As-salaamu alaykum and ahlan wa sahlan. My name’s Yakoub Islam and I be a Muslim Anarchist. The Mapmaker, this work, is part of the final act of resistance. Resisting what? -- you may ask. Islamist art such as this is celebrates the infinite possibilities of rebellion against the Imperium and neoliberal catastrophe. Call it a continuation – just don’t mistake this for a beginning, plus I don’t want to hear splat about duodecimal narrative or Chekhov's scimitar or any of your nasalised literary cobblers. What I have here is a spoon of coke shoved up the president’s sneck live on l’vision. That’s right: fuck power! Second, yer ars might not know it, but there’s a sizzling burger-meat penis inserted right up yer tush, whoops! Yessir!! You have been created, Mister ‘n’ Missis Wiggly Quigly, so that we merry cunts might go forth and trade freely.

As a rule, I’m against nihilism and cynicism as much as I’m against commercialization and public fornication (piss off, hippy). This aint no political tract, not some postmodern soufflé nor nuffink you can bludgeon with your label. Sometimes, I like to rhyme, like Aunty Mabel. I also like the word ‘expedition’, although it does have connotations of colonial acquisition, I grant you. That worries me. No one desires to be seen playing Racist Empires, like Mr. Rochester humping and dumping de mad nigger. So I thought, what if I make my expedition back to front, sort of? Let’s trip back to the 12th century, when Europe was just some grubby little crusading backwater with nice scenery, and there accompany famous geographer al-Idrisi on a trip from Palermo to old Bristol. Did he ever make such a journey? He might’ve visited England at some point, yes, and he literally put England on the map. So why not?

Today is also the day of my readmission to the Academy of Transchronal Autoethnography as a research student. Having undergone the final Adaptive Rorschach Neuroimaging (ARN) Test, I arrive on campus naked, relaxed, mildly elated, humming my way along softly torchlit corridors decorated with the faint waft of sweet cooking herbs, a muffled drill snoring in the city distance. No need for map or timetable. I simply wish for somewhere, arrive when ready. From the opposite direction, a pair of white boots and young woman’s bare legs pad softly past my right side. She cannot see me, but the draft from her trail leaves me desiring private quarters.

My student room is a perfect sphere, diameter around 10 metres, and like some yarked outside-in miniature planet, everywhere I walk is right-way up. Other than a few toy windows, the sphere is sealed. In order to get inside, find a long wide dark-green Egyptian rug bundled up with jute string. Remove the tie, lay the rug out flat as best you can, then lie down along the shortest edge and wrap yourself inside. Roll it round and round yourself until the light is gone and you begin to experience a sense of disorientation. At this point, the rug unspools, rolling you out like Cleopatra before Caesar. Theoretically, möbius clowns entering the sphere are at risk of tumbling over and over in perpetual motion, wherein neo-insectoid undergraduates are authorised to summon the academy’s accommodation gamekeeper.

The sphere is an empathic sentient, responding to my every emotion, need and desire better than I can. Wishing to study, a swivel chair stumbles upwards like a figure tangled under a sheet; the desk manifests itself more mechanically, quickly inflating out of the room’s skin like vacuum injected molding. Busting for a shit, ceramic wraps itself snugly around my lower half, switching smoothly from turd receptacle to bidet to Japanese-style fan dryer. Back at my Muslim Anarchist desk, which inexplicably rocks slightly as if it had one leg shorter, we dance and begin. The anti-bedtime book for today is… Simon Critchley’s Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance (2008, Verso Books).

Outside, away from the illusory stasis and silence, my sphere fills the lantern room of a harbour lighthouse, rotating slowly, illuminating the empty night sea. Next to the tower is the Freshers’ Map, a public house come hotel cottaging a dozen young men and women from as many former colonial nations, the progeny of elites wooed by the academy’s reputation for excellence in cartography. This latest cohort have arrived only to discover its libraries’ maps are wrong in almost every respect. A discussion ensues.

“We should start from scratch.”
“The old maps have been internalised by millions. A corrective is essential.”
“Surely a map is either accurate or inaccurate? We should start anew, and record the truth for all to see -- nothing more. That is our sole duty as mapmakers.”
“No, no. All maps are interpretations.”
“Exactly. Experience is hermeneutic. In this context, so-called objective reality is better conceptualised as intersubjective.”
“How can we construct a just map under the tyranny of the academy’s imperial gaze?”
“In other words, we can’t even agree how to begin!”
“We could investigate how the old maps came to be made in the first place…”

The students agree to make the latter premise their starting point – all except Talib, who withdraws after gaining a place at Exeter College, Oxford, where he reads PPE and is elected President of the Union, eventually pursuing a career as a stupid left-wing cunt.

Critchley begins his essay with an invocation of philosophy as “defined by militant resistance to nihilism”, but rather than a dead God, my despair is derived from a failure to radically transform myself into a transcendental ethical being. Perhaps I am the tragic outcome of what Critchley calls Promethean myths, or what Nietzsche called “European Buddhism”, born of a failure to understand my all too human limitations. At any rate, I am looking to his text for some kind of intellectual platform upon which to construct a CBT for the soul, albeit a Muslimesque one. Anything to resist, even reverse, the corrosive and incorrigible solipsism that bedevils Muslim dilettantism in Europe, such as I am. Well, almost anything.

My postgraduate research entails undertaking a field review of a series of texts, under the foresight of the thesis: “What does Islam mean to me? An Autoethnographic Review.” It’s an exciting prospect. The fieldwork office has the resources to post me almost anywhere, anytime. All placements have one common factor: they are journeys. I could find myself following in the hominem footsteps of Laetoli; or among the first to cross the Baring Strait; or travelling through India beside Ibn Battuta; or even aboard a freight train rolling up to the gates of Auschwitz. But these are unlikely allocations. The academy has been assiduous in winnowing out thrill-seekers ever since Jesus nearly got bum fucked at Capernaum. Those in search of the visceral intoxication of wonder or horror are now offered euthanasia. Selection criteria for serious students is determined solely by the demands of the thesis. And on that basis, I have requested al-Idrisi.