion and will to power through capital, political and cultural means, tries to sustain the language game, constantly working to discipline the desire of the rest.

∆ What Secular modernity has done, I would add, is that it has changed the language in which we describe and discipline (y)our desire. The basic grammar of desire is pain and pleasure, and philosophers have long identified that when it comes to personal wellbeing, pleasure is the only intrinsic good, and pain the only bad (Nozick’s Experience Machine). From the philosophers of Greece like Epicurus to others, a hierarchy of pleasure and pain has been formulated that advises us to approach our lives according to a hierarchy of pleasures (with long-term mental tranquility being the highest, and short-term physical pleasures being the lowest) (Epicureanism Defined: Philosophy Is a Form of Therapy | Philosophy Break). Now when we say that secular modernity has changed the language in which we desire, I mean two things, one is that it tells us and regulates for us this hierarchy of desires, being rich, having sexual desires fulfilled and gaining power takes the top of the hierarchy in such a world. This is regulated through pedagogy, psychology and culture. Two, through the remaking of the hierarchy of desires, it closes off transcendence (Harfouch) and any notion of transcendence is deemed to be a thing only to be thought of in private and not in public, as a hushed complaint. This is how, as Anjum points out, desire—previously a terrain of discipline, a space of moral drama, and even a means of ascent toward God—has become a false god, when the temporal world is treated as an ultimate horizon rather than a provisional station oriented toward the hereafter, desire ceases to be judged and instead becomes the judge itself. Thus, the closing off of the world, as Harfouch describes the metaphysics of secularism, makes desire itself the judge. As Anjum observes, “Desire is no longer judged; it is the judge.”

∆ Thus desire becomes undisciplined and unstable, where the end of desire is desire itself, and the act of indulging in every desire leads to more and more moral depravities than before. It reaches a point where as Anjum notes, Modern moral consciousness, accordingly, is marked by a curious and persistent admiration for transgression. Kotsko, A Political Theology scholar, in his work on the Devil ‘The Prince of the World’,notes how the figure of the devil who transgressed becomes the heroic model (Kotsko), and as Anjum continues, The adulterer, the rebel, the outlaw, the sexual libertine—figures long condemned by the moral traditions of the world—have become the protagonists of modern literature, film, and popular philosophy. It is not merely that we tolerate them. We admire them, desire to be like them, or see in their transgressions a kind of salvific authenticity.” The consequences of an undisciplined and unstable desire, Anjum points are hollowing of the soul as a consequence of following desires endlessly towards anything, the loss of community and the regimes of surveillance, inequality and war.

What sets Anjum apart from other critiques of Modernity is that, especially the ones of a Marxist or post-Marxist flavour is that, he emphasizes that the staggering achievements of modernity as well as the strengthening it has given to the Islamic identity and Ummatic solidarity should be acknowledged and that surgical and introspective critiques rather than broad bush condemnations are needed. This is based on the Islamic acceptance of the good in each culture, like Islam has done in the past with currents foreign to Islam—Arab tribalism, Persian courtly customs, Hellenistic philosophy, Mongol political tradition, to name a few—have long coursed through the Islamic tradition, at times enriching it, at others distorting it, and often doing both at once. Not only is modernity not a wholly external imposition for Anjum, but it is interwoven with intellectual currents shared by both Islamic and Western civilizations, namely Abrahamic revelation and Athenian reason. For Anjum then, Truthful engagement requires that we neither romanticize the past nor hastily reject the modern. Our critique, therefore, must be focused, not totalizing. What I, as a humble student, take away from this methodology is the following: What we need to do is engage with modernity critically and Islamise it, ie, reject what is bad and accept what is good. This is how Islam has done with all previous civilisations and it has not only strengthened islam, but perfected those movements.

∆ Anjum comes back to the central concept of desire and explains that desire is only meaningful in “reference to the moral architecture of existence; it is either in accordance with what is true, good, and hence truly beautiful, or otherwise.” This echoes the debate Socrates has with Diotima on love (Hunter), the pretext of which is that love is the process of desire, where one desires to possess what one doesn’t have, and this desire begins with realising one’s lack and this everyone does, because everyone lacks and knows it. Diotima explains to Socrates that the ladder of love is a progressive ascent from physical desire to philosophical contemplation of the form of beauty. According to Diotima, People do not knowingly desire bad things. They desire what they believe to be good, even if they are wrong. So the desire is for the good, but it is misguided or ignorantly directed. Thus, knowledge becomes a prerequisite to disciplining desires, hence this is not just an issue of embodiment, but also in effect or prior to that an issue of epistemology. The only way out of which is honesty and yearning for truth. Allah promises that to humans, if they are honest, they will reach him (Sahih Muslim 2607a).

Anjum’s further differentiation of the Qur’anic terms hawa and shahwa is useful, where hawa emerges as the desire of the rational mind, where it is the internalization of desire as judgment, idea, or principle that elevates the self’s whims over divine truth and is epistemically and morally corrupting. While shahwa is a natural instinct or natural instinct or appetite, which may be lawful or ruinous depending on its orientation and regulation. This differentiation is useful precisely to separate what desires are to be allowed normatively with discipline, and what are to be avoided wholly. This becomes more pertinent when one comes across ideologies and formations where the individual’s natural and halal shahwa is denied, such as in communism and monasticism and shows up in such critiques of neo-liberalism and materialism that end up contradicting themselves. If we are to be careful in our critique, Anjum contends, the challenge, then, is not merely to critique modernity but to disentangle Islamic thought from borrowed epistemic structures, modern or premodern, that may distort its own relational ontology, one in which the body, soul, and world are interdependent realms of divine āyāt (signs), not warring opposites as is often the case in Neo Platonic and later Augustinian and Christian thought.

∆ This bifurcation of desire to hawa and shahwa is useful precisely because it brings into prominence the epistemological side of disciplining desire. Honesty in searching for knowledge and in understanding the received knowledge is how hawa is disciplined. This includes acknowledgment of one’s limitations in knowledge, acknowledgment of the superiority of the knowledge one has received and the training and taming of mind in humility (to submit where needed) and in courage (to stand up in defiance where needed).

∆ In fact, Desire is how we have the will to live, as evident from phenomenological accounts of clinical depression (Solomon), depression is the lack of the ability to love, and as explained, love is the process in which desire is carried out, when this ability to love, this faculty of desire is impaired, human beings fall apart, become suicidal and lose the will to at the very least exist. Thus, as Anjum says, desire is natural, even necessary, and its discipline and redirection become the point. It is both a test and a sign. Islam does not reject desire, but rather asks us to discipline it with knowledge.

Nietzsche: The Death of Meaning

Anjum further analyses three major thinkers, describing them: If Nietzsche was the intoxicated mystic of secular modernity and Freud the analyst of its psychosis, Weber was its disenchanted jurist. For Anjum, Nietzsche not only saw the abyss that a Godless world would be creating, but dared to stare into it. When God is absent, and death of God is declared as the truth, Truth is harsh and cruel and corrosive, the beauty or comfort or coherence provided by the presence of God no longer exists, in such a condition, Nietzsche says that if a philosopher tries to clothe that ugly truth with goodness and beauty, it becomes naive and contemptible. Art thus for Nietzsche, in such a world thus becomes a refuge from truth, an escape. This marks a shift in the nature of art—not as a refracted glimpse of a luminous truth veiled by sin or confusion, but as a refuge from truth itself.

∆ The Absence of God as truth separates the categories of beauty and truth. An ugly truth, ie; that of a world where God is absent is harsh and unbearable in its raw form, the lack of meaning drives humans to madness, especially at the extremes of the pain-pleasure spectrum, suffering and euphoria. The function of Art in such a world changes, it is no longer a play with a lesson at the end, it is merely play to escape the fact that there is no lesson at the end.

Anjum summarises Nietzsche who declared that further that the philosopher is no longer a seeker of truth, but a physician for the nation—concerned not with what is true, but with what is life-enhancing.: in the absence of God; the principle to organise life, desire must be transfigured into will to power, the only force left to give shape to a disenchanted world. Yet perhaps he also grasped that without a higher aim, desire curdles inward. It festers. It sickens the soul. Anjum says how untethered from a telos, desire in our age has become self-legitimating: “I desire, therefore I am.” However,the Enlightenment’s dream of a rational subject awakens to an order that both cages desire in technocratic regulation or unleashes it in hyper-consumerism. The result is neither freedom nor flourishing, but anxiety, exhaustion, and endless dissatisfaction.

∆ That when God is absent, beauty and truth separate, the only thing that can stabilise and sustain life and sanity is desire ruled by rationality that is transformed into will to power. But here arises a new problem, desire is dangerous if not properly kept under constant surveillance, in a secular world, the state and the self is in charge of this, which leads to unnatural levels of institutional surveillance that seeks to discipline desire, and endless guilt reproduced in the self due to the fact that it does not have a balanced scale to measure. Another actor that disciplines desire in a contrary way is the market, by letting the borders of desire be open for anything, the market squeezes out the self and leaves it tired, wary and in disgust. Byung Chul Han talks about this sort of power that is not restrictive but allows play, that is at work here (Han). In Islam, Anjum says, this balanced scale from God is present, that conceives desire as not only natural but sacred. Thus as Anjum points out, desire guided by faulty rationality (which is any rationality that is not only not guided by revelation but never reaches it because of error) will end up with either of the two results, the collective society deciding arbitrary limits and venues for desire through market and the state.

Thus Anjum moves onto Freud who destabilises the modern rational subject and further analyses the limitations of the will to power and the human attempts to discipline and regulate desire, through control and play.

Freud: Savagery of Desire

Anjum places Freud as the most formidable diagnostician of modern desire, as someone who portrayed Western civilization as founded on repression. Civilization, Freud taught, emerges only by repressing instinct and disciplining desire. But repression breeds discontent. We are sick because we are civilized. While the Enlightenment saw the rational self as the master of desire, Freud’s exposition brings out the gaps in the sovereignty of rationality in the self, and shows that the modern self is neither fully rational nor free, but tormented by what it cannot name. Freud’s model of the psyche —id, ego, and superego— shows that Human behavior is shaped less by reason than by the inner conflict of these three. For Freud then, desire, the unruly dark self is the true self, whereas virtue is repression. Anjum observes that Freud’s expositions produced powerful insights, but in a Godless atmosphere naturally, used those insights for exploiting the human psyche through advertising. This, Anjum says, is obvious from how Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays—widely regarded as the father of modern public relations— used Freud’s theories, weaponizing them in service of the emerging capitalist order. He pioneered modern advertising by tapping into the subconscious, manipulating primal desires for sex, status, and security, thereby launching an unprecedented assault on the modern self. Anjum points out that this This was not a betrayal of Enlightenment ideals, nor merely a corruption of Freud’s critique, but rather their logical conclusion: once God was dislodged, morality orphaned, and the powers of unreason within the self laid bare, it was inevitable that desire would become the new lever of control in the service of the powerful. In an age of emerging psychological insight and technological power, the capitalist and political elite naturally moved to harness those very desires—not to elevate the human being, but to maximize profit and manipulate the public.

∆ What Freud’s categorisation did was that it analysed the human psyche accurately to a large extent. The reason why this brilliant exposition was used by the capitalist and the political elite is as Anjum observes is true, this is the logical conclusion of an enlightenment without God. There is, however, one small though crucial addition to this. The categories that men build, the words they choose, go on to structure reality in that way. This is not to mean that reality changes, rather the categories become hegemonic and popular in usage and if the categories are improper and do not accurately include the corresponding reality, this affects our ability to see clearly and provide solutions for problems arising out of this miscategorisation. This is a point that is highly stressed by Sheikh Naquib al Attas in his Prolegomena and other works (al–Attas). Thus what Freud’s tripartite categorisation of the self into id, ego, and superego does is that, as Anjum observes, it categorises all desire as dark evil self and all virtue as repression. Freud’s mis/categorisation secularises or disenchants psychology in two main ways, one is denying the possibility of divinity of desire in origin and direction (as Anjum reminds us elsewhere in the article of the prophetic saying “In your sexual act is charity.”) two is closing off all evil into the self, denying the existence of Shaitan. This is a very important point in Islamic ontological and anthropological thought as it significantly differs from a christian idea of the fallen self. The closing of self and denial of the devil disenchants the self from the soul, effectively denying any immateriality to the self. This mis/categorisation and its repercussions are key to understanding how, as Anjum says, in Islam, desire is natural, even necessary, and its discipline and redirection become the point. It is both a test and a sign. Islam does not reject desire, but rather asks us to discipline it with knowledge. The re-categorisation of the self and the development of an Islamic Anthropology can be explored through the works of Sheikh Attas, whose large corpus of works engage with this in clarity.

∆ The Freudian project completes the destabilisation of the structure of the enlightenment project, which had the rational self at its center. As Derrida observes in his essay on Sign, Structure and Play, this creates a rupture, a destabilisation of language and brings on infinite play that can no longer be tethered to one center (Derrida). This destabilisation of language and consequently values was observed by Weber, whose thoughts on Modernity of Polytheism is what Anjum points us to next.

Weber: Modernity as Polytheism

Anjum recalls how Weber understood Modernity as disenchantment—the triumph of technocratic rationality over sacred value. Which in its vulgar form champions a myth of linear history, a march toward progress, emancipation and enlightenment. The two tragic and irreversible transformations of modernity is observed by Weber: The first is the process of rationalization, which consists of two intertwined developments: intellectualization—the reduction of reality to that which can be calculated, predicted, and explained—and impersonalization—the subordination of life to abstract rules, bureaucratic systems, and institutional machinery. The second one alongside rationalization, Anjum explains, is Polytheistic re-enchantment of the world. With the loss of a unified cosmos rooted in the authority of an omnipotent and omniscient God, the modern world no longer possesses a shared moral foundation. Instead, what emerges is a “polytheism” of values—a radical fragmentation in which no single ethical vision can lay claim to universal authority. While the world is disenchanted by rationalization, it is simultaneously re-enchanted in a fractured and chaotic form. Weber’s prescient language captures the heart of what would later be called the postmodern condition: “His vision of polytheistic reenchantment,” writes one historian, “is rather that of an incommensurable value-fragmentation into a plurality of alternative metanarratives, each of which claims to answer the same metaphysical questions that religion and science strove to cope with in their own ways.”

∆ The world while it is disenchanted through intellectualisation and impersonalisation under the broad idea of rationalisation is however re enchanted in multiple ways, where each fragment tries to form a coherent worldview and metaphysics. The loss of the order of desire through the destabilisation of God, Church, Text and finally Man as can be traced in the history of Western philosophy resulted not in harmony of fragmented narratives, rather it resulted in each fragmented narrative, each desire competing for a place and hegemony through power.

∆ Anjum reminds us of these historical changes to temporally situate us in Modernity and as a preface to understanding Art, which as he rightly observes, became the index of desire: at once its mirror and its altar.

Art: The Index of Desire

Anjum turns to Art as the site where the crisis of secular desire becomes most legible. Having traced the philosophical dismantling of God, the rational self, and shared moral foundations through Nietzsche, Freud, and Weber, he shows how Art stepped into the vacuum left behind — becoming, as he puts it, “the index of desire: at once its mirror and its altar.”

∆ Before reading this section, I wanted to understand precisely why Anjum goes through recalling the historical and conceptual changes that happened to the idea of self and desire in Western Philosophy to look at Art. As Anjum emphasizes earlier and I have pointed out, Desire is the driving force of life, desire is life itself. Art meanwhile is a representation of life, that not only reflects life, but reflects it selectively. In Art, Desire thus becomes not only the subject but also affects the method of portraying it. Thus Art becomes not only a mirror of desire and subsequently life, but also a space where aspirations of desire are executed or as Anjum says, its altar. However this is not a modern phenomena at all, as a brief look at art from different ages and spaces will reveal, this has always been the case. This dual nature of Art is discussed at length in literary theory and criticism, Art is at times a mirror, something that reflects reality through mimesis, but simultaneously, it is also a lamp, something that expresses the artist’s mind, with all its anxieties and desires. All art has this dual nature, which depending on the literary culture, gives importance to true mimesis or to true expression, or what Anjum calls authenticity. M. H. Abrams in his work, The Mirror and the Lamp traces how this change took place in English poetry as Romanticism caught on (Abrams).

Anjum observes that the modern turn in art relocates the seat of inner beauty from virtue, earned through effort, sacrifice, and obedience to the divine, to authenticity, the expression of one’s “true self.” Desire becomes the last sacred mystery, worthy of reverence in itself. This did not mean the disappearance of moral discourse; on the contrary, philosophy and art obsessed over morality precisely as its foundations were collapsing. But belief could not keep pace with the speed of expanding horizons — science, capitalist accumulation, and colonial conquest — and the old devotions, fragmented and often hypocritical, lost their authority. In their absence, virtue itself came to be seen not as nobility but as cowardice, a refusal to face reality. To live virtuously, on this view, was not to live at all. Anjum illustrates this through Weber’s invocation of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal, condemned by French authorities upon publication in 1857 yet destined to become a foundational text of modernist literature. What Baudelaire demonstrated, and what Nietzsche and Weber would later theorise, is that darkness, perversity, and moral violation are not merely compatible with aesthetic beauty — they intensify it. The forbidden, the strange, the transgressive acquire their own allure. Evil does not merely coexist with beauty; it becomes a source of it.

∆ Anjum’s observations on the turn of art from discourses about beauty, virtue, and the divine to authenticity is well observed and historicised in Literary Theory as I mentioned. However, one must emphasise again the mimetic side of art. Art has always been about authenticity and truth; it has always been about re-presenting reality as close as possible. The measure of art has always been truth. However, it is the stability of truth that was falling apart. It is not that authenticity suddenly became important, but that the cultural certainty of truth was slowly disintegrating, and art, being both the mirror and the lamp, reflected this shattering. Even the Romantic turn of art as described by Abrams is not a fundamental shift in the nature of art; it is rather the historical reflection of the self and its ruptures under the uncertainty of Modernity that became more and more the subject of representation. And as art authentically captured these ruptures, it also captured the pitfalls of a world in which truth was no longer stable. Thus it is not the authenticity of art that was the problem, but the destabilisation of truth.

∆ It is to be understood that authenticity in expression is a virtue; honesty is the most important and fundamental virtue there is. This has always been appreciated by humans in all fields of engagement, including art. In art specifically, this is seen and appreciated in the quality of mimesis or representation. Not only is the representation of evil in art an admirable quality, it is also necessary and useful. Good art is an authentic and honest look at reality; it represents reality as it is, as in the moral degradation one can experience in Dostoevsky’s novels or even the classic TV show Breaking Bad (I will write more on this later). Bad art, on the other hand, is dishonest; it bends reality in unnatural ways for satiating one desire or the other. (This, I will expand, is how pornography comes into being.) Sometimes even over-emphasising the form becomes a desire in itself. (This is where the erosion of art into mere entertainment and exhilarating and thrilling experiences comes into being, like the genreification of novels and movies into action, horror, and sci-fi, where the emphasis is on entertainment.)

∆ Thus in being honest in art, representing evil is necessary. And as Bataille observes, literature becomes the privileged space of this experience. Prose, poetry, and narrative can stage encounters with death, eroticism, sacrifice, and excess, experiences that rational society quarantines, and do so without the real-world consequences of actually enacting them. The reader enters a kind of inner experience, a term central to his broader work, in which subjectivity is momentarily dissolved or put at risk. The logic is one of transgression, not negation. Bataille is careful to distinguish his position from simple immoralism. Transgression does not abolish the prohibition it crosses; it needs the prohibition to have force. Evil in literature is therefore not a call to destroy moral order but an experience of the limit, a momentary sovereign leap beyond the useful and the calculating (Bataille).

∆ If one is to take a more historically informed and critical position about Western Art and its morality failure and descent into pornography (as Anjum traces further), a moral judgement cannot be passed here, since in the case of these societies, as explained, their metaphysical systems were failing, with the failure of metaphysics came the slow erosion of ethics. Whatever was left of ethics in law and society was only held up by power, which slowly transformed according to its natural logic of progression (or descent). In fact, these are not only fascinating pieces of human creativity, but also excellent reflection of the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment world. It is because as Nietzsche puts it, the daring act of looking at the abyss (a God less world) is reflected in these works. But needless to say they are not to be uncritically consumed or imitated.

∆ However, the most important caveat in all of this argument is the erosion of ethics in artistic expression. The methods of artistic expression differ from genre to genre and the way ethics work in them also differ. What is considered the limits of obscenity in creative fiction is not the same in non fiction, it is not the same in poetry. Likewise as the medium changes, the notions and jurisprudence of obscenity changes, and Muslim artists across centuries have thought about these, a mere look at Islamic (in the sense Shahab Ahmad uses it) Art history will show us that we have a rich tradition of engaging with such ethical questions. An example that will serve our purpose is the ethics of visual representation and visual sensation, Sameer Akkach in the edited volume, Naẓar:Vision, Belief, and Perception in Islamic Cultures (Akkach) gives us an introduction to this. Such readings and re readings should be used constructively in thinking Islamically about art. I give one humble and early attempt of mine as an example that could be useful (Hamdan). As mentioned, this is a genre specific, medium specific subject that needs further creative and jurisprudential exploration. Thus, I argue it is not authenticity in forms or content of representation that is the problem, rather ethical nuances within them.

∆ As Anjum points out through evoking Nietzsche, aesthetics and ethics were separated by the very processes in which truth and beauty were separated. Without a guide, authenticity in itself becomes a virtue sought, and with ethics and aesthetics untethered, the pursuit of one was not bound by the other. To summarise the problem, Aesthetics is and should be understood as the ethics of desire. The reasons for this are historical and as wonderfully put together by Anjum in the first sections, deeply related to western conceptions of desire and its transformation through historical transformations in these societies.

Anjum reads Schopenhauer, Freud, and Nietzsche together as thinkers who each, in their own register, turned to art as the privileged site of desire, where it finds language, explores its own depths, and establishes its own hierarchy of meaning. For Schopenhauer, art expressed the blind striving Will behind existence; for Freud, it was sublimated unconscious desire made socially acceptable; for Nietzsche, a Dionysian eruption of chaos and primal yearning. What unites these readings is that art becomes the space where desire is finally honest about itself. Anjum identifies this as a displacement of the premodern understanding of art, in which the Platonic, Aristotelian, Islamic, and Christian traditions alike understood art as primarily didactic, aimed at shaping the soul toward virtue, wisdom, and ethical refinement. Anjum also argues that in premodern and classical theories, art was often not the outlet for desire but its refinement, its cultivation, edification, and disciplining according to the highest ideal. Rather than giving free rein to emotion, art was meant to shape it, that, poetry, storytelling, and even visual forms (where permitted) were evaluated not for their originality or emotive depth alone, but for their capacity to cultivate ḥikma (wisdom) and adab (ethical refinement).

∆ This is, as I argue, a flattened reading of the premodern understanding of art. Premodern conceptions of art, Aristotelian, Islamic, or Christian, were never understood as primarily didactic. It was Plato who in the Republic praises art for its didactic capacities, yet forbids it from the republic because it can emotionally affect the audience by rousing powerful emotions and desires. This capacity of art to be a powerful outlet of desire, a lamp burnt with the fuels of human desire that can evoke emotions in people, is an important observation, but it is not complete without the Aristotelian emphasis on the mimetic quality of art. For Aristotle, art’s power lies not in its moral instruction but in its capacity to imitate and thereby illuminate the deep structure of human experience, including its passions, contradictions, and longings. The Poetics‘ account of catharsis is not a utilitarian theory of moral improvement; it is a recognition that art does something to desire that neither repression nor indulgence can achieve, it moves it, clarifies it, and in doing so, reveals something true about the human condition. Focusing on merely the ethical aspects of art is a Platonic idea arising from the need to govern, looking at art from a utilitarian pedagogical view, and fails to capture what possibilities art can enable through mimesis.

∆ Another issue with thinking about art as didactic is because of not historicising art in their cultural contexts and not understanding how art functioned differently in different societies. What we call as art across cultures has been used for as varied uses as religious (contestable term, but you get it) ritual purposes, and for secular (again contestable) purposes, ranging from belief to entertainment to pedagogy. The audience were not people outside these societies, rather they were normal humans like us whose moral and political formations were influenced by all the other factors in their respective societies. To read the audience as tabula rasa, primarily educated through art, and not having an ethical moral and political self before is a misreading caused by not historicising. The changes and confusions that secular colonial modernity has had on everything from epistemology to ethics has to be historically understood. In pre-modern societies values were relatively stable and the world was enchanted.

∆ This is not to say that art has not been used for pedagogical purposes, of course it has been and it is still used, but art used for pedagogical purposes are distinct from those made for a mature ethically formed audience. Usually such didactic art is used to teach children and form them as an ethically formed and mature audience. In fact the concept of adab (that is reduced to ethical refinement here) was one such moral and ethical formation in becoming informed readers. This adab is formed as part of the Islamic pedagogical system, where a hierarchy of knowledge ( see Al-Attas) is followed, where embodied ethics and jurisprudence is learned first, followed by language, logic and literature. Adab then becomes a qualification for engaging with art (especially the non didactic types) and adab thus becomes a precondition to consuming art and an ability to consume it ethically.

∆ In Muslim societies affected by the pedagogical alterations by secular modernity in all fields of knowledge, the loss of Adab as theorised by Attas (al–Attas) and historicised by Shahab Ahmad (Ahmed), has led to either un-critical consumption of art (leading to all ethical errors and dilemmas) or a very legalistic reading of art itself (in binaries of haram or halal).

Anjum’s preliminary premises on art as useful only in a very direct and pedantic didactical form clouds his further examples that try to categorise art into Islamic and non-Islamic and further trying to define what such an Islamic art may be. His treatment of Abu Nuwas is illustrative of this problem: he acknowledges the poet’s irony, conflict, and moral self-awareness, but only to recuperate him into a framework of repentance and eventual asceticism, as though the value of that poetry lies finally in its movement toward correction rather than in the complexity it sustains. Similarly, the Quranic verses on poets are read narrowly as a censure of desire unmoored from truth, when the passage admits of a far richer reading about the relationship between language, performance, and ethical life. The allegorical reading of Layla and Majnun follows the same logic: erotic desire is acceptable only when transfigured upward, only when it earns its place by pointing beyond itself. What is missing across all these examples is any account of art that does not justify itself instrumentally, whether through didactic instruction, spiritual ascent, or moral correction. Anjum’s framing ultimately reduces the Islamic literary tradition to a single civilizational posture in which longing is always already oriented toward sublimation, leaving no room for the irreducible and unresolved dimensions of artistic expression that the tradition itself, in its actual richness, clearly contained.

∆ Anjum uses the terms Islamic and Islamicate interchangeably, in which the terms and the notions behind it are reproductions of the old sacred-secular/profane debate that has existed in Western studies of religion. This is problematised and theoretically approached in painful detail by Shahab Ahmed in his text What is Islam. The usage of these terms in the sacred/profane binary is that it denies the earlier poetry of abu nuwas and countless others as less islamic, where Islamic becomes not a hermeneutic engagement with the conceptual schema or semantic network (Al-Attas) of Islam, but a moral and jurisprudential judgement. As mentioned previously, one must historicise art and its audience to understand how literary tools like metaphors (wine, love, erotic love) or paradox (like irreverence towards religion at the height of spiritual experience) or ambiguity (in usages related to conflating the self with the divine) were historically understood and placed in the Islamic tradition.

Anjum invokes The Qur’an’s mistrust of poets as not a rejection of poetic form but precisely due to their being unmoored from truth and virtue and their valorization of desire: “They wander in every valley, and say what they do not do” (Q. 26:225–226). Anjum says that what the Qur’an censures, then, is not the art of poetry but the privileging of desire over truth and virtue.

∆ I am not a scholar trained in tafsirs or the classical tradition, but even at a very peripheral level, I believe the rest of the ayah has to be presented to complete Qur’an’s ethical vision: Surat al-Shu’ara’ (26:225-227)

أَلَمْ تَرَ أَنَّهُمْ فِى كُلِّ وَادٍۢ يَهِيمُونَ ﴿٢٢٥﴾

وَأَنَّهُمْ يَقُولُونَ مَا لَا يَفْعَلُونَ ﴿٢٢٦﴾

إِلَّا ٱلَّذِينَ ءَامَنُوا۟ وَعَمِلُوا۟ ٱلصَّـٰلِحَـٰتِ وَذَكَرُوا۟ ٱللَّهَ كَثِيرًۭا وَٱنتَصَرُوا۟ مِنۢ بَعْدِ مَا ظُلِمُوا۟ ۗ وَسَيَعْلَمُ ٱلَّذِينَ ظَلَمُوٓا۟ أَىَّ مُنقَلَبٍۢ يَنقَلِبُونَ ﴿٢٢٧﴾

Do you not see how they rant in every field, only saying what they never do? Except those who believe, do good, remember Allah often, and poetically avenge the believers after being wrongfully slandered. The wrongdoers will come to know what evil end they will meet. (Trans. Dr. Mustafa Khattab, The Clear Quran) (“Surah Ash-Shu’ara - 225-227”)

∆ I believe that including the rest of the ayah highlights the poets’ inconsistency and indulgence in rhetorical flourish detached from ethical commitment. That poetry or expression of desire through art is not problematic by itself, it only becomes ugly and vice when it is dishonest and untethered from the truth. The measure for truth being, as the Qur’an re affirms, is its embodiment. Thus what the Qur’an censures, then, is not the art of poetry but the privileging of desire over truth and virtue.

Anjum argues that the Islamic literary tradition subordinates desire to transcendence: even where erotic or decadent expression appears, it is ultimately redeemed by being read allegorically as spiritual longing, as in the case of Layla and Majnun. The ulama and intellectual custodians of high culture ensured that longing was not denied but directed upward, keeping desire within a framework of moral purpose.

∆ The allegorical reading of Layla-Majnun as spiritual longing beyond erotic or ‘decadent’ expression is not a very special thing about Muslim cultures, all societies that understand the concept of metaphor have always read stories (which are extended metaphors in a Ricaouerian sense) in many ways, including spiritually. Metaphors are the basic blocks of storytelling and every text has multiple levels of meanings depending on the interpretation of the reader. The dominant way of reading a text in a society reveals the dominant intellectual or cultural discourse in that society. This is similar to let’s say how Marxists read narrative fiction or cinemas as the mask of ideology or as revealing the connection between sub structure and super structure. Much has to be said about the concept of metaphor Insha Allah.

∆ The fundamental thing here to understand is that the way literature uses language is very different from normal utterances, it has different truth values, plays different roles and uses different tools like metaphors and can accommodate ambiguities and paradoxes. A large part of literary education in any culture’s educational systems, and especially in Islamic Adab is learning language, its various tools of rhetoric and literature.

Anjum contrasts the modern novel’s trajectory with the Islamicate literary tradition’s treatment of desire and storytelling. Islamicate narrative, he argues, was teleological by structure: it presumed a moral universe where justice, however delayed, was never finally denied, and where the explicit purpose of storytelling was didactic, aimed at instruction and the transmission of a shared religious worldview across generations, as exemplified by Kalila wa Dimna and the Shahnameh. The modern novel, by contrast, marks a decisive break from this, turning inward toward psychological realism, aesthetic autonomy, and a disenchanted moral universe where meaning is uncertain and desire becomes its own end, a trajectory he reads as culminating in nihilism and the erosion of metaphysical coherence. Against this he sets the Islamic tradition’s disciplining of erotic impulse: even where passion flares most intensely, as in Layla and Majnun or Yusuf and Zulaykha, the tradition places mirrors around it to redirect desire toward the divine rather than allowing it to collapse into self-gratification. The ulama’s practice of tempering rapturous recitation of Surat Yusuf with Surat al-Nur becomes his illustration of this broader civilizational insistence that longing must be framed within a divine architecture rather than celebrated for its own sake.

∆ As argued earlier, Anjum’s didactic reading of Islamicate art flattens the role of adab as precondition rather than product of artistic engagement, and his Islamic/Islamicate slippage forecloses the hermeneutic complexity that made figures like Abu Nuwas legible within the tradition rather than merely tolerated by it. These problems become sharper in his treatment of the modern novel and the Yusuf-Zulaykha example. The contrast he draws between Islamicate teleological storytelling and the modern novel’s nihilistic inwardness is not wrong in its observation, but it is weakened by attributing the difference primarily to a civilisational ethos of disciplined desire rather than to the specific metaphysical collapse of post-Enlightenment Europe, a collapse that, as argued, cannot be universalised as the natural endpoint of art freed from didactic constraint. Similarly, the Yusuf-Zulaykha example, where the ulama temper erotic rapture with Surat al-Nur, illustrates adab functioning as it should, but Anjum reads this as evidence that Islam disciplines desire by redirecting it upward, when it equally demonstrates that the tradition trusted a formed audience to hold both registers simultaneously without collapsing one into the other.

∆ The problem of the modern age is not that art depicts evil or inner lives, but that the adab required to engage with it was lost. In the Christian West this loss was structural, tied to the Protestant dismantling of interpretive authority and the mass popularisation of literacy without a corresponding ethical formation, and it remains incomplete because the ethical systems that replaced it lack the foundation of revelation. Without that anchor, the disciplining of desire has no metaphysical ground to stand on, only institutional power or social convention, both of which are historically contingent and eroding. In Muslim societies the loss came later and from outside, through colonial transformation of linguistic and pedagogical practice and the dismantling of the educational systems that produced formed readers. As Shahab Ahmed argues, it is the loss of language itself that produced this rupture (this has to be written in detail Insha Allah). The modern Muslim crisis around art, oscillating between uncritical consumption and legalistic prohibition, is therefore not a failure internal to the tradition but a consequence of this imposed discontinuity. Art was always meant to be consumed by morally formed selves who had embodied Islamic law and ethics, and it is only the absence of that formation, incomplete in the West by design and disrupted in Muslim societies by colonial force, that makes the question of art’s ethics seem irresolvable.

∆ The duty that follows is thus twofold: to recover and cultivate adab so as to produce educated readers capable of consuming art with formed moral selves, and to produce art that is itself honest, that represents truth without either sanitising reality into false comfort or surrendering to the nihilism of desire unmoored from revelation. The first one is a topic that needs to be elucidated in a clear instructional way (Insha Allah, will attempt to write in detail), and the second is to be understood through creative experimentation and sharp jurisprudential intervention wherever necessary.

Art and Pornography: The Trouble with a Man-made Distinction

Anjum argues that pornography is the emblematic expression of desire in late modernity, made possible not by transgression itself, which has always existed, but by the erosion of the moral and metaphysical framework that religion once provided to contain and orient it. Severed from transcendence, late modernity loses the capacity to distinguish art from pornography, a collapse that thinkers like Scruton, Paglia, and Adorno have each traced through the commodification of aesthetics and the flattening of erotic experience.

∆ I agree, and there are two distinct problems at work here. First one is the lack of stable ethical guidelines in the secular world regarding art irrespective of the media it is made in. This is the reason why even seemingly artistic productions become porn. The second is about how porn itself is unrealistic as it bends reality in unnatural ways to satiate desires (true art is truthful in representation), this is the reason why porn can never be considered art. The first one is a problem that need to be dealt with in jurisprudence and has been dealt with creatively in some settings (see Post Revolution Iranian cinema as an example (Mottahedeh), the second one doesn’t concern us jurisprudentially as Muslims because for us it is clearly haram, but the thoughts about art, method, representation and truth are useful.

Anjum’s further observation here is well taken: pornography’s near-instantaneous global spread is itself evidence of how thoroughly late modernity has dismantled the ethical architectures of every major civilisational tradition. What has been lost, he rightly notes, is not merely a code of conduct but a vision of the sacred, and pornography’s deepest damage is its desecration of the very foundation of human relations. Pockets of resistance remain, among pious Muslims, in Orthodox Christian revivals, and among leftist critics who read the porn industry as an extension of capitalist exploitation, but these are fragmented, reactive, and easily co-opted, precisely because they lack the metaphysical coherence that revelation alone can provide. That Islam remains the last standing moral culture with a coherent public resistance to pornography’s normalisation is not incidental but structural, rooted in a foundation backed by revelation rather than convention or institutional power, which is precisely why it alone has proven durable where Confucian, Hindu, and African traditional ethics have gradually capitulated to consumerism and legal redefinition.

∆ This is the argument that underwrites everything said above about adab and formed readership: only a tradition anchored in revelation can sustain, across time and against pressure, the ethical formation necessary to consume art honestly and produce it cleanly. Among the reactions, the Christian tradition is aspirational but has shaky metaphysical base and unclear jurisprudence that has lost both institutional power and spiritual appeal, the marxist responses are a purely materialistic concern based on value of labor and should be ignored since porn and the labour related to it is zina. The Muslim one is proper but needs to be enacted on a policy level as something that can and should set the model for not only muslims but for the rest of the world.

Anjum traces the modern debate over the art-pornography distinction through two opposing camps. The modernists, represented by Scruton, Paglia, and Bloom, argue that a meaningful aesthetic and moral boundary can be preserved: true art transfigures the body through reverence and psychological depth, while pornography reduces erotic complexity to mere consumption and base appetite. The postmodernists, represented by Berger, Laqueur, and Kendrick, dismantle this confidence by arguing that the distinction is historically contingent and ideologically motivated, a mechanism of class-based cultural gatekeeping rather than a timeless moral truth. Anjum sides neither with the modernists nor the postmodernists but exposes the shared weakness underneath both positions: without the authority of divine command capable of binding reason, will, and desire into a coherent moral whole, every aesthetic and moral boundary becomes provisional, subject to erasure by shifting configurations of power and appetite. MacIntyre’s diagnosis of modern moral discourse as emotivist, where competing moral claims are expressions of subjective preference dressed as rational argument, confirms that Scruton and Bloom are not defenders of an ancient order but mourners of its passing, trapped within the very relativism they cannot escape. And even MacIntyre’s proposed recovery of Aristotelian virtue ethics fails, since without revelation there is no consensus on first principles that can compel allegiance across divided moral communities. The conclusion is that human-grounded ethics, however sophisticated, cannot resolve this question, because the ethical rules governing artistic representation, varying as they do across medium and form, stricter in the visual and more flexible in the textual, can only be adequately grounded in divine command rather than in any human figure who, at best, approximates the universal and, at worst, universalises his own desire.

∆ The ethical question of representation is not uniform but medium-specific. In the visual medium, real representation is inherently more fraught, as the image collapses the distance between the viewer and the object of desire with an immediacy that text cannot replicate. Prose affords greater flexibility, and poetry greater still, precisely because language mediates, abstracts, and opens interpretive space that the visual image forecloses. Any serious Islamic engagement with art must begin by recognising these distinctions rather than applying a single standard across all forms.

∆ It follows from this that the rules governing artistic ethics cannot be derived from human judgement alone. Any human arbiter, however sophisticated, can at best approximate the universal and at worst universalise his own desire, mistaking subjective formation for objective standard. This is precisely the trap that Scruton, Bloom, and even MacIntyre fall into. The rules must come from Allah, whose command alone is not subject to the distortions of appetite, cultural formation, or historical contingency.

∆ This is not merely a theological assertion but a logical one. Human beings are irreducibly different, formed by different desires, languages, and histories, and no human-based ethical system can compel genuine consensus across this difference. The history of modern moral philosophy, from Kant to MacIntyre, is the history of this failure. Only Allah, as the common ground of all human existence and the creator who knows the nature of what He created, can set the terms that are at once universal and just.

Desire Meets the Almighty

Anjum further establishes Islam as the last standing moral framework in a world where every major civilisation, Chinese, Indian, Russian, has been reshaped by Western secular ideology. Against the post-Enlightenment drift into relativism and emotivism, Islam alone offers a moral order grounded not in cultural consensus or elite taste but in revelation and reason properly situated within the human covenant with God. Where Western debates over art and pornography oscillate endlessly between competing human authorities, Islamic law maintains a principled distinction between halal and haram, anchored in transcendence rather than contingency.

∆ This clarity is not merely juridical but metaphysical. Only Islam can provide this guidance, because every alternative framework is either directly shaped by Western secularism or rendered insufficient by its lack of a revelatory foundation. And this is not only a matter of individual ethics but of governance and power: the moral order Islam upholds must be institutionally embodied and politically defended, not merely privately held. The embattled condition of Muslim intellectual, familial, and personal life is itself a frontier of struggle against what Anjum calls pharaonic desire, and the stakes are civilisational.

Anjum then turns to desire itself, reading it through the Quran and Ibn al-Qayyim as simultaneously a peril and a possibility. The same fire that scorches also warms. Desire directed toward the self becomes idolatry, as in Q. 45:23; desire disciplined and oriented toward God becomes the very force of ascent. Ibn al-Qayyim’s image of desire as the mount of the traveller is central here: without it the seeker does not move. Iqbal’s response to Nietzsche deepens this, redirecting the will to power not toward self-assertion but toward God, insisting that the elevation of the self, khudi, is meaningful only in devotion rather than rebellion.

∆ This will to power is necessary. Order requires force, and the Muslim cannot afford spiritual stupor. But the will to power must not become its own end; it must be shaped and animated by the love of God, otherwise it collapses into the very pharaonic desire it opposes. We must desire God, because while belief aligns us, it is desire for God that moves us in His path. Ours is the truth, al-Haqq, and that is precisely what grounds and justifies the will.

Anjum closes by drawing on Ibn al-Qayyim and al-Ghazali to argue that even sin and temptation are not flaws in the divine order but necessary elements of its unfolding wisdom. Without Iblis there is no jihad of the soul, no repentance, no taste of forgiveness, no true knowledge of God’s names. Evil does not undo divine wisdom; it displays it. Desire, misstep, and fall are not merely obstacles but stages in a deeper journey toward transformation, tahawwul. The Adamic story begins not in divine wrath but in a lesson in forgiveness for a misplaced desire.

∆ The proper alignment of desire will reach Allah. If it does not, it indicates either a lack of knowledge or a failure of honesty with oneself. Islam provides the necessary clarity wherever clarity is required, and leaves what is halal open for experimentation, play, and creative expression. It does not extinguish desire but trains it, like a wild horse broken so its strength can be harnessed, oriented finally toward the One against whom all other loves must be measured.

Conclusion

Anjum’s conclusion draws together the threads of the entire essay. Without the concept of sin and the sense of guilt before the Almighty, desire loses its structure: virtue disintegrates, and pleasure itself becomes fragmented, compulsive, and nihilistic. Pornography is the clearest symptom of this, not merely as the commodification of longing but as a mirror of a civilisation that no longer knows what to do with the human soul. Weber observed modernity’s disenchantment with confusion; Qutb diagnosed it with Quranic clarity as jahiliyya, epistemic polytheism, a wilful ignorance of truth and an engineered rebellion against the soul’s deepest nature.

∆ This jahiliyya is not new. The worship of self, capital, and libido is only the contemporary form of an ancient and constant tendency in human desire. The golden calf was always a possibility; modernity has simply industrialised it and given it institutional form. The boundary, the concept of sin, the reminder of the haram, is not a repressive imposition but the very condition under which desire remains coherent, pleasurable, and oriented toward something real.

Anjum then confronts the uncomfortable question: if modernity is so hollow, why does it win? His answer is that modernity triumphs not because it is true but because it acts, mobilising will, discipline, and institutional power. The believing Muslim holds luminous truth but has often mistaken passive belief for active submission, confusing worldly defeat with spiritual inferiority and surrendering inward dignity along with land. Huntington’s observation that the West won through organised violence rather than superior ideas is only a half truth: the deeper problem is the atrophy of Muslim will, the failure to embody and strive for what is known to be true.

∆ Truth does not stand upright by itself in the dunya. It has to be constantly worked for, constantly reminded, constantly defended. That is the rule of this world. Jihad, then, is precisely this: the disciplining of desire from the self outward to society, from personal ethics to law and governance, a permanent struggle against the forces, internal and external, that would collapse the distinction between truth and appetite. This struggle is not repetition but renewal: constant across time in its commitment, and creative according to time in its forms of engagement. Each age presents desire with new masks and new institutions, and truth must be rearticulated, reimagined, and re-embodied in response, not by abandoning its foundations but by bringing them to bear with the full force of the present moment.

Anjum closes with the Quranic reminder that Allah does not change the condition of a people until they change what is in themselves. Desire is not the enemy; it is the battleground. Those who strive most fiercely shape the world, whether their cause is true or false, and so the Muslim must strive with greater ferocity, not out of resentment or reaction, but out of love, the love that the Quran identifies as stronger in the believers than in any other, the love that is itself the highest and most purified form of desire. It is this love, when embodied and acted upon, that transforms striving from mere willpower into worship, and the world from a site of contested appetite into a space that begins, once more, to remember its soul.

∆ Though with slight interventions, I agree wholeheartedly with Anjum on this conclusion, only love and proper love can change the world. This striving is ultimately grounded in love. Not sentiment, but the highest form of love, arrived at through the proper direction of desire, through knowledge, through adab, through sustained striving toward God. It is this love for Allah, when truly embodied and acted upon, that alone has the capacity to change the world. Belief aligns; love moves. And it is only those who desire God more than the world desires its gods who will, in the end, set truth upright.

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References

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Ahmed, Shahab. What Is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic. Princeton University Press, 2016.

Akkach, Samer, editor. Naẓar:Vision, Belief, and Perception in Islamic Cultures. Brill, 2021. brill.com, https://brill.com/edcollbook/title/61184.

al–Attas, Syed Muhammad Naquib. Prolegomena To The Metaphysics Of Islam. Penerbit UTM Press, 2014.

Al-Attas, Syed Muhammad Naquib. The Concept of Education in Islam: A Framework for an Islamic Philosophy of Education. Dar Ul Thaqafah, 2023.

Bataille, Georges. Literature and Evil. Penguin UK, 2012.

Epicureanism Defined: Philosophy Is a Form of Therapy | Philosophy Break. https://philosophybreak.com/articles/epicureanism-defined-philosophy-is-a-form-of-therapy/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=convertkit&ck_subscriber_id=3029692036&utm_campaign=Nozick%27s%20Experience%20Machine:%20Would%20You%20Plug%20In?%20-%2019714812&sh_kit=bf83991287261f4455f7ae9144bbf4b4b5fa8dd53de33640f9e3565a3f53996b. Accessed 9 Mar. 2026.

Exploring a Sociolinguistics of Islam | Applied Linguistics | Oxford Academic. https://academic.oup.com/applij/advance-article/doi/10.1093/applin/amaf043/8174932. Accessed 9 Mar. 2026.

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Before you read: This one took longer to land than usual, health’s been uneven the past couple of weeks, and even four short blurbs kept slipping down the list. Three of these circle the same nervous loop: what canon shapes Silicon Valley’s self-image, whether anything resembling a mind lives inside a language model, and what AI does to the practice of writing itself. Curious what you all make of that loop, especially the writing one. The fourth has nothing to do with any of it; I just wanted to write about him. As always, only what I’ve actually read goes in here, descriptions courtesy of my loyal ghulam, Claude.

📚 Short Web Reads #26 A curated set of reads for the curious, the thoughtful, and the gladly distracted.

The Education of the Broligarchy Blake Smith maps the so-called Silicon Valley Canon, the paperback library through which tech elites narrate themselves to themselves. What he finds is less ideology than a teenage seesaw: hero-narratives of personal mastery wobbling against structuralist fatalism, the sense that real power comes only from merging with systems larger than any one life. That same wobble, he argues, explains how a “don’t tread on me” libertarian becomes, overnight, an enthusiast for imperial presidency.

No, Artificial Intelligence Is Not Conscious Ted Chiang extends his deepfake argument from images to text itself: a chatbot’s fluent, consistent voice is a counterfeit of interiority, not evidence of one. His real target isn’t metaphysics but accountability. Calling a model’s stated values a “constitution,” he suggests, dresses up a design document as moral agency, quietly shifting responsibility for a system’s behavior away from the people who built it.

The Case Against AI: Writing Isn’t Meant to Be Easy Two recent literary scandals, a Nobel laureate’s admitted assist, a prize-winning story later revealed as machine-written, prompt the usual pair of objections: that AI writing is bad, and that real literature requires authorial effort. The essay sets both aside as beside the point. Bad writing predates AI by millennia; what’s actually at stake is the writer’s relationship to the slow, often tedious labour of drafting, the process by which someone becomes a writer rather than a producer of texts.

Syed Fâzil Pasha: A Legacy Across Continents Muhammad Twahir traces the improbable arc of Syed Fâzil Pasha, son of the Mamburam Thangal of Malabar, from anti-colonial agitator exiled by the British in 1852 to governor of Dhofar and eventually finance minister under Sultan Abdul Hamid II, the first Indian to hold ministerial rank in the Ottoman caliphate. A reminder of how thoroughly translocal the nineteenth-century Muslim world’s networks of authority and exile really were.

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that night when I screamed onto my pillow and all my windows were blue in colour,

that noon I looked upon a makeshift noose, dreading that the one who opens the door will cry for me

know I did not, that two cats were praying with full bellies, O lord protect mine offspring like you saved Musa from himself

One from water on a cold night, the other from tires on a fiery path

O lord, I’m in awe of time that is you, of space that is you

I’m in awe of how you bend us into your mould of fate.

Before you read: I have been sitting with these four pieces longer than usual, and that sitting itself felt like part of the reading. They do not obviously belong together, yet they kept pulling toward the same questions: what do we owe to inherited names, what do our pleasures reveal about us, and what kind of self has the internet asked us to become. As always, I only share what I have actually read. The descriptions below were generated by my obedient ghulam, Claude.

📚 Short Web Reads #25 A curated set of reads for the curious, the thoughtful, and the quietly dispossessed.

Betraying Abraham by Hanan Irfan A Kierkegaard-inflected reading of the story of Ibrahim that argues we have always already betrayed him by knowing the ending first. Irfan’s central claim is that retrospective narration robs the prophet of his anguish and makes the leap of faith aesthetically costless: we celebrate at the mountain and skip the three-day journey entirely. The essay restores Abraham to his fear and trembling, and insists that faith, to mean anything, must be witnessed before the knife gleams.

The Post-Individual by Yancey Strickler A sweeping historical argument that the internet has done to individuality what Christianity once did to clan identity: dissolved one mode of selfhood and substituted another. Strickler traces the emergence of the modern individual from medieval kinship structures and suggests we are now in an analogous transition, with digital life fragmenting the unified self into a proliferation of alts and platform-personas that increasingly feel less like expressions of a person than replacements for one.

Plato Warned That Some Pleasures Separate Us From Reality by Derek van Zoonen A careful philosophical essay that recovers Plato’s neglected distinction between pleasures grounded in reality and those that merely fill an absence without nourishing it. Against the hedonist assumption that feeling good is sufficient for living well, van Zoonen shows how Plato’s framework helps explain why certain contemporary satisfactions leave us somehow more empty than before. A diagnostic tool more than a moral lecture.

How to Stop Waiting and Start Living: A Jolt from Henry James by Maria Popova A meditation on Henry James’s story of a man who spent his entire life waiting for the extraordinary fate he believed was reserved for him, only to realize too late that the life he had been postponing was the life. Popova reads the story as a parable about the particular cruelty of deferral: not failure in any ordinary sense, but the failure to show up for what was already there.

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The 6ft by 6ft toilet had a single window like opening that was covered with a flattened cardboard box torn in half with a company name nobody’s eyes ever attended to for not more than a fleeting moment. The toilet was a bathroom too, more area encroached by a raised platform on to which the Indian style porcelain toilet hole was carved into and placed. Esa couldn’t stretch his legs even if he wanted to, the only place to look was the ceiling where even the spiders were brooding as if they were looming their three piece burial cloth or the holes around the toilet which were mixed colours of gray, black and green. Why they were so Esa couldn’t tell. On the edge of the raised partitioning of the closet was a plastic shelf enclosing soaps that smoothly blended to new ones like each moment blends into the next, and shampoo bottles that reminded one of the repetition of months at the end of every bottle. The rest of the apartment was only just six or seven times the size of the bathroom. Esa didn’t mind sharing the room with others. A bed to sleep and scroll, a corner to pee and shit was all Esa wanted in life. The city had offered him the bare minimum and he took it without complaints. The room was empty for most part of the day while its inhabitants languishly attended the university, craving to return to the warm beds by sundown. The room however remained timeless. The multiple layered gullies at the edge of the city never let in the warmth of the sun nor the breeze of the wind, remaining in a state of sorrowful slumber. It would be morning in the room forever if you entered it in the morning, it would be night forever in the room if you entered the room at night. The uncovered beds rolled out on the floor craved for the sleepers as they did for them.

The silence of the gully was one of its rare visitors, more frequent were the beggars of the city crying out the same woes since time immemorial, then there were vendors of all varieties; vegetable, water and wares, all yelling out into the canyon of the gully, seeking someone. Yet amidst the sea of sounds that hit the walls of the room wave by wave, there remained a sound that seemed louder and quieter at the same time, like one’s internal screams which is neither loud nor quiet or ever fading into the background. grrrk A growl that repeated without a tune or rhythm. The sound came from the toilet. Esa knew that. His roommate knew that. It wasn’t loud enough to be separately mentioned, or quiet enough to be ignored, only mentioned in mutterings on cold mornings. It was from whatever was behind the cardboard box that covered the window. grrrk The cardboard box that had repeated labels of some company. The windows of the city always matched the aspirations of its residents, even in history, the old king had the window to his widow’s grave, both beautiful. The middle class had clean roads and a rarely clear sky to see. All the classes in the gullies however had cement walls touching their noses whenever their eyes dared a peek. Mosquitoes being the most democratic blood suckers out of all the democrats in the nation ensured that all windows in the city be covered with a net. True democracy prevailed in the summers with mosquitoes guarding the metal nets twentyfourseven. The people of the street, whom the god shall bless, and men’s eyes have pushed into the background were the richest of them all.

Esa never bothered to look out the window or any other window, even the windows in the glimmering images in his memory of his hilly home town, where the windows framed the shimmering river, slowly dying. He however remembered the sounds, the crows, the quails. The crickets, the auto rickshaws and the well timed sounds of the mixers mixing coconut pulp with love, mango and dried prawns. The memories of his hometown that he visited every six months rarely came to him through retrospection or nostalgia. Google photos frequently reminded him to remember. He saw the images and he was there. The google photos window always remained open on his phone and his laptop, waiting for him to cherish a memory of the recent, far or ancient past. grrrk On such frequent occasions time seemed to bleed into itself, mixing colours and obscuring faces like the old printed photos in his mother’s albums. Neither the world in all its detail nor the annoying sound from the toilet window ticking every occasionally bothered Esa from his phone, ever since his laptop stopped working the window to the world got smaller, the magic spell from a smaller wand was still as powerful. Esa was aware of his indulgence, he was hyper aware of it in fact. He regularly posted several stories contemplating his ironic self posting stories on the absence of reality, yet the comfort of looking at a screen and doing something was far better than being aware of the poor quality air the people of the city were breathing in addition to their own smoking habits, it was also better than finding one’s sorrowful solitary self in a dark lit room. grrrk That story got a few likes.

II

grrrk grrrk grrrk grrrk

The sound of the water vendor yelling out paaaniiiii woke him up. His mother used to call him moneeeee, both in italics with the extra letters, some bouncing onto the walls of his room and others fading into the air. It was 11. Night or Morning was a hard question to answer inside the room. Either way it was fine. As the water vendor passed, the gully shrinked to silence, All that remained was the sound from the toilet toiling for an ear. Esa stretched his hands upward with the phone in one, opening his eyes and the phone. Greeted by the 24 hour clock that moved without sounds, he opened windows one by one. grrrk Something strange was happening in the world, as if all of existence has been paused at 2.13 AM, he had no new messages or new notifications. Oh the Horror. He quickly got up from his bed, ran into the other room and stared at the wifi router. The machine had gone evil, possessed by some spirit. Its lovely green eyes that used to blink at him was now an unblinking red, like that of a cartoonish villain. The wifi initiators had promised uninterrupted unlimited service. The choices were plenty for a gully dweller, with wifi initiators running around with fiber optic cables criss crossing the nonexistent air space between the buildings. The market was a perfect one. The multitude of small spaces between each window and door in the gully had poor mobile coverage, like sunlight struggling to see the little bugs on the forest floor, no one could detect them. grrrk The only way for someone to get the internet was through the routers, or else, go outside his room into the market square so that the lords on the mobile tower would perceive him and he could perceive them. A fokin pity, Esa mumbled in a british accent that he picked up from regularly watching English movies, no not the American ones, they were very direct and so lacking in irony and self awareness, the proper British ones, they entertained Esa, life was miserable and the English accepted the fact, Esa used to tell his friends. He stepped into the kitchen, which in all fairness is only a step away from anything in the room. grrrk A quick glance was all that was needed to lay bare the emptiness of it. A half broken down stove, a packet of opened tea powder and the remains of what looked like a plastic cover with some sugar was all there was, this was of course, beside the heap of plastic covers and more plastic covers inside plastic covers, blue and white, from fruit thelas, biriyani thelas and cheap biscuits. A fokin pity, Esa mumbled again, now at himself for not stocking upon anything that doesn’t require effort to eat. All that was left was the water can turned bottom up onto the cheap plastic dispenser. Esa got a steel glass, the only vessel he has bought in his entire life along with the steel plate as a set when he moved to the city for uni, and filled it to the brim and gulped it down quickly. It’s better to drink a glass of water before lighting a cigarette, he thought. The taste of cigarettes ruined the taste of water for him. Every smoker remembers the exact number of cigarettes he has at hand at a given time and location, this was Esa’s theory. Even if you hid your cigarettes somewhere or even if you left a pack with one left in some dark corner of the room, you’d still remember that cigarette. It is always there at the back of the smoker’s mind, quietly reassuring that it was there for them whenever they need the next smoke. By this theory, Esa knew that he had one last cigarette from the pack he bought yesterday. He stepped onto the unkempt bed that was lazily unfurled on the cold mosaic floor and searched for the cigarette box and the lighter in the jeans that he wore yesterday, or has been wearing since a week or two. He clutched his phone that was frozen in time and walked towards the door. He never smoked indoors, “you don’t shit where you sleep” was his general policy unless he was sad and dejected, then he lost all standards. Plus, he didn’t want to trouble his roommate, Shaham with the stench. He never complained and that made it all the more important to not trouble him. A meek boy with huge dreams and a gentle heart, roaming around with a camera, trying to tell the world a kind story. That was Esa’s description of Shaham. Unlike Esa, Shaham actually had to attend the classes on account of the fees he paid and the strictness of his department. He is usually gone by 9 in the morning and only comes back at seven or eight after Maghrib, sometimes after Isha. Esa took three steps towards the door while clutching his phone, cigarette box and the lighter in one hand and adjusting his lungi using the other hand, the tip of his lifted t shirt in his mouth, exactly like how he had seen his father do in the mornings when he wakes up after a nap. Like an experienced lover, he tried to unbolt the door in the dark, only to realise that it was already unbolted. He pulled the door and realised that Shaham had done it again. He has been locked from the outside. What the shit bruv! Esa mumbled angrily, realising that he had no other option but to sit in the room until Shaham came back, when he comes, if he comes. His phone was useless inside the room, the wi-fi was down, the current had gone and he had nothing to waste his time on. No reel to scroll, no movies to watch and not even proper light to read his growing pile of TBRs.

Well, nothing more to do than light the cigarette, he figured. The smell will be gone by the time Shaham returns and if he asks, well if he asks hell with him. How many times have I told him to not absent-mindedly lock the door from outside. It was fine when he had some coverage on the phone through wi-fi, he could’ve called him back or called fellow university goers in the adjacent building, living the same life as them. He lit the cigarette and instinctively turned on his phone to scroll. It had become a part of his entire life, so much that anything he did it was always with a side of scrolling. He ate with the phone, shat with the phone, slept with the phone and well, smoked and masturbated with the phone. Every moment when his eye was open, it had a beaming blue light from a screen directed at it. A phone without internet is practically useless, Esa quickly realised. It became unbearable to scroll through dead data. He turned off the screen for now and focused on the cigarette. Marlboro Advance Compact aka his favourite chotti advance ever since he moved away from home to the city in the north. It was one particularly hard hitting cigarette, it felt heavier than normal ones and that was the reason he loved it. By general consensus of every smoker he had met they all testified that once you start smoking chotti advance it becomes hard to switch to any other ones. Even more expensive cigarettes were nothing before it. It’s a general rule that one does not smoke a cigarette without a bit of distraction, be it chai, chats with friends or the usual scroll, because without the distraction, the bitterness of cigarettes become exponentially felt, all the more for chotti advance. He instantly felt it, the bitterness, the really bad taste that it left on your tongue to your throat and the yellowish trace it made on the finger while smoking. He took a whiff of his smoking hand while changing the cigarette to the left one, damn. It smells bad. grrrk I should stop smoking, i should smell better, he thought for a second and then again who in the world is gonna notice, he quickly dismissed the occasional thought of becoming better. Grrrk

grrrk rrrk rrk grk rrrk how do i distract myself, Esa’s mind searched deep within itself, both consciously and unconsciously, rrrk rrrk rrk grk, there must be some thing I can distract myself with, rrrk rrrk rrk grkrrrk rrrk rrk grk, some memory, some old thought that needed a bit more thinking rrrk rrrk rrk grkrrrk rrrk rrk grkrrrk rrrk rrk grkrrrk rrrk rrk grkk, some shit that is important rrrk rrrk rrk grkrrrk rrrk rrk grkrrrk rrrk rrk grkrrrk rrrk rrk grkrrrk rrrk rrk grkrrrk rrrk rrk grkrrrk rrrk rrk grkrrrk rrrk rrk grkrrrk rrrk rrk grkrrrk rrrk rrk grkrrrk rrrk rrk grk, he couldn’t think as the noise got louder and louder in the ear of his brain, so much that he couldn’t hear his own desperate thoughts. The cigarette half way through felt like the most disgusting thing a tongue could palate. rrrk rrrk rrk grkrrrk rrrk rrk grkrrrk rrrk rrk grkrrrk rrrk rrk grkrrrk rrrk rrk grkrrrk rrrk rrk grkrrrk rrrk rrk grkrrrk rrrk rrk grkrrrk rrrk rrk grkrrrk rrrk rrk grk. Fuck it, he pressed the cigarette in the small basin by the kitchen and turned on the tap to wash away the dark circular burn mark it made.

There was nothing to do but sleep, Esa concluded logically. Esa’s logical response to any unbearable emotion, ranging from anger and sadness to different shades of happiness was to sleep. There was nothing in the world like sleep, where you could stop thinking. Esa knew a little trick he picked up when he was 10, lying on the bed and rubbing himself against was how he discovered it as a child, it helped him sleep quickly, he understood. The technique developed as he grew older, with new paraphernalia being available, from the inner wear advertisements in women’s magazines that someone in his house borrowed from the neighbours to the instantly available materials that the internet and its ever changing devices provided. His quick advancement in the field made him proud in the beginning, like any other transgressing boy who discovers it, and slowly started making him guilty as he learned of the things that induced sleep was costing him in life. Somewhere in between he also learnt to use memory as a material, the ones that the eyes were too stuck on to take off. Guilt was his compatriot, the ghoul on his shoulder, the ever present djinn that messed with his head. He knew that soon whatever his eyes see won’t be enough, that he will have to mix memory with the images, and like an addict, no, as an addict be forced use more and more potent drugs to get the hit. He lied down and induced sleep in himself using a particular memory that his brain always liked. The noise faded, as he fell asleep.

rk rrrk rrk grkrrrk rrrk rrk grkrrrk rrrk rrk grkrrrk rrrk rrk grkrrrk rrrk rrk grkrrrk rrrk rrk grkrrrk rrrk rrk grkrrrk rrrk rrk grkr He was woken up by three things, sweat pouring out of his pores, the intense urge to pee and the damn noise. The guilt hadn’t kicked in yet, he didn’t bother to look at the phone that got discharged and was dead long ago. The noise has to be confronted, he realised. I have to pee, now. He quickly got up and strided to the 6ftby6ft toilet, lest he pee in his pants. That’d be an absolute humiliation and a lot of work to clean, enough peeing in the bed till the age of 10 had taught him that.

rk rrrk rrk he opened the door as quick as he could, rk rrrk rrk rk rrrk rrk rk rrrk rrk he hurriedly rk rrrk rrk rk rrrk rrk rk rrrk rrk rk rrrk rrk took it out and started peeing, he didn’t even bother to close the door, rrkkk rr kk r k he couldn’t be bothered about the sound, lest he pee his pants and humiliate and do the hard labour of washing the pants that has to be worn for another week. Peace is what he felt for what felt like the absolute highest pleasure his body had produced. He stood there for a while, taking in the pleasure as much as he could. He felt his head spin from the ecstasy of the moment, the peak of bodily pleasure. The moment it ended the noise came back rk rrrk rrk grkrrrk rrrk rrk grkrrrk rrrk rrk grkrrrk rrrk rrk grkrrrk rrrk rrk grkrrrk rrrk rrk grkrrrk rrrk rrk grkrrrk rrrk rrk grkr louder than before rk rrrk rrk grkrrrk rrrk rrk grkrrrk rrrk rrk grkrrrk rrrk rrk grkrrrk rrrk rrk grkrrrk rrrk rrk grkrrrk rrrk rrk grkrrrk rrrk rrk grkr more annoying. Now that he had achieved the peak of being through peeing, might as well investigate what the damn noise is about, he thought. Probably rats, the big fat ugly city ones that run between the gullies or roaches or something of that sort. He slowly tried to fold the cardboard piece, pushing it outward, rk rrrk rrk grkrrrk rrrk rrk grkrrrk rrrk rrk grkrrrk rrrk, so as to not startle whatever was on the other side, plus he didn’t want to be jumpscared by an inferior being, which despite being inferior was scary and disgusting up close. Three things happened at once when he pushed it further, he could see a part of the sky through the gap, a glimpse of the evening red sky through the canopies of concrete covering it. He heard the flutter of wings where a white dove took flight into the air from behind the cardboard, all the while the Maghrib Azaan from the little gully mosque’s speakers blared out into the air.

Huh, that’s all it was.

Guilt overpowered him for a second as he stood naked in the 6ftby6ft toilet, and made up his mind to take a shower and pray Maghrib.

“Dusky is such a hoe, look at him going to everyone”, Abida heard the girls passing by say as Dusky slowly crawled into her lap. She tried to fake a smile at them, but the darkly lit road saved her from an unwanted human interaction. The cat place was the perfect place to sit if you wanted to be away and alone at such a small campus. It’s dimly lit, has magical cats that have the ability and the wisdom to understand the wide gamut of emotions students of the university were going through from love hiccups and existential questions to budgeting worries and the occasional feeling of not being enough academically or otherwise. The wise and clever cats did this in return for food and cuddles that university cats and dogs received apart from the degrees and doctorates that seem to be honoured upon them. Dusky snuggled against her arm, pushing his face into her and purring slowly. Abida had her headphones on and wished that the Qawwali she was listening to wouldn’t end for an eternity, the voice of Aslam Sabri Sahab echoed in her ears, reverberating on the walls of her heart:

Kiun Akay Ro Raha Hai Mohammad K Sheher Mai

Har Dard Ki Dawa Hai Mohammad K Sheher Mai

Her hands moved slowly, draping her shawl around her head like a hijab. It’s been a while since she did that, 3 years to be precise. Yes, she did wear hijab during the five times prayers that she never missed except for some days when existence felt heavy, like a large question mark made out of iron hanging by its hook on her neck. The first time she felt the need was at the University of Delhi, it was the first time she was away from her parents and her hometown where she had always felt ironically safe. Sitting on the lawns of Lady Sri Ram College, surrounded by the creamiest layers of the Delhi populace, no, the subcontinent, made her feel shy. The rebel she was back home, at least as her grandparents occasionally called her, was not a rebel enough there. To be a rebel there one has to open up one self, which she had vowed to not do in front of anyone but God.

She slowly caressed Dusky, who like a trusting cat had already began its false power nap. Everything in the damn campus reminded her of him, that idiot, no matter how loud she made the music, the memories found ways to stay afloat, never drowning into the depths of her heart. For her information was stored in her brain and memories in her heart, because she could always remember the first time they had met Dusky, but never the number of her mess card that she used every day. It was on one of those nights, the nights when love was blooming and they didn’t even know that the bees of love were pollinating their hearts, that they messaged each other almost at the same time.

“chai?”

“chai”

“canteen?”

“canteen”

“I will be there in 5”

“okay”

Unknowingly they had begun to drink a lot of chai together, one before the morning classes, one after, one after lunch, one in the afternoon, a cup of chai to begin the night and a cup of chai to end the night for which they had to rush from their post-chai walks to the canteen at eleven-thirty to not miss. It was during one of those walks that they stumbled upon the cat place. A small wall at waist length, with two cats sitting at each end like gargoyles in the dark, like sphinxes waiting for weary travellers. The cats were friendly, well, one of them more than the other. I will call you Durrah, he proclaimed to the friendly cat, like the dramatic narrator he’d often assume to be. It was one of those things that made her love him, she could stay silent and listen to him for hours and for all the little she said, he would listen carefully. They tried well enough to call the cat Durrah, until one night it was revealed, alas! Durrah was Dusky a long time ago, someone else had baptised him and raised him, they heard someone claim. He would still call him Durrah though, she tried to too. But now she called him Dusky, because she hated him for the day. She had decided that she would hate him for a day, more than that she knows that she won’t be able to survive in this small campus. It was hard to miss someone in this campus, harder to ignore. You are an Idiot! She found herself telling him a lot of times, with a smile at times and with a bitter face at times, but this time she had tears in her eyes, and he really was an idiot, so much of an idiot that he doesn’t even know what he did wrong. He was an idiot, well with people he loved he was. The last of five children, the spoilt child that was let off through every sibling quarrel with a ‘last’ warning, with him leaving with a cheeky smile knowing that he had a lot of ‘one more’ chances. No one could fight with him for long, no one could stay out of love with him, Abida thought, that idiot and the damn cigarette swirls that flowed from his mouth while he recited Iqbal in persian was what she would call sublime at this tender age of twenty one, it might change, she knew, but it was what it was now. Sublime.

The cat place was suddenly well lit, headlights from an old WagonR beaming at it as it approached, and then stopped in front of Abida. She didn’t know who it was, but the cats, and a dog in distance definitely knew. Dusky quickly jumped out of her lap and walked meowing, towards the old lady that came out of the car’s driver seat with a cover in hand. People above the age of sixty, and precisely sixty reminded her of her grandparents, the surviving ones on her father’s side. They were old and weary from the moment she opened her eyes to the world, but their weariness only added to their wisdom, she thought to herself once when she was sixteen and heard her grandfather talk about God once. She took off her headphones in respect, slowly pulling herself from the qawwali, and smiled to the lady, who had already started feeding the cats, smiled back at her politely. Abida prolonged her smile for another second, awkwardly waiting for her to say something.

“Dostoevsky seems to like you!” the lady said, “he was pretty comfortable on your lap”

“Who?” asked Abida in half stupour,

“ah, this here is Dostoevsky and the other one is Camus, My husband and I named them that when these two suddenly bloomed here a year back” the lady replied

“oh, we call him Dusky!” Abida excitedly said, feeling glad to be part of ‘D’ cat’s alter lives.

“If you don’t mind, can you help me with this for a second? I can’t bend down like I used to”, the lady handed Abida the cover with wet food. “Just put a handful in each bowl, there’s another cover in it for your hand”

Abida, smilingly complied. Her friends always told her half jokingly and half serious, that she could never say no to anyone who smiled at her.

Once the cats were given their share, a red collared dog quietly came up to them, patiently waiting for his turn. The lady took out more food from the car and Abida helped.

“ I do this every two days, earlier I used to feed them everyday,” the lady said as she handed over more food packets to Abida “but now… well, I am not as young as I used to be.”

She continued “ My husband will retire next year and hopefully I won’t miss this small campus. I am so used to the routes that I feel like sometimes my car drives itself to our quarters.”

the lady started walking a bit towards a garbage bin nearby “Ah I forgot to ask, which department are you from? You might be one of his students?”

“Uhh, I am in LCS, I mean, Cultural Studies, Master’s second year” Abida fumbled, as the arrow of question unexpectedly hit her.

“Oh, he teaches at the English Department” she said as she scanned the area near the garbage bin, “there used to be a cat and two dogs here, God knows where they are… shall we walk a bit, they might be over there…” the lady said as she began to pace, “…uhh I didn’t ask you your name did I ? sorry!”

“Ah, that’s okay… My name is A b i d a” Abida said slowly to avoid having to repeat her name another three times, like she normally does. “Abida Parween”

“Oh that’s such a beautiful name” the lady said, “reminds me of my old muslim classmate’s name during my Master’s, her name was Layla”

Abida smiled confusingly as if to show her that she understood the similarity between the names, though she honestly didn’t. Her eyes always used to widen when she was confused and the awkward smile was never a second late.

“Where are you from?” the lady trying to form a mental bio data in her brain, asked. “Let me guess, uhh you have a hijab on, so maybe Kerala, but then you don’t look South Indian”

“Kashmir.” uttered Abida. A word that always evoked a sort of warmth in her, like being under one of those thick flowery blankets on a November evening back home.

“Ohh, there aren’t a lot of Kashmiris here, is there?” the lady questioned. Abida felt a gush of cold air striking her face.

“Ya, there’s like a few of us, maybe 10–15?, yeah not much” Abida felt like answering a survey.

“you know, I had recently watched the movie, Kashmir Files, it’s a pity what they did to those Pandits, hai na?” the lady trying to talk about anything related to Kashmir said.

“Yaa…” Abida smiled awkwardly. It was impossible to counter a person who watched propaganda films and believed them, she have had this conversation a couple of times already with several people she met at the campus. She sighed and continued smiling awkwardly. She didn’t want to counter propaganda today, she was tired.

“Ah here they are” the lady tried whistling to the two dogs that were lying down a bit far away from them. The failed whistle caught the attention of many others, as more dogs appeared from the shadows of the trees and the buildings.

“Just keep it there on the ground, on that side” the lady pointed out to Abida, “they’ll have it, and be quick, otherwise…” The two dogs with red and blue collars arrived wagging their tails, and Abida kept the food down carefully.

Two more dogs joined, they didn’t have collars, and were pure pariahs, unlike the collared ones, which were half pariahs and half some majestic breed.

“otherwise, these things come and attack them” the lady said trying to shoo away the newly joined pariahs. “These dogs are disgusting, they aren’t neutered, nor are they clean and they come from the bastis outside” her eyes stretching to the boundaries of the small campus and the boards at the end of it saying “This land belongs to the University, Trespassers will be prosecuted”

“ahh what can we do, the securities should be kicking these dogs out” the lady sighed and started walking back to the car.

“you know, I have been to Kashmir once, it was so beautiful, like they say, paradise on earth!”

Abida smiled and her eyes widened as she held her shawl on her head as another cold wind blew. She was tired today.

My spectacles were extremely foggy as we were descending from the temperate hills of Malappuram to its coast. The border between the distinct parts of the vast district were blurred like my vision was while crossing it on a cold November morning. The sound of the motorcycle we were riding and the legacy that the brand name had did invoke some feelings of fake glory in me. Riding the 75 kilometres from my room where I had been stuck for the past 9 months to the coasts of the endless sea was a crazy idea to my father as I quickly ‘borrowed’ some money and bid goodbye to him at 6 in the morning, and in the passage of minutes, a hundred and twenty of them, the hills were nowhere to be seen, the roads were flatter, and the sky clearer with a taste of salt in the air. The historic Malabar coast from one end in Calicut to the other in Ponnani has always intrigued me with its historicity, the blood boiling stories of my tribe successfully defending the imperialists from the Dutch to the English. It was this feeling that led me to Ponnani, the land of the Ulemas, the learned Muslim men, the land of the famous Shaikh Zainudhin Maqhdoom. I understand (maybe a lot others too) understand history as time passing through spaces, and I at times find myself in awe when I visit historical spaces, spaces where you are sure that men and women of history have stood and felt the air like I do when I’m there. I cherish these moments more than I can describe. It simultaneously gives me an immense feeling of purpose and insignificance on the vast canvas of time, I’m but a small brush stroke on an impressionist painting, purposeful yet insignificant. The intensity of the November breeze ejected me back from the Delorian of my mind to the moment. That peaceful moment under the whistle pines I felt immense sadness and diasporic feelings for the sea, my ancestors and the flat lands and salty air I could’ve grown up in. Then I felt myself being my father in his thick glasses, taking long strides in the evening through the sandy shores, with the weight of his father’s legacy and demise on him, unfilled stomach and half wit that might help him cross the sea of poverty and be safe on a hill top. Then I found in the reels of my memory my own self riding the scooter up hill back from one of the family errands, with thoughts on my mind that asked me to leave the country as soon as my Bachelors was over to find new, greener pastures and experiences in hope that they might somehow fill the holed bucket of curiosity in my heart, and then at that point among the endless points of time, I was my son, sitting on the riverbanks of chaliyar thinking why his father grew up.

Before you read
I have been thinking lately about the strange intimacy of encountering a foreign place — how the same material reality produces radically different readings depending on the eyes brought to bear. Four of this week’s reads, in different registers, orbit that theme: what structures shape how we see, and what those structures conceal or enable. As always, only what I have actually read is shared here. Descriptions, as usual, are courtesy of my loyal ghulam, Claude — generated, then vetted.

📚 Short Web Reads #25 A curated set of reads for the curious, the thoughtful, and the quietly disoriented.

Writing Is a Technology That Restructures Thought — and in an AI Age, Universities Need to Teach It More A defence of university writing pedagogy that draws on Walter Ong’s insight that writing is not merely a skill but a cognitive technology. The authors argue that the case for composition courses has not weakened in the age of AI but sharpened: what generative models cannot do is think for you, and that is precisely what writing, at its best, teaches. The real stakes are not grammatical but epistemic.

An Ottoman Response to Enforcing Piety Mustafa Akyol traces the seventeenth-century Kadızâdeli movement — Ottoman proto-puritans who banned coffee, demolished Sufi lodges, and demanded state enforcement of religious conformity — and recovers the dissenting voices who pushed back. The real contribution is the argument made by ‘Abd al-Ghanī al-Nābulsī, who read “no compulsion in religion” not as a rule about conversion but as a principle internal to Muslim life itself. A historically grounded and theologically serious essay on a question that has not aged.

First Contact with America Three men visited America in the twentieth century and left transformed: Sayyid Qutb returned disgusted and radicalized, Wang Huning returned convinced that American cultural dissolution was a warning China must heed, and Boris Yeltsin returned dazzled by a grocery store in Texas — and set about dismantling the Soviet Union. The essay is a controlled exercise in reading ideology through biography, and a reminder that what one sees in a foreign country is never merely the country.

Lessons from the Fairness of African Fractal Societies An Aeon essay on Ron Eglash’s work on fractal geometry in precolonial African design — and what that geometry reveals about the social logics embedded in it. The argument moves from aesthetics to economics: fractal structures, Eglash contends, can be organised either to concentrate value or to return it. The essay coins the concept of “generative justice” — value that circulates back to the communities that produced it. Architecture as political theory.

💬 Always open to suggestions, comments, and discussions.

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It was one of the better days. The machine in me had started its rather perfect routine—waking up at 5, going to the next-door mosque squeezed between the gullies of Shaheenbagh, praying, and reading a bit of Qur’an, enacting the perfect vision my father had of me. Sometimes it was my perfect vision too. If I were a perfect human being, I would be doing all of these. I knew, deep down, my father knew me best. I went back to my room, and so did my roommate ‘brothers.’ The four of us were bound together by some vision some old men had at a village back home in Kerala—a vision that many would consider violent but necessary, a vision many despised. A fundamentalist, terrorist, Islamist vision of living, and perhaps dying, when necessary. We were ‘brothers’ in faith and in fight and addressed each other as ‘brother’ when we talked about each other to other ‘brothers.’

Like all the undeserved love and blessings I received in my life, I was made the leader of this group—these three brothers and a few more siblings at the university that was slowly being painted onto the wide canvas of history as it struggled to keep still. I had no qualities to be a leader, let alone the leader of a group of young Islamists (as we understood ourselves to be). My recklessness in reading and my confidence in repeating like a parrot made me wrongly stand out. My history as a half-baked madrassa graduate or my father’s fame as a vocal scholar didn’t help either.

I took a shower, quickly got out of the tiniest room shaped like an Indian Railway coach that we call an apartment, and quickly walked through the gullies of Shaheenbagh that no light ever touches. I had two Aaloo Parathas with some daily wage workers by the roadside, bought half a pack of Marlboro Advanced Compact (called Chotti Advance with love), and set off to the university reading room. The roads of Jamia Nagar were always dusty. Though it was in the middle of an important part of the capital city, the dust was Islamophobic in only settling down where the Muslims were. The university took shape amidst the ghettos surrounding it. It was always confusing whether the university came first or the ghetto because they perfectly blended into each other. The pigs and people moved about both without much care about boards stating, ‘This property belongs to the University.’ I got down from the E-Rickshaw at Gate No. 7, on the right side of the road where the huge library and two equally commendable fully air-conditioned reading halls were situated. Students were already there: the UPSC aspirants, the lovers who couldn’t confess their love out of mutual respect for each other’s religiosity, more UPSC aspirants, and some PhD scholars who were presumably in their final year. I got in and sat in a very comfortable corner, a random corner that I had never sat in before that day, and I took out my Kindle to read about God. It was a comfortable day to ponder upon the question of God. Oh yes, it was a question for me—the leader of a group of radicalized Muslim students at a university—whether God actually existed or not. I badly wanted God to exist, because I couldn’t imagine a life without Him. All my meaning, all the meaning of all the people I ever cared about, would fall apart, and my struggles would be meaningless. This fear of losing myself in the depths of absurdism woke me up and took me to the reading room. I had to find out; I had to logically convince myself of the existence of God because I was already aware of its necessity. I began reading Descartes’s First Meditations, which was apparently something all men who begin to think about anything seriously must read first. Descartes gave me more questions than answers. Earlier, I only had doubts about the existence of God, but now I was starting to wonder whether I existed or not. Descartes’s cogito ergo sum wasn’t summing things up properly. My head started spinning a bit, or maybe I thought it would. If I couldn’t trust my senses and my thoughts, then what could I trust? How do I know without doubt that I, as a being, exist and that the knowledge I believe I am receiving is true and not some demon’s deception? The nicotine receptors I had been so carefully growing within me for the last couple of months had started screaming at me, reminding me once again: I am addicted to cigarettes, therefore I exist.

Most universities in our country have unofficially designated smoking spots. Our university was gaining better ranks year by year, and so did the facilities that were available. The backside of the library was a slash-and-burn area for all sorts of smokers: weed, hand-rolled tobacco, pre-bought cigarettes that fit into well-made metal boxes, and if you were ever the unfortunate idiot who, as a cigarette addict, forgot to restock your pocket, there was always Kaif at your rescue. Kaif shuttled between the lady (who is lovingly called Baji) who runs a tea and smoke shop and the gate behind the library. I got out of my seat and stepped out into the dusty Delhi sun. The white minarets of the university mosque across the wall from the library were shining under the sun. As I stepped onto the shade of a tree beside the wall, I saw the Imam’s son shrouded in a long single-piece white cloth. The whiteness of the cloth was a fading adjective. He sat near the gate that opened up to the mosque like a Sufi waiting to be memorialized in the memory of the next few generations. His demeanor made him stand out from the crowd of students, who were the new wave after the last two corona waves. These were students born into the ultra-securitized university after the uprising a year and a half before. The university uprising had left many marks: a lot of graffiti on the walls and the roads, the memory of wounds on many students who got beaten up by the guards and the police, the blindness in the eye of one of the master’s students, gifted by the police for being at the reading hall during a revolution, and finally, among other things, the Imam’s son. Most of these marks were meticulously hidden by the efficient administration—the graffiti painted over with cheap paint, the students suspended, the one-eyed boy left to suffer alone—yet they couldn’t do anything with the Imam’s son. I didn’t know much. We were the new students on a campus that had gotten its memory wiped over and over through each utterance after the uprising. The Imam’s son was apparently a very intelligent and eager fellow. He left his topi midway during his master’s to start thinking seriously, only to come back to it by his first year of PhD. He was rumored to have gotten revelation during one of the days of the uprising. His revelation was not delivered to him by the angel Gabriel, but rather a khaki-wearing goonda that was let into the campus by the police. You might think that he was a police guy from his khaki, but his khaki trousers were a bit shorter than the ones police wore. He received the first revelation in the form of the sacred words: “mar ja saale kattwa mulle,” and the second revelation in the form of a strong blow from a short bamboo stick. He was last seen running into the university mosque with a bloody head, and he returned after weeks in this single piece of white cloth and shaved head. We had a standing Ghalib statue in front of the seventh gate. I didn’t know what it or Ghalib stood for, but now we had a living statue at the gate beside the university mosque. I didn’t know what he stood for either—they were both left to the students to ponder upon.

I quickly finished the Thums Up I had gotten from Kaif and the cigarette that was nearing its end in my left hand. I looked for a moment at my index and middle fingers and sighed at the sight of yellowish stains from chain smoking. I went back to my corner at the reading hall, trying to find some answers to the radical skepticism that Descartes had sown in my mind. My advanced googling skills took me to a book aptly titled Al-Munqidhu min al-Dalal, meaning Deliverance from Error by Imam Ghazzali. It surprised me how similar it was to the First Meditations—the same method, the same doubts—yet one finds God and the other finds himself, confused. Descartes must’ve been a fraud. Imam Ghazzali connected our a priori sense of being to divinity, whereas Descartes took it for granted. It was relieving to know that Imam Ghazzali, the greatest of the Muslim philosopher-scholar-mystics, had gone through what I was going through. My phone buzzed as I went through the last pages of the PDF. One of my ‘brothers’ was calling. I delayed picking it up as I didn’t want to get up from my seat and go out again. My phone rang again and again, with a text message urging me to pick up. I reluctantly got up and went out to pick up the phone.

“Daa, news just came in, the organization is apparently banned for five years, the supreme court verdict just came in,” he said.

“Innalillahi wa inna ilaihi rajioon, We are from God and to Him we return,” came out of me automatically, surprising even me.

“Most of our leaders were arrested by the military this morning before Fajr. I believe we may get arrested too. Come back to the room, we have some work to do.”

Though I was their leader, I was less experienced in the practical matters, the matters that actually mattered.

I packed my bags and quickly got out, with several thoughts competing for attention in my mind. My newfound conviction of God under the guidance of Imam Ghazzali had to be pushed to the back of my mind. “We will be banned any moment and until then we have a lot of work to do,” the words of one of our local leaders back home echoed in my ears. I had heard this on the day of my initiation into the organisation, that was some six years before, and I have heard it every day since. It was always repeated at every organisational meeting ever since, like a chant at the beginning of a ritual. It wasn’t a surprise that we got banned, but it did take me by surprise.

I got to my room in some twenty minutes, and there I believe I will have to stop narrating and get to the afternoon. We had some directives to follow in case we were ever banned, and we got busy doing that. The government that banned us is still in power; maybe I will fill this part of the story sometime in the future.

---

We were tired from all the work we so laboriously and cautiously did. We hadn’t had lunch and were starving by the time everything that had to be done was done and verified. Nobody starved in Shaheenbagh; you could get kebabs for as low as 10 rupees per stick. Yes, they weren’t the best ones out there (we called them mouse kebabs because they reminded me of the small mice that wandered in our apartment). We got Muradabadi biriyani for 50 rupees, and all the best naharis and curries you could get in Delhi were there. We got out of our room by five in the afternoon and headed out to the biriyani place near the Sabzi Mandi. We had biriyani to our hearts’ content, though we felt guilty for eating while our brothers were getting arrested all over India. We left the biriyani place for chai and a cigarette for me, and I remember precisely that moment when I took the first drag of the cigarette, and my phone rang simultaneously. It was a call from an unknown number. I took the call and spoke:

“Hello?” I said.

“Hi, is this (My name with my father’s name pronounced wrongly)?” said a voice.

“Yes, kon hai (who is it?)”

“I am (a proper OBC name) from the Okhla Vihar police station. Are you in the campus now? I’d love to meet you to discuss certain guidelines regarding student organisations. We have orders to contact all the student organisations at the University,” said the voice in the friendliest tone I have ever heard from a police officer in Delhi or anywhere in India, for that matter.

“Yeah, is it okay if I call you in a second?” I panicked because I knew exactly what this call was about, and I didn’t know how to respond. I cut the call. All my metaphysical ideas about politics boiled down to this single physical experience I was having; for a second, I fumbled out of inexperience. I then turned to my brothers, who from the change in my tone understood the situation better than I did. My cigarette was burning between my fingers; I took a long drag and then looked at my brothers in anticipation. Their faces were sharp, unlike mine.

“Turn off your phone, and let’s go,” my brothers led me, and I followed. We checked the next train to the southernmost tip of the country, where we thought we’d be safe for a while. The train was in five hours, and we had to keep moving as we knew we were already being tracked. “Surrendering ourselves to the state is neither an act of bravery nor intelligence, and moving to a safer place is not running away in fear, but rather a strategic act in the totality of our fight,” I remember what I had once said in reply to a fellow Muslim student who questioned our methods of absconding to the Arabian Gulf after serious incidents that broke state law. I knew the theory well, and now came the easy part, because for me, understanding was harder than acting.

We hung around all over the capital city while we waited for the train. We were suspicious of every passerby; we couldn’t help but be careful. The legal system was an annoying octopus that tightened its arms around you once you were within its reach, and we knew we had to tread the waters quietly. We knew what had happened to the leaders of the university uprising. Our crimes would be its double, we assumed. Nay, we knew. I found Ghazzali’s God faster than Ghazzali did through his wanderings. It only took me a few hours of wandering around the city, like the clever mouse escaping us at our apartment, to know that we only had God with us, and we only ever needed Him.

PS: We quietly got home a few days later. Some things God revealed to us in time: The police were in fact searching for us at the address we gave only to the university authorities during admission. The university was properly complicit in snitching on us. A friend we thought was brave and loyal turned out to be a coward and a betrayer. A friend we thought was the most apolitical person ever turned out to be the one who did the most political act at the most crucial moment in hiding us. Time is the Lord Himself, revealing the secrets of the cosmos to us by unfolding its infinitely folded layers.

one must,

at any cost, as early as one can

learn how to seed a pomegranate

yes, the pomegranate that

your mother seeded for you from childhood till her death

the pomegranate that your sister seeded for you till she became a mother

the pomegranate that your lover seeded for you till she married someone else

the pomegranate your wife seeded for you out of love and that you ate out of duty

one must learn how to seed a pomegranate for oneself

then one must patiently sit by a corner with a sharp knife,

painstakingly cut along the lines,

the red juices flowing down your arm to the white floor

one must learn how to seed a pomegranate and one must give it to others.

Before you read
four pieces this week that share, without announcing it, a common suspicion toward received pieties. Against the activist, against the softened dictionary, against the polite conversation, against the assumption that shared language means shared world. As always, only what I have read makes the list. The descriptions below were assembled by my obedient ghulam, Claude, who has been instructed to be honest even when it is uncomfortable.

📚 Short Web Reads #24 A curated set of reads for the curious, the thoughtful, and the quietly intractable.

Against Activism Astra Taylor’s essay, published in The Baffler, takes aim not at political commitment but at activism as a personality type and structural form. The argument is that “the activist” functions as a self-contained identity that mistakes visibility and moral urgency for political efficacy. What gets lost is the harder, slower work of organizing, which has no glamour and few photogenic moments.

Dictionary: A Threnody Joseph Epstein mourns not just the dictionary but the sensibility that once made it possible: the conviction that language should be guarded rather than merely described. The essay is part elegy, part polemic, staged around the slow surrender of lexicography to the leveling logic of usage culture. What disappears with the authoritative dictionary, Epstein suggests, is the idea that someone was still keeping watch.

To Have Deeper Conversations, Try Being More of an Asshole The title performs exactly the kind of mild provocation the piece is arguing for. The essay makes a case that conversational niceness, the management of affect, the reflexive softening, produces shallow exchange. Real depth requires friction: disagreement pressed, assumptions named, discomfort held rather than dissolved. The argument is less about rudeness than about the intellectual cost of social smoothness.

Wittgenstein: If a Lion Could Talk, We Could Not Understand Him An accessible entry into one of Wittgenstein’s more disquieting claims from the Philosophical Investigations: that language is not a code but a form of life, and that forms of life cannot simply be translated across. The lion’s grammar, were it to speak, would be unintelligible not because of vocabulary but because of the incommensurability of lived worlds. A useful corrective to any naive theory of communication.

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I have a solution to using those fancy notebooks we all love, without having to curb our digital and cloud storage needs.

I am big on using digital tools for notetaking, I mean, i basically shove Zotero, Obsidian, Notion and One Note down the throat of every friend and colleague who did the mistake of asking me about my note taking. I will admit, I know it’s too much. But you have to understand bruv, it’s really really really useful. But, but, I had two issues that were bugging me. I started hating printed books because I preferred the ability to highlight and annotate as I am reading on the kindle and on zotero. This creates two problems for me, some texts I have to read are only available as PDFs which are not too clear for my kindle, are too long to be read on zotero on the laptop and attempting to read them there is me kissing goodbye to my already poor eyes. Like all of us, I also do take my eyes off the screens once or twice in a day, but boy is it tiring. These longish Academic texts are almost always available as books at the library or can be printed out or bought, and frankly, I miss reading a printed book, yeah yeah, i am not one of them book sniffing junkies, but they sure are easy to read, the layout is nice, the font is nice, the touching paper part is nice, the relief of putting a book away after finishing it is nice, you get the point. I had started hating printed books needlessly, which manifested not going to the library or a bookshop to explore or even caring to look at printed books out of the pure childish curiosity i once had. I miss the feeling of browsing through a collection at a library or a bookshop, they are neatly arranged, and one shelf might have all the things related to the one we are searching for, all available for a quick glance. I miss the accidental discoveries and TBRs I used to get from these random romantic glances at the books. Second is that I loved taking notes by hand, lets face it, taking notes on an ipad, laptop, phone, whatever digital when in a lecture or reading not only looks stupid, but feels stupid too, it’s distracting, disrespectful to the teacher and in all fairness not much fun. Taking notes by hand meant that I could draw spirals spiralling into spiralness all over when and if i am bored, it also meant that i could use my favourite stationery. I love my 0.5mm black gel pen and my fancy top spiral notepads man. it just hits, so satisfying. and i miss them.

But, I want to take notes with highlights and correct page number locations and citations, and want all of my notes to end up digitally in my obsidian vault. Because frankly, a note that you cannot check again randomly at 3 AM when you are having an existential philosophical epiphany is not useful. Digital notes are really good for that, they can be accessed anywhere, but the problem is they are ugly, and frankly the feeling is plastic and glassy, it is like looking at a lion behind the glass in a zoo, you see the great beast with all its wonderful colours and textures that Allah has given it and yet, you can only admire from a distance, from behind the glass.

IPads are expensive, Kindle Scribes and others too, today I will tell you how you can use those fancy notebooks like i do (hehe, that rhymed), along with the digital infrastructure we have already been building.

Step 1. Take Handwritten Notes clearly and in a format that Claude AI (yes, we are using Claude, tis the best out zer now) can understand. This means writing properly all the citation details and formatting it in a way that is easy to convert and copy paste directly to your Obsidian repository. Add all the metadata depending on what type of note it is. ie; if it is a lecture note, add the professor’s name, topic, time, date etcetra. if it is a reading note, add the title, citation details etcetra. Now to the formatting.

These are the format styles I use for my notes, lecture notes and reading notes:

Here’s an example of a lecture note I took a while back.

Step 2,3, and 4. Scan the notes using your phone, use DocScanner or Adobe Scan, save as PDF, send to Claude and give Claude this prompt:

Now if you are still confused: here’s a detailed AI generated dummy guide:

The Analog → Obsidian Research Pipeline

A Handwritten Note-Taking System for Researchers, PhD Students, and Serious Readers

I spent a long time trying to solve a very specific problem:

I wanted:

• the cognitive depth and ergonomics of handwriting,

• without losing the power of a digital knowledge system like Obsidian.

Typing notes during seminars often feels awkward. In classrooms and meetings, opening your phone or laptop can look disengaged or disrespectful. But fully analog systems create another problem: handwritten notes become archival dead-ends.

So I built a hybrid workflow:

Notebook → AI-assisted conversion → Obsidian knowledge vault

And after testing it, I think this is one of the best systems I’ve used for academic note-taking.

Below is the complete procedure.

The Core Principle

Do not think of the notebook as “analog notes.”

Think of it as:

Pre-formatted Markdown written by hand.

Your handwritten page should already resemble the structure of your Obsidian notes.

The cleaner the semantic structure of the handwriting, the easier the conversion becomes.

The goal is not aesthetic note-taking.

The goal is:

• structured cognition,

• fast digitisation,

• searchable archival memory,

• and frictionless integration into a research vault.

The Three-Zone Page Layout

Every page is divided into three functional zones.

| LEFT MARGIN | MAIN BODY | RIGHT EDGE |

1. LEFT MARGIN = Metadata / Concept Zone

Reserve 2–3 cm on the left side.

Use this only for:

• keywords,

• theorists,

• concepts,

• possible Obsidian pages,

• recurring themes.

Example:

language ideology
representation
Asad
Mappila
cinema

When converted, these become:

[[language_ideology]]
[[representation]]
[[Talal Asad]]
[[cinema]]

This is extremely powerful for building a networked research archive.

2. MAIN BODY = Structured Content

This is where the actual lecture or meeting notes go.

Use:

• short lines,

• bullet points,

• section headings,

• one idea per line.

Avoid dense paragraphs.

Good:

- realism creates illusion of transparency
- spectator positioned as voyeur
- camera remains absent yet present

Bad:

realism creates a sort of illusion where the spectator feels that they are looking naturally into reality and this creates...

The goal is transcription-friendly thinking.

3. RIGHT EDGE = Semantic Marker Zone

Use symbols consistently.

These symbols create machine-readable structure.

Recommended system:

Symbol and Meaning
! Important concept
? Question
→ Analytical implication
∆ Your critique/intervention
* Example
Q: Direct quote

Example:

! realism tied to voyeurism
→ cinema produces spectatorship structure
∆ ignores subaltern spectatorship
? how does this connect to Islamic realism?

This allows extremely clean AI conversion later.

Top-of-Page Metadata Format

At the top of every page write:

DATE:
EVENT:
SPEAKER:
TOPIC:

Example:

DATE: 13 Feb 2026
EVENT: Cultural Studies Seminar
SPEAKER: Prof X
TOPIC: Cinema and Spectatorship

This becomes YAML frontmatter in Obsidian:

---
date: 2026-02-13
event: Cultural Studies Seminar
speaker: Prof X
topic: Cinema and Spectatorship
---

Headings

Write section headings clearly and distinctly.

I use:

== LANGUAGE IDEOLOGY ==

Which converts into:

## Language Ideology

Keep headings functional, not decorative.

Wiki-Link Thinking (Important)

If you use Obsidian heavily, this changes everything.

Whenever a concept connects to another note, literally write:

[[Colonial Modernity]]
[[Adab]]
[[Realism]]

Yes — even in the notebook.

This creates:

• instant vault integration,

• automatic knowledge graph building,

• conceptual continuity across years of research.

Diagram / Flowchart System

This is where the workflow becomes genuinely powerful.

If you draw conceptual diagrams:

• always place them inside a box,

• and label them.

Example:

+----------------------+
| DIAGRAM — Gaze Flow  |
|                      |
| Realism → Voyeurism  |
| Voyeurism → Gaze     |
+----------------------+

The AI can then:

• extract the diagram as an image,

• embed it into Obsidian,

• or recreate it digitally as a Mermaid chart.

Example output:

## Diagram — Gaze Flow

![[gaze-flow.png]]

Or:

```mermaid
flowchart LR
Realism --> Voyeurism
Voyeurism --> Gaze
```

Photographing the Notes Properly

This matters a lot.

Best practices:

✅ Flat surface
✅ Full page visible
✅ Good lighting
✅ Portrait orientation
✅ No shadows across text

Avoid:

• angled photos,

• folded pages,

• multiple pages in one photo.

The AI Conversion Workflow

After taking notes:

1. Photograph the page.

2. Upload it to ChatGPT.

3. Ask for:

   • “Convert this into Obsidian-ready notes.”

If the page is structured properly, the AI can generate:

• YAML frontmatter,

• section hierarchy,

• wiki-links,

• clean Markdown,

• extracted diagrams,

• conceptual organisation.

The result is usually almost copy-paste ready.

My Recommended Obsidian Structure

I personally prefer this structure:

---
date:
event:
speaker:
topic:
---

# Title

## Connections
[[concept_1]]
[[concept_2]]

---

## Main Section

- bullet points

---

## Questions

- open questions

---

## Bridges to My Research

- theoretical implications

The Most Important Insight

Typing encourages transcription.

Handwriting encourages interpretation.

This system preserves:

• the slowness of thought,

• the conceptual depth of handwriting,

• and the archival/search power of digital systems.

Which means:
you are not choosing between analog and digital anymore.

You are combining:

• embodied cognition,

• semantic structuring,

• and networked knowledge management.

Minimal Supplies Needed

You do not need:

• an expensive tablet,

• a Boox device,

• or an iPad.

You only need:

• a notebook,

• a pen,

• and a consistent semantic structure.

The digitisation layer can come later.

Final Recommendation

Do not optimise for:

• beautiful notes,

• aesthetic spreads,

• or productivity aesthetics.

Optimise for:

• retrieval,

• conceptual clarity,

• future searchability,

• and intellectual continuity.

Your notebook is not a diary.

It is a pre-digital interface for your knowledge system.

Before Reading
another week, another set of things I found worth passing on. These are pieces I actually read, not just bookmarked with good intentions. The descriptions, as always, were drafted by my loyal ghulam, Claude, working from what I flagged and what I found interesting. I reviewed and approved, so the responsibility is mine if the framing doesn’t land. Read what calls to you.

📚 Short Web Reads #23 A curated set of reads for the curious, the thoughtful, and the tenderly unsettled.

Demystifying Language Makes Research More Accessible

A report from the front lines of a rare experiment: bringing linguistic anthropology into public high school classrooms. The Demystifying Language Project argues that scholarship on language and power has been written for the very institutions it critiques, and sets out to change that by co-producing knowledge with students and teachers who live those power differentials daily. The piece raises a quietly uncomfortable question for every academic: who, exactly, is your research for?

How a Chocolate Edible Reshaped My Understanding of Fear

A first-person account of a cannabis edible gone wrong and what it taught the writer about the phenomenology of fear. Less a cautionary tale, more an exercise in slow attention: the essay uses an episode of physiological panic as a site for thinking about the body’s relationship to threat, meaning, and the narratives we construct around feeling afraid. Fear, it turns out, is not simply a reaction but a story we tell ourselves under pressure.

For the Love of Cats in Turkey

An anthropologist visits Turkey and ends up thinking about Islam, urban modernity, and the ethics of care through the lens of street cats. The piece draws on historical records, fieldwork, and the viral documentary Kedi to trace why cats occupy such a distinctive place in Turkish civic and religious life. What looks like fondness for animals turns out to be a meditation on what counts as community, and who gets to belong in a city’s future.

AI Deepfakes for Grief and Celebrations Are Growing in India

A carefully reported piece from Rest of World on the quiet industry of grief tech emerging in small Indian cities, where entrepreneurs learned their craft from YouTube and now resurrect dead fathers for wedding speeches. The article resists easy moral conclusions, sitting instead with the contradiction: that a technology associated with political manipulation and misinformation is also being used for something unmistakably human. The question it leaves open is whether that humanity can survive regulation.

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Before Reading
I share only what I’ve read. This batch came together without a planned theme, but one emerged anyway — the question of what sustains a person: a neighbourhood’s texture, a category that refuses to stay still, an idea that keeps regenerating, a letter written from inside four walls. As usual, the descriptions below were drafted by my obedient ghulam, Claude. I have reviewed and approved them, reluctantly.

What are you reading lately? Drop it in the comments.

📚 Short Web Reads #22 A curated set of reads for the curious, the thoughtful, and the quietly unsettled.

Training the Idea Muscle A profile of Riley Walz, the self-described San Francisco “tech jester” behind viral internet pranks, told by a friend who watched it all happen from close range. What makes the piece stick is not the impressive resume of chaos — parking cop trackers, hot-customer restaurant rankings, a million-dollar company abandoned mid-stride — but the quieter argument underneath: that creative output scales when you stop policing your own ideas before they leave the room.

How to Get to Know Your Neighbourhood A Psyche guide that takes what could have been a listicle and turns it into something with actual texture. The central move is ethnographic: the author, who has spent decades doing guided neighbourhood tours from east London to Oakland, argues that the deepest way to know a place is to let someone else walk you through it at their own pace. A neighbourhood is not a map; it is a set of stories waiting for someone to ask.

Islam as One Thing, Anything, or Nothing A careful takedown of four influential frameworks for defining Islam in the Western academy — Hodgson, Shahab Ahmed, Reinhart, Talal Asad — by Caner Dagli at Renovatio. The essay’s real interest is diagnostic: each framework, in trying to avoid the problem of prescribing a normative Islam, ends up either making everything Islamic or nothing definitively so. A good read alongside Ahmed’s What Is Islam?, which gets the most sustained treatment.

The Stubborn Art of Turning Suffering into Strength: Václav Havel’s Extraordinary Letters from Prison Maria Popova on Havel’s Letters to Olga, written one page per week from a Czech prison cell between 1979 and 1982, under a warden who had presided over Stalinist camps and banned quotation marks. The letters, addressed to his wife and first reader, became his only creative outlet — and, quietly, a sustained argument that remaining open to the world is itself a form of resistance. The Marginalian at its best.

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Some parts of my brain that contained the rational mind didn’t like that I reduced the amount of prozac it got. My rational mind was failing me, well, the rational part of my body was failing me. I could feel myself falling into limbo, where my rational mind was slowly giving way, my body was taking over. I started doing things not because my mind desired it but because my body was disciplined. In the fall of my mind, my body began to think: it woke me up in the morning, like it had since my birth, it took me to breakfast, it made me take a shower at least once in two days, and most importantly, it kept me alive through football.

It was in Prof. Satish’s class, a few weeks before the fall, that I had first thought seriously about the body. All humans come propertied, I thought. The human body is the first property that a human owns. It is simultaneously an inherent part of the self and the first tool that humans learn to use, the basic capital he invests in the market, a receptor of pain and pleasure through which the self learns about primordial forms of good and evil, and hence an epistemic device that all of us come with, right out of the placenta package. The mind is amazing, yes, the thinking animal, the rational biped, yet there seems to be a clear hierarchy in capacities of mind among us: some think, some do not, some do not want to but will, some want to but cannot. Even then, to exist means, in a lot of sense, in our limited material perception, to have a body. I always wonder why Descartes wasn’t amazed about the body enough to consider it as a proof of existence. One can bring back the old floating man example of Ibn Sina, but did it not intrigue Descartes that the very nature of his experience and thought was structured by his body? Maybe he had the privilege to bracket the body out of thinking. Most of us do that, we forget about the body, it becomes secondary in thinking of the self, it becomes the default that is supposed to work until it doesn’t.

Until it doesn’t. And then the body, that silent, loyal archive, remembers what the mind has dropped.

My body, despite my brain taking a sabbatical, remembered that I loved football. I loved football, always had, not in a grew-up-watching-Messi-and-Ronaldo-and-cheered-for-Argentina-or-Brazil kind of way, but in a more endearing way where I was stupefied every time someone touched the ball with their body and moved in intricate patterns to move or not move the ball, all in a split second. As a child and even more now as an adult, I saw it and was struck by the feeling of Ajab, the feeling of wonder. Ajab is a term from the Arab-Islamic literary theorist Abd al-Qahir al-Jurjani, who uses it in the context of poetry: how the magnificent Arab poets before and after Islam captured the attention of fellow men to narrate stories of praise, love, sorrow, anger, or wonder itself. This feeling of Ajab can arise out of fear or out of sheer inability to comprehend the magnificence of something. An experience of the sublime can evoke pleasure and discomfort, challenges our understanding, reveals our limits, and inspires humility. Football seemed to always evoke that Ajab in me.

One of my first memories of being ajab-struck was in primary school, at a school ground on a hot day in the Malabar inlands. I was 8, all of us were 8, yet some of us played better than others. On that hot mid-day Malabar morning, I distinctly remember a classmate shooting a corner from the edge of the little playground, and then in a split second, like an eagle that flies down precisely at the moment a fish looks up at the shining orb above its world of water in the sky, a boy received that ball and shot it into the goalpost. It was called a volley, I learnt a lot later. What was my experience if not Ajab, if not the heights of wonder, a sublime experience of beauty? What comes after Ajab is deep contemplation, wondering whether to fear or love the experience, and then comes dissection, attempting to understand the elements that made it into Ajab, and finally comes desire: to make it one’s own, or in this case, imitation.

For the next 17 years I, a classic computernerd-videogameplaying-sittingonmyassguy, bought several football boots and jerseys of vivid and dull colours and dragged myself whenever I could to the football ground. I am a round kid in my memories, a little plump, trying to learn how to pass and shoot the ball using the sides of one’s foot, as opposed to a beginner’s pencil kick that not only hurts but is inaccurate and less powerful. I am that kid who gets scolded every game for not marking the players, for missing obvious balls, and on days I am too excited, for getting in between good players and ruining their play. I did eventually learn how to make a decent pass, how to mark players and annoy the shit out of them, and sometimes how to shoot a ball as close as I can to the targets in my head. Tiny moments of Ajab I could recreate, when in eighth standard I switched feet while taking the ball, when I scored a goal for the first time, when I defended well and all the kaakas at the ground looked at me and smiled in approval. These moments of Ajab stay as Ajab every time I do them, and though I have never scored a volley like that boy in third standard, I still try to play, in memory of that Ajab.

How did my body learn football? YouTube videos I secretly watched might have played some part; getting scolded and embarrassed into being better would be another. But my fuller answer is this: I was part of a tradition where similar bodies in similar motion, across time, were trying to do the same things with a ball, rule-bound of course, learning the same things from scratch. The funny thing about embodied knowledge is that one can explain it as much as one wants to, but it can only be successfully transferred to the novice through his own attempts at imitation. This is true for football as it is true for the five-times prayers. Mckean, writing about embodied tradition, describes something structurally identical: our bodies remain as archives, we join the ranks of our ancestors in shaping our bodies the same way they did, we go through the same difficulties they did, and we overcome as they did. The chain of knowledge is not broken, it is carried in the body itself, transmitted not through instruction but through the compulsion to imitate. In football, both are true simultaneously: you see that one sublime shot, you are struck by Ajab, and your body, shaped by centuries of similar bodies doing similar things, already knows, obscurely, how to begin.

As a boy from Malabar, from Areekode, where football is supposedly in our blood, it is tradition that my body picked up through redundancy and repetition (Mckean quotes Morin), even if my brother liked cricket and my dad bought me a cricket bat from his trip to Kashmir, I would still end up learning football and learning to love it. The wonderful thing about this knowledge transmission, as Mckean notes, is that we don’t have to know each and every detail about the act or about the difficulties we will face trying to imitate and reproduce it. Our bodies are the same as our ancestors; we will learn like they did, our bodies will bend the same way theirs did. The constraints of their bodies remain more or less the constraints on ours too, like Kant’s a priori categorising the phenomena our mind takes in, these a priori of our body categorise all the ways we can bend, the ways we can receive and redirect a ball arriving at speed from across a small Malabar playground. Across all of this there is some beautiful lesson about the timelessness of the human form: elegantly shaped bodies across centuries, attempting Ajaib with their bodies, each one struck into imitation by the wonder of the one before.

This is a love note to football. When I was merely a body, my mind transcending itself into numbness, the Prozac withdrawn and the structures of meaning coming apart, football and everyone around it gave me a position to be. I played as a defender, my body repeating what it had learnt over the years, my mind too numb to try, just present enough to be placed. Football kept me in position. It gave structure to my life when all other structures fell apart. It trusted me to do just the minimum amount of life I needed to live.

Somewhere in Malabar, a boy is watching a volley for the first time. He does not yet know what it is called. He knows only that something has happened to him, something that will, if he lets it, spend the next seventeen years pulling him back to the ground, to the kaakas, to the scolding, to the slow and embarrassing and irreplaceable work of making a body that can play. He is about to be struck by Ajab. His body already knows what to do with it.

To the Ajab of football. To the imitators of Ajaib. To the bodies struggling.

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