Greetings travelers of the internets! If you’re reading this chances are pretty good that you’re familiar with my work as a historian of the medieval and early modern Islamicate world, perhaps via my professional profile, my personal website, or my social media presence. This newsletter will touch on aspects of that work- particularly the more theoretical and critical side of it- but I have undertake a much wider ambit here, one that I felt was ill-suited to any of my other online presences. Over the last few years, while completing my doctoral studies and then in the immediate aftermath (perhaps too dramatic a word!), I have been exploring new horizons of study and thought while also refining many long-standing features of my thinking and approaches to the world, from the political to the theological to the phenomenological. I’ve also begun to feel tentatively more comfortable expressing my thoughts in public about a wider array of subjects, and, even more tentatively, believe that you- yes, you dear reader- just might enjoy reading them and might even benefit from said experience.
What I am aiming for with this newsletter is an approach to history that is more integrative and expansive than that which I generally do in my professional work as a historian; an uncharitable way of putting it might be that here I will talk about things in which I am no expert but as often as not an interested amateur, interested in moving towards, as the tagline suggests, a sort of universal history, putting deep time in dialogue with the pressing realities of late modernity, to give one but one example of the kinds of configurations I am interested in pursuing. There is something deeply appealing in the kind of cohesiveness and mastery that many medieval and especially early modern thinkers were able to muster in relation to many different disciplines and approaches to understanding the world and the human relationship to the world, to one another, and to God, fashioning narratives- including universal histories that began with cosmic origins as then understood and advanced up to the present- that aimed at both unity and comprehension. I want to recover a bit of that approach- to think about past and present in a way that brings together otherwise disparate fields and ways of thinking, and in so doing I hope forge better paths forward for us here in the living present. I also want to write at times at least in a more personal vein than seems appropriate for my other loci of digital presence- using the autobiographical and reflective as different sorts of entry points into the big questions and issues that form the core of this writing project.
More concretely, this newsletter will tackle variations on the following three themes:
1) topics in the history of deep time, including, but not limited to, the history of life on earth, the metaphysical and theological ramifications of evolution in deep time, ways in which ‘big history’ (a term I viscerally dislike even if I am drawn to what it aims at describing!) and ‘shallow history’ can mutually inform one another, and so forth
2) topics in Islamicate history- my actual field of expertise!- from a more theoretical and methodological angle, particularly as that history and my practice of it intersects with the other two topics, especially
3) critical understanding of the role of technology and technics in human history and especially in the modern, industrialized age, with perspectives drawn in part from the works of thinkers like Ellul, Illitch, Mumford, Rosa, and others, examining in particular the role that historical thinking can play in explicating our current situation and providing possible vantage points for ways forward. Topics to be covered might include digital humanities, the interplay of technology and cultural dynamics, the historian’s role in navigating the Anthropocene, and the theological implications of living in our technological society.
I will continue to produce translations, essays on specific Islamicate historical topics, and the like on my personal website, but will reserve my thoughts on these other more diffuse topics for this newsletter. So if any or all of the above interests you, please subscribe! And while all content will be free and open, if you would like to support my writing do consider becoming a paying subscriber, I would very much appreciate it; benefits and opportunities will be worked out as- if- I add paying subscribers.
In the meantime, tell your friends, especially if they’re into reading long rather esoteric explorations of the cosmos and human history and quite possibly the kitchen sink, they’ll thank you for the reference!