Listening to HARDtalk last night, which isn't so hard. Laughable, actually. A bit like some parts of academia: think that questioning everything is the way to go, when sometimes it would be better to sit down, be quiet, and just think, 'gather one's thoughts', or simply acknowledge what you've always intuitively thought was right.
Shlomo Sand. First reaction: sceptical. Always sceptical. But you warm to his views-and he has a kind face. Why should it sound so strange that states and their historians have concocted stories, myths, fabrications to mask the violence of the inception of the state? What is a people? Who is a black man (and is he black)?
What does 'Pakistan' mean? Sorry, bro', but it was never meant to be an Islamic state and never will be (inshallah). And why stop there? Why not declare it, as some are clamouring for, a Sunni state? How to talk of a community that is not defined in terms of religion or ethnicity, and that simultaneously shuns the false universality of the market, the abstract, thin, notion of Man? Not to be lured by the past, the origin: always the purest moment-and everything after that is a veritable Fall- but also to not be swayed by the technicolour futures of the self-styled progressives.
The 'wilderness' of the wild west: barren, pure, stark, something to be colonised, made over.
Here he is, speaking at NYU.
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