We are a book of signs. We are also living in a book of signs. We must learn how to read it.

"Read, in the name of Thy Lord who Create Thee, from a clot (of Blood)."

This foundational and genealogic Quranic verse suggests the importance of reading. We can interpret this as reading being more than an act of understanding; that reading is an act of knowing, naming, de-constructing, and reconstructing the world.

What are we to read in our lifetime? How are we to live a life that has been pre-determined by the ideological framework that awaits us at the point of departure from that clot of blood?

"Man, in a word, has no nature . . . what he has is history," said the Spanish thinker Ortega y Gassett.

" Cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore I exist)," said the French mathematician Rene Descartes.

The Western tradition suggests that circumstances and historical-materialism create the conditions of human existence. This seems to suggest to the idea that we must use our mental capacities to master our environment and the possibilities that await us, provided that we recognise the structures of oppression we are in.