Well, it’s been a couple weeks since my last missive here, and in the interim between I’ve been busy with the beginning of the fall semester this last week and, the week before that, our family’s visit down to Mississippi to visit with my family. Travel by air with children is generally not the most enjoyable experience, and the interminable era of covid has certainly not made it any better. But other than the expected frustrations of air travel (it is hard in such circumstances to maintain any excitement at the wonder of mechanical flight, to be honest) and the cutting short of our trip due to the unexpected imminent arrival of Hurricane Ida it was a good trip, Cormac and Vera having a wonderful time at their grandparents’, and finally getting to meet their great-grandfather. We also visited the Mississippi Museum of Natural Science, which is a real gem and if you are ever in the region well worth the visit, with an excellent overview of Mississippi’s deep past as well as its ecological present. Outside of working hours I spent some time searching the banks of the Pearl River outside of the town of Byram (pictured above, from the early 20th c. swinging bridge that spans the river there), a few miles west of my parents’, for exquisite Oligocene marine fauna, mostly mollusks but also some gorgeous corals of the genus Archohella. The heat and humidity were also exquisite and my expeditions were concluded once the accumulation of sweat on my brow meant my glasses would not stay in place. Such are the perils of scientific inquiry!
We missed experiencing a hurricane as a family—which was downgraded to a tropical storm by the time it was in Mississippi, and had a fairly light impact all things considered, helped by river levels that had finally fallen after a very wet spring and summer—though I could not help reflecting on another hurricane sixteen years prior when I was an undergraduate in college in South Mississippi. No doubt that chapter of my life would benefit from sustained reflection but for now here are some sporadic thoughts along those lines in, where else, a Twitter thread. Returning to Mississippi is always a somewhat if not deeply melancholic experience, and the ravages of covid, the steady drip of rural population loss, and all the other things at play in recent years and over much longer trajectories only accentuates the feeling of loss and melancholy and slow burning tragedy. Thinking about the deep past of my ancestral land—my ‘people’ settled in east-central Mississippi from around 1830, so going on now two centuries, a respectable span—is somewhat, if you will pardon the vastly overused expression, rather therapeutic, locating a history and a narrative that owes nothing to the often dark and tragic much more recent past.
The deep past—from the Cretaceous forward, with a remarkably continuous and visible record all through the Cenozoic to the present—flows in and out of the ecological present of Mississippi and the rest of the Deep South, with deltas expanding, oceans rising, bottomlands and other wetlands forming and being buried under mud and storm and sea level rise, rich lands and rich seas cycling again and again into the present. The nature of the Deep South, so close to the subtropics if not yet outright subtropical, is full of a sheer exuberance, a riot of life, which is visible in the rich fossil record as it is in the evening air heavy with cicadas and tree frogs and all other manner of living thing, unconcerned with whatever is presently perturbing the human population.
Speaking of deep time—as mentioned previously I am helping to lead a reading group on big history and deep time, based here at the University of Maryland but which is open to anyone interested in participating, on which have a look here. Our first meeting will be in the last week of September, time to be determined, and if you are interested do get in touch—we’ll be operating primarily virtually so geographic proximity or lack thereof is not at issue. We will be reading Cameron Gibelyou and Douglas Northrop’s Big Ideas: A Guide to the History of Everything, which promises to be an excellent introductory text.
Also of note in recent weeks, on Tuesday I started teaching a new course, an intro to modern Islam (which actually begins in 1500 and so includes early modern Islam as well); the course webpage which may be of some interest even to non-students can be accessed here.
Finally in announcements last week I gave a talk on Islamicate manuscripts, check it out below:
For this week’s material culture offerings, first a manuscript folio mentioned in the above lecture but worth presenting in more detail (LOC 1-85-154.76a-b):
At the center of these compositions are ‘Abbasid if not older pages from a Qur’an, written on parchment as was the style in early Islam; the script is ‘Kufic,’ and not easy to read for most Arabic readers (self included!), with many orthographic and style peculiarities setting it apart from latter developments. What is interesting about these pages, however, is that they were repurposed many centuries after being made, having been either recovered from loose folios or excised from an extant volume and placed in a paper frame, with intricate Persianate illumination surrounding, and imitation of the original script at top and bottom. This was probably done in the sixteenth century Safavid lands, though I’ve also seen similar examples from the Ottoman world, reflecting an early modern interest in these sorts of manuscript ‘remixes’ and reframings. The pages are clearly old and no doubt functioned as portals, as it were, to the by then quite distant and hallowed past of early Islam, connected to the present through contemporary visuals of illumination, visual components in turn overlaid by imitation of the venerable ancient script.
As for the second image I’d like to share today I’ve nothing profound to say about it, it simply struck me as a fascinating photograph, of Afridi tribal warriors in mid-19th century Afghanistan, taken by a British photographer—it’s not clear who exactly however—and included in an album of photos from the region now held in the Library of Congress (Afghan album [Near East Section cage]). Afghanistan and its relation to the Anglo-American world is, let us say, a live topic these days, though I do not feel especially qualified to address it. It would be interesting and insightful, however, to say construct a genealogy of just visual representations of the Afghan ‘other’ and his—and her—increasing distance from the idealized ‘Westerner,’ but that is a task for another day.
As for books, most of my reading the last couple weeks has been of relatively older volumes. I particularly enjoyed Jonathan Neaman Lipman’s Familiar Strangers: A History of Muslims in Northwest China (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997), as I have been reinforcing my knowledge of Islam in China for teaching purposes, and also wishing I had kept up Chinese as well as Arabic way back in my relative youth. Reading Lipman’s volume two rather small things struck me, one historiographic, one personal—first, it had never occurred to me that it was Muslims in China who first seriously engaged with printing, well before Müteferrika in the Ottoman world, yet no one has really considered this fact in thinking about Islamic relations to printing. Second, on a personal level, Islam in China has long fascinated me for the simple reason that it was in China, Yunnan specifically, over a decade and a half ago now, that I first encountered Islam as a lived religion and a physical, spatial presence, yet in my studies since then it has figured very little, with the language barrier certainly a major factor. That said there has been a real shift in recent years towards a more global study of Islam and the Islamicate and Chinese Muslims (in all the possible configurations) have been part of that shift to some extent.
The only other volume I’ll mention this week is one I picked up in Mississippi but have not yet begun to read: Christian Pinnen and Charles Weeks, Colonial Mississippi: A Borrowed Land (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2021), about which I was quite excited as the early modern—ie in American parlance ‘colonial’—period in Mississippi is one that I have long wanted to better know and hoped to be able to integrate into my own teaching of the global early modern world, and this volume appears to go a long ways towards rectifying that lack. I’ll also add that I had forgotten what a wonderful bookstore Jackson’s Lemuria Books is, definitely one of the highlights of the city.
Finally, I leave you with a fascinating passage from St. Thomas Aquinas’s Commentary on Aristotle’s Physics, cited in the aforementioned Gibelyou and Northrop’s book Big Ideas; it provides what I think is a most productive way to think about nature in a way that does not reproduce anthropocentric teleology but also does not reduce nature and natural processes to total a-teleology but suggests instead a more complex ontology and relationship with Divine Wisdom (source of translated passage is here):
For it seems to some that nature does not act for the sake of something because nature does not deliberate.
But the Philosopher says that it is absurd to hold this opinion. For it is obvious, that art acts for the sake of something, yet it is also obvious that art does not deliberate. Nor does the artisan deliberate insofar as he has the art, but insofar as he falls short of the certitude of the art. Hence the most certain arts do not deliberate, as the writer does not deliberate how he should form letters. Moreover, those artisans who do deliberate, after they have discovered the certain principles of the art, do not deliberate in the execution. Thus one who plays the harp would seem most inexperienced if he should deliberate in playing any chord. And from this it is clear that an agent does not deliberate, not because he does not act for an end, but because he has the determinate means by which he acts. Hence since nature has the determinate means by which it acts, it does, not deliberate. For nature seems to differ from art only because nature is an intrinsic principle and art is an extrinsic principle. For if the art of ship building were intrinsic to wood, a ship would have been made by nature in the same way as it is made by art. And this is most obvious in the art which is in that which is moved, although per accidens, such as in the doctor who cures himself. For nature is very similar to this art.
Hence, it is clear that nature is nothing but a certain kind of art, i.e., the divine art, impressed upon things, by which these things are moved to a determinate end. It is as if the shipbuilder were able to give to timbers that by which they would move themselves to take the form of a ship.