Only a few items this very late installment, though I hope to have more published on here soon, and promise that a podcast is coming down the track. This month’s newsletter features: i.) the usual updates on local happenings, ii.) a response to the war in Gaza, iii.) some scholarly things I’m working on, iv.) music, and v.) a poem.
i. into winter
Here at the southern end of the Southern Appalachians winter has begun to reach into the days and nights, as mild sunshine alternates with genuine cold. The Nativity Fast is reaching its end, and Christmas approaches. Like just about everyone else this time of year our family has been battling colds and sinus infections, the wild vagaries of the weather not exactly helping. Outdoors, I’ve been working to cover some of my vegetable beds and wring out a full winter growing season this year (I know, it’s work I should have done months ago); trying to make the most use of stuff I’ve sourced from existing supplies. Outside of the main annual vegetable beds I’ve finally really gotten down to work on a proper permaculture-inspired landscape, with two forest gardens, our chicken coop area, some small ponds, and meadow area for cutting hay. I had avoided any serious dirt work because of the intense drought which settled on this corner of the Appalachians, running from around Knoxville in the north down into the southern reaches of Lookout and Sand Mountain; for that tier of counties up and down the Tennessee Valley and parts of the Cumberland Plateau it was the driest autumn on record.
Smoke—locally sourced this time, and not Canadian—was a not infrequent visitor between the ridges these last couple of months. Thank the Lord, towards the end of November the heavens opened and it rained harder than we’ve seen in several months. It didn’t make up our rain deficit but it helped, and it was enough to soften the earth so that I could dig out a nice little wildlife and water control pond, plus a bunch of little berms and swales to contain and direct rain runoff. Since then we’ve had more rain, the creeks are filling back up, the waterfalls returning to life.
Despite the drought, and the occasional bursts of summer-like days in October and November, I’ve set out new fruiting trees and shrubs for our home food forest, and so far they all seem to have remained alive. I’ve more trees on order, and will be rooting a bunch of things as I have the time and energy. On the community food forest front, we’ve gotten to work preparing the ground and both of our sites in Chattanooga, and hope to begin planting and building more over the coming months, things have really moved along and I’m looking forward to what next year will bring. I’ll write more about that project in the future, though for now I encourage you to have a look at our website and the fairly active blog I’m maintaining there: Food Forest Coalition of Chattanooga.
ii. war
In the wider world—which of course has a habit of bleeding into our smaller more constrained orbits—October and November were a fraught couple of months, to put it mildly. The Middle East has seen one tragedy after another this year, but the war that erupted on October 7 is easily the bitterest and most violent, made all the more troubling by the seeming lull in large-scale hostilities into which the region seemed to have been settling.
That said, I’ve seen people online express bewilderment or frustration at the centrality of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and to some extent I get it: there are a lot of nasty wars and conflicts going on at any given time, and one is never at any loss to find horrible states and often equally horrid resistance groups, battling it out despite ever growing casualty counts among the non-combatants. There are a lot of reasons for the centrality this particular conflict has taken over all the others, and in fact the sheer intractability of the conflict is partly if not entirely rooted in the simultaneous existence of all those reasons. This is the most over-determined armed conflict of our lifetimes, I’ve little doubt, with seemingly every facet of twentieth century history, of multiple streams of apocalypticism and eschatology from multiple faiths, of a dizzying array of ideologies and political approaches, all ultimately playing out on a slice of the Levant that is only 11,000 square miles in size but is weighted with a couple continents’ worth of history and symbolic resonances for Muslims, Christians, and Jews—which is to say, much of the earth’s present population. It is not too much an exaggeration to say that the Holy Land has become something of a black hole of contemporary history, so many lines of force converging there, the gravity of our times collapsing inward on what are otherwise pretty humble hills and valleys and a sliver of coastal plain.
But the centrality is not only in the realm of the symbolic and world-historical significance. Israel and Palestine, despite being really quite tiny polities numbers-wise and in square mileage, are entangled in the lives of people all over the world. Neither polity is for me a distant abstraction, nor is it for many other Americans or residents of many other countries around the world.
The conflict also gets at a fundamental truth about our world, one that we probably always suspect but are loathe to admit: all of our explanations, our analysis, our ideologies, our political-moral frameworks, all of it is insufficient, leads to explosive dead ends. It isn’t just that things don’t fit into the ready-made boxes we have on hand, they set the boxes on fire when they come into contact. Perhaps the worst are those that are predicated upon some form of ethno-nationalism: it doesn’t really matter whether it is framed as liberatory or as reactive, it is poison.
To say there is a lot troubling about this conflict would be a cruel understatement; the violence we have seen—on both sides, if in different forms—is genuinely horrifying, in a way that has not really been in true in the most recent crop of conflicts, with the possible exception of the operations of the Islamic State during its zenith a few years ago. But while it does not involve a loss of life—for now—I have been especially disturbed by the kinds of discourse appearing in the midst of this war, in particular what is hard to deny is an increasing mainstreaming, or at least frequent appearance, of open and in many cases almost cartoonishly vile antisemitism, of the sort I cannot remember having seen expressed in public in my lifetime. While it is especially prominent on the right—where it was growing well before the war in Gaza—it is showing up among leftists, among Muslims, among people who I would not have classified as particularly political or as likely to be attracted to antisemitic tropes (and in some cases it is possible people genuinely do not understand with what they are engaging and promoting). At the same time, rhetoric around the Palestinians and around Arabs and Muslims generally has reached levels of vitriol and violence that are reminiscent of the days after September 11th, and in some cases quite possibly worse, reaching a decidedly genocidal fever pitch in the darkest corners of the discourse. The only silver lining, if it can be called that, in any of this is that some of the absolute worst political factions and tendencies have ended up split, with one side committed to violent hatred of Jews, the other side to violent hatred of Muslims; one hopes this will discourage political activation in the real world, but that is a rather slim hope.
I don’t have any solutions to any of this, and anyone who suggests as much is almost certainly naive or lying or hyped up on ideology. What I can suggest, and what I’d like to think I’m working to realize in the real world around me, is a move away from totalizing ideologies of identity towards forms of identity that are both more rooted- as in rooted in particular places, geographically-nested histories, and actual living communities- while also being more capacious, more open to many layers of identity and culture and movement, oriented around communities in particular places, communities that retain openness while also being committed to their localized well-being and development. It’s beyond my remit in this newsletter, but I’d argue that most of human history has been marked by such a dynamic of identity and belonging for the average person; strong identification with states, empires, and the like, much less imagined dispersed nations, has been quite rare and usually limited to a stratum of the ruling elite.
Ordinary human identity was until quite recently a fusion of the highly localized and the highly distributed: one ‘identified’ (via such mundane mechanisms as one’s ‘full’ name, for instance, particularly in Arabic and other linguistic/cultural traditions) with one’s city, quarter or neighborhood, region, with a particular family lineage or place of ancestral origin (the two often running together), perhaps with a clan or a moiety. The latter could themselves be quite geographically distributed, perhaps over an entire continent and even over linguistic zones; yet more universal, pre-modern people understood themselves in relation to a universal religious tradition, to large-scale traditions and ‘institutions’ within a religious group (a madhhab or ṭarīqa in Islam, a monastic or confraternity in Christianity), and, usually in a less formalized manner, ‘ecumenical’ cultural traditions which however were not usually understood to have a single political home or orbit. And while it would be absurd to over-idealize such a situation, or to imagine that such identity ‘complexes’ were never deployed for violence and exclusion and the like- obviously at points most of them were- it is also the case that almost none of them had the rigidity or essentialism of most modern forms of political and national identity. We could do well to more seriously explore the many alternative ways of thinking and doing that human history presents to us, here and elsewhere (obviously a recurring theme in these digital pages!), not as a search for models to merely imitate, but as ways of opening up our horizons, as resources for moving beyond the moribund but still deadly constructs we have inherited from the immediate past and which are failing to address the various crises we face.
iii. some recent findings
Turning to rather more cheerful things: I’m going to be doing more with both of these discoveries in the near future, but I wanted to talk about them just a bit here beforehand. My ‘original’ scholarly interests, professionally speaking, were and are the history of Islamicate (primarily but not exclusively) medieval and especially early modern saints, sainthood, and devotional discourse and practice. I do not have the time and energy to develop my scholarship on those topics as much as I previously did- that, and no longer casting out for a tenure track job in academia I’m under no great pressure to get out articles or monographs on my particular topics, which means greater freedom to explore my many other interests, whether it’s learning K’iche’ or reading up on Pleistocene megafauna or thinking about the politics of permaculture. Still, I try to keep moving along some of my previous tracks, in no small part because they remain deeply interesting and I think relevant, albeit not in obvious ways.
As part of an attempt to annotate and translate manuscript texts, I’ve been working through some devotional and devotional-adjacent texts, of which there are very, very many (for an idea of the vastness of such texts in Orthodox Christian traditions in Egypt and Ethiopia, see this magnificent new initiative: The Princeton Ethiopian, Eritrean, and Egyptian Miracles of Mary (PEMM) project). In particular, as discussed in a previous post, I’ve focused on material relating to the Ahl al-Kahf; I’m also working on a short treatise on the question and practice of seeking a waking vision of Muhammad, on which see my recent post: Many Worlds in One Manuscript: A Close Reading of Ms. Yah. Ar. 765, Part I.
The second item which I’ll be translating and releasing in the near-ish future is a treatise- more like a pamphlet, really- by a major Ottoman Islamic scholar and sufi saint, ‘Abd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī (1641–1731), on the respect owed to bread (iḥtirām al-khubz). While this little treatise is, as it turns out, listed in the major biographical treatment of his life, I will confess to not having noticed it (in fairness ‘Abd al-Ghanī was incredibly prolific, turning out hundreds of works in his lifetime- he would have loved internet publishing!). Composition wise it’s very much in the vein of a collection of related bits of texts, reflecting ‘Abd al-Ghanī’s prodigious knowledge and, probably, library. What is most interesting is the subject, the proper treatment of bread.
Now, that bread is widely respected, venerated even, in the Islamicate world was something I discovered many years ago when I first arrived in Morocco. Bread is to be consumed, and any leftovers are to be treated with respect and disposed of in a proper and useful fashion, not tossed in the trash or out on the street. Such respect owed bread is widespread, but there is, as far as I’ve been able to tell, relatively little written on the subject, either historically or in contemporary historical scholarship. It seems to have been something that was just part of the uncontested cultural milieu (with analogues in non-Muslim communities as well). So why did ‘Abd al-Ghanī feel the need to pen a defense of the practice? At the end of the treatise he briefly notes an encounter with someone in Damascus who rejected special treatment of bread, though ‘Abd al-Ghanī does not elaborate upon the man’s rationale.
At some point in the new year, Lord willing, I will take a deeper dive into this treatise and the veneration of bread and its deep context in the Middle East and North Africa; there is a lot to be descried concerning the ethics of agriculture, food, and religious practice, an interplay of elements that is ultimately rooted in the Neolithic transition, the physical traces of which, unbeknownst to ‘Abd al-Ghanī or anyone else until quite recently, slumbered in Syria and elsewhere, only in recent decades really seriously coming to light. The work of interpretation and of continuing forward the powerful ethic of food and ecology that arose in the pre-modern world is a task for our own future- but more on that soon!
iv. music
v. a poem
hopotecetv
I dreamed the buzzards, black and turkey, returned and
again roosted above the ten thousand things,
speaking mvskoke and yuchi, looming sharp and dark
against the palisade of the rocks rising to point,
angling their hooked beaks in supplication asking
for the biers of the bodies of the past left
to the sky, open to the heaven above, world tree
of the Cross swirling in the middle distance, axis
mundi wrapped in the ridgeline’s smoke, rabbit
tobacco burning on the backs of the buzzards,
drawling slow in still older tongues, you better
get to work son, they said, time is passing, and
we will not pass this way again.