Live Blog II: Student Must Burn More Oil

Much more of the essay is written. I read an extract from Herodotus and then chased down Bardasanes's entertainingly nutty pronouncements, quoted by Eusebius of Caesarea in his Preparations for the Gospel (ca. 313 AD).

The following three passages appear to be tongue-in-cheek:

"From the river Euphrates, and as far as the Ocean towards the East, he who is reviled as a murderer, or a thief, is not at all indignant: but he who is reviled for sodomy avenges himself even to the death: among the Greeks, however, even their wise men are not blamed for having favourites."

"The Medes all cast out the still-breathing corpses to the dogs whom they carefully rear"

"In Syria and Osrhoene many used to mutilate themselves in honour of Rhea: hereupon king Abgar at one stroke commanded that those who cut off the genital organs should also have their hands cut off, and from thenceforth no one in Osrhoene mutilated himself."

I think that 'at one stroke' is a brilliant pun, by the way; one wonders if it was the translator or Bardasanes himself who coined it, or if it was accidental.

In my essay draft I wrote a footnote explaining that Bardasanes is not the most reliable source and gave as my example the fact that he boldly announced that "most of the Germans die by strangulation." (He also said, "in Britain many men have the same wife.") If strangulation was a popular practice of the Germanic criminal system, however, I am guilty of sloppy research.

An internal debate I had was whether to mention the Salic Law (about which I have plenty of notes) as an example of law whose origins were contemporaneous with pre-Islamic and early Islamic law, but decided to come back to it at the end of the essay, if there is room. For some reason I find these legal codes deeply engrossing, though the Code of Hammurabi is atrocious and the parts of the Code of Justinian which I read (the 'institutes') seem less horrifying but repellently smug.

Now I will try to read Margaret Smith's biography of Rābi‘a, a Sūfī mystic who was a woman. There were Sūfī 'convents' toward the end of the Abbasid period, too, but since we had an acrid debate about the Arabic term in one of our seminar classes I have decided to, er, tread lightly.

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02:01 Undoubtedly the longest name I have come across: "Abū ‘Abdu l-Lāh Muhammad ibn Idrīs ibn al-Abbās ibn ‘Uthmān ibn Shāfi‘ ibn as-Sa'ib ibn ‘Ubayd ibn ‘Abd al-Yazīd ibn al-Muttalib ibn ‘Abd Manaf." As far as I can tell, 'ibn' refers to distant ancestors (a grandfather at the least) and 'al-' to nicknames (like 'the' in 'Ethelred the Unready'), so this is no more complicated than a protracted genealogy.

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02:48 Fuel for the mind: two pancakes with "rote Grütze" (diluted because the tub was almost empty), quark with vanilla sugar prepared with true beans by brother Gi., and maple syrup, which is admittedly gilding the lily.

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04:02 Finished the extract of the book on Rābi‘a, which was simple because it was short, and much of it went into Sūfī doctrine (interesting but, from the perspective of m' essay, irrelevant). Tried to find out where I read a passage by Fatima Mernissi about Islam being used as an excuse to keep men on top of the political sphere, which was cheekily expressed and not propagandistic as far as I can tell; it turns out it might have been in Beyond the Veil. It also has the delightful though quintessentially passive-aggressive detail about women (in certain tribes in the 6th and 7th century) divorcing people by turning their tent entrance in the opposite direction. I had skim-read it during my first trip to the university's library. So now the question is whether I can call it quits with the main research and finish the essay, only researching here and there to confirm the facts. I really hope so. (c:

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05:43 I Rejoiced Too Soon and, after wrapping up another source, have decided to complete the cycle of research by returning to one of my first sources, Wiebke Walther's Women in Islam. Though originally written in German, it was not on my professor's reading list and I wonder if it is a purposeful omission. But it seems like a simple, direct return to the essential subject of the essay. And I'm reading it on Google Books, so half the pages are probably missing and I'll have fewer notes to take!!! In the meantime I'm eating the second pancake . . . cold. With butter and maple syrup.

07:08 I understand the reason why the book isn't on the syllabus now; it is rather Islamic History for Dummies in its approach. Haven't finished the pancake, by the way. It's daylight, and if I want to go look up final details in the Islamic Department library, it opens at 9:30 AM today. Time is fleeing.

07:51 Another strange quotation I just came across, this time in a certain online encyclopaedia's entry on the Book of Tobit: "After Sennacherib's death, he is allowed to return to Nineveh, but buries a man who had been murdered on the street. That night, he sleeps in the open and is blinded by bird droppings that fall in his eyes. This puts a strain on his marriage" . . . .

10:19 Finished! but only with the main research. And I have a certain inkling that I will be sucked back in like a sailor near a kraken.

18:58 I was wondering how long I've been awake and . . . yikes! I have been working on the body of the essay and crawling through my notes like a seine net, with much success and a break for dinner.