For the morning, I finished my readings for my other seminar, dealing with the question of how Islamic jurisprudence (law) developed. The particular question surrounds the use of the ‘hadith’, the narrative of the doings of the prophet, Muahmmad. The problem is that none of these were written down until several centuries after the event in question took place. As these narratives serve as the basis for Islamic law, there is naturally interest in establishing their authenticity.

The traditional way to establish authenticity of a hadith is to examine the line of transmission (isnad), prior to its being written down. Since each hadith begins with something like “recorded by A who received it from B who received it from C who was with the prophet on this occasion,” the obvious method of checking is to establish the bona fides of those alleged to have transmitted the hadith. Was B a trustworthy person? Did he live at the right time? Is he known to have met A and C? Etc.

Obviously, this has some limits. What one scholar we read, Joseph Schacht, claims, is that most hadith were essentially created by jurists later on, to support their beliefs, and then the isnad for each was gradually extended backward, in order to establish credibility. He makes some more elaborate arguments, along with evidence he claims supports him, but this is really the gist.

I’m not quite sure I buy it. There are an enormous number of hadith. There are moreover a certain number which scholars agree, by the above method, are manifestly fabricated. But to assume that they are all fabricated, is to in effect assume a gigantic conspiracy of jurists. Schacht is in effect claiming that large numbers of scholars who lived in a vast area, with widely differing beliefs, all engaged in a massive fraud. Which is quite an extraordinary claim.

Oddly enough, class discussion was mainly focused on the present theory and practice of Islamic law. Relevant, no doubt, but not exactly touching deeply on the readings.

In the other course, we discussed Fanon of course. A fun discussion, but one that got occasionally airy, courtesy of a lack of general knowledge of Algeria itself. Context, as we are always told, is everything.

Dinner and sleep followed.

The morning was spent finishing the paper on Ottoman Greece. Not really satisfied, but I’m definitely out of time. As for the seminar, we each gave 5 minute presentations on our region of the Ottoman empire. I was actually a bit disappointed, as most people seemed unable to give a very good historical summary, let alone a broader analysis of the incorporation of their particular region in the empire. Summarizing is difficult, true, but the least we can do is be linear, and (on the other hand) not repeat every single battle, right?

For the evening, I was going through various works by Frantz Fanon, including an excerpt from “A Dying Colonialism” on the political implications of veiling in the Algerian Revolution, that I read last spring in Paris. The chapters on “National Culture” and “National Consciousness’ from “The Wretched of the Earth” were new though.

In “National Consciousness”, Fanon offers a very compelling analysis of postcolonial states. Essentially, the native elites use nationalism to stir up the masses and force the colonizer out. This achieved, they immediately take the place of the old colonial rulers. The new ‘nation’ remains essentially colonial, run by a corrupt native elite that basically uses national unity and nationalization as a means to line their pockets with the monies that were formerly taken by the colonizing power.

He says much more of course, but this scenario has played out many times, most of them after Fanon’s death in 1962.

The problem is that analyzing the problem and solving it are two different things. The supreme irony is that the Algerian Revolution that Fanon was so dedicated to, and had so much faith and praise for, played out largely along the lines he had described (and claimed the Algerians were not following): nationalism becomes a cover for dictatorship, corruption, and the rule of an intellectually barren native elite.

So today was more of the same. I guess I spoke too harshly of the nationalist historians. Consider the following two (paraphrased statements): “There is no evidence of significant Greek opposition to the practice of devshirme,” and “The practice of devshirme was invariably opposed by Greeks.”

Not really the same thing is it? Doesn’t quite help me with my paper, but it does illustrate that even straightforward historical questions don’t always yield straightforward answers. The two authors in question, one Greek, one British, are writing within about 10 years of each other. The first statement is actually the later one. Very odd.

Meanwhile, the monitor has begun to flicker most annoyingly. Not sure quite what’s up, but the gray background in Photoshop is enough to illustrate the problem. On another note, my new bank is sending me ridiculous amounts of mail.

So today, I figured I’d try and resurrect this journal. What with having my desk finally set up, and having a screen I can read (even if it does flicker on occasion), it seemed like the opportune time.

The funny thing is that I can actually remember events that happened 3 or 4 weeks ago far better than those that happened only a few days ago. I think that’s because class days for me wind up being rather similar, and hence hard to differentiate. They all kind of merge together. Going to the beach or hiking, or visiting someplace special, they all tend to stick.

Beyond that, I think I’ve given up on lighttpd for this site. I’m just too tired of having simple things not work. For instance, recursive includes in server-side html required a special patch, because the source doesn’t normally support it. Now I’m in a position where a very simple cgi script, a hit counter, won’t run, because include-virtual only works in a very particular way, and exec isn’t implemented for shtml. Blah.

As for less technical matters, I had a large quantity of French to review, and an even larger quantity of research to get through on Greece under the Ottoman empire. It appears that the library here has a decent Greek collection, but it’s almost exclusively in Greek. A bit difficult for somebody like me to take advantage of. Those few things that aren’t in Greek tend to largely regard Ottoman Greece as a ‘Dark Age’ in need of little or no explication. Bloody ahistorical nationalists. Something must have happened from 1450-1550. What?

As the setup of my apartment has proven exceptionally difficult to explain over the phone, this will perhaps be of interest.

I wasn’t planning on making an Ikea advert, but given that the desk, office chair, bookcase, lamps, trashcan, and even blanket are from said Swedish monstrosity, I suppose I didn’t quite succeed.

So the highlight of the day was a quick visit to Best Buy, happily only a few blocks away, to finalize on a new monitor. The idea was to finally stop squinting at the laptop’s screen, which for all it’s perks, has a native resolution of 1600×1200 on a 15″ screen. Wonderful for details, unreadable for fonts.

It’s become quite a challenge to avoid getting these ‘widescreen’ monitors with the 16:9 aspect ratio, or in other words, 20″ LCDs offering 1680×1050 resolution. Since height, not width, is usually what bugs me when viewing documents/webpages/photos, this isn’t a trade-off I wanted.

So with a little advice from a friend, plus the surprising discovery that Best Buy can actually have lower prices than Newegg (though not often), I am now the proud owner of a Samsung 204B 20.1″ LCD monitor. Aside from a somewhat limited vertical viewing angle, it looks pretty good. My desktop background has reverted to IMG_3104.jpg, the highly saturated Swiss photo (Lac de Moiry) that I used to use before deciding the computer wasn’t doing it justice.

Otherwise, it was a quiet day, mostly spent ensconced at my desk reading. I even managed some good old-fashioned paper correspondance, though of course the post office was closed by the time I got there. I also picked up some long neglected groceries, though after looking at the bill, my first thought is that I need to stop by Trader Joe’s more often. $27 just doesn’t go as far as it ought.

The document I got from the Grad Office on taxes might as well be written in Greek for all the help it is. Whoever does the actual writing at the IRS clearly was unable to get a job doing technical writing in the real world. In terms of poor organization, lousy sentence construction and general abstruseness, the paper is a masterpiece. It is however just about useless for actual reference.

Meanwhile, the Despotate of Morea has fallen to the Ottoman Turks, and I have massive quantities of French to do tomorrow.

The morning was pretty random. I stopped by the Grad Office to get stipend info, and wound up with a 60 pages IRS document. Yay. To be examined LATER. The NYU bookstore did not have the book I was looking for. I did toy with the thought of getting something NYUish and wearable, given that my UCLA sweatshirt seems mildly inappropriate for the location, but NYUware was only available at inappropriate prices, so there went that idea.

I did make it down to the Apple store, partly because I wanted a little exercise, mostly because I wanted to see the new 24″ iMac. Which I did. Big. In fact, almost too big. Certainly wouldn’t fit well on my desk. Core 2 Duo pi_css5 benchmarks were good though. The Mac Pro results were less good.

Read most of a book on the political history of the Ottoman empire. I’m beginning to feel marginally competent on the area. Sad to say, but I still know American political history (dates, presidents, wars, major laws, etc.) better than anything else. Thanks to 11th grade AP US History with Mr. B… In any case, interminable Russo-Ottoman wars finally forced me out, this time to Staples where I got, among many things, a stapler capable of stapling more than 10 sheets at a time.

When an important phone call I received died midway through I was a bit miffed. For some reason I thought of Skype, and since I now have a headset for use with NaturallySpeaking, I could actually give it a try. I did. Not only did it work, but voice quality was better than on my cell phone (this on a cable connection, where upload is limitied to ~40KB/s). And for now in the US, calls are free. If only Cingular service was this cheap and reliable…

For dinner, I was invited to some friends of my grandparents. I had of course forgotten that it was the Jewish new year. Oops. Now I know what it is to be a gentile. A very pleasant ceremony, followed by dinner, and some rather wide-ranging conversation followed. Their apartment is not only less than 2 blocks away, but it has a great view of the financial district of downtown Manhattan. The perks of living in a 25 story building (mine is analogous, but has only 17 stories, and is blocked by another identical 17 story building, so my view is limited to a good-sized courtyard/park).

Getting up for French isn’t the hard part, although I dropped my alarm clock on the floor yesterday, and it seems to now only work as a clock (the alarm part is basically inaudible). The hard part is staying awake after French. Still 8AM class is 8AM class, so I arrived as usual at 7:59AM, having only finished about 2/3 of my cereal. Blah.

After class, I verified that my $1000 deposit check (for housing) is still AWOL. Nobody seems to know where it is, or has received it. Clever. My checkbook from the new bank arrived though, so I’m still at least as solvent as Uncle Sam.

Had lunch at a nice little Thai place on 4th St. near 6th Ave. with my grandmother. In the process, we wandered a bit in the village, passing a chess shop, where I bought my last chess set, about 10 years back. Also played in a kid’s chess ‘tournament’ at a different chess place across the street around that time. No wonder ‘the Village’ seems slightly familiar.

Afternoon was a mishmash of reading and wrestling with CSS. I’m trying, per somebody’s request, to get the sidebar here moved to the left side of the page. Unfortunately, my skills in the department are a bit lacking, so after almost 3 hours, I was forced to admit defeat. At least now, all the ugly hacks on the original wordpress theme have been pretty much tidied up. The diff against ‘kubrick’ is down to maybe 50 lines.

“Orientalism” on the other hand was slightly more successful. Some of yesterday’s discussion is finally beginning to click. Not for the last time, I’m sure.

Today centers around 2 salient facts: Cable internet access was enabled in the apartment, and I “led” a class discussion of Edward Said’s controversial (and influential) book, “Orientalism”

Actually, I was desperately trying to come up with good questions for said discussion when we got a ring from the cable guy. Up he came, fiddled with the cable a bit, plugged in a cable modem, made a 5 minute call to headquarters to enable the connection, and there we were. Oddly enough, he left me only a receipt: no documentation, no charges. Peculiar.

Then I went back to formulating discussion questions. Not east. They’ve got to somehow get at the essence of the topic, while forgoing judgment, and engaging everybody in the discussion. Make them too broad, and the discussion goes nowhere. Make them too narrow, and nobody will have anything to say. A balancing act.

Meanwhile in my other class, we had a discussion that essentially centered on how one can write history based upon problematic sources. The issue in early Islamic history is that we really have no original documents from, say 622-750AD. What we do have is the Quran, and a large supply of hadith, narratives of things the prophet or his companions did or said, via some chain of transmission. Since none of these documents are provably from the period they ostensibly describe, there is the question of how much of it is retrojection (projection of current circumstances into the past) or downright fabrication (indeed, with hadith, there is a whole field in Islamic theology devoted to distinguishing the good ones from the bad).

For the discussion itself, which started at 5PM, the professor began with a presentation of Orientalist art. You don’t need to see a lot of it to see many of the traditional Orientalist myths cropping up: the exoticized Orient, the eroticized Orient, the timeless Orient, and so on. The discussion actually more or less ran itself, though my questions proved less helpful than I’d hoped. One of the things we did get at though was the sense that Orientalism as a discourse influenced on many different levels, and in different ways. The fact that two individuals are embedded in the Orientalist discourse does not, a priori tell one a whole lot about what those individuals actually did or thought. This is something that many of Said’s critics maintain he discounted, but his actual position seems reasonably nuanced.

After the discussion, I went home and cooked some more spaghetti. Seems like Wednesday is spaghetti day. This time I think I undercooked it though. Despite having eaten spaghetti for at least half my meals this last week, I’m still not sick of it. What I am sick of is discovering that the still unripe fruit (nectarines and peaches) that I bought is rotting from the inside. Ditto for my avocado. Not cool.

So the Orient is cabled, and I’m tired.

A solid hour into French this morning, we turned to the topic of ‘verlan’, the language of French youth originating in the impoverished slums around Paris. Basically, ‘verlan’ reverses the sound of words. We read a rather neat poem which alternated back between ‘verlan’ and regular French. A few examples:

Ar-a-be -> beur

Fre-re -> reuf

Me-re -> reum

And so on. Essentially, the sound is reversed. Supposedly it was originally constructed so that ‘les flics’ (the police) couldn’t understand it, but it has since taken on a life of its own. It’d be as if gangsta’ talk here had become common among youth from all backgrounds. Not bloody likely, given that we’re such a melting pot and all.

My other course was a seminar, in which we discussed a very methodical book on the Ottoman empire subtitled ‘structures of power: 1300-1650.’ The book itself featured chapters entitled ‘The Army’, ‘The Palace’ and ‘The Provinces.’ It’s funny how sometimes structure conveys substance: this is a case where the author clearly believed that one could subdivide power under the Ottomans into a discrete set of structures. The result is a fascinating, but heavily skewed book, which gives a very elite perspective on Ottoman history. The obvious subtext is that if you weren’t involved somehow in one of those categories, you weren’t a part of the power structure. This seems highly simplistic to me: informal structures of power are often as important as formal ones, and the notion that power can be transmitted unidirectionally on an empire of millions of inhabitants seems a bit thin.

At any rate, we had our discussion, and then it was back to the apartment for me, to prepare for tomorrow’s seminars. Plenty more reading to go. I’m now on the cusp of finishing the spaghetti I made last Wednesday, which is also an achievement of sorts.