Preliminary Discourse

 "You know what I’d like to be? I mean if I had my goddam choice?... You know that song ‘If a body catch a body comin’ through the rye’... Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around—nobody big, I mean—except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff—I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I’d do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all." – The Catcher in the Rye (JD Salinger)

A new report has just been released by the Institute of Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA), the Annual Review of Constitution-Building Processes: 2017. One chapter caught my attention, W. Elliot Bulmer's "The Constitutional Recognition of Religious Identity". Drawing from case studies from Sri Lanka (Buddhism), Israel (Judaism) and the South Pacific countries of Samoa and Tuvalu (Christianity), it contends that constitutional references to religion often serve political and socio-cultural functions rather than legal ones. Furthermore, religious and ethnic identities often intertwine and the vast majority of differences occur within the religious community itself. In all cases the religious and the indigeneous (including the ethnic) intertwine: in Sri Lanka, Buddhist identity is linked to the ethnic Sinhala; in Samoa and Tuvalu, Christianity is integral to the value system of indigeneous people as can be seen in how the assembly of respective island chiefs, the ...

When misfortune afflicts one, to lose hope in Allah is to be faithless; to be thankful to Allah despite misfortune is to be faithful; to thank Allah even for the misfortune is to soar beyond faith.

A candid and honest appraisal of Islamic intellectual history will no doubt reveal how much this tradition has been influenced by the surrounding intellectual milieu. But for over-zealous adherents who claim to ‘purify’ the entire tradition from any external accretions, to return the religion as it were to its pristine purity unadulterated by any ‘outside’ influences, the whole religion must be kept strictly self-referential. That means all that savors of Islam must be identifiable back to the Qur’an (and Sunnah) alone. If indeed there are elements of, say, Greek, Hellenistic, Hindu, Jewish or Christian origins in the tradition, this must be replaced with an entire system based squarely on the Qur’an. In doing so, what the so-called ‘reformists’ have done, unbeknownst to them, is to replace a system of intellectual inquiry made up of hundreds, if not thousands of learned men and women, with a new-born ‘system’ born of the narrow confines of their own ego.

Now that Palestine has recognition for statehood, the next step, like all others, will be drafting a Constitution for Palestine. That's where the power struggle will be.

Worry for the evil of banality as much as the banality of evil.