thegoodfellas/blogset-br huggingface dataset:
"imperialism," and democracy -- i.e. for something that apologists want to deny that Islam actually represents. The Left, of course, has no respect for Islam as a religion or for its traditional religious or social values. All of these, from the subordination of women to the ferocious treatment of homosexuals, are actually anathema to elite political correctness. But opportunism trumps honesty, and this is as true for the Islamists as for Western Leftists. Both are pleased with the alliance, however Unholy to either ideology, as the old Arab saying (from the days of tribal vendettas) is well remembered -- "The enemy of my enemy is my friend."We see this alliance in various examples of what can only be called wishful thinking, if not outright delusion. Thus, Hollywood personality Rosie O'Donnell, a homosexual herself, drew considerable attention to her assertion that Christian fundmentalists are as bad as Islamic terrorists (along with claims that the 9/11 attack was an "inside job," a favorite trope of the Left). Since "just as bad" doesn't seem to square with the absence of Christian suicide bombers, mass terror attacks, or large popular organizations that preach Christian Holy War through terror and combat, O'Donnell seemed more than a little out of touch with reality. Not as extreme but just as revealing was the speculation by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg that the perpetrator of the May 2010 attempted Times Square bombing was, "Homegrown, maybe a mentally deranged person or someone with a political agenda that doesnt like the health care bill or something." It looked like Bloomberg was hoping that the bomber was one of his political enemies (i.e. opposed to socialized medicine), rather than the kind of Muslim radical that he turned out in fact to be. Bloomberg loudly supports the ground zero mosque. Meanwhile, the City of New York has attempted to prevent the rebuilding of the St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church, which was actually crushed by the falling South Tower of the World Trade Center on 9/11. Bloomberg has not spoken out on this issue.The courageous Ayaan Hirsi Ali grew up in Somalia, lived in Saudi Arabia and Kenya, and fled an arranged marriage, and Islam, to the Netherlands. There she worked with Theo van Gogh on the movie about women in Islam that got him assassinated on the street. She was elected to the Dutch parliament before her citizenship was revoked, probably because of the embarrassment she was causing to spineless Dutchmen like Ian Buruma (a Professor of "Democracy and Human Rights" at Bard College), who has publicly said that Ali is as much a fanatic (for freedom, human rights, and tolerance?) as the Islamists (for murder, terror, and intolerance?). If Buruma means that this is good, he has not done a good job of clarifying his intention.Similarly, Ali has been confronted in interviews with the proposition that crimes are committed as much by Christians as by Muslims. Since the common crimes of Christians are rarely framed in terms of a Holy War against infidels, Ali naturally found the proposition more puzzling than anything else;
of HistoryHome PageCopyright (c) 1996, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012 Kelley L. Ross, Ph.D. All Rights ReservedIslam, 622 AD-presentThe advent of Islam, with Arab armies coming out of the practical equivalent of nowhere, was unforeseen and unforeseeable. It dramatically and permanently altered the history of both the Middle East and the Mediterranean world. Persia was eliminated for many years as an independent political or cultural force, and the revival of Romania was ended, with the Empire reduced from about 3/4 of its original extent, as restored by Justinian, to little more than 1/4, all that was left by the reign of Leo III. THE PROPHETTHE H.IJRAH ERA,THE ISLAMICHISTORICAL ERA16 July 622 AD28 April 1998 AD = 1419 Anno HegiraeMuh.ammad,Peace Upon Him622-632The Arabs were the first Semitic speaking people since the Assyrians to dominate the Middle East. This broke up the cultural oecumene that had been created by the conquests of Alexander the Great and reinforced by Rome, and it reduced Western Europe for some time to a cultural and economic backwater. The poverty and ignorance of the "Dark Ages" was in fact a side show to the prosperity and learning of the Islamic Middle East. In European eyes, this made Islam the successor to what Persia had been for the Greeks, the great looming threat of Oriental Despotism, now including North Africa (where, after all, the earlier threat of Carthage had been) and with the added twist of religious Unbelief. This polarization, however, obscures the fact that Greece itself was essentially a Middle Eastern civilization, and that Islam itself had nothing else to build upon but a common heritage of Greece, Rome, Iran, Judaism, and Christianity. Although perhaps alienated cousins, Christendom and Islam could have nearly equal claim as standard bearers of "Western Civilization," and the revival of European learning after the 11th Century undeniably owed a heavy debt to what Islam had been doing with Classical philosophy and science in the previous centuries.Although the Arabs tend to be thought of as desert nomads, the origin of Muh.ammad was urban and mercantile. His home town of Mecca became increasingly hostile to his attacks on polytheism and idolatry, until he was invited to the nearby Yathrib as a mediator -- later marked as the beginning of the Islamic Era in 622. Soon the virtual ruler of Yathrib, which then became Madinatu-nNabi', the "City of the Prophet," or just Madina (Medina), Muh.ammad seemed to pose an even greater threat, and the Meccans resorted to military force. Since the results of this were inconclusive, and warfare was very bad for business, the Meccans decided that if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. Under a treaty, Muh.ammad returned to Mecca and smashed the idols. Since the House of God, the Ka'aba, then became the goal of universal Moslem pilgrimage, the Meccans ended up doing very well out of the transaction. Muh.ammad did not long survive this triumph and was buried in his house in Medina, around which the Prophet's Mosque was built.The Islamic Era accompanies the
Despite the seemingly half-hearted religious mission, the zeal of the Arab armies nevertheless permanently altered the linguistic and religious map of lands from the Hindu Kush to the Atlantic. Of the major territories won in this period, only Spain would later return to Christendom, while in our own time a precarious Jewish state has been established in Palestine. The principal disappointment, the failure to take Constantinople and overthrow Romania, had to wait 800 years for the Ottomans.The high water mark of the Omayyad realm was certainly under 'Abd al-Malik and al-Walid, as North Africa, Spain, Transoxania, and part of the Indus Valley fell to Islam. Permanent monuments to the period were 'Abd al-Malik's Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem and al-Walid's Omayyad Mosque in Damascus. Since both these buildings are now some 1300 years old, it is an oversight of many treatments of history that they are not more celebrated as monuments from a period that is otherwise considered an obscure part of the "Dark Ages." Never before had Damascus been, and never again would it be, the center of such power and civilization.In time, hostility against the Omayyads began to mount. The resentment of the non-Arabic second-class Moslems joined with the cause of the partisans of 'Ali, questioning the legitimacy of the regime and agitating against it. Also, later Omayyads sometimes seemed insufficiently interested in Islam. Desert hunting lodges contained images much more Roman than Arab in inspiration, and one Caliph is supposed to have shot a copy of the Qur'an to pieces out of resentment for its prohibition of wine.When the storm broke, it was with astonishing ferocity. The entire Omayyad clan was exterminated. Only one prince escaped, to Spain, where an Omayyad regime endured. Elsewhere, the rebellion succeeded completely, bringing to power distant cousins of the Omayyads, the descendants of Muh.ammad's uncle 'Abbas.All Moslems now became (more or less) equal, and when the capital shifted to Baghbad, the influence of Persian civilization began to predominate over Roman. The Arabs lost their preeminence, and soon it was the rare Caliph who was not the child of a Persian or Turkish mother. As the Abbasids later declined, Arabia itself slipped from their hold, to become once again a political, if not a religious, backwater. The Arabs had bestowed their religion and their language on the civilization of the Middle East, but true Arabian Arabs would be politically insignificant until the discovery of oil in the 20th century gave them a geopolitical status beyond what any other asset would warrant.The defeat of the Chinese at Talas was probably still a function of the momentum of Omayyad conquest. However, the overthrow of the Omayyads immediately deflated this momentum, and no further advantage was taken of the Chinese embarrassment -- at a time when the T'ang Dynasty had seen its best days and was on the verge of decline. Curiously, there seems to have been one long-term consequence of the battle of a very different sort. Reportedly, among the Chinese prisoners taken at Talas were artisans who knew how to make paper. What they
by the Mamluks or fell to the Mamluks after Mongol conquest. The line in H.amah (or H.amat) was a little more durable, only falling to the Mamluks in 1332; and the line in Diyar Bakr, with some interruptions, survived until conquest by the White Sheep Turks in the later 15th century. Only the lines in Egypt and Damascus are given in the table -- genealogies of the others are below.Although originally ruling from Egypt, Saladin spent the last years of his life fighting in Syria and Palestine and was buried in Damascus, next to the Omayyad Mosque. The Ayyubid family still survives in Lebanon and retains Saladin's sword. His tomb is intact and open to visitors of the Omayyad Mosque. It was even visited by Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany.Under Saladin, Cairo replaces Baghdad as the intellectual center of the Central Islamic lands. The great Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides (1135-1204) and the Sufi 'Ibn 'Arabi (1165-1240) both relocated from Spain to Egypt. This climate became the subject of the play Nathan der Weise (1779) by Gotthold Lessing (1729-1781). Saladin's toleration, however, had its limits, since he executed another Sufi, Suhrawardi (1153-1191) for heterodoxy -- less of a danger for Islamic mystics than for Christian, but still a problem.The genealogy of the Ayyubids that follows is from The New Islamic Dynasties by Clifford Edmund Bosworth [Edinburgh University Press, 1996, pp.70-73] and A History of the Crusades, Volume III, The Kingdom of Acre and the Later Crusades by Steven Runciman [Cambridge University Press, 1951, 1993, p.532]. Since Bosworth simply gives names, and the genealogy there must be reconstructed from the patronymics, about which there are minor but confusing variations, some uncertainties occur. Some of these can be confirmed or corrected with Runciman's chart, which otherwise is innocent of dates and of diacritics for Arabic. The chart below includes the Ayyubid lines for Aleppo and H.ims. (Homs) that are not included in the table above. A larger popup table also includes the lines of H.amah, Yaman (Yemen), and Diyar Bakr. The continuation of the Ayyubids in Diyar Bakr under the Mongols, until annexation by the White Sheep Turks, is covered in a separate popup. Diyarbakir is today a city in Turkey, on the upper Tigris near where the Tigris and Euphrates approach each other before diverging courses. South of this, the broad area between the rivers came to be called the Nahrain, the "Two Rivers," or the Jazira, the "Island." Today, the northern part lies in Turkey and the southern part in Syria. A corner of it lies in Iraq northwest of Mosul. Edessa, long the principal city of the area and a Crusader County, is now the city of Urfa in Turkey. It is not clear from the sources who actually used the title Sult.an. I have restricted it to the rulers in Egypt and Damascus. Other rulers are simply "Lords," except Yemen, whose ruler Rucimen calls "King." As a matter of fact, every single one of these sovereigns employs the title al-Malik, i.e. "the King" -- so I have at least used it
far as Indonesia. After a delay of some years, and not until after the death of Suleiman, an Ottoman fleet of 19 ships sailed from Egypt. Only two ships reached Acheh, however, the rest having been diverted to bolster Ottoman authority in Yemen. The aid finally delivered to Acheh was thus minimal and, as it happened, ineffective.While it is tempting now to think of Indonesia as a unified realm, not only were there multiple sovereignties in earlier days, but their subjugation by the Dutch was a process that took some time. Thus, the last Sult.an of Acheh held out for many years, and the Dutch conquest was not complete until 1903. We see much the same process in Bali, where Dutch conquest was not complete until 1906, amid scenes of great slaughter, something like 3600 Balinese falling.Acheh entered the news late in 2004 with a great earthquake, magnitude 9.0, the largest on Earth in forty years, off the coast of Sumatra. This was bad enough, but the tsunami, , generated by the earthquake inundated coasts as far away as Sri Lanka and Thailand. The death toll overall is estimated up to 200,000 people.We are thus unpleasantly reminded of the geological forces at work under Indonesia, where many great earthquakes and some of the largest volcanic eruptions in the geological record have occurred. For instance, the eruption of Mt. Tambora in 1815 put so much material into the atmosphere that it darkened the sky world wide and produced "the year without summer" in 1816. Not as large but better known was the eruption of Karakatoa (Krakatau, between Java and Sumatra) in 1883. This blew away the small island of Karakatoa itself, with a blast that was actually heard as far as 1000 miles away. There have been few such eruptions anywhere in historical times. Ice cores show a spike of volcanic gasses for 535 AD. It is not known if this was one of the Indonesian volcanoes, but they are the best candidates. It may even have been Karakatoa. It would have been an eruption as large or larger than Tambora. It did have some serious historical consequences. There is much comment in European records of the time about the dim sunlight of 536 AD and the failure of crops thereafter. The cooling may have precipitated the plague that arrived in Egypt in 541. The "Dark Ages Cooling" was thus another heavy blow against the diminishing Roman Empire.Prehistorically, Sumatra may have been the place of the largest volcanic eruption in the history of the human species. When Mt. Toba erupted 74,000 years ago, it was perhaps 10,000 times the size of the Mt. St. Helens eruption in 1980. This could have caused a 5o Celsius (9o Fahrenheit) global drop in temperature around the world. The "year without summer" might have become months or years without summer. There is some evidence that this caused a "genetic bottleneck" in human evolution, which means a large portion of human beings may have died. This was before the advent of fully modern humans, about 30,000 years ago;
to a large extent, and cannot be reconciled with any clarity." Thus, he simply gives two different lists for Saba'. They are presented side by side here. They both do end with the same king, Ilasharah Yahdub, but one dates him close to the beginning of the Christian Era, the other a good century later. This is like the degree of uncertainty and variation that one gets with thinly historical material like that of nearby early Ethiopia or even the (contemporary and equally remote) Greek Kingdom of Bactria. It is also noteworthy that Old South Arabic did not write vowels. Genuine Sabaean texts are without vowels. The names of the kings given in these lists thus cannot have been derived directly from Yemeni epigraphy or annals. I am left wondering how much of Sabaean history actually can be reconstructed from contemporary sources, and how much of this derives from later texts and legends. Although Hoyland mentions the latter, he does not discuss the nature of their use or value.The legends, indeed, extend to the Old Testament. The kingdom of Saba' is the Biblical Sheba. Here the reign of Solomon is dated 970-931 BC. This antedates the beginning of either list here for Saba', and all the reasonable reigns even for at-Tababi'a -- though Balkis is the candidate for the Biblical "Queen of Sheba." Hoyland suspects that the reference to Sheba "may only have been slipped in at a later date" [p.39]. It was long doubtful that developed states even existed in that era; but Hoyland says that now it seems more likely that things were happening by Solomon's 10th century, though we don't have texts appearing until the 8th. The rulers of Saba' were kings (mlk, Arabic malik) or "unifiers" (mkrb, Arabized rendering mukarrib). It is not clear what the relationship was between these titles, and the mukarribs are often regarded as early priest-kings or as later "emperors." There are a couple of female rulers given in the lists, so it is conceivable that there was a Queen of Sheba as in the Biblical story. Her visit to Jerusalem, of course, is also part of Ethiopian legend, since her son by Solomon is supposed to have been Menelik, the founder of the Abyssinian state. There is little doubt that these stories, whatever their historicity, reflect the existence and development, even if in later periods, of sophisticated states in South Arabia and adjacent Africa.The early development of Saba' and the other states in the area was on the inland slopes of the mountains. The wadi dammed at Ma'rib thus flows into a desert basin; and the city of Ma'rib itself, capital of the Sabaeans, is at the foot of the mountains. Development occurred in this way because the caravan routes headed up inland. Even from later history it is noteworthy that Mecca, a caravan center itself, is well in from the coast. In three voyages between 117 and 109 BC, however, Eudoxus of Cyzicus is supposed to have learned how to use the monsoons to sail all the way from (Ptolemaic) Egypt to
locations in the city was a large square downtown. It was a transportation hub. Busses and taxis left from there for Damascus and elsewhere. The place itself was commonly called the "Bourj," which means "tower." There was no tower, but evidently there had been, and the name had stuck. The official name was the "Places des Martyrs," which at the time seemed to be about something else equally non-existent, since my fellow students and I could not imagine what kind of "martyrs" there ever could have been in Lebanese history. As it turned out, there were indeed martyrs, but it was not just in Lebanese history. On August 21, 1915, eleven suspected Arab nationalist leaders were hung on that very site in Beirut, oddly called "Liberty Square" at the time, by the Turkish military authorities, under Jemal Pasha. On May 6, 1916, the Turks executed twenty-one others, seven in Damascus and fourteen in Beirut. On hearing the news of the latter, Prince Fays.al, son of the Sharif H.usayn of Mecca, who was visiting near Damascus, is supposed to have thrown down his headress and exclaimed, "Death has become sweet, Oh Arabs!" Fays.al returned to Mecca, and the Arab Revolt against the Turks, long in preparation by Fays.al's father, commenced on the 5th of June.Prince Fays.al and the Sharif H.usayn were Hashemites, i.e. were supposed to be descendants of the Prophet Muh.ammad. At right is the complete genealogy of this descent, as reported by the family itself. I have derived this from a curious source, a book called A Prince of Arabia, the Amir Shereef Ali Haider, by George Stitt [George Allen & Unwin, London, 1948 -- this is from the personal historical library of my friend Tom Dunlap]. Ali Haider was from the senior or Zaidi branch of the Hashemite family, who had supplied most of the Amirs or Sharifs of Mecca until 1882, when the junior or 'Awni branch took over. When H.usayn revolted against the Turks in 1916, Ali Haider was appointed in his place by the Ottoman Sultan. Ali Haider was never able to go to Mecca and exercised no real authority under the Turks. His son did end up marrying the granddaughter of the Ottoman Sultan Murad V (1876). Histories of the period or the area rarely mention him. Unfortunately, the book about him from 1948 uses Anglicized versions of the Arabic names. I have not supplied the proper transcriptions for all the names. Other information here is from Clifford Edmund Bosworth, The New Islamic Dynasties [Edinburgh University Press, 1996], and from George Antonius, The Arab Awakening [1946, Capricorn Books, New York, 1965]. The romance of the Arab Revolt, with Lawrence of Arabia and all, and its success in sweeping all the way to Damascus, as the British advanced into Palestine, came to be fully balanced by bitterness at the British betrayal of assurances for Arab independence after the war. The British had made promises elsewhere, to the French and to the Zionists, and not a lot of care had been taken in the desperate days of the