The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Nic_C:

Disclaimer: IANAM (I am not a Muslim, I just study medieval Muslims, so I may be underinformed about modern belief and practice ;-))

Dave Bell @ 45:

I can't tell from the article exactly what it is they're doing - the implication seems to be that some hadiths are being rejected for their content (matn), not just for their transmitter chains (isnads). The isnad is where classical and medieval criticism used to focus.

Because yes, as several posters have pointed out, hadith-criticism (that is, trying to identify and reject spurious traditions) has a *long* history in Islamic scholarship. One thing that has irritated me about the media coverage of this is the implication that poor benighted Muslims have *only just realised* that people sometimes made stuff up about the Prophet to back up their arguments. Er, no.

What is interesting about this is a) that it's state-directed, and b) the criteria for selection, which seem to be based less on an attempt to get back to the 'authentic' words of the Prophet (whatever those may be), and more on picking 'acceptable' traditions.

As others have said, its likely impact is questionable, though. The Islamic world is much more culturally diverse than Europe at the time of the Reformation - and, of course, Islamic teaching and leadership is way more devolved. It's down to each scholar whether he (or she) accepts the changes, I would imagine. What I suspect will happen is the formation of a new school of Islamic law.

heresiarch @ 65:

As I understand it, the language of the Qur'an was pretty obscure even to Muslims of the second and third centuries after the Prophet (very poetic and allusive, lots of unusual verbs, not to mention the fact that some pronouncements are mutually contradictory), hence all the tafsir (exegesis). And, indeed, hence the hadith and sira. Early Muslims attempted to understand the Qur'an by fitting its verses to events within the Prophet's life (reasoning that, e.g., one verse might contradict another because it was revealed to the Prophet at a later, securer stage in his preaching career, as an abrogation of the previous ruling).

There's a whole bunch of related (heavily debated) issues here about which bits of the Prophet's life were actually memorialised by the first generations of his followers, and which bits had to be sort of filled in later when people became interested in other aspects.

Harold Feld @ 67:

What you said, yes. The reports also seem to keep missing the fact that hadith are primarily important for law, (mis)using terms like 'theology' instead.

Fascinating post! I'm sure pondering this will give me many fun hours of procrastination today.

I was born in September 1980; I'm a Brit. The earliest 'news' memory I've so far been able to dredge up is of the wedding of Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson, in (according to wikipedia) July 1986 - I remember because (at the behest of our teachers) we held a little event/enactment of it in my infant school.

Most of the other early news events that have stuck in my mind were several years later. I remember the Berlin Wall coming down, partly because my grandmother is German; I also remember her comments providing a bit of a counterpoint to the euphoric news coverage playing on her TV (she was afraid that west Germany would suffer badly because everyone from the east would want to live there). And then the 1990 World Cup (I was torn over whether to support England or Cameroon, because the latter team had a great celebration every time they scored a goal), the first Gulf War (which I watched quite a bit of on TV), the August 1991 Soviet coup (heard on the radio while on holiday in the Lake District; I think this one stayed with me because my parents were quite clearly anxious about it), and the Tory leadership contest that eventually saw the end of Margaret Thatcher.

1986 was also the first time I remember being aware of the date, and how it related to me; my Dad was reading the newspaper as he had his breakfast one morning, and I read the date off the top of the page as I walked past him. I think that was January or February.

Ajay @ 17

15: my Arabic is shaky to non-existent, but wouldn't that make TNH a musakkani?

:-) I think I'd go for the active participle (with feminine suffix), musakkina.

Carrie @ 38

What I always liked most about the way Arabic works (besides this building-block structure in the first place) was how the meanings sort of... drift, sometimes in oddly tangential but logical ways. I forget which root it is now that starts out in the form I as 'to be happy', and ends up in about form X as 'to take a concubine'...

Tim @ 50

Yep, sukuun is the same root.

Nix @ 66

(Does it less confusable in non-transliterated form, or once you understand the underlying rules?)

Nope. Well, with long experience, sort of. :-) Because, as Carrie mentions above, the consonants are the foundations of Arabic - the alphabet is all consonants (plus a couple of consonants - w and y - that get co-opted into diphthongs or long vowels if the preceding letter is vowelled). The basic vowels, the 'short' vowels, are represented by little marks above and below the letters. Most of the time in the written Arabic, no-one bothers with these short vowel marks, unless something is *really* ambiguous.

So, to build on Tim's example, if you saw ktb in a written Arabic sentence, it might be kataba (he wrote), kutiba (it was written), or kutub (books). The only way you know which of those it is comes from context - for example, if it's the first word in the sentence it's going to be a verb - or if a helpful editor has put the mark for 'u' over the 'k'.

Nomie @ 13:

It also inspired someone I know to go to a Halloween party this year dressed as caped-crusader Cory. :-D

While I'm here (curse you, distracting internets!), this seems as good a place as any to mention that I think I've found an Arabic word meaning 'to disemvowel'. Or close, anyway. While flipping through my dictionary the other day, looking for something else, I came across sakkana. In a grammatical context, it means 'to make vowel-less' (that is, 'to pronounce [a consonant] without a following vowel'). Arabic has a verb for everything.

Amusingly, the usual meaning of the word, in a non-grammatical context, is 'to calm' or 'to soothe'...

I wasn't going to click on this thread, but wanted something to read while I ate my lunch, and got all sorts of amusement and education I wasn't expecting!

On Narnia:

I read the books when I was about 9 or 10, I think, and while didn't spot the allegory, I disliked the presentation and implications of the final judgement stuff in the last book so much that it killed my enjoyment of the rest. I've never been back to them. :-(

Clifton @ 6 & Jenny @ 27:

The Burton translation remains great fun, although - quite apart from issues of translation - it's based on a much meddled-with version of the Nights. Essentially, much of what we think of as being contained in the Nights - including, as you say, Sindbad - came from other story collections, or were invented wholesale for the various French translations of the 18th century. (And then, in certain cases, translated 'back' into Arabic to make them appear genuine...).

The problem was that people like Antoine Galland (its first translator into French) took the '1001' part of the title literally, and thought that the manuscripts they'd found in the Islamic world were incomplete, because they only contained 250 or so 'Nights'. So they took stories from other sources, and eventually resorted to creating their own. Much of what is in Burton and others, therefore, is early-modern French literary fiction rather than medieval Arabic tales.

Haddawy claims to have dug the original text out from later additions and interpolations

Yes. I haven't read Haddawy's translation, but it's based on the standard scholarly Arabic edition, Muhsin Mahdi's, which does just that - takes the compendium back to its ~14th-century contents. It's much shorter than Burton - a single volume of 600 pages.

/geek

Theo @19:

is against a woman's right to choose her own religious beliefs

*blinks*

Wtf? Would be very curious to read more on this, if you have useful links.

Greg @ 114:

The unhappiness mentioned was a thing called unrequited love, not being gay.

Yes and no: if Dumbledore hadn't been gay, he couldn't have fallen for, and had his heart broken by, the bad guy. (Also, what is your sexuality but who you love?)

This sort of thing is a hot-button issue for me, so I apologise if I sound combative; I'm well aware that there are other, equally valid ways to read the situation. But I can't help but see D's portrayal in the light of the long history of often deeply unfavourable portrayals of gay people in popular media - one of which is the cliche of the gay character with the hopeless, unrequited crush on the straight friend, and their resultant life of misery.

I would love to be able to judge each character on their own merits, or to believe that it doesn't matter if a character is gay or straight, but the effect of stereotypes and cliches is cumulative, and all too rarely balanced out by positive images. If some of the straight relationships in the Potter books are dysfunctional, it hardly matters since the books are awash with others of a very different nature. But if the only canon gay character has spent his life being unhappy...?

If D being gay is irrelevant to Harry's story, then putting "D is gay" in the story simply because he is gay is not only bad writing, but turning a children's book into a soapbox for political issues.

I agree that making it into a huge issue would've been tedious. But surely there's space between invisibility and soapboxing? If Snape's heterosexuality is part of his backstory, casually mentioned, why can't D's homosexuality be the same? (And if simply mentioning that someone is gay counts as soapboxing, it can only be so because it doesn't happen often enough.)

Spiegel @ 136:

I wish. I'm on an HP mailing list and those readers are whining that JKR has alienated them.

Yes, I've seen some of that since I my comment yesterday (lots of "I've got nothing against gay people, I'd just rather not know", and "This has no place in a children's novel" type stuff). Clearly I was being too optimistic about people's rationality and tolerance. ;-) I still say it's a shame and a cop-out there it wasn't there in the text, when older characters' heterosexuality was, but even a few people re-think their worldviews after the revelation that a character they liked and respected happened to be gay, then there is something to thank JKR for.

Renatus @ 148

It's not the author's fault if a chunk of the readers buy into heteronormativity and decide that the default is heterosexual until proven otherwise, although a sufficently clued in author may be able to play with this assumption in entertaining ways.

It isn't their fault, but I do think it's something to be aware of. Why did this make headlines, after all, if not because the majority of people - even very open-minded people, even people gay themselves - assumed D was straight. Why? Because straight, white and (usually) male remains the default in popular media, and so we unwittingly take that into our reading with us. It's sad, but true: if a character is gay, or black, or anything other than this default, and this fact is not explicitly stated (or at least heavily hinted at), it will be functionally invisible to the vast majority of readers. And that's how people get written out of history. :-) I strongly believe that only a greater deliberate diversity of representation can change this situation - until it really does become irrelevant whether a character is straight or gay.

And all that turned out rather longer than I intended it to be. Ahem. Sorry, everyone...

(Sorry for double post; forgot to say:)

FWIW, yes, at my school there was long-running speculation over the sexuality of two teachers. I think in both cases the speculation arose partly *because* neither of them had a visible long-term (straight) attachment.

And I reckon many girls at my school would have found the idea of a tragic secret love affair quite appealing/romantic, whether gay or straight. ;-)

I have to side with those who see this as Rowling trying to have her diversity cake and eat it. This way she gets to give the fanfic-ers one last squee and look a lot more liberal than her created world would suggest - while avoiding alienating her more squeamish/bigoted readers (who can if necessary play the denial game, since Dumbledore's sexuality is entirely extra-textual). Those for whom even denial is not enough probably wouldn't have been buying the book in the first place, so no danger of scaring them off. I doubt very much that *anything* could have hurt the sales of the final Harry Potter book.

If it's not there in the books, it has all the appearance of an empty gesture. Once again, a gay character is visible only between the subtextual lines. To say nothing of this being yet another example of a gay character whose sexuality is the wellspring of his unhappiness...

Congratulations!

Sarah @ 38:

So... love the sinner, hate the sin? *g*

Oh, genius. And once again I vow not to read this blog while consuming heated beverages...

I can't bring the precise reference to mind, but the image of a roomful of women screaming in Greek is one of those "check where the exits are" moments.

Yes, you want to watch your Bacchae in that sort of situation...

(Xopher: good one!)

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