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what scaling does to greatness

Someone said to me recently — I cannot remember where, which is either embarrassing or appropriate — that art is only art, is only great, when it isn’t scalable. I have been thinking about this for a few weeks and I think it is pointing at something real that it cannot quite name yet.

What it is pointing at is not Walter Benjamin, exactly, though Benjamin is nearby. Benjamin was interested in the aura — the quality that attaches to an original and drains away in reproduction, the here-and-now of the thing that copying cannot transmit. The scalability claim is adjacent but different. It is not about originals and copies. It is about whether the power of a work survives being generalised — being made available to anyone, anywhere, without the specific conditions that produced the encounter. A performance that destroys you the night you see it. A poem that arrives at exactly the wrong moment in your life and never arrives the same way again. A film that requires a particular kind of attention the streaming interface is structurally designed to prevent. The claim is that the power is in the resistance — that whatever makes something great is exactly what gets lost when it circulates.

I find this persuasive and also immediately troubled by what we spent last session doing. Because Gauguin is scaled. His paintings are on postcards in the Musée d’Orsay gift shop, on tote bags, on the covers of books about Tahiti that have nothing to do with the girls in the paintings. The scalability has been total and uninterrupted for over a century. And the work is still called great — is still in the permanent collections, still on the syllabi, still the subject of the involuntary response Dederer describes, the beauty that arrives before the judgment and does not wait for it. If the scalability claim were right, the postcards should have done something to the greatness. They haven’t, or at least not in any way the institutions have acknowledged. Which means either the claim is wrong, or the work’s continued greatness is being produced by something other than the work.

The Nobel Prize is a scaling machine. This is what it is for: to select certain works for global circulation, to make them available as great to audiences who have never encountered them in their original language, their original context, the specific conditions of their production. What the committee in Stockholm does, every year, is not discover greatness already present in the world. It manufactures a particular kind of greatness — the kind that travels, that can be summarised in a press release, that fits the criteria of a specific institutional tradition with a specific history of what literature is supposed to be and do. And the Arabic literary tradition has one laureate in 120 years. One. If the Nobel both confers and constitutes greatness — if being recognised is part of what being great means — then the prize has spent 120 years producing a world in which Arabic literature is less great than it would otherwise be. Not failing to notice an existing quality. Actively not producing it.

The scalability claim should make this worse, but I think it actually makes it more interesting. Because what the Nobel selects for is, in part, translatability — the quality of surviving being moved across languages and contexts without total loss. Certain kinds of work travel better than others. Certain literary traditions have spent longer learning how to make work that European institutions recognise as universal. And the work that doesn’t travel — that is embedded in a specific linguistic texture, a specific cultural density, a specific moment — that work is, by the scalability argument, potentially the most alive. The most resistant. The least recoverable in a press release. Adonis has been nominated for the Nobel repeatedly and has never won. Whether this is because his work is too difficult, too political, too rooted in an Arabic tradition the committee cannot read without losing everything, or simply because he is Adonis and the politics around his name are intractable — I don’t know. But the fact that the most celebrated living poet in Arabic has no Nobel is a statement about scaling and about who gets to decide what survives the journey.

Dederer’s note on involuntary beauty is the thing that resists this most interestingly I think. You cannot decide to find something beautiful, she says, which is also to say you cannot decide not to. The response arrives before the apparatus of judgment has assembled itself. And this might be the one place where the scalability claim holds absolutely: you can put Gauguin on a postcard, but you cannot put the involuntary response on a postcard. The response belongs to the encounter, which is singular, which happens once in a specific body at a specific moment. What the postcard scales is the image. What it cannot scale is what the image does. If greatness lives in that doing — in the specific event of the encounter — then the institutions that confer greatness are always conferring it on the wrong thing. On the image rather than the event. On the work rather than what happens between the work and the person standing in front of it, without having planned to be affected, discovering they are.

Which leaves us somewhere difficult before next session. The problem of time — whether historical distance dissolves complicity or just makes it comfortable — is also a problem about scaling. Wagner’s antisemitism feels different from Polanski’s rape not only because one of them is dead. It feels different because Wagner has been scaled into the infrastructure of Western music in a way that makes the antisemitism feel like a feature of the past the music has survived, rather than a condition of the present the music is still producing. The distance is real. But the comfort of the distance might be a scaling effect — the consequence of a century of institutional reproduction that has smoothed the surface, made the encounter feel clean, taught us to receive the work without the conditions of its production pressing through.


For next session — the problem of time: Find one work you consume or produce today that will feel, in fifty years, the way Wagner feels now. Not a work by a bad person. A work that is entangled, right now, with something that future audiences will find it uncomfortable to have ignored. What is the entanglement, and what are you doing with it?

Watch before we meet: Andrei Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia (1983) — not because Tarkovsky was a monster, but because the film is about what time does to longing, and to the question of whether something can be recovered intact across historical distance. Watch the final sequence. We will start there.


Some things worth reading:

Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1935) — the aura argument. The essay that the scalability claim is in conversation with, whether it knows it or not. Short enough to read in one sitting; the implications take longer.

Dave Hickey, Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy (1997) — Dederer’s source for the involuntary beauty argument. Hickey is a critic who wrote about beauty when beauty was unfashionable in the art world, and the essays have the quality of someone defending something they shouldn’t have to defend. Read “Enter the Dragon: On the Vernacular of Beauty.”

On the Nobel and Arabic literature: M. Lynx Qualey’s writing at ArabLit Quarterly is the best sustained critical attention to Arabic literature in English — the question of what gets translated, reviewed, and circulated in Western markets is her actual subject. Not a single text but a place to start.

what the voice was carrying

In 1932, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk ordered that the call to prayer be given in Turkish. Every word was translated faithfully. Every theological claim preserved. Every invocation rendered into the vernacular of the people who were supposed to receive it. By any account of what language is for — communication, meaning, the transmission of content from one mind to another — nothing was lost. And yet the response, across Turkey and across the Muslim world, was not that something had been diminished. The response was that something had been destroyed. The Turkish azan was reversed in 1950, under pressure that had nothing to do with electoral politics and everything to do with what it felt like when the sounds were wrong.

This interests me more than most of what I’ve read about religious practice. The assumption embedded in most thinking about religious speech — and I include careful academic thinking, the kind that builds frameworks and cites everything — is that voice is a vehicle. Something is placed inside it: a message, a meaning, a theological claim. The voice travels. The meaning arrives. What the voice is made of — the particular shape of the sounds, the specific phonemes of Arabic rather than Turkish — this is the container, not the contents. You keep the contents and swap the container, and you have performed an act of translation. The Turkish azan was exactly this operation. It failed in a way that the vehicle model cannot explain, and the failure is the thing I keep returning to.

Charles Hirschkind, an anthropologist who spent time in Cairo in the 1990s, was interested in something adjacent: why men who already knew the content of popular religious cassette sermons were listening to the same recordings again and again, on buses, in taxis, walking home. When he went back to the classical Islamic scholarly literature to understand this, he found a developed science of listening — not rhetoric, not the art of speaking, but a detailed practice of receiving sound correctly. How to hold the body while hearing quran. What physical responses — tears, a tightening in the chest, the breath changing — were understood as signs of the heart beginning to turn in the right direction. The tradition’s claim, as Hirschkind reconstructs it, is not that the voice transmits something to you. It is that repeated encounter with the voice makes you into something. The sounds are not a vehicle. They are a technology of the self, which is a phrase Hirschkind borrows from Michel Foucault and which does something strange when placed inside a premodern tradition that arrived at the same idea without Foucault’s help.

This reframe makes the Turkish azan’s failure coherent: the sounds were the practice, not the delivery mechanism for the practice. Replace the sounds and you have not translated the azan; you have ended it. But the reframe also opens something else: If the voice forms the person who hears it — training the body’s responses, making certain interior states available to it over time — then the question of who hears becomes a different kind of question. Pooyan Tamimi Arab, in his study of legal and political fights over the azan in the Netherlands, found that opposition to broadcasting the call to prayer was never actually about volume. The secular city tolerates enormous amounts of noise, think about it: traffic, church bells, concerts, people talking. What it resists is religious sound that crosses the boundary between inside and outside without asking permission. You can choose not to enter a mosque. You cannot choose not to hear the azan if you are in its range. And if the tradition is right about what the sounds do — if the voice does work on the body that receives it, forming and not merely informing — then something is crossing the threshold of the non-Muslim neighbour’s skin without consent. The discomfort is not paranoia. It is, in some sense, theologically accurate.

I find this genuinely difficult to think with, in the way I trust. It is not a difficulty that resolves into tolerance on one side and intolerance on the other, or into religious rights and secular sensibilities trading places across a legal framework. It is a difficulty about what the body is and what crosses its threshold and whether consent is even the right framework for something that happens before the body has had time to decide. The tradition that insists the sounds cannot be replaced is also the tradition that insists the sounds do something to whoever hears them. These two insistences sit together without embarrassment inside Islamic thought, and I’m not sure the secular frameworks we have for adjudicating religious sound in public space have ever really reckoned with the second one.

Which turns out to be the question at the centre of disgust, too — what crosses the threshold of the body uninvited, what the body knows before the mind has been consulted, where exactly you think you end and the world begins.


For next session: Find one thing you find genuinely disgusting. Not hypothetically, not as a thought experiment — something that produces the bodily response, the recoil, the sensation before the thought arrives to name it. Sit with it long enough to ask: what is this disgust protecting? What does it think the boundary of your body is? If you want, write one paragraph, but specific.


Reading that matters here:

Charles Hirschkind, The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics (Columbia UP, 2006). The argument about formation versus transmission is in Chapter 2; the bodywork of listening is Chapter 4. One of those books that changes what you notice.

Pooyan Tamimi Arab, Amplifying Islam in the European Soundscape (Edinburgh UP, 2017). The azan in the Netherlands as a case study for what happens when a practice designed to cross thresholds meets a secularism that believes religion should stay inside. Directly useful if you live in Europe and have ever had a thought about church bells.

Adriana Cavarero, For More Than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression (Stanford UP, 2005). A philosopher asking what is irreducibly particular about a voice — what is lost when voice is reduced to the content it carries. Counterpoint to everything the standardisation of Quranic recitation demands, and worth holding against Hirschkind.

the same logic running in both directions

Paul Rozin gave his research subjects a bottle of apple juice and a cockroach. He asked them to dip the cockroach briefly into the juice, remove it, and then drink the juice. They knew the cockroach was sterilised. They knew it was, in any meaningful sense, clean. They refused anyway — and they refused in a way that was not about calculation. They did not weigh the evidence and conclude the juice was unsafe. Something older than reasoning said no.

He then reversed the experiment. He asked subjects to handle an object that had belonged to someone they admired — a celebrity, a historical figure, a person they loved. Most people were slightly more willing to touch food that had touched the admired object than food that had not. The direction reversed. The mechanism was the same.

Rozin called this the law of contagion. Once two things have been in contact, properties transfer between them — permanently, irreversibly, regardless of what the rational mind knows about sterilisation or the impossibility of holiness residing in material objects. The law runs in both directions. Contamination flows from the disgusting thing outward. Sanctity flows from the sacred thing outward. What the disgusting thing and the sacred thing share is not content but structure: they both transmit, they both mark what they touch, they both cannot be neutralised by knowledge.

What I kept turning over after the last session was the implication that nobody said directly: if the law of contagion is the mechanism of both pollution and sanctity, then the tradition’s most careful regulations and its most transgressive acts are doing the same thing. The quran cannot be touched without ritual purification — the purity requirement manages the direction of transmission, ensures the body approaches the sacred in the right state rather than contaminating it. The companion who drank the prophet’s blood was doing the same thing from the other side: letting the sacred flow into the body through the most complete possible contact. The regulation and the transgression are not opposites. They are the same logic, applied in different directions.

This should be more unsettling than it usually sounds when stated. The difference between the careful management of what the body may touch before prayer and the companion’s drinking of the prophet’s blood is not a difference in kind. Both take seriously that touch transmits. Both operate on the understanding that what you contact enters you, or that you enter it. The distance between wudu and the most extreme forms of sacred contact in the companion tradition is a distance of degree, not of logic.

Touch is the sense that refuses metaphor in the way sight accepts it. We say I see what you mean and nobody thinks we are seeing anything. We say I was touched by his words and the body is already involved — the metaphor reaches backward into actual sensation, actual skin. This is what Lakoff and Johnson missed about touch when they catalogued the cognitive defaults of different senses: touch cannot become purely abstract the way vision can. The conceptual metaphor for understanding is visual — clear, opaque, shedding light — because vision operates at a distance and distance is what allows abstraction. Touch requires contact. You cannot understand at a distance the way you can see at a distance. The touching metaphors drag the body back in.

Which may be why the most intimate sacred acts across traditions converge on touch and ingestion rather than on vision. The eucharist is not a vision of the body of christ. It is the body of christ placed on the tongue. The pilgrimage culminates not in seeing the ka’ba but in circling it, reaching toward it, pressing lips to the stone. The sufi initiation is the handclasp — the chain of hands going back to the prophet, each link a physical contact that transmitted something forward. You cannot enter these transmissions from a distance. You have to be touched.

What the session kept circling but never quite reached was the question of whether the abjection in the most extreme cases of sacred touch — the companion drinking blood — is incidental or structural. Whether you push through the disgust to get to the baraka, or whether the disgust is part of what the transmission requires. The law of contagion suggests the latter. What makes blood abject (it crosses the boundary that skin maintains, it moves from inside to outside, it blurs the distinction between self and other) is what makes contact with it maximally potent as transmission. The mechanism requires the crossing. The sacred arrives not despite the breach of the body’s boundary but through it. You cannot be touched by something at a safe distance.

Mary Douglas argued that pollution and the sacred are structurally related — both are set apart, both are dangerous, both require careful handling, both can contaminate. The tradition that regulates touch most precisely is the tradition that has understood this most clearly: that the same sense that can transmit the sacred can transmit its opposite, that the circuit runs in both directions, that there is no neutral touching.

The worn threshold of a sacred site — stone steps gone concave from centuries of feet — sits at the edge of all of this without resolving it. What is in those steps? The accumulated touch of every body that crossed them. The trace of contact so repeated that it changed the material. This is the law of contagion made geological, made slow, made visible in stone. Something passed. It cannot be said what. The step is smooth.


Before our next session: think about a piece of music, a voice, or a sound that has done something to your body that you did not authorise. Not music you chose because you knew it would move you — something that arrived and changed the body before you decided anything about it. Come ready to describe what happened physically, not what it meant.

References:

Rozin, Paul, Jonathan Haidt, and Clark McCauley. “Disgust.” In Handbook of Emotions, ed. Michael Lewis and Jeannette Haviland-Jones. Guilford Press, 2000.

Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. Routledge, 1966.

Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. University of Chicago Press, 1980.

On the companion tradition: Ibn Sa’d, Kitab al-Tabaqat al-Kabir; Suyuti, al-Khasa’is al-Kubra.

monsters: genius — a task for before we next meet

We’ve been circling the word “genius” for a while now without quite landing on it. Last session we talked about the stain, about fans and admirers, about what fandom builds in you and what happens to that thing when the person who made it turns out to have caused harm. But there is a mechanism underneath all of that which we haven’t yet named directly. It is the word that ends arguments. The word that functions as a permission slip, issued before the crime, honoured after it. The word that makes the calculation impossible.

Dederer calls it a “glittering absolute set into a dreary system of relative worth.” The genius breaks the calculator. You cannot weigh genius against harm because genius is not a quantity that can be weighed — it is a declaration that places someone outside the system of ordinary judgment. And declarations, unlike arguments, cannot be refuted. You can disprove a claim. You cannot disprove “genius.”


Before we next meet, I want you to sit with a few things. Not tasks exactly — provocations. Things to disagree about before we’re in the room together.

The image of the genius.

When we close our eyes and try to picture a genius — not name one, picture one — what do we see? Something specific? A body? Usually male? Physical, somehow, even when the genius is a painter or a poet rather than an athlete? Excessive? Moving with a kind of freedom that ordinary people don’t move with?

Picasso crouching half-naked on a beach, drawing a centaur in light with a sparkler. Hemingway kicking a beer can down a road in Idaho. Dederer describes exactly this: she found these photographs in a photo book as a child, and something in those images told her — before she could articulate it — what genius was supposed to look like. “The men were physical, extra-alive, moved by some spirit outside of themselves.”

That image — the body that moves differently, the person who operates by different rules, the one who is simultaneously master and servant to a force beyond themselves — is not a description. It is a construction. It was built, in the Romantic period, out of very specific materials. Christine Battersby traced the history: before the 19th century, artists were craftsmen serving patrons within conventions. The Romantic genius was an invention — a figure defined by qualities that were simultaneously feminised and supermale. Sensitive, irrational, excessive, ungovernable — but not a woman. The same qualities that in an actual woman would read as hysteria or instability became, in this specifically male figure, the marks of greatness. The category excluded women structurally, at the level of what genius was supposed to be, not just at the level of who got called one.

Now: we have Kanye West in Rolling Stone saying “I am a rock star. Rock stars can pull their dick out in public then go rock 20,000 people. Rock stars can give their fucking opinion without having to deal with — what’s that thing I get dealt with every day of my life? Oh yeah. Backlash.” He starts by claiming the genius freedom. By the end of the quote he has demonstrated he doesn’t have it. The hall pass is not universally available. It was built for a specific body and it fits that body and not others.

And then there is this: Time magazine’s Person of the Year 2023 was Taylor Swift.

And the question of whether she is a genius — which has been asked repeatedly and answered differently by different people — reveals something about the category that explicit argument cannot. Because she is extraordinarily skilled. The formal control over her songwriting, the longevity, the scale of cultural influence are undeniable. And yet the word sits strangely on her for many people, and I want you to think about why. She is not excessive in the required way. She is extraordinarily controlled — known for meticulous planning, strategic thinking, careful management of her catalogue and her image. She does not perform being overtaken by a force beyond herself. She performs mastery. And mastery, it turns out, is not what the genius image is built for. The genius is supposed to be subject to something that overtakes him. Swift is not subject to anything she hasn’t approved.

Damon Albarn said in 2022 that she “doesn’t write her own songs.” When pushed — because she co-writes extensively and is widely credited for her lyrics — he retreated. He then praised Billie Eilish as “exceptional,” who also co-writes with her brother. The criterion shifted. It kept shifting until it could exclude Swift specifically while including others who do the same thing. At which point the criterion is not about songwriting. It is about something else. And that something else is worth naming.

Also look who’s the Person of the Year 2025:

The petition.

In 2009, Roman Polanski was arrested in Switzerland on a decades-old warrant. He had pled guilty in 1977 to unlawful sexual intercourse with a thirteen-year-old girl, then fled the country before sentencing. In response to his arrest, 138 filmmakers signed a petition demanding his immediate release. The petition called him an “ingenious filmmaker.” It was co-organised by Harvey Weinstein.

Among the signatories: Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese, Pedro Almodóvar, Wim Wenders, Tilda Swinton, Darren Aronofsky, Asia Argento, Wong Kar-wai.

Natalie Portman signed it. Nine years later she said: “I very much regret it. Someone I respected gave it to me and said ‘I signed this, will you too?’ And I was like, sure.”

The petition is the explicit, public, documented version of a cultural mechanism. The word “ingenious” does something in a legal-political context that an argument could not do — it claims an exemption from jurisdiction. It says: the normal rules do not apply here. And it may have worked, partially: the Swiss government released him.

But Portman’s account is the more revealing document. She didn’t think about what she was authorising. She trusted the social context. This is how the mechanism operates — not through deliberate moral failure but through the social lubrication of the genius culture. You don’t argue with the declaration. You sign.

The attraction.

Here is what I find to be an uncomfortable thing Dederer says in this chapter, and she says it almost in passing: “Maybe we have created the idea of genius to serve our own attraction to badness. Maybe we ask these artists to live out our darkest fantasies — and if we give it the label genius, then we don’t have to feel guilt for enjoying the spectacle. We can get off on the performance of badness, we can consume the biography, and remain in good taste. Well, he’s a genius. You can’t blame him. Or me.”

That last word. Or me.

She is not exempting herself from the mechanism she is describing. She is saying: the audience produced this. The collective investment, the unconditional love, the decision in advance that this person operates by different rules — the fan community issued the hall pass before the crime even happened. The genius is not imposed on the culture by powerful men and complicit institutions alone. It is something the audience wanted. The genius lives out the fantasy on our behalf.


Three things to think about before next session.

One. Go back to Dederer’s chapter and find the moment where she describes what the word “genius” does in a sentence — not what it means but what it stops. Write it down. Then find a sentence from anywhere — a review, an interview, a caption — where you can catch the word doing exactly that work.

Two. The Taylor Swift question: is she a genius? Don’t answer immediately. Notice what happens in you when you try to answer it. What is the resistance (or compliance) — or the discomfort (or comfort?) with the question itself — telling you about what the category requires?

Three. Dederer says the desire for resolution — any resolution, cancel or forgive — is itself a symptom. The fan wants the problem solved so they can go back to loving cleanly. Sit with this. Is there something on your own shelf — your own playlist, your own watchlist — where you have reached for a resolution that feels a little too convenient? Not for discussion necessarily. Just to notice.


We will start next session with the Taylor Swift question, because it is the one that forces the category to show what it is built for. From there we are going to the female monster — specifically to what Dederer says about women whose monstrousness involves their children rather than their victims — or what changes when children are involved. The asymmetry between those two types of harm is the thing I want us to think through together.

One question to carry with you until then: if the genius hall pass was issued before the crime — built into the culture before any specific person claimed it — then is the problem the individual monster, or the architecture we built for them to move through?

sensing: sight — a task for before we next meet

I won’t be there this week. Which means the session happens without me, and I want it to happen — not as a gap in the course but as something you do together that we then bring into the room when we’re back.

Here is what I’ve been thinking about, and what I want you to think about too.

We have been reading a book that is saturated with the vocabulary of light and vision. Nur — divine light. Hidaya — guidance, which is always described as light. The beatific vision — ru’yat allah — promised as the highest reward of paradise. The qalb, the heart, which replaces the physical eye because the physical eye cannot see god. Kashf — mystical unveiling. Ishraq — illumination, the dawning light of divine knowledge. Kufr — disbelief, whose arabic root means to cover, to conceal, to make dark. Islamic theology reaches for light and sight almost compulsively when it needs to describe the sacred. So does christian theology. So does buddhist. So does hindu. The halo appears around every sacred figure in every tradition that makes images of the sacred. Enlightenment is a light-word in every language that has the concept.

And yet.

I want you to think about what the body is actually doing in the practices we have been reading about. Salat: the eyes are cast downward toward the place of prostration. During prostration itself, they look at the nose. The gaze during prayer is regulated, directed at the floor — not at anything sacred, not at the source of light the theology is always reaching toward. Dhikr: rhythmic collective repetition, often with eyes closed or unfocused. The goal is wajd — a state of ecstatic finding — and the visual field is typically reduced or eliminated to get there. Quran recitation: the quran is primarily a sonic text. It was revealed as sound, transmitted as sound, memorised as sound. The written quran is but a record of a recitation, not the primary form. Fasting: the systematic withdrawal of taste for an entire month. Hajj: the body walking, running, pressing through crowds, touching stone, drinking water. The call to prayer: heard before anything is seen.

Something is going on there. The theology and the vocabulary say sight. The body does something else.


Before we next meet, I want you to do three things.

First. Take the list I just gave you — of practices where the body is not primarily seeing — and try to add to it from the book. Where else in Stjernholm’s account is the body doing something non-visual that the language around it reaches for visual metaphor anyway? Try to think of other spiritual practices beyond islam as well.

Second. Here is a verse. Read it in at least two of these translations.

Arabic: اَللّٰهُ نُوْرُ السَّمٰوٰتِ وَالْاَرْضِ ۗ مَثَلُ نُوْرِهٖ كَمِشْكٰوةٍ فِيْهَا مِصْبَاحٌ ۗ اَلْمِصْبَاحُ فِيْ زُجَاجَةٍ ۗ اَلزُّجَاجَةُ كَاَنَّهَا كَوْكَبٌ دُرِّيٌّ يُّوْقَدُ مِنْ شَجَرَةٍ مُّبٰرَكَةٍ زَيْتُوْنَةٍ لَّا شَرْقِيَّةٍ وَّلَا غَرْبِيَّةٍ يَّكَادُ زَيْتُهَا يُضِيْۤءُ وَلَوْ لَمْ تَمْسَسْهُ نَارٌ ۗ نُوْرٌ عَلٰى نُوْرٍ

Arberry (1955): God is the Light of the heavens and the earth; the likeness of His Light is as a niche wherein is a lamp — the lamp in a glass, the glass as it were a glittering star — kindled from a Blessed Tree, an olive that is neither of the East nor of the West whose oil wellnigh would shine, even if no fire touched it; Light upon Light.

Asad (1980): God is the Light of the heavens and the earth. The parable of His light is, as it were, that of a niche containing a lamp; the lamp is enclosed in glass, the glass shining like a radiant star: a lamp lit from a blessed tree — an olive-tree that is neither of the east nor of the west — the oil whereof would well-nigh give light of itself even though fire had not touched it: light upon light.

Paret (1962): Gott ist das Licht der Himmel und der Erde. Sein Licht ist — man kann es vergleichen — wie eine Nische, in der sich eine Lampe befindet. Die Lampe ist in einem Glas. Das Glas ist, als wäre es ein funkelnder Stern. Sie wird angezündet von einem gesegneten Baum, einem Ölbaum, der weder östlich noch westlich ist. Sein Öl würde von selbst leuchten, auch wenn kein Feuer es berührt hätte. Licht über Licht.

Bobzin (2010): Gott ist das Licht der Himmel und der Erde. Das Gleichnis seines Lichtes ist das einer Nische, in der eine Lampe ist. Die Lampe ist in einem Glas. Das Glas ist gleichsam ein strahlender Stern. Sie wird angezündet von einem gesegneten Baum, einem Ölbaum, weder östlich noch westlich. Sein Öl würde fast leuchten, auch wenn kein Feuer es berührte. Licht auf Licht.

Notice what changes across the translations. Arberry says “the likeness of His Light.” Asad says “the parable.” Paret adds “man kann es vergleichen” — one can compare it — a hedge that is not in the Arabic at all. Bobzin uses “Gleichnis” — parable, allegory, narrative distance. The arabic says god IS light, directly, without qualification. Then it immediately builds a comparison. The translators pull back from the directness in different ways.

The question I want you to sit with: the verse identifies god directly as light, then immediately constructs an elaborate visual apparatus to approach that identification — niche, lamp, glass, oil, tree, fire. The oil burns without fire. The tree is neither east nor west. These are impossible objects. Why does the verse build its comparison from things that cannot exist?

Third. Pay attention this week to how often sight and light appear in ordinary speech — not religious contexts, just everyday conversation — when someone means they understand something, or don’t. Write down five or six phrases you actually hear or use. Don’t go looking for them. Just notice.


Bring your thoughts on all three to the next session. We will start there before we move on to touch.

One question to carry with you: when you say something like “I see what you mean” — are you seeing anything?

the conduit problem

There is a question that Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddimah raises and then quietly withdraws, or rather that the Muqaddimah‘s reception raises on its behalf, without quite knowing it is doing so. The question is not about asabiyya, though asabiyya is what everyone talks about when they talk about Ibn Khaldun. It is about what happens to a theory when the institution receiving it has already decided, in advance, what kind of thing that theory is.

Asabiyya is usually translated as group solidarity, social cohesion, tribal feeling — and these translations are not wrong, but they are already doing something. The concept is considerably stranger than any of its renderings. Ibn Khaldun, writing in the late fourteenth century in the so-called Maghreb, was trying to account for something he had observed across the whole arc of North African and Andalusian political history: why dynasties rise from the periphery, establish themselves at the centre, and then inevitably decline, to be replaced by a new force arriving from the edges of what was just consolidated. The mechanism is asabiyya — the bond of a group at its most cohesive, which is strongest before power, because power corrupts not through the usual vices but through the specific corrosion of sedentary prosperity, which softens the solidarity that made conquest possible. It is a theory of political cycles, of the relationship between austerity and force, of how the very success of a social form produces the conditions of its dissolution. Dynasties, Ibn Khaldun writes, have a natural lifespan like individuals, and typically last no more than three generations, approximately forty years each, before the asabiyya that founded them has been sufficiently consumed by luxury to make them vulnerable to the next group arriving with a stronger bond.

This is, one might note, a sophisticated structural theory of historical change, developed five centuries before the social sciences as a discipline existed, in a context entirely unlike the European intellectual traditions from which sociology and political theory would eventually emerge. Montesquieu does something related in L’Esprit des lois in 1748; Adam Ferguson, in his Essay on the History of Civil Society in 1767, comes close to the same problem from a different angle; Durkheim’s distinction between mechanical and organic solidarity echoes it without citing it. The question of priority is not particularly interesting though. What is interesting is the question of how Ibn Khaldun came to occupy, in the Western academic imagination, the position of a thinker whose work is studied and cited as a primary source — a datum about what medieval Islamic intellectuals were capable of — rather than as a theorist whose concepts could travel forward into present analysis.

Syed Farid Alatas, who has spent much of his career attempting to recover Ibn Khaldun as a living theoretical tradition rather than a historical specimen, describes the problem as academic dependency — the structural condition by which social science communities in the global South, and in Islamic intellectual traditions, have come to depend on the frameworks produced in European and North American universities not because those frameworks are more accurate or more generative but because the infrastructure of citation, journal publishing, hiring, and institutional prestige runs through those centres. Asabiyya arrives in Western sociology as data: evidence that Muslims had sophisticated intellectual traditions, something worth noting in a chapter on pre-modern social thought, before the real theoretical work begins. It is admired. It is not used. There is a difference between admiration and use that is worth attending to carefully, because it is precisely the difference between treating a concept as an object of study and treating it as a tool for thinking.

One begins to sense, holding this distinction, that what is at stake is not simply a question of citation practices or of which names appear in which bibliographies. It is a question about what kind of thing a concept is allowed to be, and how the conditions of its reception determine that. Asabiyya is, in its specificity, a concept about the relationship between social cohesion and political power at the moment of transition — about what a group carries before it acquires what it is reaching for, and what it loses in the reaching. There is nothing in this concept that restricts its applicability to fourteenth-century Maghrebi dynasties. One could think about contemporary political formations through it, about how collective solidarities are depleted by the very institutional processes they were organised to change, about the specific vulnerability of movements that succeed in establishing themselves within the structures they were formed against. The concept does this work, or can be asked to do it, if one is prepared to treat it as theory rather than as specimen.

But something in the architecture of the academic humanities and social sciences has made this difficult to do without a kind of methodological explanation — a justification, almost an apology, for the fact that the conceptual framework is arriving from an unexpected place. One notices this in the texture of work that does attempt to use non-Western theoretical traditions: there is often a preliminary labour of legitimation that work citing Habermas or Bourdieu is never required to perform. The reader of a paper using asabiyya analytically is implicitly asked to accept that such an application is possible; the same reader encountering a paper organised around social capital or field theory is not asked to accept anything of the kind. The legitimation work has already been done, institutionally, over decades of citation and syllabi and doctoral supervision.

What this means for the researcher is not merely that certain conceptual resources are underused or overlooked. It means that the map of what counts as theory and what counts as data has been drawn in a way that makes some questions structurally harder to ask than others. A researcher whose work might benefit from thinking through asabiyya — about social cohesion and its depletion, about how solidarity is consumed by its own success — will find, if they work within the standard infrastructure of Middle East studies or political sociology, that doing so requires a kind of secondary justification that consumes intellectual energy the work should not have to spend. The concept is available. The framework for treating it as available is not.

Perhaps the more vertiginous version of this is not that non-Western concepts are treated as data rather than theory, but that the distinction between data and theory is itself a historical product, stabilised at a particular moment under particular conditions, and that the conditions were not neutral. Wallerstein’s account of the nineteenth-century university, in which the social sciences were divided into disciplines corresponding to different regions and populations — economics for the capitalist core, sociology for the domestic lower classes, anthropology for the colonial periphery — sketches a division of labour that was also a division of epistemological status. Some people were studied. Others did the studying. The people who were studied contributed material; the people who studied them contributed frameworks. And this division, institutionalised in curricula, in departmental structures, in the global organisation of academic publishing, persists in forms that do not require anyone to intend it in order for it to continue operating.

The problem with describing it this way, though, is that it risks the kind of structural determinism that makes the situation feel immovable, which is perhaps the most disabling response available. Alatas is careful about this: he insists that scholars cannot do much at the institutional or material level of academic dependency, since they are neither in charge of institutions nor of the state that funds them, but that considerably more can be done at the intellectual and theoretical level. The recovery of lost traditions — Ibn Khaldun being his central example — is not a compensatory gesture toward inclusivity. It is a claim that the existing theoretical toolkit is insufficient for the problems it claims to be able to analyse, and that the insufficiency is specific and demonstrable, not merely a general suspicion about Eurocentrism. Asabiyya can do something in the analysis of political cohesion and its dissolution that social capital cannot, because it theorises the depletion of solidarity rather than its accumulation, because it takes seriously the cyclical rather than the progressive, because it was developed by someone attending to a specific historical pattern that the progressive models were constitutively unable to see.

What lingers, turning this over, is something about the relationship between attention and the conditions that make attention possible. Ibn Khaldun, sitting in Qal’at Ibn Salama in 1375 to begin writing the Muqaddimah, was attending to a specific set of historical problems from inside their occurrence — the collapse of the Hafsid sultanate, the devastation of the Black Death across the Maghreb, the patterns of nomadic and sedentary power he had watched cycling through his own career as an administrator and diplomat. The theory was not applied from outside to data gathered in the field. It emerged from the inside of the situation it was trying to understand. Whether that origin is a feature or a problem depends entirely on what one thinks a theory is for, and what one thinks is required for it to travel. The concept of asabiyya has been waiting for five centuries in a room that most theoretical frameworks treat as a storage space. What it might do, released into actual use, is not entirely knowable in advance. That uncertainty is not a reason to delay.

Wallerstein, reconstructing the nineteenth-century origins of the social science disciplines in Open the Social Sciences, makes a remark about Oriental studies that is precise enough to be worth staying with for a while. “The premise of Oriental studies was very simple,” he writes: “These are marvellous, complex structures that we have to understand… while also explaining why they could not become modern.” The field was built around a double task — comprehension and incapacity — and the double task was not a contradiction but a design. To understand something thoroughly while explaining why it cannot do what you can do is to produce knowledge that serves a very specific institutional purpose: it accounts for the object while protecting the knower’s position. The knowledge produced under these conditions is formally sophisticated and epistemically closed. It can tell you a great deal about what something is. It cannot be surprised by what something knows.

This is the intellectual problem that faces any researcher working on the Middle East within a Western institutional framework, and it does not dissolve when the researcher’s intentions are genuinely critical or the methodology is formally decolonial. The problem is structural, which means it operates beneath the level of individual scholarly virtue. A researcher who has read Said carefully and thinks carefully about positionality is still working within an institutional infrastructure — journal hierarchies, doctoral supervision traditions, funding frameworks, disciplinary conventions about what counts as a theoretical contribution — that was not built to accommodate the kind of knowledge that would genuinely unsettle it. This is not cause for paralysis. It is cause for a specific kind of intellectual attention to what one’s own work is doing, where it is drawing its authority from, and what it requires to remain silent in order to make its argument.

The practical form of this attention is less heroic than it sounds. It does not require abandoning the theoretical frameworks one has been trained in, or substituting local knowledge for universal claims, or resolving the impossibly tangled question of what authentic non-Western intellectual tradition might look like after a century and a half of colonial education. What it requires is something closer to what a translator does: holding two frameworks simultaneously, attending to where they fail to map onto each other, and treating that failure as information rather than as noise to be smoothed over. The researcher who can say — not in a perfunctory positionality statement, but in the actual substance of the argument — “the concepts I am using come from a tradition that was built without this material in view, and here is what that costs, and here is where the cost becomes visible in my analysis,” is doing something epistemologically different from one who cannot. The asymmetry between where the theory comes from and where the material comes from is not a problem that can be solved. It can be named, attended to, made productive — which is a different kind of resolution, one that keeps the difficulty in view rather than dissolving it into method.

There is a related sorting mechanism that tends to operate alongside the data/theory asymmetry, and that is worth naming separately because it shapes what questions are even askable. The distinction between what gets called political and what gets called cultural in the study of the Middle East is not a descriptive convenience. It is a classification with consequences. When a practice, a text, a social formation, a religious tradition is placed on the cultural side of the distinction, it enters a particular kind of analysis — hermeneutic, interpretive, concerned with meaning, identity, tradition. When it is placed on the political side, it enters a different kind — concerned with power, strategy, institutions, conflict. The sorting is never neutral, because the two analytical registers carry different assumptions about what kind of explanation is sufficient and what kind of claim can be made. Culture explains through meaning; politics explains through interest. And in the study of the Middle East specifically, the sorting has historically served particular institutional purposes: the cultural register has tended to make things available for sympathetic scholarly attention without requiring the analyst to take political sides; the political register has tended to make things available for strategic assessment without requiring the analyst to take seriously what the people involved understood themselves to be doing.

The researcher who attends to where this sorting happens in their own literature — and why, and for whom — will find that the line between culture and politics in their field has been drawn somewhere specific, under specific historical conditions, and that the drawing has left certain questions on the wrong side of the line. Those questions are not unanswerable. They are simply harder to ask, and the difficulty is not accidental.


Recommended Reading

For the asabiyya concept in its original context, Rosenthal’s translation of the Muqaddimah is the standard, but the abridged one-volume edition (Princeton University Press) is sufficient. Read Part One, chapters 1–3, which lay out the theory of social cohesion and dynastic cycles. Alatas’s Applying Ibn Khaldun (2014) is the best guide to what the concept can do analytically when treated as theory rather than specimen.

On academic dependency and the global division of intellectual labour, Alatas’s 2003 essay in Current Sociology is the most concise entry point. His father, Syed Hussein Alatas, coined the term “captive mind” in a 1974 essay — “The Captive Mind in Development Studies,” International Social Science Journal — that is short, sharp, and has not dated.

On the historical construction of the disciplines and the specific role of Oriental studies in producing the data/theory asymmetry, Wallerstein’s Open the Social Sciences (1996) is indispensable. Chapter 1, “The Historical Construction of the Social Sciences,” is the relevant section. Pair it with Said’s Orientalism, Chapter 1, which makes the same argument from the literary and philological side.

For the politics/culture distinction as an analytical problem rather than a descriptive convenience, Raymond Williams’s entry on “Culture” in Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (1976) is still the clearest account of how the category was constructed and what work it was designed to do. Talal Asad’s essay “Anthropological Conceptions of Religion: Reflections on Geertz” (1983) in Man applies comparable pressure to the religion/politics boundary in anthropological frameworks specifically relevant to Islamic studies.

excess-human

Someone in the session said “excess-human” when we were trying to define monster, and I keep returning to it because I think it’s more precise than anything else we produced. Not inhuman — the monster is not simply outside humanity, not simply animal or alien or incomprehensible. Excess-human. Too much of something that is recognizably human. Too much desire, too much will, too much need, too much capacity for harm. The monster exceeds the category without leaving it. That’s what makes it monstrous rather than merely other.

This connects to something Jeffrey Cohen says that we didn’t quite reach: the monster is always a cultural body, made of the same material as the culture that produced it, arranged wrongly. Hitler and Stalin appeared on the board as examples — unlimited power, disregarding humanity, violence, ruthlessness. But notice what these examples do: they move the monster outward, toward the political, the historical, the safely extreme. They let us locate monstrousness at a distance. The artist-monster is harder because it is closer. Polanski is not Hitler. The excess is smaller, more intimate, more entangled with something we love. And the category “excess-human” is useful precisely because it doesn’t require a threshold. You don’t have to decide when exactly the excess becomes monstrous. You just have to notice it’s there.

The fandom versus tribalism question that came up is one I want to sit with longer than we had time for:

The compilation of “the most electrifying chants in football” we watched was producing a specific effect in the room that I want to name. People were moved (and also appalled). People who are not football fans, who have no relationship to these clubs, no stake in any of these results, were getting something from watching other people’s unconditional collective attachment. Which is already interesting: the fandom was legible and contagious even without the object that generated it.

The instinct to distinguish fandom from tribalism is understandable — fandom feels chosen, individual, aesthetic; tribalism feels inherited, collective, identity-determined. But the words we collected in relation to “fan” told another story. Cult. Irrational. Unconditional. And then: mob. Stalker. Hater. The dark side of the fan column arrived almost immediately, uninvited, as if the structure of extreme attachment necessarily produces its shadow. The person whose love tips into something the beloved would recognize as violence. The crowd that becomes a mob not because something went wrong but because the same mechanism that produces collective devotion also produces collective rage — the same unconditional attachment, directed differently.

What the football chants show is that the mechanism operates without any individual relationship to the object at all. Likely, no one in the Dortmund yellow wall has met a single player personally. The love is entirely mediated, entirely collective, entirely constructed — and entirely real. Which suggests that fandom is not primarily about the artist or the work or even the content of the attachment. It is a form of collective self-production. The ultras are not fans of a football club the way a music fan is a fan of an album. They are fans of their own fandom — of the identity the fandom makes possible, of the community it creates, of the rituals that mark belonging. The club is the occasion. The fandom is the substance.

This is the thing that makes “fans are monsters” more interesting than it sounds as a provocation. Not because fans commit violence — though ultras sometimes do, and that is a whole other conversation — but because the structure of unconditional collective attachment is the structure that makes both devotion and destruction possible. The same architecture. You cannot have one without the other being available. And when the artist is a monster, what the fan community has to reckon with is not just their individual love of the work. It is the collective structure they built around it — the community, the identity, the rituals of belonging — and what that structure made possible for the person at its center.

What surprised me most in the session was the question that appeared almost as an afterthought: does the artist exist without the fan? This is either a trivial observation — of course artists exist regardless of their audiences — or it is the most important question the session raised, and I think it is the second. What it is asking is not whether the artist’s body would continue to exist without reception. It is asking whether the artist as artist — as the person who made the thing that matters, who has the cultural significance that makes the monster problem a problem — exists without the collective investment of the fan community. And the answer to that question is no.

Picasso without the fandom (and yes, academic-intellectual appreciation is a kind of fandom) is a man who made paintings. Picasso with the fandom is a genius whose crimes we debate. The fandom is what produced the category of person whose behavior requires a response. Which means the fan community is not just the passive recipient of the monster’s output. It is a constitutive part of what the monster is. The capital is supportive and destructive simultaneously. The fans built the pedestal. The pedestal is what made the fall possible. And the fall is onto them.

This is another thing Dederer doesn’t quite say, I think. She treats the fan as the person who suffers the stain — the one who loved before knowing and now has to carry the knowledge. But the fan is also the person who produced the conditions. The unconditional love, the irrational attachment, the refusal to apply the same standards that would apply to anyone else — these are not just symptoms of fandom. They are the mechanism by which a person becomes a figure large enough to be called a genius, and therefore large enough for the word “genius” to function as a permission slip.

Which is where we’re going next. The word appeared on the board in the monster column — or rather, it was implied by the female/male distinction that sat there without quite being named. The monster-men on Dederer’s list committed assault, rape, abuse of power. The monster-women — Joni Mitchell, Sylvia Plath, Doris Lessing — abandoned their children, or their families, or their obligations. And the word “genius” was available to excuse the first category in a way it was not available to the second. Not because women can’t be called geniuses. Because the genius concept was built to cover a specific kind of excess — the male artist’s excess — and it fits that shape and not others.

Someone decided who gets to hand out the permission slips. The question for next session is who, and when, and what they needed the category to do.


Before our next session: re-read Chapter 5, “The Genius.” As you read, do one thing: find a sentence where Dederer uses the word “genius” not as her own description but as something being used by someone else — where she catches the word doing its work rather than just meaning something. Write down the sentence and write one sentence about what the word is doing in it. What is it stopping? What is it protecting?

For further reading: if the transitional objects question stayed with you, the clearest short introduction to Winnicott’s concept is in his essay “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena” (1953), in International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, widely available. It is short, strange, and more radical than summaries suggest.

On the monster as cultural body: Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “Monster Culture: Seven Theses” — the introduction to Monster Theory: Reading Culture (1996). Seven short theses, each one a different way the monster functions. Thesis IV — “The Monster Dwells at the Gates of Difference” — and Thesis VI — “Fear of the Monster is Really a Kind of Desire” — are the ones most directly relevant to Dederer’s argument. Read them asking: which thesis fits the artist-monster? Is it the same thesis that fits the political monster — Stalin, Hitler — that appeared on our board?

On parasocial relationships and the economics of fandom: a short and sharp piece is Stacey D’Erasmo, “The Art of the Fan,” published in Tin House — essayistic, not strictly academic, and it asks directly what the fan gets from the transaction that the artist cannot provide and does not know they are giving.

the body that doesn’t ask permission

Something stayed with me from the session that I want to think through here, because I don’t think we got all the way to the bottom of it.

We arrived at a distinction — trained body versus involuntary body — and found that it wouldn’t hold. The involuntary response turns out to be partly the product of training; the trained response turns out to produce something that feels genuinely involuntary, genuinely arrived-from-outside. Al-Ghazali says: if the tears don’t come, reach for them, and at some point the reaching and the tears become indistinguishable. William Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling (2001), says: saying “I am moved” participates in the movement. The boundary between what you did and what happened to you is not where you thought it was.

But I want to push at something the session didn’t quite reach. We kept asking whether the involuntary response is more or less authentic than the trained one. And underneath that question is an assumption I’m not sure we examined: that authenticity is the right criterion. That the thing we should be asking about a religious sensory experience is whether it is genuine — whether it really happened, whether it was really God rather than the apparatus, whether the feeling was the person’s own rather than produced by the community’s instruction manual for correct feeling.

Where does that criterion come from? It comes, I think, from exactly the Protestant interior turn that Talal Asad is tracing. The question “was it genuine” is a question about the inner state of the individual — whether the belief was really there, whether the intention was pure, whether the self was authentically engaged. It is a deeply individualist question, and a deeply suspicious one. It assumes that experience needs to be checked against something — against sincerity, against doctrinal correctness, against some standard of authenticity that exists prior to and independent of the experience itself. And that assumption is not Islamic in origin. Or not only Islamic. It arrived in the study of religion through a particular intellectual history that decided the interior was where the real thing happened.

The idea of qalb (arab. “heart”) complicates this in a way I find genuinely disorienting. The heart as perceptual organ — an organ that can be polished or corroded, trained to perceive more finely or allowed to rust shut — is not an apparatus for producing authentic inner states. It is a faculty for perceiving something real. The question is not “did you really feel it” but “could you see it.” Which means the relevant criterion shifts from authenticity to acuity. The question is less whether your experience was genuine and more whether your perceptual organ was calibrated correctly. And that is a completely different kind of question with completely different implications for what religious practice is supposed to do.

A polished mirror reflects accurately. A corroded mirror distorts. The mirror doesn’t decide whether it’s being authentic — it either shows what is there or it doesn’t. The Sufi understanding of the heart is closer to this than to anything like Protestant sincerity. Which means the trained body, in this framework, is not the body that has been conditioned to produce correct feelings on cue. It is the body that has been prepared to perceive accurately. Training is calibration, not conditioning. And this distinction matters.

And yet — here is where I get stuck, and I want to stay stuck rather than moving past it — calibration implies an object. Calibration implies there is something there to be perceived accurately or inaccurately. The polished mirror reflects what is in front of it. What is in front of the qalb? This is not a question that can be answered by methodology. It is a question the whole framework of sensory religious experience opens without being able to close. Tanya Luhrmann, How God Becomes Real (2020), can tell you how people train themselves to experience divine presence. She cannot tell you whether what they experience is a presence or a trained capacity for experiencing presence. And that gap — between the training and its object — is where every account of religious sensory experience lives.

I want to approach the next session from a different angle. We have been talking about the body that responds — to sound, to rhythm, to collective breathing, to the voice that does something before you’ve authorized it. But we have barely touched the sense that Western religious art, architecture, and theology have treated as the most spiritual of all: sight. The great cathedrals are machines for producing particular qualities of light. The mosque lamp is engineered to diffuse illumination in a specific way. Enlightenment — in every tradition that uses the word — is visual. The beatific vision. The light of guidance. Nur Muhammad, the light of the Prophet that precedes creation. We see the sacred. Or we say we do.

But why? Why should sight be the sense that reaches God when smell enters the brain more directly, bypassing the cognitive apparatus entirely? When touch is the most intimate sense, the one that requires actual proximity, actual contact? When the body praying is oriented not toward a visual image but toward a direction — the qibla — which you cannot see at all?

Someone decided that sight was the spiritual sense. That decision has a history. And the history is not obvious.


Before our next session: find one example — from any tradition, any context, religious or not — where sight is treated as the sense that accesses truth. Then find one example where another sense does that work instead. Bring both, and bring one sentence about what is at stake in the difference.


If the session raised questions you want to follow further, two short texts are worth reading alongside it. Clifford Geertz’s definition of religion — the passage that begins “a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations” — is in “Religion as a Cultural System” (1966), widely available, about 40 pages. Read it specifically asking: where is the body? What does this definition assume about the relationship between symbol and sensation? Asad’s critique in the first chapter of Genealogies of Religion will make more sense once you have Geertz’s own words in hand rather than Asad’s paraphrase of them.

On emotives: William Reddy’s concept is developed in The Navigation of Feeling (2001), but the clearest short version is in his essay “Against Constructionism: The Historical Ethnography of Emotions” (1997) in Current Anthropology, freely available online. The key passage is where he distinguishes constative speech acts from emotives — the moment he shows that saying “I am angry” is not a description but an act that participates in producing or modifying the state it names. Read it asking: if religious speech acts function as emotives, what does that mean for the niyya question? Does the intention precede the speech, or does the speech produce the intention?

task in preparation of May 27 session

Name the invisible ground in your literature explicitly. Say where your theory comes from and where your data comes from and what that asymmetry costs you. Say whether your object is being treated as cultural or political and who benefits from that framing. Write it as if you were being fully honest with a reader who already knows the field.

Two hundred words maximum. Start with:

*”The literature I am working with was built in order to…”*

That opening clause forces specificity. It requires naming a purpose, an institutional need, a historical condition — not just a scholarly tradition floating free of its origins.

Bring this to the next session.

the question you’re not asking

Here is something I notice every semester without exception. Someone comes into the colloquium with a topic. The topic is usually well-formed, defensible, recognizably academic. Palestinian urban planning. Islamic environmentalism in Iran. Moroccan migrants and religious identity in Berlin. And underneath it, sometimes buried quite deep, is a question that the topic was built on top of — a genuine intellectual problem, something that actually bothers the person, something they want to know that they cannot yet say cleanly out loud.

The topic is the safe version. The question is the real one.

What we did in this session was try to find the gap between the two. Not to collapse it — sometimes the gap is productive, sometimes you need the institutional legibility of the topic to get the funding, the supervisor, the degree — but to see it clearly and know what’s in it. Because what’s in the gap is often the most important thing about the project. It’s where the actual thinking is happening.

I want to say something about why this is harder than it sounds. It’s not just a matter of being more precise or finding better words. The problem is structural. By the time ISME students arrive at the colloquium, their topics have already been through several rounds of invisible negotiation — with what seems supervisable, with what counts as a legitimate question in a Western European university, with what Middle East studies as a field has decided is worth knowing. The topic is the result of all that prior filtering. Which means the real question — the thing that made you care in the first place — has often already been compressed, translated, made to fit. And the compression happened so gradually, and with such good institutional reasons behind each step, that most people have stopped noticing it’s there.

Finding the assumption in a question is one way back.

Every question contains an assumption — something it takes as settled that isn’t actually settled, something it needs to be true in order for the question to even make sense. “How does X resist Y” assumes X has agency and something to resist. “Why did Z fail” assumes failure is the right frame and that there was a single coherent project that could succeed or fail. “What role does W play” assumes W is distinct from the surrounding field rather than constitutive of it. None of these assumptions are wrong, necessarily. But they are positions. They have been taken. And the person who can name their own assumptions explicitly is in a completely different position from the person who can’t — not because the research changes, but because they know what they’re arguing rather than just what they’re describing.

James Scott is worth sitting with as an example because it’s clean enough to be instructive. He went to Malaysia to study peasant political economy. That’s the topic. What he wanted to know — the question that drove the fieldwork, that organized what counted as evidence and what didn’t — was something like: what does resistance look like when open revolt is impossible, or even suicidal? That question contains an assumption: that resistance doesn’t require open confrontation. In 1985, in political science, that assumption was genuinely contestable. Plenty of people would have said: if there’s no open confrontation, there’s no resistance, just accommodation. Scott’s question had something to argue against. It could go either way. That’s what made it a question rather than a topic.

Now here’s the harder version. Scott had fieldwork. He had language. He had eighteen months in the villages. He could look for foot-dragging and gossip and feigned incompetence because he was there to see them. ISME students working on their MA theses often don’t have that access, or have it partially, or have to construct it from a desk in Berlin using sources that were produced under conditions that constrain what they can say. This is not a complaint — it’s a methodological condition that is itself worth analyzing. But it means that the question has to be calibrated not just to what you want to know but to what you can actually find out. And figuring out where those two things diverge — what you want to know versus what the sources will let you say — is part of the work we’ll do together this semester.

Something else happened in the session that I want to name. When we worked through one question as a group the most productive moment was not when someone found a better formulation. It was when someone asked: who would disagree with the assumption in this question? Because suddenly the question had an opponent. Suddenly it was situated in a conversation rather than hovering above one. And you could see the researcher visibly relax into it — not because the question got easier, but because it got real. A question with an opponent is a question you can write toward. A question that floats above disagreement is just a topic wearing a question mark.

Come to the next session with two things. Your question in one sentence. And the assumption it contains — the thing that would have to be true for the question to make sense, that someone in your field would actually dispute. If you can’t find the assumption yet, bring the question anyway and we’ll find it together. That’s what the colloquium is for.


Before our next session: write your research question in one sentence. Then write, separately, the assumption it contains — the thing it needs to be true, that someone could reasonably dispute. If you find yourself writing more than two sentences for the assumption, you’ve probably found more than one. Pick the deepest one. Bring both.