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The Middle West hiding in the Middle East
There is something wrong with the term “the Middle East”. To come straight to the point, it should really be the Middle West. Of course it won’t escape the reader’s attention that this thought bubble occurs in a moment angst about the relationship between the “West” and “the Middle East”. And in the western public mind, as projected by popular media, danger lurks everywhere. Some dangers (religious fanaticism and terrorism) are sadly all too real – and the victims are all over the world, although it has to be said largely in the Middle West. Other existential dangers are well, fanciful. The “burkini”, or to describe it accurately “modest” or…
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Agora movie – seeing ourselves through an alien past
The movie Agora (director Alejandro Amenábar) is not history, but perhaps, it rises to allegory. It is well worth watching, despite its ‘interpretative’ approach to history. It is a movie which captures deeper truths about human relationships and its fictionalized past helps us understand the challenges of our conflicted present. The struggles of Agora’s characters are enriched by Dario Marianelli’s haunting film score and the movie’s epic intellectual and scenic setting. Agora takes us to the unfamiliar world of fourth century Alexandria. It is a world being overtaken by change. Certainties of a pagan past are fading as new Christian ways of being emerge. It is a world beset with…
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Seeing With New Eyes: Ibn Al Haytham, Optics and Foreignness
When we think of the science of optics we may think of Isaac Newton, who together with his other discoveries, made important studies in the field of optics. We are far less likely to think of the breakthroughs in optics and science made by Ibn Al Haytham, a scientist who lived in the Islamic world in the tenth century. To Europe he was known as Alhacen or Alhazen. Al Haytham largely solved a scientific problem that had frustrated previous thinkers for more than a thousand years. How do we see? The problem stretched back to the time of Aristotle. Aristotle spoke Greek. Al Haytham’s work was written in Arabic and…
