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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'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.

and also just how old some of the characters are. Frodo is 50!

The time between Frodo finding the Ring and the quest beginning is another thing where Jackson's view of it dominates in my mind. Intellectually I know it, but the movie seems so much smoother that that's what sticks in my head.

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