Is it possible for us, moderns, to think in circles any more? Perhaps Sunni triangles, or Shia crescents, but circles? No, we increasingly think in terms of straight lines: mine or thine, us or them, black and white, "Friend" or "Enemy" or linear progress: a line that extends into infinity.

What would it be to think in circles again, to recognise that thought can take place within faith (Anselm), that reason is bound by the Law, that we live and think with what is given to us. To think in circles is at once to reformulate the cogito : I am , therefore i can think..or, better still, we are, therefore I can think, but it is also to express one's gratitude for this possibility being opened up for me.

To think in circles is to accept the gift and pass it on. It is also to see that all of nature moves in circles and place oneself at its heart. Of course, there is at one level a discontinuity with nature, but perhaps we should also see thought arising from within nature. For the moderns, at least before Darwin (and even post-Darwin , for all practical purposes) the dull cyclomania of Nature is something to escape at all costs. She is so much "dead matter". Only we are truly alive.

Hospitality, Derrida.
One must be ready to be not ready, be prepared for the unprepared. To welcome someone who is known is not to truly welcome; to welcome someone without a smiling face is something else as well..as if one could welcome someone grudgingly! The stranger is not just an other but radically other, someone beyond our conceptions, distinctions of 'the same' and 'the other'.

Levinas, Difficult Freedom, 'Monotheism and Language':

Islam is above all one of the principal factors involved in this constitution of humanity. Its struggle has been arduous and magnificent..It swarmed across three continents. It united innumerbale people and races. It understood better than anyone that a universal truth is worth more than local particularities. It is not by chance that a Talmud apologue cites Ishmael, the symbol of Islam, the rare sons of Sacred History, whose name is formulated and announced before their birth. It is a s if their task in the world had for all eternity been foreseen in the economy of Creation...The memory of a common contribution to civilization the course of the Middle ages, when Greek texts entered Europe via the Jewish translators who had translated Arab translations, can be exalting only if we still manage today in words, devoid of rhetoric or diplomacy.

Massignon.
'Prospect of the Human Person in Islam'.
Forgiving, the supreme act of hospitality. To forgive is to welcome in, to allow a return back into the fold. But one must also forgive oneself for a lack of openness, for the inability to give oneself fully. True hospitality is always aware of a lack of hospitality. How can I welcome what is beyond my capacity (the infinite)?; how so the unforeseen, the unforeseeable, the utterly unpredictable?