The Asinine Eyewitness

This morning Greek was a little boring, except perhaps to a person who considers the replacement of proper nouns as indirect objects by pronouns, and the conjugation of irregular verbs in their 3rd person plural active forms, wildly stimulating. I also came, er, a trifle late.

In the Islamic Studies lecture, the professor went through the divisions of the Muslim religio-polity into the (I may have invented some of these names) Hassanids, Ismailites, Nizarites, Idrissids, Qaramites, etc., which was like a laundry list. He runs through the groups so evenhandedly and factually that just when I have come to think, yes, that sect sounds like a right crowd of crazypantses, a moment later he mentions something about the group that sounds reasonable. Besides, from one end of a sentence to another, I've mostly already forgotten which imam they believed was the last legitimate one, who was descended from which uncle or cousin or associate of Muhammad, whether they leaned toward the Sunni or Shi'ite, who was the de facto leader of the group, and where the group lived. And I still don't know the difference between Sunni and Shi'a!

A bright spot were the Suetoniusesque antics of Al Hakim, caliph of Egypt when the Fatimids were governing it in opposition to the caliphate in Baghdad. (Apparently the Fatimids did not use that name to refer to themselves; it was bestowed upon them by outsiders whose reference to the Fatimids' veneration of Fatima — a woman! — was intended to approximate the label of "Girlie Men.") The Wikipedia page is comparatively dull. As the professor summed it up, this gentleman was rather a hardliner but in a flip-flopping manner, in that he forbade things and then un-forbade them. He forbade wine, which is not so abstruse given the Quranic traditions; but also forbade trade between Christians and Jews with Muslims, women from going out at all (but the Wiki only mentions that they weren't allowed to go out uncovered), and men from going out at night so as to prevent nocturnal hijinks, besides which he burned down a church or temple but then felt sorry and tried in vain to rebuild it. Thanks perhaps to the bad offices of his elder sister, he went out for one of his nighttime strolls in the desert one night and didn't come back; all that was found later were pieces of his bloody clothes. I thought the professor said that pieces of the caliph were found too, but may have misremembered that; at any rate, Wiki also places an abandoned donkey at the sanguinary scene.

The hashish-fuelled Assassins sounded interesting, too, but I'll presumably read up on them some other time. The Crusades are coming up in the lectures, and I admit that I'm looking forward to hearing about them, though most of the other warfare mentioned in this course has been hugely depressing.

Over the weekend I played the piano a lot and watched bits of the Golden Globe awards and even a crime show or two (not German, but American, since I like my crime unrealistic and full of shiny high technical production values), and checked my partially (3?) correct answers for this year's King William's College quiz, much to my content.

By the way, I have my Blackboard password now and everything's fine. Regarding the post below.)