Apologies

First-up, apologies for there having been no posts on this blog for a week. In neglecting the blog like this I have broken what is thought to be the number one commandment of blogging, which is that you must blog often. People seem to think that this is actually even more important than blogging interestingly and I suspect that they are probably right... I don't feel that I have any one topic that I particularly want to blog about today, but a number of smaller ideas come to mind:

1. Rob Morello was asking whether it was OK for blog entries to be very short and the answer to that is "yes". He suggested that a blog entry could simply be a question and that seems like it could be a good thing, especially if you return to it later.

2. One thing about teaching is that there are always surprises, in that you can never judge how some things will be received. I was really surprised on Tuesday to learn that people perceived Menocal to be the "easy to read" text and the Constable collection to be "the difficult book". Thinking about this, I can understand why people feel this is the case, but I want to urge you all to make sure that you take your dose of Constable every week because the long-run gain to you will be very great I believe. While you are operating, mainly, with reasonably limited knowledge of al-Andalus, some of the documents are going to be hard to grasp, but they'll ultimately allow you to access discussions about Andalusi society in a much more profound way. Next week we'll spend more time probing some of these documents.

3. Mark Ravenhill's recent article on religion and university teaching seemed pretty interesting to me: http://arts.guardian.co.uk/theatre/drama/story/0,,2006078,00.html
While I agree with him that students shouldn't be allowed to opt-out of parts of courses on religious or moral grounds, I am not quite sure that this is as big an issue as he makes out, and I am also uncertain as to whether claiming the university as a bastion of liberalism is quite as good a thing as he believes. To me the interesting thing about universities is that as free-speech environments they can be bastions of all sorts of things, including forms of belief and expression which many would find not to be to their liking. In this way the university is the natural home of, for instance, libertarian conservatism or Islamism, as it is liberalism. To deny this would, I think, take us down the direction of the kind of culture wars which exist on American campuses, though I guess that Ravenhill would quite reasonably point out that it is the liberal consensus in Britain which has prevented such conflicts occurring, up until now.

4. I was also thinking about Ibn Hazm's Tawq al-hamama (translated rather poorly as The Dove's Neck-Ring - it really deserves a more poetic title like The Ring of the Dove), which is one of the Andalusi texts which generates most interest and controversy these days, as it is a pretty frank treatise on love. Only one early manuscript copy remains, which can be seen here:
http://bc.ub.leidenuniv.nl/bc/olg/selec/tawq/index.html
The translated text can be found here: http://www.muslimphilosophy.com/hazm/dove/index.html
Re-reading some of the chapters is just a real delight, partly because of the mix of the confessional tone, partly the fantastic choice of subjects (on sending love letters, on the dangers of spies, on falling in love while asleep!) and partly because one has a sense of how scandalised parts of Andalusi society were by this text, with its clear allusions to the love lives of all sorts of prominent figures of Cordoban society. An important text to read for anyone who harbours an idea that Islamic culture is somehow narrow, sterile or conservative.