Covenant_watch / AbuZenovia is on Nostr

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Last Notes

2025-01-15 23:50:08 GMT

Developing world has been sold on two versions of leap frogging, both of which rob it of autonomy. Cultural leapfrogging, championed by your favorites NGOs and the urban bourgeoisie alike, and faux-"economic leapfrogging," "coincidentally" also a product of the same cohort of spiritual-lumpen. The latter is uniquely nefarious in that it promises the ability to sidestep structural transformation through unbridled digitization and gig-economy galore. Care not for industry, R&D, and an independent tech-stack; sip upon libations of debt-trapping, service-sector fetishisation, and complete populace datafication, instead. Forget machinery, what the Islamicate needs is one hundred more delivery apps. Meh...
As it stands, industrial leapfrogging is the only economic imperative pertinent to Islamdom. All else is, at best, misguided or, at worst, malevolent.

2025-01-15 16:35:26 GMT

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What does this look like in real life? Well...as it befits this social network, consider cultures of FOSS, privacy, and the BTC maximalists. These very imperatives are downstream from Modernity's structural possibilities. Are they the global cultural zeitgeist. Of course not. But that is why we speak of consummation, and participation, not surrender.

2025-01-15 16:26:55 GMT

Thoughts on "Allah and His People" Chapter 1:
Azmeh is candid of his "middle-range theory" disposition, both as a scholar and within this work. As someone with a fairly similar tendency where it concerns sociology and history; I can appreciate the approach. It has a certain flexibility that civilizations-as-organisms appears to restrict. That is not to say that I find the opposite approach meritless, Spengler is a quality read.
What it offers Azmeh in the investigation of Paleo-Islam, however, is an ability to articulate Islamdom as Hellenic in a manner that neither asserts it as an aesthetic or as an aberration that corrects in the course of history. He treats the translocation of "Rome" as very much real, from the city of the seven hills, itself, to Constantinople, and, eventually, Damascus. Not Rome the Mediterranean power, of course, but Rome the historic trajectory, one of Universal Ecumenical Statehood, political theology, imperial monetary systems, mystery religions, and more.
Azmeh owes much to Becker in this regard. Which he readily admits while, nonetheless, rejecting the latter's reliance on a civilizational-genetics prior. Azmeh's thesis is more radical and assertive. Funny enough, it does so in ways that parallel much of the impulses that drive SAIF's thesis. Of course, where he reads his conceptions backwards through time, we read similar ones forward. The two that deserve specific treatment, as essential to both this portion of his text and SAIF, are notions of Islam-as-historical-consumation and cosmolocalism, with the natural relationship each has to the other.
Only right and useful that I quote the man before delving further.
"The model here adopted is polygenetic, with an emphasis on local and autochthonous forces and processes which, once their geographical and social remit had widened under imperial auspices, joined a historical flow that had been firmly in place, and realised, under central control, a number of possibilities available in the structures of polytheism, as had been the case before"
For Azmeh, this is intended as an assertion that Islam was, itself, a consummation of Hellenism without requiring diffusion or syncretism as primary explanatory variables. Islam did not just borrow from Hellenism; Hellenism as a historical trajectory stretching from Europe to Western Asia was laden with structural possibilities which Islam, the local Arabian phenomenon, realized in ways both natural to Hellenism and itself.
This mirrors SAIF futurology which considers Western Modernity, or in a macro-sense, the "Process," a globalised historic flow that harbors structural possibility which when met with local Islamic forms of revival becomes consummated and reoriented toward human ends. SAIF doesn't so much suggest that Islam is anti-modernity, but that Islam fulfills Modernity(defined as Western Modernity-in the usage of philosopher Yuk Hui) toward its righteous yet stifled ends. Of course, if and when that happens, it evolves into another thing entirely.
Such a perspective would have been largely difficult to arrive at in the 20th century. Then, Kojevian aspirations to contesting Anglo-Saxon modernity by revived Latin imperialism, the chimera Caliphate project of Islamist reformism, or even Marxist class struggle, still projected seeming notes of possibility. Today, however, it would be altogether immature to not "price in" our direction and extract the future from therein as opposed to clamoring for a "shadow-modernity" through complete material and technic separation. By exclaiming Islam not as post-liminal but as necessary to the liminal and the post-liminal both, SAIF separates its thesis from others who would suggest that Islamic-praxis is a thing largely contained posterior to the "Event." Only the Final Apocalypse rids its Day-After of substantive reliance on what preceded it. And even then, thought of critically, really, it doesn't either...
Largely skeptical of argument by eschatology, I still think it may serve to mention a hadith to further clarify the ideas in this post. Consider this tradition while presuming, for intelligibility's sake, the interpretation of the Dajjalic as a system, be it solely such or amended to an exegesis of Dajallic personhood. (I vouch for neither in this post; like I said, presume for intelligibility)
"You will attack Arabia and Allah will enable you to conquer it, then you would attack Persia and He would make you to conquer it. Then you would attack Rome and Allah will enable you to conquer it, then you would attack the Dajjal and Allah will enable you to conquer him."

2025-01-10 18:33:25 GMT

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Concerning the last paragraph, Azmeh himself shares a concern for the development Islamic History Studies beyond its beginnings in the circles of orientalist philology. "The technical and interpretative
preoccupations of nineteenth-century philological and positivist
scholarship, canonised most explicitly in Germany, still weigh heavily upon scholarship on Islam, with little headway made, until very recently, by the overall development of the historical and social sciences. This is reflected by its relative institutional and paradigmatic isolation, taking over little
from more developed fields of study, and conveying little of more general relevance to the framing of broader questions of religion and of history."

2025-01-10 18:14:37 GMT

Thoughts on Azmeh's "Allah and His People," rereading, intro-thoughts: prior to chapters,
"The category of Paleo-Islam is designed
to denominate a historical category bounded in space and in time, with time accelerated and space rapidly dilated."
Islamic "Big Bangism" has always come across as a exceedingly encumbering artifact the traditional sciences imposes on the contemporary exercise of Islamic Archive-mining. It developed for good reason of course. The fiction of "emergent-Islam-in-Tabula-Rasa" allows the primary mandate of the clerical class to operate in an environment amenable to arguing orthopraxy and orthodoxy without unhelpful "noise." The limits that prevented medieval scholars from gleaning beyond low-resolution images of antiquity naturally make any notion of their contrasting Islamic scripture to Syriac and Byzantine Christianity, for instance, moot.
Developed methods and epistemologies, however, despoil the anxious assertion that we ought still operate without that body of evidence. I understand that Muslims shy away from the enterprise, given, aside from what it may invite of uncomfortable evidences, its aIslamic origins. But, I would suggest that there's much there to buttress the faith if, in inviting said body of evidence, we did so with a prior that offers the consensus of our tradition epistemological priority, supra-rationally conceived/argued though that may be, and an elevated sense of history-openness.