The Nomad and the Olive Branch

I can't believe it has been ten years since I first started this website, and a lot has changed since then. My newfound apathy to everything economical and, these days, political can only go so far when I see something like "Daraprim prices soar to new heights" and "Volkswagen caught with its pants down modifying diesel fuel emission statistics from its automobiles". Dystopian literature has always conceived a future where every aspect of life, from body parts to the pollutants we breathe in, undergoes extensive commodification. Even Marx himself stated that capitalism in its current form would eventually be its own undoing, where the wealthy elite will consolidate power to the extent that the masses will have no viable alternative to living a life constantly in debt to their superiors other than to revolt against them. One can argue that what Martin Shkreli, the smug-faced CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals, did was immoral albeit not illegal [ 1 ]: he was withi...

Many scholars have attempted to draw hypotheses regarding socio-political attitudes and, in the loosest meaning possible, ideologies from usually superficially unrelated discourses. Such analytical work, however, tends to provide a framework for more complicated and specific theses vis-à-vis current social phenomena. Oftentimes, this has worked with marginal success, such as Edward Said’s widely-read Foucauldian eponymous treatise on Orientalism (Vintage Books, New York, 1979), a plethoric “vault” of imagined constructions about the “Orient”, or the lands of the East. This tour de force has been used numerously in critiques of “Orientalist” discursive pieces. In other cases, it has resulted, in my opinion at least, in utter failure, such as Ibn Warraq’s – a bigot who has a serious ax to grind – The Legacy of Jihad: Islamic Holy War and the Fate of Non-Muslims (Prometheus Books, New York, 2008), a book that errantly alleges that the Muslim psyche is geared towards violence against n...