What are you reading now?

A friend sends me a picture of a book on Al-Ghazali and suggests it's an interesting read. Another friend jokes that only I would read a book like that. I tell him, anyone can read any book. We're all literate enough - in both Dhivehi and English - to understand written language. It’s just that I’ve chosen to do something that many people around me might find boring.

Over the past few years, my threshold for tolerating boredom has grown. I hope to keep nurturing this capacity until I can one day read an entire volume of Al-Ghazali or Dante Alighieri. Maybe even sit down for a full week and read Proust from cover to cover. But I’m not there yet.

Right now, my tolerance allows me to engage with Al-Ghazali at the level of appreciating him, as W. Montgomery Watt once put it, as “the second most influential Muslim after the Prophet Muhammad.”

My interest in Al-Ghazali was sparked by a novel - Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights by Salman Rushdie. It’s fiction, of course, but the plot weaves through the philosophical rivalry between Ibn Rushd (Averroes) of Andalusia and Al-Ghazali of Tus, then under Seljuk rule. Al-Ghazali wrote The Incoherence of the Philosophers; Ibn Rushd responded with The Incoherence of the Incoherence.

Incoherence. There's a lot of that in how I read - and in what I read.

This weekend, I picked up Dhonbeefaanu Vaahaka by Hussain Salahuddin. It’s the second known work of fiction written in Dhivehi - over a hundred years old. Yes, it’s boring. But if I don’t find a way to navigate through that boredom, I’ll miss out on peeking into Salahuddin’s imagined world - where Acehnese nobility sail across oceans to recite Shams Tabrizi and Rumi to aristocratic women in Haddhunmathi.

No, it’s not real. It may not “mean” anything. But meaning is often something we discover through curiosity - and sometimes, by force of will.

Some days, I find meaning in Rushdie’s hallucinated tales of Ibn Rushd marrying a jinn.Other days, I read the news of someone’s death - someone like Daniel Kahneman or Peter Higgs - and feel like a cabbage, just harvested, for being alive in the year they died without ever having read about behavioral economics or the God particle—topics I still find daunting.

Some days I’ll stare at pages from a Christopher Hitchens essay collection, marveling at his wit and astonishing command of the English language.And then there are days I read Hanif Kureishi writing about a turd the size of an aubergine that simply refuses to flush.

How about you? What are you reading now?