In Preparation

Sometimes I'm a bit of a puzzle to myself. In fact, you can make that most of the time. And here's a pressing example. We start fasting for Ramadhan tomorrow and experience shows it's wise to be mentally prepared. Now for some reason I can't grasp, that preparation for me centres upon deciding what special reading I'll do for the month. This really shouldn't work, but it has done in the past and I'm hoping this year will follow a similar pattern.

It's also oddly important that I complete whatever 'secular' reading I'm doing to ensure my head is in the right place, which is why I'd been pushing on with Dostoevsky and the big Jazz book - and fortunately deeply enjoying both. I had been hoping to complete the great Henry Vaughan Collected Poems read-through, but that hasn't been possible. However, since that's been going forever (more than a year now) it wasn't exactly urgent reading.

Anyway, I've figured out what I intend to engage with in the days ahead. A re-read of Seyyed Hossein Nasr's The Garden of Truth: The Vision and Promise of Sufism, Islam's Mystical Tradition has been on my mind for ages, and now's the right time for a deeper dive that my original encounter (or so I'm hoping.) That's the central text as commentary on the faith, as it were. At the same time I'm intending to really apply myself to key sections of The Study Qur'an, a volume I've hardly begun to do justice to. I'm hoping to engage in very close reading of a number of surahs and at least three of the excellent scholarly essays at the back end of the weighty tome. And since most of the surahs I have in mind are the shorter ones after al-Takwir, I'm looking forwarding to cross-referencing my readings with Michael Sells's interesting versions and commentaries in Approaching The Qur'an, especially for the surahs that he provides a lively analysis of the 'hearing' of. 

So that's it. Do wish me luck, Gentle Reader.