I am glad that Radio 4 is producing a series called How Reading Made Us, presented by the subtle, super-literate Times columnist James Marriott. I must declare an interest. Roughly 98 per cent of my earnings over 45 years have depended on the fact that plenty of people like reading. Now we are thinking harder, however, about the fact that form affects substance. The idea of an encyclopaedia, for example, as developed (from classical roots) in the 18th century, was that all needful knowledge on a particular subject could be assembled and consulted in a book or series of books. With AI, there is little need for this form. The form of a book, which often seemed so compendious, can now seem cumbersome. Fiction, too, is affected by form. Dickens’s novels were shaped by the fact they were part-works in magazines such as Household Words. Few would write or read a novel in that way now. Netflix achieves the desired effect more conveniently. That, in turn, means that people write different types of novels. Could the very word ‘book’ become out of date, as is beginning to happen to the word ‘newspaper’? If it no longer requires physical form, does it need to be shaped and written in the same way at all?
What about the Bible? Its very name implies there is only one true book (or collection of books). The sacred duty to agree what it must contain and – for Protestants at least – to read it, shows that books benefited at one and the same time from universality and rarity value. Now that the Bible need no longer be a single object you can hold in your hand, but something you can pick up bits of online, its special power will surely reduce further. Interestingly, the word Quran does not contain the idea of a book. It means ‘recitation’. Muhammad, the prophet of Islam, was illiterate. He spoke the uncreated word of God, mediated by the Angel Gabriel (Jibril). This was later written down by the prophet’s companions, but Muslims would never say that either the companions or Muhammad himself were authors, in the sense that Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are authors of the Four Gospels. The Quran must stay, for believers, in its original, recited Arabic. The believer who can recite the whole thing by heart is especially esteemed, and called a hafiz, which means ‘guardian’. Thanks to such people, the Quran could survive a world which turned away from books. Maybe that is what extreme Muslims intend. Remember that Boko Haram (whose followers kill lots of Christians in Nigeria) means ‘Books forbidden’. Perhaps Islam is better prepared than Christianity for the long dark night of unreading.
I don’t know, but I am guessing that each member of the Guardian Council of clerics which sits atop what is left of Iran is a hafiz. Certainly each is supposed to be theologically learned. So it is a bit of a puzzle that Mojtaba Khamenei, the successor of his late father Ali, is now in charge, since he is reportedly not much of a scholar. Why have we not been allowed to see him yet? Might he be holed up in his luxurious property in Kensington, perhaps venturing out at night to dance in an unfashionable but expensive club such as Annabel’s? Or is he being cared for, wounded, in a cave (or in Harley Street)? Will he appear for the funeral of his father which, in contravention of Muslim custom, has still not taken place? It is an important belief of the ‘Twelvers’ who dominate Shia Islam that the Twelfth Imam, the redeeming Mahdi, is around somewhere, undergoing an ‘occultation’ and – not completely unlike the Christian idea of the Second Coming – will suddenly pop up and sort things out. Given current difficulties, it might be wise to arrange the occultation of Mojtaba for the time being. If so, with a bit of luck, we shall never clap eyes upon the wretched man. I am getting all this off my chest before the government’s new restrictions on what it calls ‘anti-Muslim hostility’, and others describe as free speech, come into force.
Last week on the BBC, the Bishop of Manchester’s Thought for the Day turned to ‘the Jewish community who live in the streets surrounding my home in Salford’. He went on: ‘Alongside their heightened fears for loved ones in Israel, they know all too well, in the aftermath of the recent terrorist attack on Heaton Park Synagogue, that actions of the Israeli government can expose them to reprisals here at home.’ That is an interesting way to put it: ‘the actions of the Israeli government’ produce terrorism. The Right Revd Prelate decided not to mention who actually kills Jews in Manchester (and virtually anywhere else they can be found). Quite right: to do so would be to undermine Sir Keir Starmer’s ‘wider strategy on social cohesion’, which he says is a national ‘emergency’.
Why is the anti-Muslim hostility regulator to be a ‘tsar’? Surely his role is that of a mufti.
On Tuesday night, the House of Lords agreed, without a division, to accept the wish of the Commons and remove all remaining hereditary peers. A private deal between the parties had offered life peerages to some of the hereditaries who would otherwise have gone, but there will be hereditaries no more. This abolishes the basis on which the Lords evolved over more than 700 years. Before our short debate, I walked to the end of the Royal Gallery to inspect the memorial list of peers and their heirs killed in the two world wars. I counted nine (there may be more) whose families will be expelled at the end of this session. When I spoke in the Chamber, I read out their names – Ponsonby, Stonor, Vane, Wellington, Wedgwood Benn, Berry, Colville, Goschen and Trenchard. In my mind were T.S. Eliot’s words: ‘The communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.’
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