On the Sin of Blogging and the Hegemony of New Year's

This year I am going to give in to the hegemony of the Gregorian calendar and make a New Year’s resolution. In fact it is a decision I have been putting off for two years now.

For the last few years, writing has been an important part of my life; for the last year, it has been, more or less, my main vocation.  I am very happy with my collaboration with 7iber and al-Adab and look forward for more. There are also a few English pieces that have not come out, either because they are stuck in the process of editing and re-editing, or because they have been inserted into the slow and merciless machinery of academic publishing. As a result, there are also pieces that are left out, cut, or trimmed, from the articles I publish, pieces that are never finished, or pieces that are too personal for these venues. So I have decided to start this blog to share my ‘textual trimmings’.

-          But, Ahmed, isn’t the blogging fad over? Aren’t blogs outdated?

 Yes, I do not do things when they are cool; I either do them when they are avant-garde or after they have become retro. 

Some 10- 12 years ago I said, half jokingly (and I still half jokingly stand by what I said), that whoever starts a blog is committing the sin of pride—which in Catholicism, as far as I understand is the one sin that God does not forgive; of course there is a similar tradition in Islam that puts pride, kibr, among the worst forms of sin, up there with denying God’s existence or worshipping other deities with God, but I digress. I remember when I was an undergrad, one of my professors told us a story about a medieval catholic priest who wrote a book about how everyone who writes a book is committing the sin of pride. And here I am blogging about the vanity of blogging. I seek penance in the fact that the fad is over—and in the suffering of writing in English.

Because my Arabic work is more likely to get published (I write more prolifically in Arabic, I am more comfortable writing and editing in my mother tongue, and I do not need to prove myself to an editing-publishing market that is characterized by institutional racism), my English pieces are more likely to remain unfinished or stay in perpetual editing. For that purpose I anticipate this blog to contain more English posts (which is also the reason why I am writing this intro in English rather than Arabic). But I also expect to publish Arabic trimmings here.

My first post will be something I wrote exactly two years ago, but was never published. I think it does give a context (albeit a very personal one) to what I am doing here.

Welcome to my blog!