On Re-reading

The most significant book I read last year for our bookclub was The Impossible State: Islam, Politics, and Modernity's Moral Predicament by Wael B. Hallaq. It is essentially a study on moral thought and how the modern state negotiates morality. I am re-reading it now and I find the experience different from my initial read firstly because I am now recognising ideas, rather than deciphering them. I don’t have to look up as many definitions — I had to look up the meanings of ‘noumenal’ and ‘desiderata’ the first time. For the initial read I was like a runner on an unfamiliar trail who had to deal with the terrain as it slopes and bends unexpectedly. On this subsequent read, I know where the slopes are, where I can run fast, where I have to go slow, where the trail opens into a clearing, and crucially, where to pause. I also can read my own pencilled margin notes and underlinings that now help signpost the way.

Secondly, this follow-up read is primed by the discussions of the bookclub. People who spoke at the bookclub meeting in January 2024 brought perspectives that would have never occurred to me. For example, one person quoted, as a response to The Impossible State, the following text from a Straits Times interview Lee Kuan Yew gave in 1987.

“I am often accused of interfering in the private lives of citizens. Yes, if I did not, had I not done that, we wouldn’t be here today. And I say without the slightest remorse, that we wouldn’t be here, we would not have made economic progress, if we had not intervened on very personal matters – who your neighbour is, how you live, the noise you make, how you spit, or what language you use. We decide what is right. Never mind what the people think.”

Only those familiar with the ideas discussed in The Impossible State would know how apt this quote is. And only a Singaporean would make this connection. Amidst the (completely reasonable) Euro-American references that underpin The Impossible State, this Lee Kuan Yew reference hits home, literally. I love the specificity that an in-person bookclub brings. Not only does specificity add dimension to one’s reading (and re-reading), it fixes in memory the experience of reading in time and space.

There is an interaction among orality (in conversations within a bookclub), manuscript (in handwritten margin notes) and print (in the printed book). This is the ecology of books. Through books, the reader interacts with his or her former self, interacts with authors, and interacts with other readers in the habitats that books give rise to. Books create the space for people to gather, to discuss, to appropriate, to define, to circulate. Books create culture and ways of knowing. Books and print may not be central to the structuring of public discourse, as it once was, but I am thankful that in bookclubs such as ours and in many others, small groups of people gather to partake, for themselves, in the intellectual effort to understand.