Perplexed

A  text only post, and about history, afield from fauna and flora, sort of...and grim, so dear readers, a caution to read on...

I can write about history, but I can't explain it, somewhat in the fashion that I can write about theoretical physics, or the Bible, but I can't explain them...even further in this vein, I can write about what I'm thinking, but I can't explain the how and why of that either!...And by explain, I mean in a practical sense...I can explain how to drive a car, and such...

...in the history lore, there are a lot of authors that claim to explain things, but most own up to only being able to write about history...

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Hecataeus the Milesian speaks thus: I write these things as they seem true to me; for the stories told by the Greeks are various and in my opinion absurd.

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My Pausanias books languish, and I read Herodotus and Thucydides once, and these are like history movies or stories I've seen or yet to see...I know of them, about them, but explaining them is beyond...

oh...blogger is annoying...when I copy paste a text into this text, the different font style comes with, often a different size too, and sometimes I can change it back into the text style I'm using, 'normal size, Georgia font', and sometimes not...which makes for uneven reading...sorry for that...

and the neighbors next door have fertilized their entire lawn, and the odor is permeating...I close the window so I can breath, but then it is too hot inside the house...another duress...

and in my morning update news reading, I happen on the notion that the conflicts in the middle east, while about oil, we all know that, the conflicts specifically are about gas pipe line contracts for gas pipes to Europe and as far away as China....a major pipline was contracted together by Syria, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Iran..it was to go right through Syria...seems this resembles events in Ukraine as well...

Thucydides explained a lot of old Greek history in his history book, and his explanations taken up by followers, until, after a fashion, his history actually makes events--a case of a historian making history...

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In the seventeenth century, the English political philosopher Thomas Hobbes, whose Leviathan advocated absolute monarchy, admired Thucydides and in 1628 was the first to translate his writings into English directly from Greek. Thucydides, Hobbes and Machiavelli are together considered the founding fathers of political realism, according to which state policy must primarily or solely focus on the need to maintain military and economic power rather than on ideals or ethics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thucydides

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where I'm going with this is this search pairing:

'Thucydides neocons'

google that and one will find a lot about the wars now in progress...maybe even an explanation...

a click on the 'political realism' link in the quote above takes one to wiki's take, and thereabout is a list of 'realist' thinkers, and there's an Arab in the list, which I suspect knew Maimonidis...brb...

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Next the author mentioned Ibn Arabi who "attempted to close the gap" between God and man. Why, he wondered, "was there such a distance between God and his creation?"  He consulted and "drew on centuries of Jewish, Greek, Christian and Muslim learning to arrive at a unique conclusion: man's separation from God was a product not of God but of man's limited ability to perceive the truth." 

Maimonides, al-Ghazali, Ibn Arabi, Ibn Khaldun, Alfonso X
 
http://susanne430.blogspot.com/2010/11/maimonides-al-ghazali-ibn-arabi-ibn.html

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Maimonides showed up in my post Seven...a quoted passage about the 613 laws, and their division into 365, representing the calendar days of the year, and 248, representing the bones and organs of the human body...Maimonides was a physician, which accounts I guess for the bones and organs, and maybe an astronomer too for the calendar part...

I've happened upon Maimonides before, the title of his book, A Guide for the Perplexed...of that, I know just the title, it's catchy!...sort of like the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which I have read...twice...

so last night I read a bit of wiki's take about Maimonides, and began wondering if he was a sufi, as much he wrote seems sufi stuff...so I did that search: Maimonides sufi...

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Abraham grew up in a truly multi-cultural world, where Moslems, Jews and even Christians interacted in one of the most accepting societies in the history of man. Unlike our current epoch, when the voices of hatred speak far louder than those of friendship, medieval Egypt was a place of mutual respect, protective laws and surprisingly strong and positive relations between the religions. It was also a time and place rife with Sufis and Sufi thought - and Jewish libraries often contained books by such masters as al-Ghazali, as-Suhrawardi and al-Hallaj, all dutifully transcribed into the blocky Hebrew script of the local Jewish population. Sufis and Jews knew each other, read each other's books and even compared notes on spirituality and the quest for divine union with God.

Abraham Maimonides: A Jewish Sufi

http://tomblock.com/shalom_jewishsufi


If it was Spring, and I was still at Last Chance, and M. had returned to do summertime night auditing, and was about at a table snacking before going to work, I would at my break sit down, interrupt, asking, 'Tell me about Maimonides'...  M. is jewish, and knows Bible lore really well...and much tolerant of my stumbling thoughts and questions!...he would likely divert me, probably to more about Krishnamurti, his favorite, and make me laugh, and as usual I'd have to corral him back to my point...'are jews sufis?'

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Following a tripling in the price of oil in the mid-1970s and the progressive takeover of Saudi Aramco oil company between 1974 and 1980, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia acquired large sums of revenue from oil exports. It began to spend tens of billions of dollars throughout the Islamic World to promote the movement of Islam favored in that country — known as Salafi or Wahabbi Islam.^[10][11][12] According to Pnina Werbner, Saudi funding of "the Wahhabi/Salafi critique" (along with the forces of modernization) put "Sufi tariqas" in "danger of disappearing altogether" in the 1970 and 80s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sufi%E2%80%93Salafi_relations

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It's perplexing, I'd say...

DavidDavid