Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd

Last night I lay in bed and listened to the thunder roll incessantly overhead. This morning, I woke up feeling oddly anxious and sad. The air was now cool, the sky a cloudless blue. I could not make sense of my mood.

Admittedly, however, for the past two weeks, I had been worried. My dear friend, mentor, and colleague Nasr Abu Zayd had fallen suddenly ill in Indonesia and returned to Cairo for treatment. Indeed, he had been reported dead. In disbelief at the initial reports, I had tried to contact Nasr without success, and then contacted several people who were able to provide me with reliable information: Nasr had fallen ill with a rare infection, but he was being treated and was expected to recover. That was the news one week ago today.

An email reached me this morning that he had passed away at 9:00 A.M. Cairo time.

Inna lillahi wa inna alayhi raji'un.

Good-bye dear friend. I will always remember your advice, your companionship, your support, and, no less than the others, our laughter.

The Task Ahead

The debacle of the failed American republic presents us with a formidable task: nothing less than the redemption of the American spirit.

That spirit has been corrupted by the turn it has taken through the cancerous side of what Harold Bloom has termed the American Religion.

For Bloom, the American Religion is Janus-faced; and he traces both faces back to Emerson's vision.

For we find in Emerson both the prophet who admonished us that "things are in the saddle and ride mankind" as well as the build-a-better-mousetrap-and-hitch-your-wagon-to-a-star promoter of American can-doism and exceptionalism.

The ideology of American exceptionalism is, without question, the most lethal and pernicious ideology abroad on the planet today. "Just because other Empires proved toxic for the peoples they conquered, doesn't mean ours will..."

The cock-eyed optimism of the Emersonian vein has permitted well-meaning individuals caught up in the sway of the militarized corporatocracy that runs this country to commit violence and fraud on a scale never before witnessed in the history of the world.

The task before us, then, is this: to revivify the atrophied portion of the Emersonian vision--the Emerson who admonished us all for our acquisitiveness, our compulsive reduction of all things to commodity.

The question we must ask ourselves before attempting to undertake such a task, however, is this: how late is the present hour? Is there sufficient time allotted us for so Herculean a task, or ought we to abandon this ship of fools and seek shelter and solace in a world apart?

And if we answer "the latter," where is that world?