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Robert Fisk and Islamofuturism

Only two weeks after this wonderful documentary about the work of Robert Fisk was released, the man himself is dead.

TIFF 2019: Documentary on Robert Fisk highlights how the foreign correspondent manages complex, grim realities - The Globe and Mail

He was a paragon of journalism, whose doorstop book, The Great War for Civilisation, based on his PhD taken at Trinity College Dublin, is the single best explanation for why we find ourselves in the world we are in. You really should read the book, but for a taster, here’s Fisk speaking at his alma mater about his experiences in the Middle East.

The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East: Amazon.it: Fisk, Robert: Libri in altre lingue

Fisk was a journalist of the old school, by which I mean he believed in travelling to the site of an event to explore it in person, in examining the evidence for himself, in speaking to people (directly and in their own languages ideally) to get a rounded perspective on events, and in doing careful research and taking copious notes to augment his own prodigious knowledge and memory.

In this age when the old gatekeeper media are dying out, being replaced by both the amateur hordes of opinion mongers and influencers on the one hand, and by AI algorithm reportage and platform curation on the other, Robert Fisk’s methods seem like the craftsmanship of a lost age.

His decades of reporting on the affairs of the Middle East – its conflicts, their origins and of course Western interference – stands as a testimony to how proper, factual, neutral journalism was once the norm, or at least the aspiration, before the onset of web 2.0, clickbait, alternative facts and post-truth.

Of course, all journalism is ultimately ephemeral, at best the first draft of history. Fisk however had accrued a depth of knowledge, not only of Middle Eastern cultures and politics, but of the long history which had led to the current affairs he reported on. In order to gather this information together in one place, he wrote a doctoral thesis which eventually became his magnum opus – The Great War for Civilisation.

One often feels as if one needs a doctorate in the fraught and complex history of the Middle East to comprehend why things there happen as they do. Fisk had one, and it showed in his writing. He was fully able to account for his own Westernness in his writing about Islam, Arabs and the Middle East in general, as he had spent many decades imbibing the rich, sour and often bitter history of the West’s engagement with all three. And only a Westerner of his ilk, an Englishman with a military heritage and of ultimately Norse extraction, could have been the credible voice within the West that he was.

It is a tragic sign of the times that the fraught relationship between Islam and the West has entered a deadly new phase, just as the carefully researched journalism that Fisk embodied has been jettisoned almost entirely by news outlets motivated to generate sensationalism for clickbait income. What comes next is likely to be ugly, and I’m sorry we will not have Robert Fisk to help explain it for us.

Fortunately we do have many great creators, artists, writers and filmmakers from Muslim backgrounds who are already hard at work attempting to imagine into being better futures not only for the Middle East, or for Islam, but for the world and indeed all worlds. (Allah, after all, is called God of All Worlds in the Qu’ran.) Many of these – it sometimes feels impossibly like all – are featured in a new text about Islamofuturism.

Islam, Science Fiction and Extraterrestrial Life: The Culture of Astrobiology in the Muslim World has been written by Jörg Matthias Determann, and was recently published by Bloomsbury. I have written a full review which will run in Foundation in the fullness of time. But for now, and without wishing to preview that review, I would like to note that Islamofuturism may well be the ultimate resolution for the many problems between Islam and the West which Fisk spent his life exploring and reporting about.

Media of Islam, Science Fiction and Extraterrestrial Life

This is, of course, a somewhat utopian position to take, and I am an ardent anti-utopian. (Too many utopian visions result in gulags, thought police and death camps for my liking, no matter how well-intentioned they commence.) Nevertheless, what struck me while reading Determann’s fascinating survey of Islamofuturisms from Indonesia to Syria was the pervasive presence of two things in the multifaceted iterations of this rapidly proliferating genre and movement.

Firstly, the omnipresence of the shadow of The Thousand and One Nights. We have an ongoing origin debte among Western SF about when SF originated. Was it, as I’d argue, in the late 19th century alongside the development of professional science and industrialisation? Many, most prominently Brian Aldiss, argue for Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) as an origin text, and this is somewhat persuasive. Others see SF in earlier eras and texts – the voyages extraordinaires of the Age of Expansion; the lunar visitation texts of Rome, even in the automata described by Homer in the Iliad, or the “alien spaceships” of the Book of Ezekiel. But these are all from the Western tradition. From an Islamic, Middle Eastern tradition, it makes perfect sense to identify The Thousand and One Nights as a seminal SF text.

The Thousand and One Nights - Literature 114 (Spring 2014-2015) - Harvard Wiki

Secondly, Islamofuturist cultural outputs almost entirely derive some of their animus from Western SF, according to Determann. Western forms, narrative devices and even sometimes direct lifts of scenes or characters are repurposed by Islamofuturism. Star Wars and Star Trek are huge influences, no less so than the indigenous cultures of Cairo, Istanbul or Jakarta.

What struck me, reading Determann’s book, is the sheer proliferation of Islamofuturism. His text is timely. In only a few years, the kind of survey he has conducted will no longer be possible in a single volume. Instead we will have to talk about Turkish cinematic visions of the future, Egyptian pulp SF novels, Indonesian feminist futurisms, and so on. In all of these environments and genres, Muslim dreamers are creating futures that contain Islam, centre Islam, challenge Islam, modernise Islam and most significantly, find modes of rapprochement between Islam and the West (yes, including revenge myths of total annihilation and takeover, but this is far from the norm.)

Robert Fisk and Islamofuturism thus function as two sides of one coin, or rather, as a Janus statue with one head looking back to the complex origins and sad histories of Western engagement with Islam and the Middle East, while the other looks forward, more in hope than expectation admittedly, to the future.

I hope that the Robert Fisk of a century from now has a happier narrative to write than The Great War for Civilisation. I hope he, or she, Western or Muslim or both or neither, can tell a tale of Islamofuturism and it’s reshaping of Islam and the West.

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The Sea Monsters Scam of Academic Publishing, or, how I published an article about mermaids in an oceanography journal

This was originally published on LinkedIn. At some point, I will likely decide that I have no real purpose or need of a presence there, hence reproducing it here.

The oceans of knowledge are not a safe place for an unwary early career researcher, or academic from the developing world, who needs to publish their work to gain tenure or promotion.

Here be monsters, shady companies who prey on desperate and ill-advised academics. The scam is simple. There is a drive to open source publishing in academia to make knowledge as freely available as possible. This is because academics tend to produce their work as employees of universities, who are then charged by publishers to access that same work. This too could be considered a little unethical, but it is not new. The system, for those unfamiliar with it, is well described here.

No, I’m talking about a more recent development. With the drive to online, publishers have emerged offering to publish academic work for a fee. This fee, they insist, is to cover things like editorial, proofreading, and layout, as well as online hosting costs. However, the fees requested often run into hundreds or thousands of pounds. Unwary academics, often from developing nations, do not always distinguish these ‘journals’ from more respectable ones, which is how they make their money.

Most academics have been spammed at some point by these journals (the respectable ones don’t need to spam to recruit submissions.). Most academics wearily delete the emails. Some academics dream of spamming them back. Sometimes, academics with a little spare time troll the spammers, publishing nonsense articles to highlight their lack of professional standards. There have been articles published on the use of geese in obstetrics, the existence of midichlorians (the fictional cause of Star Wars’ ‘force’), and even an article simply entitled ‘Stop emailing me’, which consisted of that phrase multiply repeated.

I’ve been on parental leave recently, and as I had a day between writing projects and the baby was behaving himself, I decided to bite on the latest spam from an alleged Journal of Advances in Oceanography and Marine Biology. This too is an indicator of a scam journal, when their topic is very distant from your own speciality subject. Mine is not oceanography. I’m a literary scholar who teaches literature and journalism. So, rising to the challenge, I wrote an article about mermaids, selkies, sea monsters and oceans of lard.

They asked for $979 to publish it. We negotiated, while the article allegedly was out for ‘peer review’. Peer review is a system where other academics read your work blind and offer guidance on whether it should be published. It’s a voluntary quality control system, which moves slowly, because academics aren’t paid to do it, and it’s often at the bottom of their large ‘to-do’ lists. Articles can languish in peer review for months, and sometimes even longer. So it is another indicator of a scam journal when your article completes peer review in ten days, as mine did.

Meanwhile, I had beaten the cost down to $50. They got sticky there, because obviously the sales people on the email line like to make their money and this seems to be their floor. Equally, I didn’t intend to pay at all, and I knew that for the scam to work on others, they needed some content. I gambled that they would publish my article for free to lure others. I also gambled that they hadn’t actually read it, and nor had any peer reviewer. The gamble was correct, and you can read my ridiculous article here (until they read this and delete it.) It’s called Speculative Oceanography.

The Times Literary Supplement is entirely correct to demand a reform of the practice of charging universities for work that they themselves produce. But there is a risk that we may then lurch to an even worse situation, where predatory journals scam desperate academics and researchers with ever more prevalence. A brave librarian in the United States used to maintain a list of such predatory journals and publishers, as a guide for academics to consult, but he and his university were threatened with lawsuits from the deep-pocketed publishers, and now that list is no longer updated, though new journals and publishers pop up daily.

As we move to fully open source academic publishing, we need an international quality control system to prevent predatory journals from preying on the unwary. We need to kill off the sea monsters of academia.

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Mermaid research and the pay-to-publish grind

This has been all done and dusted already. Really what I’m doing is archiving it here in case the other locations for whatever reason go dark.

The short version of events is that I was spammed by a pay-to-publish academic publisher, and I trolled them. The longer version is that this is the tip of a very dangerous iceberg of academic publishing, which threatens to destroy the credibility of peer review itself, not to mention the careers of many developing world and early career researchers. Anyhow, I banged on about that here before. For reference and archiving, it is now reproduced on this blog here.

Anyhow, here’s the article in question, just in case the hosting scam publisher goes dark, which they might well. You might have fun with it. It’s short, and packed full of joke references and some fun satire of academic writing. And lots of science fiction in-jokes for the nerds out there.


Speculative OceanographyDownload

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Sum Poasyum

Today, scholars, academics, artists and writers will gather (except they won’t, this being plague year) in Canterbury (ie virtually but hosted there) to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the publication of Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker.

It’s an astonishing novel, an evocative work of post-apocalyptic world set millennia in the future but demonstrating how the future will be back to the past if we permit the fragile, complex thing we call technologically-enabled civilisation to collapse.

The most notable thing about Hoban’s novel is of course Riddleyspeak, the quirkily spelt, puntastic invented language in which it is written. Meant to evoke both the post-literate society in which it is set and the limited cognitive capacities (and low cunning) of its 12 year old narrator, Hoban’s invented language is a remarkable piece of literary creation.

I’ve been posting about Riddley Walker over at Ponying the Slovos in my own meagre celebration, seeking to get under the bonnet of Riddleyspeak and identify how it works and what it does. I’m hoping to experience sum of the sum poasyum too, but that will be dependent on another creature of complex idiosyncratic communication and low cunning, my infant son.

So if I fail, good luck instead to all who attend and hopefully some of the materials will end up archived and online for those unable to be there, even virtually.

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Deriding Derrida

Obfuscatory and certainly overrated he was, but perhaps we are slowly approaching something like an honest appraisal of Jacques Derrida, a midwit philosopher not without nuance, though it was often difficult to identify among the verbiage.

He was, for a time, the king of theory, the verbose form of analysis that gobbled up literary criticism in the Anglophone world in the 1980s and onward, emerging initially from the May 68 generation in France (though intriguingly, Derrida himself sat that one out.) The theory wars of those years have created generations of critics who have learned to theorise but not to criticise, arguably. But perhaps, like all pendula, it has begun to swing back again as that generation ages and a new generation has its own concerns and modes of expressing them.

Undoubtedly, though, literary analysis has suffered at the dead hands of Derridean deconstruction. We have lived in the long shadow of what Anthony Burgess might have termed Frenchified madness for far too long. However, it must be said that, among the anti-semites, paedophilia apologists and spoofers of that era, Derrida (and Cixous, and certainly Arendt) is far from the worst.

Prospect mag features a review of a new biography of Derrida, which is intended to provide some nuance to the polarised perspectives he generates. For some, and I find myself largely in sympathy, he is one of a school of French obscurantists who had little love of language or literature and a significant debt to Marxism, and who did more damage to literary criticism than contributing to its development. For others, he was a key voice in a generation of French theorists who provided new ways of looking at cultural production.

Anyhow, Derrida’s star may have waned, and perhaps not enough, but it seems that he will be with us for some time yet. One waits (in vain) for similar sober reappraisals of others of that era, in particular the preposterous Badiou, the overblown Foucault and especially the charlatan Lacan.

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Riddley me this

So, after a summer hiatus, there’s a new post on the Ponying the Slovos blog, the first of three looking at Russell Hoban’s post-apocalyptic novel Riddley Walker on the occasion of its 40th anniversary.

Hoban’s novel, like A Clockwork Orange, deals with dystopia by distorting the language, the very means of communication between author and reader. A broken world is revealed piecemeal via broken English.

Can we talk about Riddleyspeak as a language in itself? It’s obviously derivative of English and is supposed to be that English which has evolved over 2000 years following a civilisational collapse. In that regard, by its own premises, it fails. A mere 13 centuries after Anglo-Saxon and Caedmon’s hymn, English is entirely unrecognisable compared to its forebear tongue, whereas Riddley Walker’s English is mostly comprehensible to us on first sight.

Perhaps that is nit-picking, since books are written to be understood and read.

Anyhow, more here.

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Stranger in a Brave New World

Recently I’ve been researching Heinlein, for the ongoing project on Buddhist futurism, but also in light of Farah Mendelsohn’s recent book, which I have sitting on the shelf, waiting to be read properly.

I thought it would be worth catching up on existing criticism of Heinlein first before tackling her magnum opus, so among other things, I picked up a copy of “The Martian Named Smith”, a thin but weighty text on Stranger in a Strange Land by William Paterson Jr and Robert Thornton.

Amazingly, the second hand copy I purchased was the one that Paterson had given to his father, before he died.

The book was as I say slight as in short, but managed to be incredibly dense on detail and panoramic on perspectives on what remains an influential and also controversial novel. This is not necessarily surprising, as Paterson was a great scholar of Heinlein, perhaps the best to date.

What most struck me, though, was that this density and range of perspective was aimed at undergraduate readers, perhaps even secondary school students. I derive this conclusion from the fact that each chapter had debate questions at the end for discussion in class.

This book was published in 2001. What an odyssey we have embarked upon since then. Paterson and Thornton’s work exudes a sense of the scholarly mission. It acknowledges different schools of thought, weighs up seriously competing perspectives and ideologies. It’s becoming hard to imagine such a text emerging nowadays, when polemic and activism are supplanting the pursuit of knowledge.

The present is a strange land, and this book, like so much scholarship from the (even very recent) past, seems a stranger in it.

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Ten Grand

I was on the BBC this morning discussing, inter alia, the UK government’s decision to implement fines of up to £10,000 for people who fail to quarantine themselves when directed to do so.

It seemed to me that this is yet another example of the government attempting to be seen to be doing something while doing nothing at all. The overwhelmed police, already disgruntled from being told to check how far and for how long people had been walking or jogging last spring now find themselves ordered to snoop on whether people are conscientiously staying at home or not. They don’t have the manpower to solve the vast majority of muggings and burglaries, so how are they expected to achieve this?

Apparently the government want the public to start grassing up their neighbours. This is an intriguing suggestion predicated on a number of unlikelies, including: a) the idea that people know their neighbours; b) that they know where their neighbours have been holidaying or whether they received a message to quarantine; and c) their desire to grass up their neighbours.

Of those three, only the last seems remotely likely, and I still feel that most people are either disinclined or disinterested in reporting their neighbours’ activities. Furthermore, who spends their time twitching the curtains to monitor the rest of the street? Most of us have our own lives to live.

Anyhow, this kind of pointless nonsense is why the UK has suffered one of the worst COVID infection rates in the world. The government are too busy doing stupid shit badly to bother even attempting to do the right things (testing being the main one).

There’s more here, including what put me right out of my comfort zone this morning, if you’re interested. Archived programme available for the next month or so. UK listeners only, alas.

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What is religious futurism?

Best perhaps to start with what it’s not. It’s not a form of futurology, or attempting to predict what has yet to take place. Few people during the tenure of Pope John Paul II would have predicted that his right-hand man would relinquish Peter’s throne in favour of an Argentinian Jesuit. Futurology is best left to those who make a living mugging companies by claiming to predict societal trends, and gamblers. It’s simply not academic.

Futurism, on the other hand, is an attempt to read the the present through how it depicts the future. This means looking at cultural outputs, such as art and literature which address future-related themes and analysing them.

alien-priest painting 1400 AD | ANCIENT ARCHIVES

Recently there has been a number of shifts in focus in this area, casting new light on how previously marginalised visions of the future, emerging primarily from non-caucasian communities, envisage the road ahead. Afrofuturism, or aesthetic depictions of the future from an African(-American) perspective(s), is the most prominent, but there have been many from a disparate range of sources, all now thankfully achieving academic scrutiny and consideration.

Religious faiths have not been excluded from this process, despite the predominance of atheist beliefs among those who produce Science Fiction and other futurisms. However, they have yet to attain similar levels of academic attention. I have an interest in how SF and cognate art modes consider the future of religion in general, and Catholicism and Buddhism in particular. Other scholars consider how the Hinduism, or Islam or other faiths are envisaged as developing (or dying) in the future.

Religious futurism can help us understand not only how art, but also how society is responding to evolutions in world theology in real-time. It can allow us to process better the role of religion in the world by understanding better how the world imagines religion will be in years to come.