Mr. Wadood (AGI23) wins the Confluence award!
Congratulations to current Annapolis GI student, Mr. Abdullah Wadood, who recently won the Confluence award for excellence in creative writing. Below, he answers a few questions about his experiences with writing and St. Johns.
What brought you to St. Johns and where are you in the program?
Currently, I am in my second semester. A good friend suggested I apply to St. John's. He said I would be a good fit. I thought SJC would just be a good place to find like-minded people. It was the only school I applied to, the only school I really wanted to go to.
What are some of your main interests or what do you enjoy about studying at St. John's?
I'm interested in occultism and Hellenistic-Islamic thought insofar as they are guides in answering the question "How can I live the best life for me?"
It's disappointing to me how as Westerners we don't appreciate the Islamic world as a genuine claimant to the inheritance of Rome. I say this as someone who very much feels between worlds. For example, too often we make lazy comparisons with contemporary political developments and "sharia law". It's silly since "sharia law" is a legal tradition just as vile and splendid as any other legal tradition, with as much depth, challenges, and diversity of opinion. The other thing I've noticed is that we tend to recognize Islamic thought only insofar as it has influenced Western European thought, e.g. optics, medicine, geometry, Thomas Aquinas.
Again, I'm interested in the question and experience of how to live the best life for me. What I have found especially beautiful in the Hellenistic-Islamic space is how its thinkers acknowledge their indebtness to the past and see themselves as continuing a project, revising and improving on it. In their works, they take their time, they meander, there's a cool confidence in the way they write. And the simplicity of their presentation of ideas goes to show how intelligent they are. You can tell just how much they love the God and human beings. I feel there's so much I can go on about, like how I think the way they conducted themselves maps on to how Freud describes the psyche integrating and maturing into itself. But that seems enough for now.
How has St. Johns influenced your interest in writing?
St. John's has exposed me to people who I otherwise wouldn't consider paying attention to, but I loved to write long before I came to St. John's.
How did you become interested in writing?
I started to write seriously and consistently by age 15 or so. I make sure to write about one thousand words a day. What inspired "Ellipses" was my encounter with Khalil Gibran's "The Madman, his Parables and Poems" about three or four years ago. I thought I could do better than Gibran, and without Gibran's oppressive moralism getting in the way of the expression of an idea or experience.
What about Khalil Gibram’s work did you want to preserve despite the moralism?
I don't think you can really appreciate any work without understanding the author or having a sense of the author's life. Writing is often an intensely private activity, an expression of who one is. To view a text by itself, in my opinion, is to isolate it from the real experiences that formed it. So years ago I read many, many books on Gibran's life. And I really appreciate how intensely personal Gibran's works are, even if they don't seem so personal at first. I identify with Gibran's struggles. It's just my opinion that he gets in the way of himself too much, and what's left behind is an immature sentimentalism of a man who struggles to control his lofty expectations about the world, and then he's very disappointed when those lofty expectations aren't met. His most famous work "The Prophet" is up there with the Bible and Shakespeare's works as best-sellers. I see copies piled up in used bookstores all the time.
Here's the link to Mr. Wadood’s award-winning work:
