South Asian Islamicate manuscripts will frequently have “yā kabīkaj” inscribed on their first page. Kabīkaj was the king of the cockroaches. It was hoped that, out of respect for their king, cockroaches would spare the book.
Mir Wokewala
6,406 posts
Mir Wokewala
@mirchond
Associate Professor | Department of Occidental Languages & Cultures at NEOM University
NEOM
Joined September 2018
- My favorite story about Chinese hajjis is the one in which two groups of Muslims, one affiliated with the Chinese Nationalists and the other with Japan’s embassy to Saudi Arabia, set aside their stark differences and celebrate Eid al-Adha together in Mecca.
there was a Chinatown in 19th century Mecca - Finished this book. It's a comparative history of the Ottoman and Mughal Empires from the 16th to early 18th centuries.
- Umayyad envoys sent to Tang China in 713 refused to kowtow to the emperor, saying they “prostrate only to God,” which caused some controversy at the Chinese court. Over a millennium later, an embassy sent by Ahmad Shah Durrani caused offence at the Qing court for the same reason.
- The British Indian army was disproportionally made up of peoples like the Sikhs, Punjabi Muslims, Pashtuns/Pathans, and Gurkhas—groups that are mostly hostile or ambivalent towards modern India (let alone Hindu nationalism).To celebrate the liberation of Haifa from the Ottomans by Indian forces I did a special, interpretive dance outside the Beit Hagafen Arab-Jewish cultural centre. The highly artistic fluid movements represent the galloping charge of Indian cavalry & the fleeing of the Turks
00:00 - Salafi jihadism is like a cancer or autoimmune disease in the Muslim body politic.The Islamic State claims last night's attack in Oman. Their first ever there.
- Finished this book about conversion to Islam in the Middle Volga region in late imperial Russia.
- An underappreciated fact is that Indians were settling on the African mainland under the auspices of imperial Oman before the arrival of European empires. Musa Mzuri, “Handsome Moses,” a Gujarati Khoja, helped found the settlement of Kazeh (🇹🇿), for example.
They are all Ugandan Indians (Gujaratis) btw - The New Atheists (e.g., Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris) were more critical of Islam than Christianity. According to a Pew Research Center study from 2014, American atheists had more positive views of Catholicism than Islam.
- The number of Palestinians killed by Israel is probably higher than the number of Jews killed by all the caliphates, sultanates, and amirates of the past 1,400 years.
- I know a Pakistani on here who became a fan of BAP, converted to Christianity, and developed an intense hatred of Haitians.
- Hindutva’s foremost ideologue, Savarkar, also had a positive take on America’s Jim Crow laws. He told an American journalist that “the position of your Negroes” was a model for how India should treat its Muslims.
As an entirely value neutral observation, Hitler was directly inspired by American racial segregation laws, both republished the anti-semitic pamphlets of Henry Ford and copied his industry practices, loved Western films & met with then-mainstream writers like Lothrop Stoddard.
