If you’re interested in more SFitze issues please subscribe, support or share with others. This is a newsletter about mundane, banal and absurdist SF happenings all around, recognized or not. As SF melts into thin air – it infuses the forces of production, commercial culture, pop iconography, and comics as well as the mundane-as-fuck growing category. Think about the unbearable lightness of billionaires in space and presidential candidate Mélenchon projected as hologram in several cities during the recent French elections (thx Ion D. for this one) but also about Muslim teens and China’s nascent green hydrogen sector. SFitze is about how to trace SF spillovers independent of scale. Two things I’ve come to appreciate: never be dismissive and also never accept SF labels or outright denials thereof (“this is SF or this has zero to do with SF”). As the email version is shorter than the original one please scroll down the original substack post.
Tag Archives: islam
2067 – THE BUDDHA AND I: INDIAN INFLUENCE ON ISLAMIC AND EUROPEAN THOUGHT / History of Philosophy without any gaps (series of podcasts)
Here’s an incredibly – well invaluable resource (for me as a non-professional interested in philosophy and its twists & turns) that I recently discovered. It is a collaboration of researchers from two institutions: King’s College London and Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich.
I suggest starting with the episodes on the Indian influence on Islamic and European thought as an introduction to this entire section and I will detail below why I think one should start here at the end rather than at the beginning. Even if one does not have any interests in philosophy or any prior knowledge in the Western tradition of philosophical thought – from this eps one can at least gather how stunted this reception of Indian philosophy was (and partially still is) in the West.
For good or for worse (Theofil Simenschy, M Eliade) Romanian intelligentsia has shown along the years a certain appetite for Indian philosophy, so there is a lot of various translations – even pulp and trashy ones, adapted versions and pocket versions. All this is proof of a widespread interest in extra European philosophical traditions and a diversified pop cultural exchange btw India & Romania. At the same time one should not profess any innocence in regards to this Indophilia, and regard with a certain suspicion all claims about a Romanian-Indian continuum, especially in view of the usual right-wing nativist or aryanist tendencies. That said, before 1989 and after as well, so-called anti-sectarian perspectives where banishes, a position maintained by the majority Romanian orthodox church. This is a tendency to discredit evert hing associated with Indian practices or yogic knowledge. Gurus or anything close to New Age religions is regarded as potentially harmful or condemned as ‘perversions’. Not saying there are no exceptions to the rule, yet suffice to say, nodaways in Romania (as elsewhere) – there is a thoroughly hyper-commercialized mindfulness industry catering to the needsof those afflicted by generalized burnout under capitalism. I consider quite fruitful thw para-academic come & go tracing such pop cultural influences and there’s much interest in exploring weird deviations & non orthodox practices. My bes example is Bogdan Lyphkhanu – poet friend and also a consummate collector and investigator of such spiritual Romanian- Indian (and also Spiritualist, Taoist, Tantric, Occult, including unclassifiable etc) hybrids.
For various reasons, I abstain from discussing Islamicate – Indian philosophy relations. Many Islamic authors, since the very beginning, have drawn parallels btw Sufi Islamic mystical traditions and Indian philosophical schools. Importantly, many Western impressions on Indian philosophy are much indebted to previous Persian or Arab translations (listen to this podcast).
I am ignoring this at the moment to focus on the plethora of sometimes very specialized knowledge and updates commentaries on Indian (or specifically Buddhist/Jainist sources here), sources relevant to the current debates animating much of today’s mind philosophy (mind body dualism/hard problem of consciousness, panpsychism/pancosmism, eliminativism etc).
These podcasts are definite proof that we have moved away from the various misinterpretations. A that seem in retrospect quite rudimentary, completely biased and misinformed, never able to grasp the diversity of Indian philosophical schools or engage with the conclusions of their main representatives (their historical debates, the diversity of their examples, multiplicity of perspectives, a rich and evolving conceptual vocabulary and most of all their sheer diversity). The Western reception is biased from the beginning. No matter where it hails from, we get the sense we’re being served an impoverished and caricatural version of it. Beyond the mind philosophy relevance discussed above – there is also a new interest for the idealist resources of Indian philosophy as today’s idealist philosophy gathers pace or even with those attempts to seek out a bridge between the continental and the analytic Western philosophy. There are countless other aspects including those offering a new appreciation of Indian epistemology (in the Buddhist philosophy) and so on.
With the possible exception of Gottfried W. Leibniz, almost all mentioned in this podcast (Hume, Hegel, Schopenhauer, etc) show a combination of either uncritical admiration or outright disdain for Indian philosophy (particularly its cosmology or cosmogony as in the example with the elephant sitting on top of the turtle). If they were very attentive in their analysis of ultimate questions about experience, perception, truth and limits of knowledge, or avidly debating current scientific worldviews, western philosophers were less careful about other traditions, throwing around careless generalizations. Sadly they almos constantly ignore actually existing ‘Indian philosophy’, and make their statements based on hearsay or by taking Indian philosophy as a unified stock, a single corpus, a monolithic non differentiated block. One should first recognize if possible these initial widespread positions held by practitioners of Western philosophy, so that one can appreciate its further refinement or even complete revision of what we thought we knew about Indian philosophy.
That being said – this is just just an entry point, so pls consider listening the whole section from 43 Buddhist and Jains (or earlier) to 62 Kit Patrick. Each eps has short and up-to-date Bibliography on the subjects being discussed for those interested.
listen here:
THE BUDDHA AND I: INDIAN INFLUENCE ON ISLAMIC AND EUROPEAN THOUGHT
2024 – Zeros and Ones (2021)
Zeros and Ones is a 2021 American-Italian thriller film written and directed by Abel Ferrara. It stars Ethan Hawke, Cristina Chiriac, Phil Neilson, Valerio Mastandrea, Dounia Sichov, Korlan Madi, Mahmut Sifa Erkaya and Anna Ferrara. (wiki)
I decided to repost my thread with first thoughts on Abel Ferra’s remarkable last production. Altough hard to encapsulate and probably not a success with the critics – Ferrara’s late foray into current world affairs is one of the most visionary & contemporary things out there. It’s impossible for me to sum up but it as if he took wll our daily digital supper, all the aberran and yet so real and hard to encapsulate -apocalyptic moods and made them into a movie. My tw were posted as sort of personal notes freshly after watching it online and reading just Steven Shaviro’s blog review (he’s a big Ferrara fan). I stumbled on Ferrara almost by chance, wachted Bad Lieutenant with my father as an adolescent. We were both blasted apart. There was nothing to compare it with. Will never forget his academic vampire movie (The Addiction) – a total and welcome radical reworking of old horror tropes.
1711 – The Longest War (2020 documentary)
This documentary feature unpacks the human stories and drama behind America’s involvement in Afghanistan, now the longest war in U.S. history. (imdb)
1710 – Afghanistan: The Great Game (documentary | TV mini-series 2012)
Afghanistan: The Great Game – A Personal View by Rory Stewart is a 2012 documentary in two parts written and presented by Rory Stewart that tells the story of foreign intervention by Britain, Russia, and the United States in Afghanistan from the 19th century to the present day. (wiki)
1672 – Islam, Science Fiction and Extraterrestrial Life: The Culture of Astrobiology in the Muslim World by Jörg Matthias Determann (2020 book)
The Muslim world is not commonly associated with science fiction. Religion and repression have often been blamed for a perceived lack of creativity, imagination and future-oriented thought. However, even the most authoritarian Muslim-majority countries have produced highly imaginative accounts on one of the frontiers of knowledge: astrobiology, or the study of life in the universe.
This book argues that the Islamic tradition has been generally supportive of conceptions of extra-terrestrial life, and in this engaging account, Jörg Matthias Determann provides a survey of Arabic, Bengali, Malay, Persian, Turkish, and Urdu texts and films, to show how scientists and artists in and from Muslim-majority countries have been at the forefront of the exciting search. Determann takes us to little-known dimensions of Muslim culture and religion, such as wildly popular adaptations of Star Wars and mysterious movements centred on UFOs. Repression is shown to have helped science fiction more than hurt it, with censorship encouraging authors to disguise criticism of contemporary politics by setting plots in future times and on distant planets. The book will be insightful for anyone looking to explore the science, culture and politics of the Muslim world and asks what the discovery of extra-terrestrial life would mean for one of the greatest faiths.
Jörg Matthias Determann TW / academia.edu
1200 – Life of Pi (2012)
timespace coordinates: 1970s India / the Pacific Ocean / Mexico – 2000’s Montreal
Life of Pi is a 2012 survival drama film based on Yann Martel‘s 2001 novel of the same name. Directed by Ang Lee, the film’s adapted screenplay was written by David Magee, and it stars Suraj Sharma, Irrfan Khan, Rafe Spall, Tabu Hashmi, Adil Hussain, and Gérard Depardieu. The storyline revolves around an Indian man named “Pi” Patel, telling a novelist about his life story, and how at 16 he survives a shipwreck and is adrift in the Pacific Ocean on a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger. (wiki)
TimeSpace Warps 