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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   1697 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 20, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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So, what are you reading?

I finished Nasr Abu Zayd's Rethinking the Qur'an: Towards a Humanistic Hermeneutics. It's a short essay, but very valuable.

It is not only a question of contextualization, which is pivotal in discourse analysis, but more than that it is what the discourse tells about the context and how. Now, the question is which is historical and which is universal, a question that keeps all the modern liberal Muslim scholars of the Qur'an busy. Being confined to the Qur'an as 'text' alone, the conservatives win at the end of the day. When the liberals, for example, emphasize 'togetherness' as the universal eliminating the 'hostility' limiting its meaning to the negative past the conservatives will apply the principle of 'abrogation' to historicize 'togetherness' as abrogated and will universalize 'hostility', as the abrogat [sic]. In the present context of unsolved Palestinian-Israeli trauma, whose hermeneutics or meaning is valid? The winner is sure to be the meaning of ghetto, separation and isolation, the meaning of Mr. Sharon's wall.

Zayd's hope is to fight against that outcome in Middle East/Western relations, which 'hostility' he sees as being supported by the adapting of Islam to resistance.

I’m reading “The Protector’s War,” the second book in S.M Stirling’s Emberverse series. I previously read his Nantucket trilogy, which I loved. I thought the first book in the Emberverse, “Dies the Fire” was good, but in general I like this series less than the Nantucket trilogy. I don’t know why, exactly, but two things sort of standout:

  1. The speed with which people adapt. They’re two weeks into this world shattering event and there is literally an organized kingdom.

  2. I wouldn’t say it’s blatantly anti-Christian or anti-traditional religion, but the focus on a witch coven as this beacon of civilization (at one point facing off against a nasty preacher) just sort of rubs me the wrong way. Of course if this was traditional fantasy I’d take no issue.

Overall, though, I’m enjoying the series.

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