What’s wrong with philosophy? Does it have any relevance to contemporary problems and issues?
Issues
Heaven forbid one day the phrase ‘ask ChatGPT’ becomes as colloquial as ‘google it!’ Only time will tell.
It was end of July, and I was headed along the coast of Trinidad on the Buccoo Reef, a passenger vessel that bore the name of the fishing village in which my father was born and to which, once we dropped anchor in Tobago, I would journey.
My mother Jena, was a devout, highly intelligent and independent minded Muslim woman.
Hadith literally means a report or a saying. For Muslims, it is a report documenting the sayings, actions, physical features, and tacit approvals of the Prophet Muhammad.
The absence of black people from mainstream histories of Britain, and the lazy assumption that the presence of African and Caribbean people began with the SS Windrush docking at Tilbury, east of London, in 1948, means few today know there were black Romans, black Tudors, and black Stuarts here hundreds of years earlier.
I lived in Paris for most of the 2000s. For much of that time my then girlfriend worked overseas, and I ended up befriending her mother: a diminutive, chatty, and sharply analytical Egyptian woman in late middle-age.
Published in France in 2006, Jonathan Littell’s novel Les Bienveillantes sold over 700,000 copies and won the Prix Goncourt.
Concerning evil, nothing occurs to me. Evil is simply the privation of good. This was the profound insight of the Church Father St Augustine which in its wisdom would advise feeble spirits to look no further.
The story of the prophet Jonah (Yunus) is briefly sketched out in the Qur’an (37:139-148): Jonah is a messenger on the run, bent on eluding the message, the God who gave it to him, and the duty to deliver it.