It started with a question about how Islam treats people with psychosis. And it has turned into a bit of a project that I am reaping benefits from.
Read Mohammed: A Prophet for our Time to get the story of Islam, and then The Caliph and the Imam: The Making of Sunnism and Shiism, and I would recommend it to anyone wanting an understanding a major part of the non-Western half of history.
I guess it made me think of my interpretation of history and why we are not taught these things. Like that the first philosophical novel was by an Andalusian Muslim Ibn Tufayl in the 12th century about a boy deserted on a deserted island raised by a gazelle who, through systematic analysis and deduction, is able to arrive at ultimate truth. It is the third-most translated Arabic text after the Qu'ran and One Thousand and One Arabian Nights. I intend to read it after this book about the Abbasid Period (Islamic Golden Age).
I think I'll be scaling back my blog visits. Too much other stuff on the go right now.
Also, I kind of want to move away from the weird manic stuff a bit and focus on trying to be a normal human being. Interestingly, part of Ibn Tufayl's philosophy is about the difference between the "theoretical" that comes from being-in-the-world and the "visionary" that goes beyond what can be deduced or described. Kind of like Schopenhauer's quote: "Talent is like the marksman who hits a target which others cannot reach; genius is like the marksman who hits a target, as far as which others cannot even see."
I have to say that learning about this complete Islamic history in one book really tells me how ignorant I am. This is the other major part of history because Islam was the other major "connector" of global society. And I knew nothing about it and it never occurred to me to read about it. Then again, this book was only published last year and is extremely thorough. But if that's ignorance despite everything I've already learned about reality, consider that such an idea never occurs to most (it didn't occur to me until just now...)
"We distort and conceal the past so that we can fight in the present to create the remembered past of the transcendent future rather than that future itself." -- Me
