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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.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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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 find myself going back to older books. A lot of Golden Age detective stories, which can be an acquired taste. Most recent is a collection of short stories from 1925 about a forensic surgeon for Scotland Yard called Reggie Fortune. The tone is very much of the time, and it could be grating in large doses, but for example I found this exchange very funny (of course the big cheese at Scotland Yard is a minor sprig of the gentry, of course the style of badinage is very of its day, of course it is about the well-off upper classes, of course it is very much Entre Deux Guerres and before the Great Depression and economic crash):

In a day or two Reggie made a call on the chief of the Criminal Investigation Department. He was received with a cry of joy. The Hon. Sidney Lomas pranced round the table holding out his arms.

“Reginald! My innocent child! Embrace me! I thank Heaven for your deliverance. Not a stain upon your character, they tell me. Wonderful!”

“You know all about it, do you?” said Mr. Fortune morosely.

“These little things will get about,” Lomas chuckled. “I wish I’d seen you at the police station. The fair young hero, falsely accused, defying calumny. ‘Where are my emeralds?’ says the villain hoarsely. ‘Search me,’ the noble youth cried, ‘search me, varlet!’ And his innocence was proved in the fair light of Heaven.”

“Yes. I wasn’t taking any risks,” said Mr. Fortune. “You see, I’d had the beastly things in my pocket.”

The face of Lomas changed like an actor’s from mirth to gravity. “The devil you had! And what have you been up to, Fortune?”

“I wish I knew. I was stuck in that show behind a woman who was having a spasm of the heart. When we moved on I thought I felt something at my coat-tails. I found that emerald pendant in my pocket. I dropped the beastly thing under the table and looked about for anybody suspicious. All very ordinary people. And then Mr. John Good, of the International Detective Service, was arresting me. Queer sensation, Lomas. Ever tried it?”

“Nobody has arrested me yet,” said the chief of the Criminal Investigation Department modestly.

What's interesting is that this is in the approved style where murder is treated more or less as a lark for the quirky investigator to have fun solving, but the stories are not like that. They're often about serious effects of the crimes on the people involved, and Fortune is more concerned with justice (so far as he can manage it) than the requirements of the law. He's also fully aware of the results of his investigations: if he catches the bad guy/proves his guilt, he gets that person hanged. It's not all fun and games.

The language and behaviour of the characters may be that of the "silly ass" from Wodehouse's Drones Club, but they are in fact intelligent and capable people. Though nowadays describing a male character as "prancing", "conspicuously jaunty", or "sitting in front of his dressing-table perfecting that work of art, the wave in his hair" we would have a very different impression of his, er, personal life.

Maybe the same applied in the 1920s!

Also Lord Peter Wimsey, who always heavily salts his conversations with quotes from some poem or other that nobody (who hasn't specifically majored in fin-de-siecle English poetry) has ever heard of. It gets annoying for the reader sometimes!

Reggie is definitely a forerunner to Lord Peter. He writes a telegram in Latin to tease the CID boss, and another story has his knowledge of Ancient Greek be a plot point.

But so far, I'm amused. Though in the first story he's thirty-five years old, which everyone treats him as being "just a boy". And we think extended adolescence is a modern phenomenon!

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