Narrower Than a Strand of Hair

Dear friends,

It’s been a while since I imposed myself on you in this way. I had little news to share—I turned 50 on June 12; I postponed my August-September trip to the States (because the Culture Resource, for the second time in a row, turned down my application for a modest mobility fund!), and I dismantled and started reassembling my new novel for the fourth time—and so succumbed to summer slowness.

But in truth I’ve been craving an excuse to write to you. Unlike posting on social media, sending out these letters feels like a gesture of faith, a way to defy isolation and insignificance. It helps.

Anyway I have something to share now: “Paradise Way: Watching Sirāt After Gaza“, my essay on what was, for me, the film of the decade.

This is less of a rant than the “Behind the Essay” piece I’ve been working on for the Shenandoah blog, which talks about the rage that is deliberately occluded in “Jab, Cross, Infidel” and most of Postmuslim. But it does deal with some of the same issues. The way identity is thought of as an inborn and immutable quality, for example, involving no agency whatsoever, and the rule that only someone who has that quality can credibly speak to its meaning…

More importantly, this reflection on Sirāt is my first attempt to apply the postmuslim thesis to something outside of my own direct experience:

Sadly, whether by clinging to it or renouncing it, Muslim artists themselves rarely get past the idea of Islam as a narrow belief system or behavioural code. At the same time, to be part of the contemporary world, they feel obliged to uncritically embrace Western ideas that stunt and distort their sense of themselves and the world. Laxe evidently speaks some Moroccan Arabic and has his own Muslim religious practice, but he is free of that double bind.

That too helps. Laxe’s existence, I mean, and the magic of his work managing to come through to me at this point in time.

Another thing that’s kind of helped is Bernardo Kastrup’s critique of the age—another recent discovery. Reading and listening to this guy has reconfirmed my sense that there is a link between scientism, capitalism, and the violence that inheres in the metaphysics of matter. What does profiteering have in common with the suggestion that, outside accident and illusion, there is no such thing as consciousness?

I don’t know if I agree with everything Bernardo says but he definitely confirms my suspicion that the horrors of the so called Market, the general triumph of pettiness, Brian Cox’s emetic smugness, and the paradox of true believers being terrified of the dissolution of the body are all of a piece.

This is also an opportunity to share the UK cover for Postmulsim: A Testimony, and to express my gratitude for you being aboard the same ark as the flood rages. Here a snippet of the incredible Mustafa Ismail reciting Surat Hud that starts with the words “And it sailed with them amid waves like mountains”:

All my love,

Y