Dear Yaqub-Paul,

In response to the evocative, uninhibited power of your writing here, I am
tempted to risk sharing, below (and also attached, where the 'form' of the
writing is more apparent), with you and others, a personal piece of writing
I made coinciding with the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.

I feel that this educational conversation has now moved into the deepest
territory where we really start to grasp the nettles of the philosophical
and spiritual issues at stake (pun intended). For me, there is a need to
understand the roots of the kind of hegemonic thinking, and that I recognise
as a source of deep pain within myself, which led to the Holocaust. I think
those roots are alive and well in our educational and other institutions,
where their logical foundations in the 'law of the excluded middle'
(independence of material objects) that occludes our possibilities for love
and services the one-way communication filter of the Vampire Archetype
remain largely unrecognised and unquestioned. This has great bearing on our
educational practice. Do we persist in subjugating our practice to the
logical limits we have imposed upon nature and ourselves in order to gain a
false sense of security by working within prescriptive structures? Do we
find improvisational ways of opening up our enquiries to the flow-forms of
new possibilities, allowing our activities to be guided by emergent
structures (dynamic boundaries/living standards of judgement)?

Best


Alan

-----------------------------------------------------

Space - Your Final Dissolution


I am your final dissolution
The nurturer of your nature
That soothes and softens
As we live and breathe together

No gas-tight chamber doors
Designed to wall in
Or wall out your fears of devastation
Can exterminate me

You cannot live without me
You cannot die without me
I cannot find expression without you
You live in the breath of my inspiration
You die in the breath of my expiration
You die as you live
You live as you die
With me
Within and without

So, if you try to close me in
Or close me out
In your Manly human quest for Godly immortality
I cannot love you as you stir within my womb

I cannot assist you
I can only watch, impassively by
As you use me to destroy
Yourself
Or suffocate in the stasis
Of a never-ending, never-opening
Paralysis
That's no life for any one of us
Alone

So, please, bear with me
As I am alongside and within you
Take me in as I take you out
Certain only of the uncertainty
That recreates a rich and vibrant world
I am what life and death is all about

Rising and subsiding
In ever-flowing form
Living Light and Loving Darkness
Together






----- Original Message -----
From: Yaqub Paul Murray <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: 01 July 2005 22:04
Subject: AR as spirituality


> Submission? What am I going on about?
> to borrow from Benjamin Zephaniah.
>
> The power, emotional zealotry, and clarity of expression in Alon's very
> fine and choate writing
> invites me to doubt, for a moment, the will of my submission and the
> integrity of my will.
>
> The compelling and factual scenario of the Christian message cited in
> Alan's posting reminds me of my Uncle Sydney's (now Sadiq) account of his
> abandonment of a Eurocentric and white Christianity of deceit for the
> transgressive politicisation of Islam in apartheid Cape Town.
>
> I hear you thinking. So what? Giving up a white representation of God for
> a desert-brown prophecy of Allah. What's the difference? Who cares? One
> form of slavery of the will relinquished in the embrace of another demand
> of submission. Held in the synonym of slavery, submission binds my Uncle
> whether he is a Christian Sydney uncle or a Muslim Sadiq uncle. I hear the
> muttering. Submissive sub-personalities under the skin. The suzerainty of
> His overlordship holding the person in thrall.
>
> What Alon and Alan's postings  do for me is this.
>
> They make me think. Deep and hard.
>
> What is this submission to the will of God/Allah? Not very different to
> submission to the will of neo-liberal thinking, to neo-conservative market
> idols, to the commodifying argot of the academy in Britain, to the deceit
> that is Iraq, to the New World order, the new imperialism of the US. How
> much easier it would be if those nasty Falesteen would submit to Israeli
> colonialism with the mellifluous ease that they bend their necks to their
> Allah, I hear the Israeli soldier with blood on his hands muttering to the
> Israeli liberal. Two great communities separated by narratives. Jew
> killing Muslim, Arab killing Israeli, self and other. The world suffers
> and humanity pays the price. Saada and Rachel both pay heavy prices for
> the hubris of nationalism and supremacy when their umbilical creativity is
> mashed into pieces too small to be collected for burial. Like it or not:
> they have tasted their maternal submission. We submit to behavioural tests
> to grade us in schools, we submit to the institutional racism that allows
> Stephen Lawrence's murderer's to roam the land, we submit to the authority
> of discipline in the academy, and we submit to the judgements of the
> doctoral pontificate. We are all in submission, without remission, in
> subjugation and conflagration.
>
> I like my own complex multiplicity in this matter.
>
> My postcolonial critical pedagogy strikes out for emancipation of
> consciousness. Domesticated consciousness and desiccated politics. This is
> what the Business Studies curriculum offers. I teach against capitalism. I
> use the great artistry of my educational relationships to 'name'
> the 'Vampire Archetype, within me, within others, within institutions, and
> within the hegemonic of the West and elsewhere. I use my role as College
> Diversity officers to speak with vampires, critically. Let me begin with
> state violence as racism. I can't handle the rest just yet. I have to make
> a small and modest contribution. Let me see how state violence as racism
> is culturally reproduced through discourses and discursive practices of
> higher education. Then let me awaken students to the vampire within them,
> flowing through, and between us all as we feed the 'vampire archetype,
> emboldening it through our bloodlessness.
>
> I am not a bloodless educator. A bloody educator is who I am. The blood of
> slavery, colonialism, and apartheid is in my veins. More like my
> imagination, that glimmer of creatively defiant artistry in my
> consciousness.  My rich heritage of 'once were masters and once were
> slaves'. The blood of omission is on my hands, too. Yet I am an educator
> who teaches, publicly, avidly, and cogently against capitalism. despite
> the blood lust and my own bloody complicity. Rather than permit this
> negation to disenable me, I draw on the negation to enliven me.
>
> I am an imperfect Muslim. A striving Muslim. I clear my path to Islam for
> myself, holding my self accountable to Allah in the other for the quality
> of my practice in my human encounters. I don't tread anybody else's
> prescriptive, normative path to Islam.  I submit my will in belief of
> Allah - bismillah ur rahman ur rahim - and I ground myself in Islam within
> the mundane practicalities of life. Smiling at my neighbour, cooking my
> friends a curry, letting a car out at the junction, supporting my lived
> one's in their life projects, supporting Asma in her racial discrimination
> case as she fights the 'Vampire Archetype' of whiteness.  Not for me an
> Islam that has a unity in my imagination with no correspondence in earthy
> practicality. being a Muslim means getting my hands dirty in the soil of a
> loving humanity. I submit to Allah, I abhor slavery. In my pedagogy of the
> postcolonial particular I work from the particular ground of my life with
> others in learning and remain faithful to the emergence of my student's
> realization of her/his transgendered/in-
> between/liminal/dispraxic/white/brown/Christian/tree-hugging/alterity of
> personhood. I have room for those who have room for me, as Alan puts it. I
> can make room for the existential accoutrements of the other as long as
> the other's preconception of me in my Islam doesn't Other me. I work from
> the margins to shrink the centre, not to swap positions. For at the centre
> is a vampire. Critical pedagogy means teaching to dissolve. Student and me
> as solute. I have supervised about 120 undergraduate and taught Masters
> dissertations over a fourteen year period of loving learning,
> accoutrements and all. Theirs and mine. A student, Danny Solomon (not real
> name), even brought his Israeli paratrooper accoutrements with him to
> supervision and supper. Some kind of accoutrement. Born in Manchester,
> killing in Ramallah, reflecting on life and humanity's meanings with me in
> Cirencester.
>
> I am a Progressive Muslim because I am part of the multiple critique
> undertaken by progressive Muslims.
>
> This multiple critique requires us to stand up to extremists and
> apologists in Islam, to the increasingly hegemonic Western political,
> economic and intellectual structures that perpetuate an unequal
> distribution of resources around the world. This hegemony as Omid Safi
> suggests includes environmental degradation, the Walmartisation of the
> globe, neo-imperial practices and unilateral governments.
>
> Without the 'brand' you wouldn't even imagine I was Muslim, would you?
>
> No logo, perhaps? (after Melanie Klein). I don't proselytize or convert.
> My Islam, my submission to Allah, actually inspires me to influence the
> education of students in the realisation of their personhood without
> imposing Islam on them. I don't claim to teach my students anything. I
> encourage students to cut their critical incisors on spectator and
> propositional theories. In this way they can access to their own critical
> educational standards of judgement. This is a gem of a pedagogic tip I
> picked up several years ago from Moira Laidlaw. Students who choose to be
> supervised with me are not renowned for being spectators of their own
> lives: they tend to 'verb/a-lize' their own lives as important and
> sacred 'doings'. Just take a look at the email below and you may see what
> I mean.
>
> My Islam is fecund. Humanistic endeavour brings me closer to Allah: He is
> so much bigger than me in the universe of things. Like Chinua Achebe, I
> believe that things on earth fall apart. Pedagogising my educational
> relationships in a doctoral thesis will eventually fall apart. But the
> performative mystery that is artistic education could be carried forward
> in the living possibility of my students, beyond mere words placed in
> dusty text and ethereal web pages, and a critical possibility could
> thrive. This is not an example of my imagination spiralling out of
> control. This claim comes from the ground of my earthy 'project' of
> practicality. Take a look, read and feel what I mean in this email sent to
> me by a student, below:
>
> 30th June 2005, 20.09
> Hi Paul,
>
> How are you?
>
> What a lovely email! Thank you for including me! Could have kissed the
> external when she announced to E3 that the sort of work I had undertaken
> in
> my dissertation was what was going to get us all jobs. As you can imagine
> their was a bit of negative feedback from the usual suspects regarding the
> 'critical management skills' module. However I was taken back at the
> amount of
> people who actually stood up and admitted that the module was of great
> benefit to them and should be included in the curriculum at an earlier
> stage. I naturally defended our corner and was delighted at the external's
> enthusiasm regarding interpersonal development and self reflective
> approaches to education/personal development.
>
> Had an interesting chat with Caroline Mountain earlier who has said she
> would support me whole heartedly if I wanted to peruse my
> masters.....money
> depending I look forward to starting it.
> Hope you are knuckling down with the PhD and having a peaceful time at
> work?
> Hope the family all well and Asma's 'situation' a bit better now?
> Got loads to catch up on and really looking forward to seeing you again
> soon.
> Love
> Debs x
>
>
> It is in my students own telling that the validation of my work resides.
> This is the habitus of rigour and validation: 'dialogic validity' as Paula
> Saukko puts it.
>
> This is key to the nature of my living educational educational theory of
> my postcolonial criitcal practice. And I believe I am showing in this
> posting what counts for me in the construction of my edcuational theory,
> and what counts as evidence of my educational influence in the learning of
> student, and self.
>
> I imagine that in the email above you can imagine my student feeling the
> excitement of having participated in my 'critical issues in management'
> module. She heard the external examiner's comments, felt elated, and
> joined in, as did others. A chorus of garlic-breath voices contributing to
> the dissolution of another manifestation of the 'Vampire Archetype'. As a
> person with agency, as a being-in-the-pre-existing social world, I choose
> to interpret my progressive Islam as loyalty to humanity in edcuational
> relationships like the one above, which you are able to glimpse.
>
> Alon expresses his commitment to his belief system convincingly, for him,
>
> "And I do believe this makes the 'I' sufficient as it  includes the
> immersed phenomenological, critical struggles of being-in-the-world",
>
> and why shouldn't this be enough?
>
> I am developing my heuristics of existence from Mohamed's self-critical
> question, 'Is the I sufficient, even if necessary?' The 'I' is necessary
> but not sufficient without a third person knowledge of the social, the
> political, the militaristic and the hegemonic comprising a multitude of
> forces, 'out there/in here' and beyond my particular, singular grasp to
> change and transform through my agency alone. Though together we can enact
> Gladwell's possibility of a 'tipping point'. I like Alan's posting because
> it urges me to remain ever critical, to defy dogma and zealotry because
> the 'Vampire Archetype' is as much latent and living in here, in me, as it
> is procreative and prodigious 'out there' in institutions, governments and
> the demonized Other.
>
> I like the way Omid Safi suggests a progressive Islam in a way that I can
> hold it in my outstretched palm with space aplenty for Alan's 'invitation'
> to inclusion because -
>
> "At the heart of a progressive Muslim interpretation is a simple yet
> radical idea: every human life, female and male, Muslim and non-Muslim,
> rich or poor, 'Northern or 'Southern', has exactly the same intrinsic
> worth."
>
> Especially in the face of the terrorism of the 'Vampire Archetype'.
> Sometimes this vampire is visceral and snarling. Sometimes it creeps up on
> us, taking us by surprise in the guise of a friendly old professor who
> smiles but not from the eyes as your curriculum innovation
> disappears: 'resources have been reallocated to the imperative of
> university priorities; nothing personal you know.'
>
> Back to Safi,
>
> "The essential value of life is God-given, and is no way connected to
> culture, geography or privilege. A progressive Muslim is one who is
> committed to the strangely controversial idea that the worth of a human
> being is measured by a person's character, not the oil under their soil,
> and not their flag. A progressive Muslim agenda is concerned with the
> ramifications of the premise that all members of humanity have this same
> intrinsic worth because, as the Qur'an reminds us, each of us has the
> breath of God breathed into our being....'Progressive', in this usage,
> refers to a relentless striving towards a universal notion of justice in
> which no single community's prosperity, righteousness, dignity comes at
> the expense of another. Central to this notion of a progressive Muslim
> identity are fundamental values that we hold to be essential to a vital,
> fresh, and urgently needed interpretation  of Islam for the twenty-first
> century. These themes include social justice, gender justice, and
> pluralism."
>
> As Jean has suggested in a posting elsewhere, these values seem to be
> those embodied values that underpin Rousseau's democratic project as well
> as the non-unified project of postcolonialism. Though the kind of
> postcolonial praxis or definition one comes up with is largely determined
> by the ontological take of the person who undertakes the praxis and
> interpretation (to paraphrase Safi).
>
> Returning finally to Safi
>
> "Ours is a relentless effort to submit the human will to the Divine in a
> way that affirms the common humanity of all of God's creation. We conceive
> of a way of being Muslim that engages and affirms the humanity of all
> human beings., that actively holds all of us responsible for a fair and
> just distribution of God-given natural resources, and that seeks to live
> in harmony with the natural world. To put it slightly differently, being a
> progressive Muslim means not simply thinking more about the Qur'an and the
> life of the prophet, but also thinking about the life we share on this
> planet with all human beings
>
> This is how I have been thinking. And it has brought me to a point where I
> am asking, What am I going on about (after Zephaniah).
>
> What I am going on about is how I enact hopes for humanity, like Safi's,
> which I imagine we all share in essence, through my practice of humanity
> as postcolonial critical pedagogy. Clarifying my practice of critical
> pedagogy in the form of a living educational theory account in a way that
> I clearly share my meanings is vitally important to me in my life. When I
> waiver I only have to read Debbie's email above to restore my flagging
> faith in my praxis, and my faculty to write clearly about it.
>
> My postcolonial critical pedagogy as an expression of my progressive Islam
> and expressed within my educational relationships demonstrates the nature
> of my incontrovertible loyalty to humanity and to Allah. These goals do
> not seem to be incommensurable. As I think Debbie's words attest.
>
> Why I write (after George Orwell) -
> I have not written about progressive Islam as a sneaky act of
> proselytization. I do not wish to offend by sharing my views. I have not
> written with an intention to exclude any colleague. Choosing self
> exclusion is, however, to enact a human choice.
>
> Instead I chose to share Omid Safi's writings because he clearly professes
> a human project designed in the same pedagogic and educational spirit as
> the projects of Alon, Alan, Mohamed, Samia, Harriet, Jack, Jean, Pip,
> Chris, Andrew, Steve, Peter, Sarah, Rachel, Jane, Brian, Moira,Branko,
> and many others of us. I wrote my posting because I am an inveterate
> educator. This is who I am through what I educatively do. My life as a
> performative verb, not a taxonomy of propositions. I hope I am keeping
> Peter's level of tension in mind as I write this posting. In writing about
> the ontological and epistemological crafting of my living educational
> theory I am endeavouring to hold on to the original stated theme of the e-
> seminar, i.e. 'The nature of educational theories: what counts as evidence
> of educational influences in learning?'
>
>
> Paul, Paulus, or Yaqub
>
> - whichever you prefer to use, for I have no identity crisis. For my part
> Yaqub feels good with my  commitment to non-scarification through
> postcolonial practices and relationships. Thanks Jack.
>