In this book we try to pry open the door to the Islamic universe. We are not interested in evaluating Islam from within those dominant perspectives of modern scholarship that make various contemporary modes of self-understanding the basis for judging the subject. Instead, we want to portray Islam from the perspective of those great Muslims of the past who established the major modes of Koranic interpretation and Islamic understanding.

This is not to say that we will simply translate passages from the classical texts in the manner of an anthology. The classical texts ask too much from beginning readers. They were not written for people coming from another cultural milieu. Rather, they were written for people who thought more or less the same way the authors did and who shared the same world view. Moreover, as a general rule they were written for those with advanced intellectual training, a type of training that is seldom offered in our graduate schools, much less on the undergraduate level.

The classical texts did not play the same role as contemporary textbooks, which attempt to explain everything in a relatively elementary format. On the contrary, they were usually written to present a position in a broad intellectual context. Frequently the texts would present only the outline of the argument---the rest was supplied orally by the teacher. Students did not borrow these books from the library and return them the following week. They would often copy the text for themselves (by hand, of course), and spend several months or years studying it word by word with a master. We ourselves have attended sessions in which classical texts were being studied in the Islamic World, and we can attest to how easily a good teacher can choose a word or a sentence and draw out endless meaning from it.

[...]

We are perfectly aware that many contemporary Muslims are tired of what they consider outdated material: they would like to discard their intellectual heritage and replace it with truly "scientific" endeavors, such as sociology. By claiming that the Islamic intellectual heritage is superfluous and that the Koran is sufficient, such people have surrendered to the spirit of the times. Those who ignore the interpretations of the past are forced to interpret their text in light of the prevailing world view of the present. This is a far different enterprise than that pursued by the great authorities, who interpreted their present in the light of a grand tradition and who never fell prey to the up-to-date---that most obsolescent of all abstractions.

The introductory texts on Islam that we have encountered devote a relatively small proportion of space to the Muslim understanding of reality. The reader is always told that the Koran is of primary importance and that Muslims have certain beliefs about God and the afterlife, but seldom do the authors of these works make more than a cursory attempt to explain what this means in actuality. Usually the reader encounters a short history of Islamic thought that makes Muslim intellectuals appear a bit foolish for apparently spending a great amount of time discussing irrelevant issues. More sympathetic authors try to explain that these issues were important in their historical context. Rarely is it suggested that these issues are just as important for the contemporary world as they were for the past, and that they are constantly being discussed today in our own culture, though with different terminology.

We like to think that the Islamic tradition provides many examples of great answers to great questions. The questions are those that all human beings are forced to ask at one time or another, even if contemporary intellectual predispositions tend to dismiss them as irrelevant or immature or unanswerable or self-deconstructing. We have in mind the great whys and whats that five-year-olds have the good sense to ask---though they soon learn to keep quiet in order to avoid the ridicule of their elders. Why are we here? What is the meaning of life? Where did we live before we were born? Where do we go after we die? Where did the world come from? Where does God come from? What are angels? Why is the world full of evil? What are devils? If God is good, why did he create Satan? Why does God allow good people to suffer? How can a merciful God predestine people to hell? Why do I have to go through all this?

Texts on Islam often tell the reader, in extremely cursory fashion, what Muslim thinkers have concluded about such issues; what they do not address is the universe of discourse that informs Islamic thinking and allows the conclusions to make sense. Studies usually highlight the differences of opinion; what they do not clarify is that the logic of either/or is not always at work. Perspectives differ in accordance with differing interpretations of the sources, and the perspectives do not necessarily exclude each other. We are told that people took sides, for example, on free will and predestination. But any careful reading of a variety of texts will show that the common intuition was that the true situation is neither/nor, or both/and. The extreme positions were often formulated as intellectual exercises to be struck down by the thinker himself, if not by his followers.

[...]

Readers need to be warned at the outset that this book is not designed to provide the "historical acts." In the last section of the book, we will say something about the Islamic view of history. That will help explain why the concerns of the modern critical study of history are not our concerns. To write history, after all, is to read meaning into the events of the past on the basis of contemporary views of reality. The events themselves cannot make sense until they are filtered through the human lens. If the Koran and the Islamic tradition are read in terms of contemporary scholarly opinions or ideologies, their significance for the Islamic tradition is necessarily lost to sight.

Naturally, we as authors have our own lenses. In fact, some people may criticize us for trying to find Islam's vision of itself within the Islamic intellectual tradition in general and the Sufi tradition in particular. But it is precisely these perspectives within Islam that provide the most self-conscious reflections on the nature of the tradition. If we did not take seriously the Muslim intellectuals' own understanding of their religion, we would have to replace it with the perspectives of modern Western intellectuals. Then we would be reading the tradition through critical methodologies that have developed within Western universities. But why should an alien perspective be preferable to an indigenous perspective that has survived the test of time? It does not make sense to us to employ a methodology that happens to be in vogue at the moment and to ignore the resources of an intellectual tradition that is still alive after a thousand-year history.

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Now this is probably just sour-grapes writing, but I am disappointed by the nature of the applications that won: most of them are based around automated referrals:

• a WordPress plugin, and TwitterAPI app that use geographic location to suggest DonorsChoose projects,
• an email signature generator that suggests projects based on the projects' funding needs
• a browser extension that suggests DonorsChoose projects when you search Amazon.com

The one winner I do like sends automated press-releases to local news outlets. The content of the release isn't much to work with (though Print & Share shares that problem), but it could be an effective news peg for general school issues (not that "Local schools must turn to the internet because of waste/fraud/abuse" is the story I'd want to see run).

My criticism of those automated referral tools is that they all require an advocate to install the tool---but that advocate has little control over the projects they refer people to. In other words, these winners require someone to really care about DonorsChoose as a whole, not necessarily any specific project. Do those individuals exist, en masse? I've learned there is a big network of teachers who promote eachother's DonorsChoose projects, but since they can't specifically suggest a friend or colleague's project, will they adopt the winning tools? It's the sizzle of social networking without the (tofu-) steak .

The fact that these tools seem in search of an audience is what disappoints me most. As attributed to thinker Seth Godin by Richard Millington: "Find products for your audience, not audiences for your products." We built Print & Share as a tool for teachers to better promote their own projects---because teachers are the audience that cares most about their projects' success-- which is why the tweet I just received while writing this post cracks me up:

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The essence of editing is easy come easy go. Unless you can really say to yourself, “What the hell. There’s plenty more where that came from, let’s throw it away,” you can’t really edit. You have to be a big spender. Not tightass.

More…

You can’t be a good, ruthless editor unless you are a messy, rich producer. But you can’t be really fecund as a producer unless you know you’ll be able to go at it with a ruthless knife.

More…

Editing must be cut-throat. You must wade in with teeth gritted. Cut away flesh and leave only bone. Learn to say things with a relationship instead of words. If you have to make introductions or transitions, you have things in the wrong order. If they were in the right order they wouldn’t need introductions or transitions. Force yourself to leave out all subsidiaries and then, by brute force, you will have to rearrange the essentials into their proper order.

Every word omitted keeps another reader with you. Every word retained saps strength from the others. Think of throwing away not as negative—not as crumpling up sheets of paper in helplessness and rage—but as a positive, creative, generative act. Learn to play the role of the sculptor pulling off layers of stone with his chisel to reveal the figure beneath. Leaving things out makes the backbone or structure show better.

Try to feel the act of strength in the act of cutting: as you draw the pencil through the line or paragraph or whole page, it is a clenching of teeth to make a point stick out more, hit home harder. Conversely, try to feel that when you write in a mush, foggy, wordy way, you must be trying to cover something up: message-emasculation or self-emasculation. You must be afraid of your strength. Taking away words lets a loud voice stick out. Does it scare you? More words will cover it up with static. It is no accident that timid people are often wordy. Saying nothing takes guts. If you want to say nothing and not be noticed, you have to be wordy.

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I've previously discussed two pillars of nonprofit structure: Incorporation (and Discretionary Conception) and Tax Exemption. So today lets talk about Restrictions on Political Activity for nonprofits.

Section 501(c)3 of the Tax code is relatively clear on prohibiting candidate endorsement: organizations are prohibited, directly and indirectly from participating in, contributing to, or speaking on on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for elective public office. on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for elective public office.

Nonprofit organizations are allowed though:

• Neutral and non-partisan voter education and registration activities. For example, an organization could indicate how candidates voted in the past or a survey of opinions on an issue, so long as all candidates were included no preference was given to the outcomes.
• Lobbying, so long as “no substantial part” of their activities may be that of attempting to influence legislation. Lobbying rules are complicated but the The Nonprofit Lobbying Guide makes it all very clear.

So how did this all come about: some sources place responsibility upon the shoulders of Lyndon Johnson and reactionary, red-baiting, 1950s politics.

In 1952, the Cox Committee was formed to determine "whether foundations have been infiltrated by communists, as well as whether tax-exempt groups are using their money for stated purposes and are not endangering our existing capitalistic structure." The committee found that foundations weren't infiltrated, but were vulnerable. Foundations were powerful and could exercise "thought control" and through this could "materially influence public opinion"(OMB Watch).

Echoing today's nonprofit criticisms (other than the fear of communist leanings) foundations were knocked for their arrogance, insular and irresponsible mismanagement, cronyism, and ignorance of sound practice---existing tax rules did not compel compliance, "as interpreted by the courts, permits far too much license." Said one former fund advisor, testifying before the Cox Committee:

"Not a single member of the staff [of The Ford Fund for the Advancement of Education], from the president down to the lowest employee, has had any experience, certainly none in recent years, that would give understanding of the problems that are met daily by the teachers and administrators of our schools.... As a former member of the so-called Advisory Committee I testify that at no time did the administration of the fund seek from it any advice on principles of operation, nor did it hospitably receive or act in accordance with such advice as was volunteered."

(This quote, along with many others, can be found in the right-leaning American Mercury article

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The thesaurus data we’re working with is the Moby Thesaurus from the Project Gutenburg library of free electronic texts. Like many thesauruses, it’s structure in an interesting way. Every word is assigned to one or more groups based on it’s general meaning or idea. Each group has a keyword, also known as a headword, that is a general encapsulation that idea—this is why, for example in Roget’s, you must first look up a word in the index to acquire its keywords. Each group has only one keyword, but a keyword can exist in other groups (but as an ordinary word).

This thesaurus structure allows us to do some easy simplifications and analysis on the data. For many functions, we can treat the groups as supernodes, performing operations and storing connections upon them in place of the words themselves. For example, when determining relatedness between words, we only have compare the groups they are a part of; while there are approximately 100,000 words in our database, there are only 30,000 groups, which greatly diminishes the size and complexity of the data set we’re working on.

Currently Panlexicon works by comparing the overlap between groups of words. When typing in a search term, Panlexicon looks up all of the groups that word is a member of. It then returns a list of words that are also in those groups. The weight of each word (or size in our word cloud model) is calculated according to how many groups—-of those groups that include the search term—that word is a member of. A property of this is that no other returned word will have a heavier weight than the search term. When searching multiple terms, Panlexicon creates a set of groups such that all search terms are a member. In the case when there exists no groups that contain all the search terms, Panlexicon returns nothing.

Already we’re digging into some interesting relations that turn up in the thesaurus data. For example, one of my favorite linguistic myths is that Eskimos have 50 different words for snow. The supposed lesson was that eskimos had a different conception of snow than us (the non-Eskimos). I always wondered, “Well, is 50 a lot?” The largest group in our thesaurus has the keyword cut with 1448 related words or synonyms. This is followed by set (1152), turn (1108), run (1025), and color (1007). That’s quite a bit.

Also, interestingly in our dataset, are the most versatile words. These words are members of the most groups. The list shares four out five of the same words as those of the most synonyms, beginning with cut, being a member of 1120 distinct groups. This is followed by set (928), run (750), turn (715), and check (699).

Right now, we’re investigating paths between words. This will allow us to play the Kevin Bacon game, making connections between words that may not share the same group. It will be interesting to determine what words are connected (even through a medium) and which ones are disconnected. Lastly on our list of things to do is determine the eigenvectors of our groups in relation to how their connected to other groups. This will allow us to determine—without using fancy words like Markov chains—which words are probably used the most. I say probably because we’re analyzing a taxonomic work, rather than actual speech. Who knows if they match up; we’ll find out.

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• Drop Zone trailer

I've an avid participant of Harvard Law School's Berkman Center's Tuesday Luncheon Series. On February 27, author Matthew Pearl gave a great talk on copyright in the nineteenth century; I have reordered and summarized the content, though you can listen to the full audio. Through analysis of the writings and motivations of numerous 19th century authors, publishers and tradesman, Matthew Pearl carried an interesting theme: the intellectual property rhetoric of pirates and thievery was pure artifice until the rhetoric itself was codified as law, or still in some cases, not.

The mid-ninteenth century was a heady time for American publishers and a frustrating one for authors. The United States, while having domestic copyright law protecting the literary rights of American authors, had no International Copyright provisions. The works of foreign authors--British especially, because they were English language--could be printed or altered without royalty or the permission of their writers. The works of Charles Dickens, or Anthony Trollope, could be freely printed in America, and they were. Publishing agents would eagerly wait at the docks of Boston for transatlantic clippers to arrive with the newest novels to then reprint. The publisher Harper & Brothers, today HarperCollins, was the most notorious and proud of their unapproved additions.

The free-spirited atmosphere created by a lack of international copyright affected both foreign and domestic authors. Foreign authors did not receive royalties on books printed in America; the content was also sometimes modified from the author's original text. Domestic books, by such authors as Mark Twain, Walt Whitman and James Fennimore Cooper, sold less because the prices were undercut by non-royalty paying foreign novels.

At this time the authors often banded together in copyright clubs or leagues to protest. James Russell Lowell, noted poet and president of American Copyright League penned this motto:

In vain we call old notions fudge,
And bend our conscience to our dealing;
The Ten Commandments will not budge,
And stealing will continue stealing.

This motto, in the same vein as many other pro-copyright writings, is interesting because of the themes it calls up. Notably, it evokes a traditionalist past implying that there was a time when literary property was respected. The motto also refers explicitly to stealing, yet at the time, there did not exist a legal framework of infringement. Indeed, courts at the time stated that there existed no common-law for the protection of literary works

In the same vein, Rudyard Kipling published the Rhyme of the Three Captains, a long and complicated poem literalizing the theft of one of his books by Harper. Kipling moralizes the episode with the serious line "Does he steel with tears when he buccaneers? For God then why does he steal?" One reviewer even goes so far as to call them "book-aneers".

Other works contained similar ideas of constant, instantaneous and expected crime. Edgar Allen Poe's Purloined Letter concerns a crime that is completely in public view. Charles Dicken's Martin Chuzzlewit is about the "false commerce" of America.

But authors, while protecting their writings, had a tightrope wire to walk with themes very American: democracy, class, culture and slavery.

Royalty-free novels made possible, for the first time, "railway station" editions that could cheaply purchased by the general public. In the past, only library quality editions could be purchased by those who could afford their high costs. Restoring high prices these could viewed as keeping knowledge or betterment from the masses. Additionally, the growth of the publishing industry was fueled by cheap foreign novels, and to be against them placed authors as elitists above the working class typesetters and bookbinders.

At this time there did not fully exist the concept of the sanctity of a creator's work. English books were often Americanized, removing British language or themes and replacing them with more American counterparts more easily understandable or acceptable to American palates. Twain's A Yankee in King Arthur's Court is the archetypal American meddling with high British romance: invading, changing and ultimately destroying it.

Disallowing the modification of works was even viewed as imposing a slavery of words. When Harriet Beecher Stowe went to court to prevent an unauthorized German translation of Uncle Tom's Cabin, she was named a hypocrite by some in calling for the emancipation of the negro yet shackling her novel.

Charles Dickens, on his two visits to America, was viewed with much animosity by the American public. On these visits he called for an international copyright but was derided as only seeking greater profits for himself.

Indeed, authors went to great lengths to not fall too heavily on either side. Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass contains a very measured call for stronger protections. Mark Twain, in a confusing episode before the U.S. Senate, gave strange or contradictory answers. James Fennimore Cooper would outright lie when asked about having signed petitions.

Despite all of this, there was created by authors a wholly successful fictional narrative superimposed on an actual legal regime. Today's concepts---and laws---of copyright infringement, piracy, robbery and thievery are based upon these artificial metaphors and themes. At the time no laws existed to make the actions of publishers such as Harpers illegal, but rhetoric, poems and stories were created until a legal framework could codify them.

To learn from these episodes Matthew Pearl makes this important point:

It is easy for us to forget that at one point there existed the need to craft the rhetoric of "a shadow copyright regime".

Today, it's difficult for us to notice how we adjust the rhetoric, for better or worse, in the popular conceptions and legal framework of ownership and copyright protection. And when taking into account concepts like Fair Use, noticing that conceptions may be just rhetoric.

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