Day 36

The end of September / beginning of October has been eventful, with various lectures and workshops. I appreciated especially two events given by the Moroccan scholar Zakaria Rhani. It offers me a sort of more realistic insight into what Sufism may be today, from a local perspective. It brings me down to earth from my conceptual excursions that remain in the old perennialist horizon. For sure, my work is precisely in the interstice between the Maghrebian (cultural - political - religious) reality and the European game of concepts. 

Right now, I'm facing the essential. I think about writing a major, defining essay concerning the extra-cultural. I'm also thinking about books that will appear as the result of my project. It's time to make sketches, lists of chapters, to start writing something that will later on enter those books.
I also revisited my old Polish version of Natrętny duch pustyni. I do regret this book did not appear in its proper time in Poland. I do believe it was some sort of missing element, that wouldn't change the course of national cultural history for sure, but at least would mark something, testify that other kind of awareness was possible at that time. It would mark a point to which, later on, scholars and historians might return. But I lost the chance, for my country more than for myself, since I'm still in it, while my country is not. Anyway, it doesn't matter now. What remains to do is to write other books, and to think about my place in a much larger context. How my outlook of extra-cultural becoming is to take shape, how it is to foster and articulate that eternal adventure. 

I've been lazily reading Norman Daniel's The Arabs and Mediaeval Europe (1975), and started Laroui's Les tribulations du dernier Sijilmassi.