You Can't Make Mistakes.

The other day Jeff and I took a walk down al-Darb al-Aḥmar, one of the city’s most famous streets, and one that I had never walked before. I had gone to a talk about the street and the orientation and placement of its mosques and mausoleums given by Dr. Nasser Rabbat, Agha Khan professor of Islamic Architecture at MIT, and wanted to take a closer look at some of the the monuments themselves. This was also the last part of the medieval city that I had not previously walked along the path from the northern gate to the Citadel.

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So, Jeff and I went. He took care of the photography and I took care of the pointing and saying words that probably meant a hill of beans to him, but it was kind of him to humor me. Along the way we meant a guy named Gamal and started talking to him. He worked at the reconstruction of the Mosque of Amir Aqṣunqur (1347, a.k.a. – Blue Mosque) and I told him what we were doing. He knew many of the faculty members in my department at the university and was thrilled about that so he grabbed us by the arms and took us inside the reconstruction projects and showed us around.

Aqṣunqur is in a terrible state of disrepair, but still stunning. It is called the “Blue Mosque” because it was restored and rebuilt in 1652 by Amir Ibrāhīm Aghā Mastaḥifẓān and the qibla wall was redecorated with blue Ismet tiles. these tiles show up all over Cairo during the Ottoman period and can be seen adorning doorways and windows, though not to the extent that they are present in Aqṣunqur. We didn’t take any pictures of the interior since we weren’t really supposed to be there anyway and sometimes folks here get touchy about things being photographed if they are in any sort of state of disrepair.

Next he took us into the mosque and mausoleum of Amir Khāyrbak (1502-1520). The interior is completely restored. It is stunning. You can see it pictured below. We went from there to the House of al-Razzāz (1494-1778) and wandered around the palace where a number of Mamluk sultans and Ottoman rulers spent their days. There is a passage that runs from there to the citadel. Scary and unstable looking.

After this we continued back up the street and climbed into the minaret at the mosque of Amir Altunbūgha al-Maridānī (1340) so that we could have a view of al-Darb al-Ahmar from above. What we saw is a little disconcerting. This is a part of the city that was hit hard by a 1992 earthquake. Many of the buildings which collapsed then are still in terrible disrepair if not completely demolished. In 18 years, very little has been done to rectify this. You can see some of this in the pictures below.

We then continued back down the street toward the Citadel and exited in front of Bab al-‘Azab and caught a cab to Bab al-Lūq. The last photo is from the front of a restaurant in Bab al-Lūq. I have seen the restaurant a million times but have never noticed the hilarious advertisement for brains.

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This is a recent paper I wrote for a seminar on Islamic Political Thought with Dr. Huda Lutfi at the American University in Cairo. I will post a few others that I am writing and have written recently in the coming weeks.

It isn’t that I haven’t been writing in the last two months of blog hiatus, it is that I have been writing this sort of thing. So, rather than not posting at all, when I have tortured my ever avid fans (?) by never posting, I will further torture you by making you read my academic work. More importantly, I am working on a few conference papers and journal submissions and any feedback—on content or style—is very helpful. Thanks in advance for your kind patience.

To view the paper click one of the links below. Enjoy.

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Citation (Chicago/Turabian):

Martin III, John D. “Agency and Authority: Considering Free-Will in the Discursive Narrative on Caliphal Authority.” If You Don’t Know What You’re Doing, You Can’t Make Mistakes. http://youcantmakemistakes.com/2009/12/17/agency-and-authority/ [accessed September 3, 2010].

“A series of pipes.”

My dad has been hosting his origami site at Geocities for the past several years. I spoke to him yesterday about acquiring a domain name and self hosting the site as Geocities—presently owned and operated by Yahoo—will close its electronic doors very soon. He will move from there to a self-hosted site with its own independent address, which is inherently better because of greater control over the back-end of things. He rightly said that this was a good thing anyway, because this is how we keep these things—websites, the Internet—alive. This started me thinking about the Internet and how different a place it is from when I first started using it over a decade ago.

Thinking about Geocities in particular made me a bit reminiscent about all of the one-off, special interest sites that sprang up in the late 1990s. Usenet aside, you could find almost any information—be it quality or not—in single column pages with colored text and often over a bright—sometimes obnoxious—background. In those days, the big Internet companies had sites that were complex, multi-column affairs with boxes and ads, but the real Internet was the domain of the people writing whatever they wanted in center-aligned pages.

It was a great time to be a conspiracy theorist. Or really into Wicca.

Searching the Internet in the 90s was fantastic and weird. Democracy at its finest. All things change with time, some for worse some for better. There are reasonable arguments in either direction for the changes evident in the Internet over the last decade and a half. For some applications, the Internet has made life easier, obviously. Communication is fantastic. I live in Egypt and communicate with friends readily all over the world in an inexpensive and effective way. This is due to greater ubiquity of broadband Internet coverage in Egypt and elsewhere.

Websites have also become easier to create and maintain. I use WordPress to generate this site and have been for several years. The first version of the site, however, was written in PHP by yours truly. It was an exercise in basics which has made working with and customizing WordPress much easier for me in subsequent years. That said, it is really easy now to have a site that looks more or less professional, and everyone does. The downside is that now everything on the Internet seems to be a blog and sites grow stagnant as soon as the writer gets a book deal—which seems inevitable for many upstart bloggers these days.

The information which used to be so readily available on the Internet is now relegated to the All Thing¹ of Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a great tool as a first-reference: it democratizes basic reference, particularly for those who already have experience with traditional encyclopedias. It also contains vastly more information on a much wider variety of topics than do traditional encyclopedias. That said, it is still only a first reference, and the “peer-review” to which the information is subjected to is conducted by experts and non-experts alike.

My brother and I grew up with a set—two actually—of encyclopedia in the house. It was a great first- or quick-reference for almost anything that we wondered about or were writing about for school. As I got older and learned more about doing research, the references and bibliography proved perfect guides to more and deeper information on a given topic. That was how it was done.

The Internet changed all that. I cannot count the times that I heard college professors tell students that they had to use books and journal articles rather than online references. I was always confused. Did college students really not know how to use a library? It turns out that, no, they did—and do—not. Library usage seems to be, more and more, a thing of the past. The library at my present University is not expanding its collection very rapidly because they are exploring electronic alternatives—none of which work very well.

We used to go to the library with my mom almost every weekend. We had library cards by the time we were six or seven years old. I was—and am still—an avid reader because of this level of access to books. I am like a ship without a rudder—or more aptly, a ship without water—when I have no access to a library. This is not to say that I do not now primarily access academic journals via the Internet while conducting research. I do. It is easier, and saves me the time of sifting through stacks of journals in the basement in order to photocopy endless pages from them. This is an improvement.

Additionally, Google Books and the Internet Archive are becoming ever more useful resources for finding out-of-print and public-domain works written before the current copyright cutoff. They do not, however, replace the public or research library. Instances of false information being reported elsewhere in the media based on a Wikipedia article as an authoritative source are a good argument for returning to more rigorous forms of research on the part of journalists and academics alike.

Also, the above-mentioned one-off specialist sites seem to be going by the wayside as the Internet evolves into an archive of photoshopped pictures of cats and funny/stupid things. It used to be the case that the top of the search engine output would be a number of websites with a vast amount of—potentially questionable—data on almost any topic.

Now, on the other hand, Wikipedia is at the top of the list for almost anything that you can search for. That is unless you are accustomed to advance searching and particularly adept at using keywords. Most of the students who I help at the reference desk are not. They typically begin their research by going to Google and typing their topic or a full sentence (e.g. – “Mongolia” or “why is there domestic violence in the middle east?.” These are two recent examples of searches which students were having trouble with). To get to much of the real information that is available on the Internet these days you have to sift through hundreds of entries in blogs or advertisements. Monetizing the Internet proves to be primarily a tool for obfuscating it rather than improving user-as-content-generator experience.

This is one of the primary reasons that I am an advocate of net-neutrality and online rights—including, but not limited to, file-sharing, digitized books, and un-filtered/un-traffic-shaped Internet service, not to mention open-source/open-licensing. The Internet has the potential to be a tool for posterity, and indeed it is already serving us in this manner to some degree. It has the potential to be so much more. The moment that corporate interests became more important than the needs of Internet users, the system broke. It will limp though, but it will not recover fully and become the repository of information that it should be until corporate money-making interests are set aside.

This will not happen anytime soon, and indeed, Yahoo’s decision to discontinue Geocities in order to promote their new web-hosting platform—which is pay to play—is a step in the wrong direction. The Internet is not about closing things down in order that they might not be in conflict with business interests: it is about information being freely and readily available the world over and even beyond. This used to be a purpose of libraries as well.

It seems, however, that we have lost sight of this, lulled into contented complacence by cute pictures of talking cats and repositories of awkward family photos. This does not bode well at all. It will eventually change, though. Economies and finance online are not, and never have been stable. The one thing that is stable at this stage is the ability of one computer to connect to another. As long as we have that, when the corporate hegemony Internet collapses, we will simply start over, one node at a time.

Until then, if anyone needs me I’ll be reading online comics and looking at pictures of sandwiches.

———
¹ A reference to the progeny of the blogosphere presented in Dan Simmons’ Hyperion and Endymion.

This is for all those die-hard fans

I have no explanation for this really. Anyone else?

Pay special attention to the “Fantasy” section. It’s worth it.

What will come over us next?

I caught this article this week on Reuters. Apparently, it has become a bit of a problem in Jerusalem that while people are there visiting holy sites and relics, something comes over them, causing odd behavior, spontaneous preaching and the perceiving of visions of prophets and messiahs. This phenomenon has been termed “Jerusalem Syndrome.” However, this label is reserved for pilgrims who have no prior mental disorders. I will leave that completely alone.

The topic of religious experiences is an interesting one. William James argued that they were somehow simply a part of the human psychological structure. As humans, he said, we have mystical experiences as a normal part of our development. The degree to which this has an effect over an individual, of course, varies greatly from individual to individual.

I have always taken the stance, as a hardcore materialist, that these experiences are physio-neurological events which our brains cannot interpret rationally. Rather, when such an event occurs, we go outside the normal rational structure which we have developed since childhood and unconsciously search our minds for some explanation, which generally results in something which appears more like a dream rather than your average experience of external phenomena. Some part of the process confuses the interpreting mechanism in our brains and we interpret these events as though we are perceiving and processing sensory data from external sources.

Mamoon Yusaf, my friend and a London-based NLP coach, confirms that this perceptive shift is also possible to produce synthetically using tools of Neuro-Linguistic Programming. Since our perception of sensory data from external sources is actually processed by the same parts of our brain as our internal representations, human beings can actually alter their emotional and physiological state through simply meditating upon and reproducing visual, auditory, and kinesthetic cues in our minds. Conversely, when a human being alters his physiology—by, say, smiling—his internal representations will change considerably.

So, imagine this scenario: you go to Jerusalem. You carry a bunch of internal representations with you regarding feeling inspired by religious text, artifacts, sites. You walk into [insert place of religio-historical significance]. Your brain starts mulling over the fact that you are standing in the place where [insert important religio-historical event here] happened. You feel a sense of inspiration. Your body feels tingly or light, you head starts to swim a little bit. You begin to look around and imagine the places that [insert religio-historical figure here] stood, talked, laughed, spoke, performed a miracle, etc. These stories have a great deal of significance for you. You, standing in this place, seeing these things in your mind, contemplating the mysteries and significance of this event/place, have begun to confuse your perceptions of the world outside of your body with the vivid, emotionally charged pictures/sounds/feelings in your imagination. You are physically standing in a spot of religio-historical signifcance. You are emotionally seated in that place in your mind. At this point, for your brain and your body, your outer and inner perceptive mechanisms are the same, and you shift into that place/time.

This is the only explanation of “Jerusalem Syndrome” that makes any sense to me. We can argue about where the inspiration comes from or what has made these things significant to the point of causing a “mystical” experience, but that will tell us nothing. This would be an interesting topic to study with the help of neuro-psychologists and neuro-linguists. Perhaps I will conduct such a study in coming years. I believe that this model can be applied to my particular field of study—Sufism—though I feel like it would be pretty significant if we could find data that suggest a wider application of such a theory.

Fun times ahead for the scientific study of religious behavior! In the mean time, I hope that you all see Jesus, Buddha, one of the 99 names of Allah, or something spiritually significant to you on your toast, tomatoes, lambs, or fishsticks and have a good weekend.