West Asian ancestry in South Asian Muslims
Recently a Bohra Patel emailed me to express some exasperation that people are quoting me saying that the ancestry of South Asian Muslims is almost all from Hindus (or non-Muslims). Basically, I say things like this “99% of the ancestry of South Asian Muslims is indigenous.” This means some people are going to be 75% …
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Demography is destiny, Inshallah
I just finished doing a quick edit of an interview by some of my fellow Brown Punditeers with some fellows at the Middle East Forum (I posted for Patrons, should be live on the podcast in a few days). Listening I felt like I was being thrown back to 2005. All the talk about Islamism, […]
Islam on the fringes
Decided to start reading India in the Persianate Age: 1000–1765. It’s a fast and easy read (and, it’s an affordable book for a nonspecialist like me who only spends $100 or more on genetics texts). I jumped ahead in a few passages, which seem to be adaptations from papers I’ve read from the author before. …
Cancel Muhammad?
The person above is a professor at a “Research 1” university. He clearly does not know that Cato was a Plebian. That he held the position of Tribune of the Plebs, which existed to allow for Plebian political rights within the Roman system when Patricians were dominant. As it is, decades before Cato the Younger’s […]
The Abbasid invention of Islam
Since many readers of this weblog have rather naive views of Islam and its interaction with the Indian subcontinent, I thought they might appreciate my post on my other weblog, The Myth Of Arabian Paganism, And The Jewish-Christian Origins Of The Umayyads. It wasn’t emphasized in the piece, but I will make it clear here: …
The myth of Arabian paganism, and the Jewish-Christian origins of the Umayyads
Ibn al-Kalbi’s ‘Book of Idols’ depicts 6th c. Arabia (excluding Yemen) as dominated by paganism. But what do the Arabic inscriptions of 6th century Arabia tell us? day 2 ~AA @safaitic pic.twitter.com/HkcleuU88g — Tweeting Historians (@Tweetistorian) April 28, 2020 Today on Twitter there was something interesting and edifying posted. The account above reported the finding […]
Years of Rice and Lentils
Going back twenty years I have been fascinated by “alternative history” science fiction. This is often termed “Uchronia.” If you want to explore this genre, I suggest the Uchronia website. Probably the biggest breakout into “mainstream” science fiction of this sort of work is Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Years of Rice and Salt. Here the …
Islam is not a race
Over the past generation or so there has been a meme, “Africa Is Not a Country”, which reflects the reality that many well-meaning people don’t know much about Africa, to the point where they confuse a diverse continent for a country. There is a similar reflex though which to me is redolent of the same …
How Islam’s greatness redounds to Indian religion
Reading a paper on Yemen made me realize something that is quite bizarre upon reflection: the greater the evidence of Islam’s transformative power, the greater the miracle and robustness of Indian religion in the face of its expansion. To me, Islam’s demographic impact is clear when it comes to Sub-Saharan African ancestry. Though some of …
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The Ummah for we, but not for thee
How geopolitics enabled India’s gambit in Kashmir: “Saudi Arabia has traditionally been close to Pakistan, but over the past several decades India and Pakistan have diverged economically to where India’s economy is now about eight times larger than Pakistan’s,” he says. “The Saudis can’t ignore that” for the sake of Kashmir. The philosopher of science …
Genetic genealogy and the origins of Islam
The standard narrative that you read in the history books, as passed down through Islamic tradition and historiography, is that in the first decades of the 7th-century the religion of Islam was promulgated by Muhammad and his followers from the cities of Medina and Mecca. Muhammad brought the tribes and peoples of the Arabian peninsula […]
The myth of the primitive Arab culture
The author of The Map of Knowledge freely admits that her education was in Classics, so it was remiss in “non-Western” history. These gaps show up in the text of her book. For example: It helped that Sassanian culture was one of the most sophisticated and impressive on earth, and that Arab culture was young […]
You really can’t talk about shariah in 20 minutes
Vox‘s Worldly is a short (less than 30 minute) podcast on world-affairs. I listen to it because American politics is boring, and it’s not a major timesink. But, it’s brevity is something that has worried me, since this is not a long period of time, and it’s hard to address things in a subtle manner […]
Between Tariq and Columbus
I have long followed Brian Catlos’ more academic works, so I was excited to read Kingdoms of Faith: A New History of Islamic Spain. Aside from some strange contemporary allusions, this is a good introductory book. If you are curious about more detail, the author has written good monographs. The reason that this work is …
The blood on brown hands is a legacy of all of history
Yesterday I put up a tweet which went a bit viral (I won’t embed since it has a vulgarity). It was the result of my frustration with a very liberal Indian American who was using unfortunate tensions in the Indian subcontinent to attack “white supremacy.” My frustration was due to the reality that a major […]
Salman Rushdie and me, 20 years on
Readers of this weblog know that I have a peculiar relationship to the Salman Rushdie controversy in the late 1980s. When I first heard the name “Salman Rushdie” and book called The Satanic Verses I was by chance not in the United States. I…
Criticizing Islam is turned into “hate speech” on Facebook
Obviously, this isn’t happening to everyone who criticizes Islam. But someone like Abdullah Sameer is getting popular, and he’s a pretty attractive face for apostasy from Islam. He was until recently a rather conservative Muslim himself. He’s the person you need to shut up if you want to retain Muslims. As he notes manipulating Facebook […]
The creation of Islam in Late Antiquity
Periodically people ask me my opinion of Tom Holland’s In the Shadow of the Sword: The Birth of Islam and the Rise of the Global Arab Empire. I don’t have an opinion because I haven’t read it. Many years ago I took an interest in the topic of Islamic revisionism, and from what I can […]
Muslims have always known how weird Saudi Arabia is
I’m not a big fan of Hasan Minhaj’s “Millennial smug” style of comedy. What it really reminds me is Brad Stine’s “Christian comedy.” It’s aimed toward ingroups and comes off as tone-deaf and stupid to outgroups. So you know what you’re getting into. That being said, as someone who is Muslim Minhaj has always “gotten” … Continue reading “Muslims have always known how weird Saudi Arabia is”
Muslims are not a People of the Book
Recently I became a patron of the Secular Jihadists podcast. Ten years ago this wouldn’t be a big deal, but as a “grown-up” with three kids I’m much more careful to where I expend my discretionary income. So take that as a stronger endorsement than usual. I think Secular Jihadists is offering a nonsubstitutable good […]