A Day in the Life of an Early Modern North African Scholar-Farmer
[‘Alī bin Yaḥyā al-Salaksaynī al-Jādīrī, d. 1564] would spend his daytime fasting, teaching ‘ilm all day long, not stopping from his teaching except during the times of the ritual prayers and the call...
View Articleburned horizons
i. a white shroud hangs before the mountain, the sunis wan and thin, ebbing through the particles of ash in air.burning, burning, the rancid and unbid fruit of harnessed fire.far off dying trees groan,...
View ArticleThe Seven Sleepers In Islamicate Textuality: Complex Crossings
During an Islamicate manuscripts reading group I am coordinating this semester, I was looking around in my archive of digitized manuscripts for some nice examples of marginal texts and came across the...
View Articlegihli digalenvhida
in the distant end of the smoothsided passageway of dreams I see ascending the rough stone above the marked clay floor, turning upward, the great dog chasing the stars, heavy snout of charcoal, dark...
View ArticleMany Worlds in One Manuscript: A Close Reading of Ms. Yah. Ar. 765, Part I
I’d like to try out something a bit different in this space (and no, I have not forgotten about the Ahl al-Kahf- I still have material related to their place in the history of Islamic devotion on tap...
View Articletaphonomy
let them dig up my bones laid in a red clay hole, long centuries later when the world will have made many more turnings, settled into some other transitory state. let them take care, take heed of the...
View Articlenew echota
the land lies blank but for the reconstructed structures and the young trees lately planted, a few faint lines of roads shallowly traced. I listen for the principal people, my eyes closed, but all I...
View ArticleMany Worlds in One Manuscript: A Close Reading of Ms. Yah. Ar. 765, Part II
This post continues my three-part exploration of a short Ottoman manuscript text, Risāla fī ithbāt ruʾyat al-nabī yaqaẓatan li-man iṣtafāhu min ʿibādihi al-ṣāliḥīn, by the otherwise obscure scholar...
View ArticleMany Worlds in One Manuscript: A Close Reading of Ms. Yah. Ar. 765, Part III
This post concludes my series introducing, discussing, and rendering in translation a short Arabic treatise by an eighteenth century Ottoman scholar, Muḥammad b. Aḥmad al-Kūmuljinawī. In this final...
View Articlethe stylite addresses the world
die before you die, let the vultures of the air hover over your body, buried in the dome of the sky, touching the horizon and leaning towards the depths. climb the solitary ruins, gather the fragments...
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