This Blog has been online for almost 20 years, on different platforms.
The total number of visitors, so far, is very limited. I talk about Religion and Science. Maybe it is not a popular combination. Or maybe I am not good at it. None of that bothers me. Since, when I started the blog, I had no intention to be known or to publish anything at all.
A Programming Project
It all started in late 2004, when I thought I would like to learn PHP. Whenever I start learning a new language I think of a project and build it with that language. So, I thought about designing an online blog. All initial developments were on a PC. Two thirds of the way, I felt confident to test it online, and instead of filling the pages with random texts, I thought about posting some notes and articles I had written, some were on computer files and others on paper. And in 2005, I got a domain name and a hosting plan and posted some articles. I was satisfied with what I have learned and with how the site worked.
However, slowly, I became interested in expanding the contents of the site. So I gathered scattered old notes and later started writing new articles. I moved the articles to Blogger in 2010. By the way, some posts and parts of several posts on my account on twitter/x.com platform are direct excerpts from the blog.
What about the Notes?
Since a very long time in Islamic scholarly culture, there were (a) Scholarly works, (b) the Matn. A sort of very short text usually in a form of a poem. It works like a verbose table of contents, on a specific subject. (c) Summaries of scholarly works (Mukhtasar مختصر ) , (e) Explanations of the summaries (Sharh Al-Mukhtasar شرح المختصر ) . (f) Extended explanations of the original scholarly works. Students would typically go through Matns (usually memorized) and Summaries, while study main books on a subject. Many would write their own summaries.
I recall reading that a well-known north African Sufi (I think it was Shiekh Ahmad Zarroq), wrote about fifty summaries of Imam Al-Ghazali's Aqeedah (Creed, or a list of elements of faith). And, Sheikh Nematullah wrote about a dozen summary on Ibn Arabi's Fusus.
The ideas of Matn and Mukhtasar were the ones I adopted since high school years, and then college. That worked for me, to get as clear an understanding of a subject as possible.
Outside of formal studies, those were the same ideas applied to different subjects I would be interested to understand (Theology and Sufism in particular), as much as I could, on my own.
The notes I referred to above, as what I based this blog on, were those hand written or typed texts.
