Until today (26/01/2012), my online activity centred around researching a historical fantasy novel set in the 12th century Mediterranean. Following a period of intense reflection, I have decided to abandon this particular writing endeavour in order to focus on a new blog project. The name Tasneem Project is not new, of course, but I have been using it as a website title almost continuously since 2001 and I see no reason to abandon it now. Tasneem, the name of a fountain in Paradise (al-Qur’an 83:27-28), remains a potent symbol of my hope for humankind.

There are pulls and pushes motivating my decision – pulls attracting me to do something new and pushes persuading me to give up the old. Briefly, the push to abandon the research is time. My son, who is severely autistic, leaves school in July of this year, either to live at home or at a weekday care setting. Beyond then, either the additional demands of care or the necessity of earning a living will diminish the amount of day I have to spend on a complex novel writing project. The pull is contemporary events and an ardent desire to re-engage with them.

However, I have no wish to sire yet another political blog. Despite my interest in politics, I’m not really a political animal in the sense of feeling comfortable writing and arguing within the confines of the political discursive and the political field of knowledge. Politics is the art of lying in the pursuit of power, and although I admire some of its more principled proponents, I would like to see a revolution beyond politics – a transformation of the culture as well as the polity. To this end, several threads will inform this blog – the news media, blogs, and books.

The books will be drawn from the fields that interest me most: Islamic Studies, Religious Studies, History, Media Studies, Gender/Sexuality, and Global Politics, revolving around a core annual reading list of 13 books with a balance of non-fiction to fiction set at 3:1(ish). The blogs and news media are those listed in this blog’s links widget. My aim is to draw on both sets of reading to post at least twice a week, hopefully to a very high quality. To achieve the latter, I want to retain what is crucial to the successful blog post - a relative brevity and accessibility, whilst stepping beyond its typical function of marketing particular standpoints.

In my view, the secret to that step up is maintaining a strong narrative framework around a reflexive discussion on a single theme. The master of this approach is undoubtedly the Renaissance essayist Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592). Whilst I cannot hope to emulate his great talent or scope, I would like to take a leaf out of his pages and write on themes set a mark above the political currents that invariably wash around issues of the moment. Not that I’m pretending to be politically neutral – I naturally incline towards the place where Islamic spirituality and libertarian socialism collide. It’s a place comfortably occupied by a small number of Muslims who share my hope for a better humankind. Whatever your politics or faith tradition or spirituality, if you share that hope, and a genuine love of learning, we already have a great deal in common. Enough perhaps to meet here again.