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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   1465 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 20, 2026

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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've been rereading The Lord Of The Rings. I grabbed the first volume when I went on a trip, just to have something to read, and it has been nice. It's been several years (maybe a decade?) since I last read it, so I've been enjoying reading it again. Stuff always hits you differently when you reread books. This time, I've noticed (for the first time) just how much elvish devotion to Elbereth seems inspired by Marian devotion among Catholics, and also just how old some of the characters are. Frodo is 50! I know it was right there in the text, but it never stood out to me before, and it's interesting given how young many fantasy heroes tend to be nowadays.

I'm currently reading LOTR (after having read The Hobbit) for the first time.

It's hard to give it an objective view because a) I saw the films first, and so I know the major parts of the story, b) I'm long past the age where reading it might make a big impression, and c) I've never been into fantasy.

Interestingly in the films it was Legolas I couldn't stand while in the books it's Gimli. It also feels like a lot of scenes are weirdly underworked for such a long story. Like when they release Theoden from Wormtongue's influence after what feels like five minutes of just pointing at him and going "Mate, his name is Wormtongue. Worm Tongue! Mate, come on!" and Theoden is all like "Yes, you make a persuasive argument. Wormtongue, you have been revealed as an enemy agent and a traitor to our kingdom, and for that there can only be one punishment: Sending to Coventry".

It’s not about revealing Wormtongue (which is a nickname anyway), it’s about giving Theoden the courage to do what he already knows needs to be done. Wormtongue is providing a plausible excuse to do nothing, that’s all.

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