Arabic and Rainbow Flags

As the main project while I'm not cleaning yet, I've begun learning more Arabic and Farsi. The tools at hand: a Farsi-German dictionary, an Arabic reader for beginners and the entirety of the internet (outside of paywalls). So far I have copied out words and deciphered letters and meanings, with terribly slow progress wherein — after learning to recognize a, n and r with greatest confidence — I have finally remembered more.

e.g.
ابن
ibn; son

I would have assumed that the long stroke is an a, but it serves I guess as an all-purpose vowel; the b is recognizable enough even if I wouldn't remember which letter it is if I didn't look it up; the n is pleasingly easy to remember because it appears at the end of words so often and its swoopy shape with the diamond or dot over it is distinct.

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I read another page of the Koran yesterday but found it too enigmatic to be anything but steep going; but besides that I am skimming through the chapter on hadith and sunna in Muslim Studies, by Ignaz Goldziher. Goldziher was an old-school academic who, with a large metaphorical foot in the 19th century, pioneered the western field of Islamic studies in many aspects; his choice of topics is far-ranging to the point of being as universal as you can probably become within the field. So I have wanted to read more of his work for a while. As for Edward Said's verdict, regarding the degree of 'orientalism,' a certain online encyclopaedia explains,

Of five major German orientalists, he remarked that four of them, despite their profound erudition, were hostile to Islam. Goldziher's work was an exception in that he appreciated 'Islam's tolerance towards other religions', though this was undermined [etc.]

In the hadith and sunna chapter Goldziher is discussing the transmission of legends of the Prophet. — The Koran (I think) is about the messages of God, through Gabriel, to his Prophet. For stories about Muhammad's life and manners and those of his entourage, we turn instead to the hadith, anecdotes and sayings which have been shared and recorded (at least putatively) from his closest contemporaries, particularly after his death.

These hadith are the source of the sunna, which explains how Islamic principles and Muhammad's example are to be translated into daily life. At least that is the way I'd explain it. Then there is sunna which is the opinion of a Muslim writer who has passed into the religious canon, but not founded on a specific hadith — perhaps a Christian parallel might be the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas — and I think that Goldziher describes the Shi'a as being particular partial to these little innovations.

During an Islam-and-feminism research spree I came across Asma’ bint Umays, who recorded hadith as one of several women who were important in this scholarly tradition; but Goldziher seems to think she is unreliable, though at the same time mentioning that she married Abu Bakr, who was certainly in Muhammad's circle . . .

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This past week, thanks to Twitter I've been following the situation in Egypt — according to American-Egyptian intellectuals and activists, Egyptian journalists, correspondents in Egypt, politicians, the Army's public relations staff, Muslim Brotherhood spokespeople etc. Everything which is happening seems wrong, pragmatically and ideologically, but it might not be polite to really vent about it here.

On the whole I found the news much more cheerful during the last week of June, even though I found the partial torpedoing of the Voting Rights Act by the Supreme Court very depressing and this feeling carried over to dampen even the joy of the rulings the next day on California's anti-gay marriage state law and on the federal law of the same aim. I have the feeling it will turn out for the best after all, but none of the language which I heard from the rulings in either gay marriage case seemed to me to provide a sturdy guarantee that gay marriage will be seen as a right under the 5th amendment. In federal tax law, marriage equality might exist; and in California it might exist now too as it does in a handful of other states where no successful referenda existed; but, in every other respect, it doesn't in over 30 states. Besides, how will the federal government safeguard the rights of people who live in a state where their across-the-border wedding isn't accepted?

On the other hand I very much liked that Anthony Kennedy seems to have written that a gay marriage ban is a malicious, gratuitous, and busybody-ish denial of someone else's freedoms (in other words, that homophobes should mind their own business). As for the legal hurdles, I think that the controversiality of the Prop 8 (i.e. Californian) ruling not on moral so much as on procedural grounds is very clear if you look at who agreed and who dissented — not the usual candidates, and even the gruesome twosome of Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas decided to take up opposing causes. 'At the end of the day,' however, I believe that seeing the happy photos from Stonewall, etc., made even pessimists like me a bit more cheerful.

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