Two arguments
Most of what gets written about geographical arbitrage is written for Westerners who earn in a strong currency and want to live somewhere cheaper. I am working on a theory for small and medium-sized entrepreneurs from the Global South, who have to decide where to incorporate, where to bank, where to hire and where to sell, often while holding a passport that opens few doors.
Islam has to reform before this century is out. Nothing else will keep the Muslim world from becoming a burden on the world and on itself. The reform can only start from the model of Islam practiced in Indonesia and Malaysia, and push on from there.
I write both arguments out at length in Wajdi Archives, my newsletter, along with notes on politics.
Where I stand
I am North African by birth and secular by conviction, which does not stop me from caring what becomes of Islam.
North Africa was North African long before anyone called it Arab, and its identity is its own. We are not Arabs. Some readers will dislike that sentence, and what I wrote about Islam. I say what I believe anyway, under my own name.
For scholars
I consult for scholars, mostly on what happens after the book comes out: the launch, a newsletter, readers outside the discipline, invitations to speak. If your book is at that stage, write to me at contact@benwajdi.com.
Asides
The novelists I keep going back to are Michel Houellebecq and Günter Grass, two men who never minded making their own countries uncomfortable. I read the London Review of Books, Le Monde, Haaretz, The New York Times and The Hedgehog Review, with The New Inquiry from time to time.
I have loved watches since I was a boy, and I have a weakness for dials with Arabic numerals, the Western kind. Those digits reached Europe from North Africa and al-Andalus, in the shapes scribes there had given them,† so the weakness is partly taste and partly loyalty.
Leonardo of Pisa, called Fibonacci, learned them in his youth in Bugia, now Béjaïa in Algeria, where his father was a customs official for the merchants of Pisa. He made the case for them to Europe in his Liber Abaci of 1202.
Shorter notes and my photographs go up at Wajdi.blog.