NOW | 3 May 2025

• J and I ended Ramadhan in the land of Borobudur temple, visiting an elder beloved who retired nearby. On the morning of Eid, we prayed together in a field with a whole village, the mountains spread ahead of us.
• I've been on a streak of writing one of my silly little essays in queue at least once a month: Finding Jesus and Mary in Ramadhan for March (which reads best for subscribers since I didn't make the full version public), and The only 2 binaries that matter to me now in April. Still anyone's guess including mine which of the multiple drafts at different stages of writing will bubble to the top, and whether I'll be able to experiment with making audio versions of them too in between other demands.
• My Basics is tidier and more approachable now; I begin with my believer baseline, which is five beliefs that inform my values and the way I struggle in the world. Scrolling after that leads into more niche territory of my emotional support Quranic bookmarks and ongoing hadith collection (so far 20 out of 40). It's going to change even more as I currently digest Islam and Anarchism, one of the few books I plan to sit with all year.
• I'm back to reading fiction— for example my first James Baldwin, which was absolutely devastating and had me shaking fists. A beloved and I were exchanging texts as we were reading it together, which was really fun and now I want to try reading along with others more often.
• Another adventure in fiction: Played a TTRPG one-shot with two people I love and once built a home with. It was all our first times doing storytelling together via sober group hallucination and I additionally finally got to experience my partner J as a Game Master (since there aren't secrets to keep from me compared to when he prepares full campaigns for our friends)!
• Watched Cemetery of Splendour and it haunted me— I experienced it as a surreal and spacious film that reads anti-war in a deeply Southeast Asian and Thai way. It's meant to be sat with, not talked much about. It was our second Apichatpong Weerasethakul and we're now picking out our third.
• I've had to add a glossary to my notes system to keep up with definitions that I am forming and discovering from digesting a bunch of non-fiction to make sense of reality. Like my notes system, no version of that exists online but what you can channel surf through are idea playlists I make online to share cool pebbles with more people.
• Friends who like shuffling their YouTube algorithm with my watchliyst, I encourage you to revisit! I watched a great breakdown of US-Israel political ties lately that immediately got saved to the essential syllabus section. On the shorter side (in the 15min or less section), consider the one on the tech company reshaping reality, because all the footage in it surfaces good research that comes across way more effectively about this than reading longform text or an image carousel about the same thing.
• After a few years of exploring TTRPGs and recently reading Ideas To Postpone The End Of The World— a recommendation that reached me from Brazil— I find myself wanting to practice writing speculative fiction, new myths, fairytales for neoliberal times and a burning planet. Ailton Krenak in translation: "My main reason for postponing the end of the world is so that we've always got time for one more story. If we can make time for that, then we'll be forever putting off the world's demise."

Total notes filed: 1406

In my system as of 30 December 2024 3 May 2025

• 🔹 461 595 in reading memory (facts, events, reports)
• 🔸 679 811 in second memory (concepts, claims, ideas)

266 notes added since last update, including:

• Friends and enemies are determined by what they do, not by who they are in terms of colonial constructs of race and identity
• 2022 was the deadliest year for Palestinians in the West Bank since 2005
• A system where one population is afforded rights that the other population is denied will be safe for neither
• To reach back in history for analogy, to frame and make sense of what is happening now is worth the risk of punishment
• We face a planetary crisis because we disregarded Indigenous technology and inventions
• Structural narcissism causes the dominant group to overvalue themselves and fall for their own propaganda
• In the late Middle Ages, there was a healthy practice of the commons and communal spirit in Europe until the state divided collective farmland with enclosures in the 18th century
• Racist geopolitics routinely limit our social imagination
• Moss is inspirationally non-hierarchical as a species
• The first genocide of the 20th century was in 1904-1908 by Germany against the Herero and Nama people in Southwest Africa, now Namibia
• One of the most robust anti-colonial movements in our present world emerges from below and uses a Quranic understanding of Ummah as a blueprint
• Shirk includes deifying or prioritising any modern construct or human power instead of the Beloved
• A trick of modern politics is to disguise economic and political conflicts as cultural conflicts
• It is irrelevant from a Quranic perspective whether people and communities explicitly identify as Muslim per se or not
• The Maryam we meet in the Qur'an is not the religious ethnosupremacist ideal woman
• If you can't love anybody, you're dangerous because you have no way of learning humility
• To submit to oblivion is to trust your love in the hands of something not you on the faith that you will become more yourself than you could've been on your own
• To make time for one more story is to postpone the end of the world

This is a /now page inspired by Al Ibrahim, who was inspired by Derek Sivers, who said to think of a Now page as what one would tell a friend they haven't seen in a year.