Building Religions 20: Presenting the Past

I'm working my way through Sadakat Kadri's Heaven on Earth, which is a history of shari'a law from the beginning of Islam to the present day. While I'm still early on in the book, part of Kadri's thesis—that shari'a has never been monolithic, and has been shaped by numerous political and religious pressures—got me thinking about the idea of how religions present themselves.

Postscript on Orientalism

I don't often write about my own work here, but the post on orientalism put me in the mood to discuss some practical worldbuilding. Not long after I started as a columnist for Royal Archivist Publishing, I was given the job of writing the Guidebook to the Wàiguó Liánméng, an overview of one of the setting's major factions. I started with only a rough sketch, based on what had already been written: I knew that it was a world-spanning alliance of nations; and, based on the names of those nations, that some of its influences were Chinese, Korean, Egyptian, Babylonian, and Indian cultures.

Building Worlds: Orientalism

It was Saladin Ahmed's article on the issue of race on Game of Thrones that made me think I should add Edward Said's Orientalism to my collection of posts here. When a piece went up on the Tor website about racial diversity in Dungeons & Dragons, it pretty much solidified it for me. Neither of them have to do explicitly with the subject of Said's book, but they touch on part of his thesis: that literary representations of 'the Orient' are part of a discourse that's shared with academic disciplines devoted to its study as well as to the exercise of Western political power. To put it another way, fiction isn't exempt from the political or social attitudes of its day; it can serve to reinforce those attitudes, whether the author intends it or not.

Building Religions 19: Joseph Campbell

The long break between posts happened because I wanted to reread Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces before writing anything. It had been about twenty years since I opened it, and realized that I couldn't remember a thing about its contents. The impressions that I had of Campbell's work were intermingled with memories of his interviews with Bill Moyers, his televised lectures on myth, and references to his influence on George Lucas, so I went back to the source.