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Moderation by Majority
Who decides which Shiʿis are moderate? This week I finished a paper on Asadullāh Mubashshirī’s preface to the Persian translation of Henry Corbin’s history of Islamic philosophy. In it I cited Rasūl Jaʿfariyān with gratitude, as the historian who had mapped the reformers of twentieth-century Iran who wanted an Islam purified of superstition. I closed… — read more
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The Atheist’s Soul
Podcast — read more
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The Angels Were Right
PodcastArtificial intelligence, the objection to creation, and what a myth can and cannot settle Michelangelo, The Creation of Adam, c. 1511, Sistine Chapel ceiling, Vatican City. Photograph: Burkhard Mücke, 18 October 2017, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain. The objection arrives before the creature does. God tells the angels He is placing a khalīfa on earth,… — read more
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The Widening Circle
Podcast Ask an Iranian exile why a mosque in Hamburg should be closed and you may be told about Evin prison. The chain feels unbreakable from the inside. The state that jailed my cousin calls itself Islamic; Islam is therefore the thing that jailed my cousin; anything Islamic anywhere is therefore the enemy. Each step… — read more
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A Ladder Is Not a Home
Podcast On the declaration of qiyāma at Alamūt, the doctors who stopped seeing, and the one gift we cannot afford to hand over Across four endoscopy centres, a piece of software was switched on. It watched the live feed of a colonoscopy and drew a box around anything that looked like a polyp. It worked.… — read more
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Compliance Is Not Innocence
Podcast On the two ways an institution abuses its own rules, and why following the process is not the same as being right. Nobody installs a handrail before somebody falls. That is the first thing to understand about an institution’s rules. Policies, procedures, declarations of interest: none of it was drafted by anyone with a… — read more
