A thing! (Co-written with Ahoo Najafian!)

New article alert! Were we to leap back centuries & ask a madrasa student in Mostar or a storyteller in Dhaka, we would find that their idea of the Persian poet ʿAṭṭār differs starkly from the ʿAṭṭār on English-language bookshelves. This article explains why by tracing the fates of his Pandnama:

the latest from RD: @profirmf.bsky.social on what Buber has to teach us about collective action, resistance, and survival religiondispatches.org/2026/03/17/f...

on jan 29, will sherman (@willsherman.bsky.social) delivered the annual scudder lecture at uf's department of religion a brilliant, groundbreaking talk, will used examples of quranic imitations from late antiquity to the present to transform how we understand revelation & scriptural inimitability

Force is as pitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as it is to its victims; the second it crushes, the first it intoxicates. The truth is, nobody really possesses it.

Hey all, I’ll do the intro thing: my name is Will and I wrote a book about language and revelation among some mystics and messiahs in early modern Afghanistan. The book—*Singing with the Mountains*—was the subject of an open-access forum with some awesome scholars. www.euppublishing.com/toc/afg/7/2

Working with Taylor & Francis is simply unethical by this point. It’s unfortunately difficult to have AI use revoked from existing contracts but at least try, complain, if you have a book with them. And otherwise do not even consider.

12th c. Berber speakers called the watermelon "Palestine"; their Andalusi Arabic-speaking contemporaries called it "the Palestinian melon". journals.pan.pl/dlibra/publi...

“It therefore falls to literary criticism to continue to compare the inside and the outside, existence and history, to continue to pass judgment on the abstract quality of life in the present, and to keep alive the idea of a concrete future. May it prove equal to the task!” —RIP Jameson

For many Afghans, terror came when night fell. CIA-backed operations killed countless civilians. The U.S. left without being held accountable. A reporter returns to investigate her past and unravel the legacy of the secretive Zero Units.

"If our richest universities, cosseted by tenure and plumped with their ample endowments, cannot be citadels of free speech and forums for wrestling with the most difficult ideas, what hope is there for any other institution in our country?" www.nytimes.com/2024/04/19/o...

My book, Pious Labor, is now available open access via Jstor, though it won’t be published officially until Jan. If you’re eager to read before then, check it out! www.jstor.org/stable/jj.69...

For some bummer reasons, I couldn’t make it to the AAR, but I was sent this pic: my book lives! If you’re interested in the lives and imaginations of those living in the lands that would become Afghanistan (and the pursuit of divine language via Pashto!), check it out! www.fordhampress.com/aar-2023/

parts of Arundhati Roy's speech at the Munich Literature Festival earlier this week. "If we allow this brazen slaughter to continue, even as it is livestreamed into the most private recesses of our personal lives, we are complicit in it. Something in our moral selves will be altered forever."