Social justice

• A man named Hadi Matar has been charged with second-degree attempted murder.
• He is an American-born resident of New Jersey in his early twenties, whose parents emigrated from Lebanon.
• Review: Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder – Salman Rushdie (Jonathan Cape) Knife is very good at recalling Rushdie’s grim memories of the attack.

• “Let me offer this piece of advice to you, gentle reader,” he says: “if you can avoid having your eyelid sewn shut … avoid it.
• Here, for a number of reasons, Rushdie is not on such secure ground.
• Read more:
  How Salman Rushdie has been a scapegoat for complex historical differences

  Rushdie, who studied history at Cambridge University, described himself in Joseph Anton as “a historian by training”.

• Indeed, a speech he gave at PEN America in 2022 is reprinted in the book verbatim.
• For these intellectuals, principles of secular reason and personal liberty should always supersede blind conformity to social or religious authority.

Old-fashioned liberal principles

• In Knife, though, Rushdie the protagonist confronts a world where such liberal principles now appear old-fashioned.
• He claims “the groupthink of radical Islam” has been shaped by “the groupthink-manufacturing giants, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter”.
• But for many non-religious younger people, any notion of free choice also appears illusory, the anachronistic residue of an earlier age.
• Millennials and Generation Z are concerned primarily with issues of environmental catastrophe and social justice, and they tend to regard liberal individualism as both ineffective and self-indulgent.
• A new book traces how we got here, but lets neoliberal ideologues off the hook

Suffused in the culture of Islam

• The Satanic Verses itself is suffused in the culture of Islam as much as James Joyce’s Ulysses is suffused in the culture of Catholicism.
• In their hypothetical conversation, the author of Knife tries to convince his assailant of the value of such ambivalence.
• He protests how his notorious novel revolves around “an East London Indian family running a café-restaurant, portrayed with real love”.

Attachment to past traditions

• Rushdie discusses in Knife how, besides the Hindu legends of his youth, he has also been “more influenced by the Christian world than I realized”.
• He cites the music of Handel and the art of Michelangelo as particular influences.
• Yet this again highlights Rushdie’s attachments to traditions firmly rooted in the past.
• Part of James’s greatness lay in the way he was able to accommodate these radical shifts within his writing.

‘A curiously one-eyed book’

• Particularly striking are the immediacy with which he recalls the shocking assault, the black humour with which he relates medical procedures and the sense of “exhilaration” at finally returning home with his wife to Manhattan.
• Yet there are also many loose ends, and the book’s conclusion, that the assailant has in the end become “simply irrelevant” to him, is implausible.
• He insists he does not want to write “frightened” or “revenge” books.

• This was despite several brave comeback attempts by Milburn that likewise cited Pataudi as an example.
• Knife, by contrast, is a curiously one-eyed book, in a metaphorical, as well as a literal sense.

Paul Giles does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

• From childhood, we are told that patience is a virtue and that good things will come to those who wait.
• And, so, many of us work on cultivating patience.
• The writings of medieval Islamic thinker Abu Hamid al-Ghazali can give us insights or help us understand why we need to practice patience – and also when not to be patient.

Who was al-Ghazali?

• He traveled to places as far as Baghdad and Jerusalem to defend Islam and argued there was no contradiction between reason and revelation.
• More specifically, he was well known for reconciling Aristotle’s philosophy, which he likely read in Arabic translation, with Islamic theology.
• This work is composed of 40 volumes in total, divided into four parts of 10 books each.

1. What is patience?

• Humans, according to al-Ghazali, have competing impulses: the impulse of religion, or “bāʿith al-dīn,” and the impulse of desire, or “bāʿith al-hawā.” Life is a struggle between these two impulses, which he describes with the metaphor of a battle: “Support for the religious impulse comes from the angels reinforcing the troops of God, while support for the impulse of desire comes from the devils reinforcing the enemies of God.”

• The amount of patience we have is what decides who wins the battle.
• As al-Ghazali puts it, “If a man remains steadfast until the religious impulse conquers … then the troops of God are victorious and he joins the troops of the patient.

2. Patience, values and goals

• It all starts with commitments to core values.
• For a Muslim like al-Ghazali, those values are informed by the Islamic tradition and community, or “umma,” and include things like justice and mercy.
• Living in a way that is consistent with these core values is what the moral life is all about.

3. When impatience is called for

• Certainly, there are forms of injustice and suffering in the world that we should not calmly endure.
• Despite his commitment to the importance of patience to a moral life, al-Ghazali makes room for impatience as well.
• But could the necessity for impatience be extended to social harms, such as systemic racism or poverty?

Liz Bucar received funding from Templeton Religion Trust to support work on this topic.

• The advisory board aims to utilize the expertise of seasoned industry professionals to propel the development and strategic positioning of OZOP ARC.
• Alessa Aguayo brings a rich background in the lighting industry, with over a decade of experience spanning national accounts, distribution, and manufacturing.
• Brian Conway, CEO of Ozop Energy Solutions, commented, “We are thrilled to welcome Alessa Aguayo to our advisory board.
• With the addition of Alessa Aguayo, the board is poised to significantly impact the strategic trajectory of the OZOP ARC system.

• Pittsburgh, April 03, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Today, the Greater Pittsburgh Festival of Books announced registration is open for its third annual event, happening on May 11, 2024 on the campus of the Pittsburgh Theological Seminary in East Liberty.
• Specially planned this year, the event will focus a portion of its programming on stories about Pittsburgh – and the greater Pittsburgh area – by hometown authors.
• The Festival will be held from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturday, May 11 at 616 North Highland Avenue, Pittsburgh.
• The Festival is made possible thanks to support from sponsors including Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, The Jack Buncher Foundation, KDKA and others.