1.
“They are but names that you have named, you and your fathers, for which Allah has sent no authority.”
—Qur’an 53:23
“By using anarchism as a model for reading…, I am attempting to suggest a nonintrusive model for acknowledging the cultural connections, the semi-autonomy that occurs in literature…. Anarchic reading as I have envisioned it values an elasticity of responses. It suggests aesthetic coalitions instead of dominant models of culture or literature.”
—Juliana Spahr Everybody’s Autonomy: Connective Reading and Collective Identity
2.
This area (boundaried space manifest momentarily on your screen—a true TAZ [temporary autonomous zone] if only in kind) takes seriously the uncontainablity of meaning. It is never one though it may be never-one.
3.
“Meaning isn’t just a surplus value to be eliminated—it comes out of a product of practice…. Not passively, as a derivative of a system of differences (predefined) prior to consumption…. Instead, active—back & forth: a relay constantly making contexts out of a fabric of markings: writing & reading.”
—Bruce Andrews “Writing Social Work & Political Practice” Paradise & Method
4.
The Qur’an is a collection of words. The battle within Islam is one over meaning (singular). A battle over one is always already lost. This boundaried space says words means and as such are created, enacted, contested, and destroyed by individuals in community. However, neither reigns supreme. Meanings are developed (developing) and test themselves in the peopleshpere. Will “fork” mean “shoe?” Will it hold fast? Can we maintain this deviance if only for an evening? The night is still young and food never tasted so good!
5.
Barak al-Jerrahi: “Why does the Qur’an present heaven as a carrot-on-a-stick, an Other that is the product of good deeds? Why should I buy into another Western binary?”
Shaykha A. & Baraka Das Dills of the Many Hills Mostly: “Islam places the emphasis, the combustion, on the/within the human. The Qur’an only speaks linearly if you think linearly. You see deferred judgement/paradise, because you think time is linear. How does the Qur’an read (you read it/ it reads you) when time is no longer linear? Where/ when is judgment when time is cyclical? Where/ when is judgement when time is field-scape?”
6.
The Qur’an speaks back to us in our own current language. A trustworthy mirror!
7.
“Wild reading…critiques the status quo because it disrupts schooled reading’s conventions, its socialization. One’s approach to reading…defines how one engages the larger social apparatus.”
—Juliana Spahr Everybody’s Autonomy: Connective Reading and Collective Identity
8.
(previously) terrific = terrifying, terrible
(currently) terrific = wonderful, great
Words means and are a means. The book though closed cracks open. It opens for the first time she decides for herself.
Possibility is liberated! Liberation is possibility!
9.
(previously) “Words [were] mere windows, substitutes, proper names, haloed or subjugated by the things to which they seem[ed] to point. ‘Communication’ resembles an exchange of prepackaged commodities.”
—Bruce Andrews “Writing Social Work & Political Practice” Paradise & Method
(currently) “Proceeding…without seeing, savvy, or seizing hold of things (loosely translated), affirming a certain kind of structural blindness, will, contrary to what we might expect, keep us open to innumerable mutations and unforeseeable possibilities, to incalculable ways of being and knowing, doing and seeing, exposed to potentialities of which we presently cannot conceive, to things improbable and incomprehensible, unimaginable and unplannable.”
—John D. Caputo More Radical Heremeneutics: On Not Knowing Who We Are
10.
Qiyas is what propels “traditional” Muslim scholars from point A. to point B, or at least it is a traditional method. Analogy of rocks (concretized words, arrogant assumptions of what is true).
A popular example of the use of Qiyas is the alchohol model. Read: If wine was illegal in Muhammad’s time due to its intoxicative qualities, so than should cocaine be illegal today since it too intoxicates. Intoxication? By whose standard? Christians? Post-prohibition United States? Qiyas fails where the “elasticty” of meaning-making begins. Though it’s a fine method of deduction. Though it’s rather “clean.” Though it’s rather “clear.” A little too clean. A little too clear.
11.
“Nothing could be more normative, more logical, and more authoritarian than, for example, the (politically) revolutionary poetry or prose that speaks of revolution in the form of commands or in the well-behaved, steeped-in-convention language of “clarity.”
—Trinh T. Minh-ha Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Femenism
12.
We contest the word placed before us. We contest the meaning attached and handed down. We contest the definition imposed upon our wor(l)d from afar. As is the case, we contest the entire mainstream concept of intoxication, (along with every other assumption) so we are less likely to affirm the afformentioned analogy. The current understanding of intoxication is so ridiculously superficial, so very “civilized,” so very “Western,” non-aboriginal, non-native, and all together one-dimensional and down-right insulting that if one were to take a superficial Marxian approach to “intoxication” using the Qiyas method, one could easily assert that religion itself is to be outlawed as it is “the opiate of the masses” and impedes the creative impulses of a people.
13.
The issue is of course one of definition. Meaning. The study thereof once thought to be the occupation solely of tenured scholars, now proves to be a necessity for survival. Surely when laws define our actions and decisions are made for us based on the interpretation of words, to challenge the normative usage and inference of a word trumps the choice of words themselves. We merely suggest we find ourselves co-producers in meaning-making! It’s a free act, though they may try to put you in jail.
