#and how the medieval islamic world was like - so much more advanced than it's western counterpart it's hilarious how ppl mischaracterize it | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

qqueenofhades · 4 years

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I really don’t want to start a discourse™, but I want you to know that I really appreciate how you write joe and Nicky in deo volente. So many of the fics I’ve read have placed yusef in the role of more sexually experienced and less devoted to god, while Nicky is depicted as an inexperienced and virginal priest/knight/monk and so forth and so on. Your narrative of joe out there rescuing people and being faithful, while Nicky looks back on his life of gambling and pleasures of the flesh ...(1/?)

Not to say that there’s anything wrong with either, obviously. I love guilty priest Nicky and repressed Nicky and p much every Nicky. But in the vast array of fics out there, it’s rare to see the opposite. Not that you’re working in a binary morally good/religious vs. not way. Your writing in the fic is really subtle and and your characterizations reveal a lot of depth. I just think it’s cool to see Nicky, average second son of a duke, drinking and gambling and feeling terribly guilty (2/?)

Guilty about the crusades and the fucking horror of crusade 1 without being excessively devout. Just an average dude. Not some paragon of virtue (btw, I’m on chapter 2 of the fic, so I don’t know how much your characterization changes moving forward. You have a lovely ability to combine your incredible knowledge of history, your beautiful writing, and these intimate details of the characters that make them fit— fit the canon and fit the history. (3/? Shit I’m sorry this had gotten way too long)

I enjoy the way you’ve really inserted us into the quotidian aspect of history. Aaaaaanyway— the discourse that I was afraid of: I think that a lot of fans of the movie that are generating fan content (tysfm to all of you beauties, btw 🙏🙏♥️) are westerners (which is a whole nother kettle of fish) and that carries a sort of ignorance about the Muslim world in the Middle Ages and this desire to simplify Europe as “Christian” “fighters for faith” etc. (4/? Fuuuuck. One(??) more)

And when we do that, we end up as characterizing the brown people as “not that”. The thing I love about this fandom is that people are definitely down on the crusades. I feel like all the fic I’ve read has been particularly negative about those wars, but the thing I love about your fic is that you don’t just say war is bad because people died and it was despicable and this pious white dude says so and this one brown person agrees. (5/6, I see the end in sight I swear it)

Instead you give us a larger cast of Muslims and Arabs and really flesh them out and give them opinions and different interpretations of faith, and I really appreciate that. The crusades were terrible, and we know this because these regular dudes who struggle with their different faiths and lives say so. And I just. I think that’s really great. Also, I fucking love yusef’s mom. I feel like more people would be accepting of the gift in this fashion and I think she’s lovely and (god damn it 6/7)

Aaaaaaaand. The bit where yusef returns and she’s already gone breaks my fucking heart. Also the moment where he’s like “I’m not sure about Abraham’s god, but my mothers god is worth my faith”?? Just really fucking great. So. Excellent fic. Excellent characters. Excellent not-being-accidentally-biased-towards-white-Christians. That is what I came here to say. Thank you so much for your amazing stories. I love them and I love history. Sorry about the rambling. idek how I wrote so much. (7/7)

Epilogue: tl;dr: you’re great.

Oh man! What a huge and thoughtful comment (which will in turn provoke a long-ass response from me, so…) I absolutely agree that no matter what fandom, I don’t do Discourse TM; I just sit in my bubble and stay in my lane and do my own thing and create content I enjoy. And I don’t even think this is that so much as just… general commentary on character and background? So obviously all of this should be read as my own personal experience and choices in writing DVLA, and that alone. I really appreciate you for saying that you love a wide range of fan creators/fanworks and you’re not placing one over another, you understand that fans have diverse ranges of backgrounds/experience with history and other cultures when they create content, and that’s not the same for everyone. So I just think that’s a great and respectful way to start things off.

First, as a professional historian who has written a literal PhD thesis on the crusades, I absolutely understand that many people (and regular fans) will not have the same privilege/education/perspective that I do, and that’s fine! They should not be expected to get multiple advanced degrees to enjoy a Netflix movie! But since I DO have that background, and since I’ve been working on the intellectual genealogy of the crusades (and the associated Christian/Muslim component, whether racially or religiously) since I was a master’s student, I have a lot of academic training and personal feelings that inform how I write these characters. Aside from my research on all this, my sister lives in an Islamic country and her boyfriend is a Muslim man; I’ve known a lot of Muslims and Middle Easterners; and especially with the current political climate of Islamophobia and the reckoning with racism whether in reality or fandom, I have been thinking about all this a lot, and my impact on such.

Basically: I love Nicky dearly, but I ADORE Joe, and as such, I’m protective of him and certainly very mindful of how I write him. Especially when the obvious default for westerners in general, fandom-related or otherwise, is to write what you are familiar with (i.e. the European Christian white character) and be either less comfortable or less confident or sometimes less thoughtful about his opposing number. I have at times tangentially stumbled across takes on Joe that turn me into the “eeeeeeeh” emoji or Dubious Chrissy Teigen, but I honestly couldn’t tell you anything else about them because I was like, “nope not for me” and went elsewhere rather than do Discourse (which is pretty much a waste of time everywhere and always makes people feel bad). This is why I’m always selective about my fan content, but especially so with this ship, because I have SO much field-specific knowledge that I just have to make what I like and which suits my personal tastes. So that is what I do.

Obviously, there’s a troublesome history with the trope of “sexually liberate brown person seduces virginal white character into a world of Fleshly Decadence,” whether from the medieval correlation of “sodomite” and “Saracen,” or the nineteenth-century Orientalist depictions of the East as a land variously childishly simplistic, societally backward, darkly mysterious and Exotic, or “decadent” (read: code for sexually unlike Western Europe, including the spectrum of queer acts). So when I was writing DVLA, I absolutely did not want to do that and it’s not to my taste, but I’m not going to whip out a red pen on someone else writing a story that broadly follows those parameters (because as I said, I stay in my lane and don’t see it anyway). Joe to me is just such an intensely complex and lovely Muslim character that that’s the only way I feel like I can honestly write him, and I absolutely love that about him. So yeah, any depiction of hypersexualizing him or making him only available for the sexual use and education of the white character(s) is just... mmm, not for me.

For example, I stressed over whether it was appropriate to move his origin from “somewhere in the Maghreb” to Cairo specifically, since Egypt, while it IS in North Africa, is not technically part of the Maghreb. I realize that Marwan Kenzari’s family is Tunisian and that’s probably why they chose it, to honor the actor’s heritage, but on the flip side… “al-Kaysani” is also a specifically Ismai’li Shia name (it’s the name of a branch of it) and the Fatimids (the ruling dynasty in Jerusalem at the time of the First Crusade) were well-known for being the only Ismai’li Shia caliphate. (This is why the Shi’ites still ancestrally dislike Saladin for overthrowing it in 1174, even if Saladin is a huge hero to the rest of the Islamic world.) Plus I really wanted to use medieval Cairo as Joe’s homeland, and it just made more sense for an Ismai’li Shia Fatimid from Cairo (i.e. the actual Muslim denomination and caliphate that controlled Jerusalem) to be defending the Holy City because it was personal for him, rather than a Sunni Zirid from Ifriqiya just kind of turning up there. Especially due to the intense fragmentation and disorganization in the Islamic world at the time of the First Crusade (which was a big part of the reason it succeeded) and since the Zirids were a breakaway group from the Fatimids and therefore not very likely to be militarily allied with them. As with my personal gripes about Nicky being a priest, I decided to make that change because I felt, as a historian, that it made more sense for the character. But I SUPER recognize it as my own choices and tweaks, and obviously I’m not about to complain at anyone for writing what’s in graphic novel/bonus content canon!

That ties, however, into the fact that Nicky has a clearly defined city/region of origin (Genoa, which has a distinct history, culture, and tradition of crusading) and Joe is just said to be from “the Maghreb” which…. is obviously huge. (I.e. anywhere in North Africa west of Egypt all the way to Morocco.) And this isn’t a fandom thing, but from the official creators/writers of the comics and the movie. And I’m over here like: okay, which country? Which city? Which denomination of Islam? You’ve given him a Shia name but then point him to an origin in Sunni Ifriqiya. If he’s from there, why has he gone thousands of miles to Jerusalem in the middle of a dangerous war to help his religious/political rivals defend their territory? Just because he’s nice? Because it was an accident? Why is his motivation or reason for being there any less defined or any less religious (inasmuch as DVLA Nicky’s motive for being on the First Crusade is religious at all, which is not very) than the white character’s? In a sense, the Christians are the ones who have to work a lot harder to justify their presence in the Middle East in the eleventh century at all: the First Crusade was a specifically military and offensive invasion launched at the direct behest of the leader of the Western Roman church (Pope Urban II.) So the idea that they’re “fighting for the faith” or defending it bravely is…

Eeeeh. (Insert Dubious Chrissy Teigen.)

But of course, nobody teaches medieval history to anyone in America (except for Bad Game of Thrones History Tee Em), and they sure as hell don’t teach about the crusades (except for the Religious Violence Bad highlight reel) so people don’t KNOW about these things, and I wish they DID know, and that’s why I’m over here trying to be an academic so I can help them LEARN it, and I get very passionate about it. So once again, I entirely don’t blame people who have acquired this distorted cultural impression of the crusades and don’t want to do a book’s worth of research to write a fic about a Netflix movie. I do hope that they take the initiative to learn more about it because they’re interested and want to know more, since by nature the pairing involves a lot of complex religious, racial, and cultural dynamics that need to be handled thoughtfully, even if you don’t know everything about it. So like, basically all I want is for the Muslim character(s) to be given the same level of respect, attention to detail, background story, family context, and religious diversity as any of the white characters, and Imma do it myself if I have to. Dammit.

(I’m really excited to hear your thoughts on the second half of the fic, especially chapter 3 and chapter 6, but definitely all of it, since I think the characters they’re established as in the early part of the fic do remain true to themselves and both grow and struggle and go through a realistic journey with their faith over their very long lives, and it’s one of my favorite themes about DVLA.)

Anyway, about Nicky. I also made the specific choice to have him be an average guy, the ordinary second son of a nobleman who doesn’t really know what he’s doing with his life and isn’t the mouthpiece of Moral Virtue in the story, since as he himself realizes pretty quick, the crusades and especially the sack/massacre of Jerusalem are actually horrific. I’ve written in various posts about my nitpicking gripes with him being a priest, so he’s not, and as I said, I’m definitely avoiding any scenario where he has to Learn About The World from Joe. That is because I want to make the point that the people on the crusades were people, and they went for a lot of different reasons, not all of which were intense personal religious belief. The crusades were an institution and operated institutionally. Even on the First Crusade, where there were a lot of ordinary people who went because of sincere religious belief, there was the usual bad behavior by soldiers and secular noblemen and people who just went because it was the thing to do. James Brundage has an article about prostitution and miscegenation and other sexual activity on the First Crusade; even at the height of this first and holy expedition, it was happening. So Nicky obviously isn’t going to be the moral exemplar because a) the crusades are horrific, he himself realizes that, and b) it’s just as historically accurate that he wouldn’t be anyway. Since the idea is that medieval crusaders were all just zealots and ergo Not Like Us is dangerous, I didn’t want to do that either. If we think they all went because they were all personally fervent Catholics and thus clearly we couldn’t do the same, then we miss a lot of our own behavior and our parallel (and troubling) decisions, and yeah.

As well, I made a deliberate choice to have Nicky’s kindness (which I LOVE about him, it’s one of my favorite things, god how refreshing to have that be one of the central tenets of a male warrior character) not to be something that was just… always there and he was Meek and Good because a priest or whatever else. Especially as I’ve gotten older and we’ve all been living through these ridiculous hellyears (2020 is the worst, but it’s all been general shit for a while), I’ve thought more and more about how kindness is an active CHOICE and it’s as transgressive as anything else you can do and a whole lot more brave than just cynicism and nihilism and despair. As you’ll see in the second half of the fic, Nicky (and Joe) have been through some truly devastating things and it might be understandable if they gave into despair, but they DON’T. They choose to continue to be good people and to try and to actively BE kind, rather than it being some passive default setting. They struggle with it and it’s raw and painful and they’re not always saints, but they always come down on the side of wanting to keep doing what they’re doing, and I… have feelings about that.

Anyway, this is already SUPER long, so I’ll call it quits for now. But thank you so much for this, because I love these characters and I love the story I created for them in DVLA, since all this is personal to me in a lot of ways, and I’m so glad you picked up on that.

#history #medieval history #queer history #dvla asks #long post #the old guard meta #anonymous #ask

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lukeskywaker4ever · 4 years

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Christopher Columbus: Master Double Agent and Portugal’s 007

Henry IV of Spain – known as "The Impotent" for his weakness, both on the throne and (allegedly) in the marriage chamber – died in 1474. A long and inconclusive war of succession ensued, pitting supporters of Henry's 13-year-old heir, Juana de Trastámara, against a faction led by Princess Isabel of Castile and her husband, Ferdinand of Aragon. Portugal, Spain's much smaller antagonist for centuries already, sided with the loyalists.

(Wedding portrait of King Ferdinand II of Aragón and Queen Isabella of Castile.)

The civil war ended in 1480, with the Treaty of Alcáçovas/Toledo, whereby Portugal withdrew support for Juana; in exchange, Isabel and Fernando promised not to encroach on South Atlantic trade routes that Portugal had long been exploring and wished to monopolize.

Treaty Not Worth Much

Spain immediately began to violate the Treaty of Alcáçovas. Portugal's gold trade with Ghana was a powerful enticement, but the Spanish were also lured by the priceless knowledge that Portugal had painstakingly gathered about the currents, territories, winds and heavenly bodies relative to the Atlantic regions. The Portuguese were far advanced in the sciences of geography and navigation pertaining to the Atlantic Ocean, both south and west of Portugal itself.

Meanwhile, João II ascended to the throne of Portugal in 1481, reversing the policies of his father, another weak, late-Medieval ruler who'd surrendered excessive estates and privileges to the nobility. Large swaths of the noble class rebelled, but João II was an astute diplomat, with powerful alliances among the military and religious orders across Europe, along with an extensive network of spies. He sprang a trap on his adversaries, capturing and executing the ring leader.

(João II of Portugal)

Conspiracy!

Queen Isabel supported the traitors in Portugal, having obtained their promise to annul the Treaty of Alcáçovas. When the conspiracy was exposed, numerous traitors among the Portuguese nobility fled to Spain, where they found asylum, along with a base from which to continue their hostilities against João II. Prominent among the defectors were two nephews of the highly-born wife of Christopher Columbus – who would himself sacrifice the next twenty years of his life to join this exodus, faking desertion to his sovereign's most bitter foe. The internecine strife was so keen that after another occasion when his agents had tipped him off, which resulted in João II personally executing the Duke of Viseu, he threatened to charge his own wife with treason for weeping over her brother.

(Christopher Columbus was arrested at Santo Domingo in 1500 by Francisco de Bobadilla and returned to Spain, along with his two brothers, in chains)

The Mother of All Secrets

It's now been amply proven that evidence of hostility between Columbus and João II was fabricated. Columbus was, in fact, a member of João II's inner circle, in addition to being one of the most seasoned of all Portuguese mariners. After his false defection to Spain, Columbus attended three secret meetings with João II, the second of these, in 1488, being prompted by the mother of all maritime secrets: Dias having rounded the Cape of Good Hope, thereby establishing the shortest route to India by sea.

Now, the Holy Grail of all commercial bonanzas was a sea route to the riches of India – sought because Christendom was at war with Islam, and Muslim armies blocked the much shorter land routes across the Middle East. What the most knowledgeable Portuguese pilots knew was top secret, state of the art, a scientific prize for international espionage.

(The Portuguese discovered numerous territories and routes during the 15th and 16th centuries. Cantino planisphere, made by an anonymous cartographer in 1502.)

The Portuguese had been the first Europeans to launch expeditions in search of the Equator, which they reached around 1470, discovering while they were at it, the islands of São Tomé and Príncipe. By 1485, expert Portuguese technicians had invented charts and tables – based on the height of the sun at the Equator – which allowed navigators to determine their location in the daytime. While King João II was keeping Columbus up to date with all of the cutting-edge developments in maritime science, he was at the same time spreading so much disinformation elsewhere—among friends and foes alike— that we are still unraveling it.

(This secret letter, written by King João II was found in Columbus’ archives. Here is the exterior, addressed in the hand of King João II to, “Xpovam Collon, our special friend in Seville.”)

João II’s agents spent years pursuing the most important traitors across Spain, France and England. With that in view, the following comparison is revealing. Both Columbus and his nephew Don Lopo de Albuquerque (Count of Penamacor) fled Portugal at the same time, took refuge at Isabel's court under false identities, and fostered invasions of the Portuguese Atlantic monopoly from foreign shores. Lopo was tenaciously pursued, finally cornered in Seville and assassinated; in contrast, Columbus disposed of Portuguese secrets, exchanged letters covertly with King João II throughout his eight-year residence in Spain, stopped in Portugal on three of his four voyages, and lied to the Spanish Monarchs about these secret contacts.

A Secret Identity

Christopher Columbus is the garbled pseudonym of a very wellborn, learned, seafaring Portuguese nobleman. The antidote to all subsequent confusion about this man's true identity and character is simply to recognize that the news of his "discovery," which broke like a thunderbolt across the rest of Europe, was in fact nothing more than the release of information that the Portuguese had been hoarding for decades, laced with a linguistic insinuation that Spain had just pioneered the shortest route to India.

Everything Falls into Place

This new perspective on Columbus – as a Portuguese double agent – results in a major paradigm shift. All of the lies perpetrated by Columbus, his family, and the royal chroniclers suddenly begin to make sense as elements in a single, grand design, whose architect was King João II.

It is remarkable that the wave of treasons occurring in Portugal during the mid-1480s – engaging both Queen Isabel and Columbus so deeply – has never been linked by Portuguese historians to the biography of Columbus. Yet, no serious historian today accepts that Columbus was the first European to reach the Americas. There is no excuse any longer for maintaining that he was, or for sustaining the obsolete, pseudo-historical pretense that Columbus invented the idea of sailing west or that he ever really believed he'd landed in India.

(The secret Memorial Portugués, advising Queen Isabel that Portugal engineered the Treaty of Tordesillas specifically to safeguard the best territories for herself. Note how King João II is called (A) “an evil devil,” malvado diablo , and (B) how the “Indies,” Indias”, that Columbus visited are described as NOT the real India)

Having skirted the western lands from Canada to Argentina, the Portuguese understood there were no established commercial ports, no ready-made commercial goods, and was thus no trade potential there to compare with that of India. Columbus – and his many other co-conspirators in Spain, easily identified in retrospect – guarded these secrets faithfully, secrets they had to be privy to if they would guide the Spanish Monarchs to the counterfeit of India. The trade for gold and other goods along the west coast of Africa was immensely profitable, but still more jealously guarded was knowledge that the sea route to India lay also in this direction. The Portuguese were intent on keeping Spanish ships out of these waters. With both war and treaties having failed, João II and Columbus launched an audacious ruse to obtain their objective through less obvious means.

How History is Shaped

Colossal planning, nerve, and effort went into this accomplishment – seven years of convincing knowledgeable skeptics that the voyage was possible, outfitting a fleet and loading it with merchandise for trade (including cinnamon that would later be presented as evidence of contact with India). On a secret mission to Germany, Martim Behaim, another Templar knight member of the Portuguese Order of Christ, built a false globe based on Toscanelli's theory that East Asia lay just across the Atlantic. This globe still exists; it is the oldest one in the world. Genuine Portuguese traitors warned the Spanish Monarchs that they were being deceived.

(Martin Behaim’s globe intentionally placed the Azores islands, where Behaim lived and was married, on top of the Americas. This made Asia appear much closer to Europe than it really is, thus supporting the project that Columbus was advocating for: Map of Atlantic Ocean)

The Treaty of Tordesillas (1494), observed fairly well by both sides, achieved João II's strategic objective: to engage the Spanish in the west while keeping them out of those regions that Portugal wished to dominate. Its effect on the linguistic, racial and cultural substance of an immense portion of the globe has scarcely been rivaled by any other treaty between two nations. No single factor did more to realize this outcome than the erudite seamanship, cunning, ruthless persistence, loyalty and sangfroid of the man whom we still remember today as "Christopher Columbus," a real-life 007, on May 20th, 1506.

(Cover from the master spy and sailor's Book of Privileges , which clearly shows that the owner's pseudonym was "Colon." An international transmission of the stunning "discovery," in March of 1493, distorted the name in such a fashion as to leave us with "Columbus" in English today. Technically speaking, "Colón" as the Spanish still call him, is correct, and it will someday most likely replace "Columbus" in common usage)

Another particularly factor that King João II knew of existence of land on the west was that when the first Treaty of Tordesilhas came, the line that separate Spain and Portugal territory was just near the Cape Verde territory (already belonging to Portugal). King João II refuse that line and asked for more 370 nautical miles west from that line. The Spanish Monarchs, not knowing anything about the globe, accepted, thinking that it was just more water. When the new Treaty came, the line that King João II asked put Brasil over Portuguese domain. How King João II knew exactly the number of miles to put Brasil in Portugal territory? Because he already knew there was land on the west. The “discovery” of Brasil was NOT an accident.

#King João II of portugal #cristovao colombo #christopher columbus #portugal #treaty of tordesilhas

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antoine-roquentin · 6 years

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What are the key drivers of economic prosperity? Why do societies that were at one point world economic leaders often end up falling behind? What role do factor markets play in this process? These are the questions addressed in Bas van Bavel’s fascinating entry into the “big think” literature, The Invisible Hand? How Market Economies Have Emerged and Declined since AD 500. In this book, van Bavel proposes a theory of cyclical economic growth and decline, and he supports this theory with three case studies: early medieval Iraq (c. 500-1100), high medieval northern Italy (c. 1000-1500), and the late medieval and early modern Low Countries (c. 1100-1800).

Van Bavel’s framework can be conceptualized as an economics counterpart to Ibn Khaldun’s political cyclical theory of empires. The (somewhat neo-Marxian) argument suggests that economic decline is a natural consequence of the type of economic growth that happens via factor markets. In other words, the growth of factor markets is a self-undermining process. This is a fairly significant departure from conventional economic history accounts, which largely view the development of market economies as more of a linear process.

Van Bavel’s argument can be summarized as follows. In societies with some sufficiently high level of personal and economic freedom as well as some degree of prosperity (due to non-market mechanisms of exchange for land, labor, and capital) factor markets are likely to emerge. In the process, a positive feedback loop occurs in which underutilized resources are more productively used, specialization and division of labor arise, economic growth results, which results in greater use of factor markets, and so on. However, with factor market growth comes inequality — both economic and political. As those who own the factors of production gain more political power, they use this power to dominate the markets for land, labor, and capital, as well as financial markets, making these markets less free in the process. This precipitates the economic decline of the society, as vested interests squeeze the little remaining productive power out of the economy, leaving little for the rest of society. The decline that van Bavel proposes is therefore endogenous to the very processes that contributed to the rise in the first place.

Perhaps the most ambitious aspect of The Invisible Hand? is the cases to which van Bavel applies the theory: early Islamic Iraq, Commercial Revolution Italy, and the late medieval and early modern Low Countries. These are not randomly plucked cases: one could make the case that they represent the world’s (or, at a minimum, western Eurasia’s) economic frontier from about 750 to 1700. Van Bavel must be commended for picking these three cases: few scholars have the breadth of knowledge to dig so deeply into three such vastly disparate cases. And indeed, the cases work quite well for the theory. Iraq of the Abbasid period was probably the wealthiest and most advanced region of the world. Indeed, in 800 the population of Baghdad was greater than the top thirteen Christian cities of Western Europe combined! Yet, it clearly started to fall behind at some point well before the Mongol invasion crushed what remained of the Abbasid Empire in 1258. Van Bavel convincingly points to the rise and decline of factor markets as a culprit. Although the evidence is scanter than it is for the others cases, van Bavel makes a strong case that the development of markets in labor, capital, finance, and especially land (and land lease) played an important role in the region’s growth, while the accumulation of these factors of production in a small number of hands ended up stifling growth and, ultimately, the very markets that spurred growth in the first place. Indeed, van Bavel presents data indicating that the Gini coefficient on wealth inequality in tenth century Iraq was a startling 0.99, making it one of the most unequal societies in world history.

Similar evidence is provided for the cases of northern Italy during and after the Commercial Revolution and the Low Countries in the late medieval and early modern periods. For these cases, the data and secondary sources are much more complete and the narratives are quite compelling. Indeed, one might suspect that the Low Countries case that van Bavel has researched so deeply was the motivating example behind the book (and it is indeed a good example). In both of these cases, societies that were wealthier than their neighbors — but not by much — saw a growth in factor and financial markets, with the resulting proceeds initially being relatively widely distributed. Over time, it was precisely access to these factor and financial markets that enabled the accumulation of wealth in a small amount of hands. This gave the economic elites access to political power and the capacity to buy up most of the rural hinterlands, which ultimately led to the (relative) decline of factor markets and, more generally, these economies. Seen from this perspective, the cultural achievements of the Renaissance or the Dutch Golden Age — funded as they were by the ultra-wealthy — were a symptom of decline, not vibrancy.

As one is reading the book, it is natural to think, “an economic rise followed by the accumulation of factors of production in a small amount of hands sounds a lot like the modern day U.S.” While historians are often hesitant to make such conjectures on more recent events, van Bavel provides a quite welcome chapter overviewing (in only slightly less depth) the trajectories of the UK and U.S. since the eighteenth century. Not surprisingly, he argues that both are reflective of the cyclical theory of economic development propounded throughout the book. These are important insights, as they suggest that modern day inequality may be a structural feature of the American and British economic rise.

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mideastsoccer · 3 years

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Battle for the Soul of Islam

By James M. Dorsey

This story was first published in Horizons

TROUBLE is brewing in the backyard of Muslim-majority states competing for religious soft power and leadership of the Muslim world in what amounts to a battle for the soul of Islam. Shifting youth attitudes towards religion and religiosity threaten to undermine the rival efforts of Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Iran and, to a lesser degree, the United Arab Emirates, to cement their individual state-controlled interpretations of Islam as the Muslim world’s dominant religious narrative. Each of the rivals see their efforts as key to securing their autocratic or authoritarian rule as well as advancing their endeavors to carve out a place for themselves in a new world order in which power is being rebalanced.

Research and opinion polls consistently show that the gap between the religious aspirations of youth—and, in the case of Iran other age groups—and state-imposed interpretations of Islam is widening. The shifting attitudes amount to a rejection of Ash’arism, the fundament of centuries-long religiously legitimized authoritarian rule in the Sunni Muslim world that stresses the role of scriptural and clerical authority. Mustafa Akyol, a prominent Turkish Muslim intellectual, argues that Ash’arism has dominated Muslim politics for centuries at the expense of more liberal strands of the faith “not because of its merits, but because of the support of the states that ruled the medieval Muslim world.”

Similarly, Nadia Oweidat, a student of the history of Islamic thought, notes that “no topic has impacted the region more profoundly than religion. It has changed the geography of the region, it has changed its language, it has changed its culture. It has been shaping the region for thousands of years. [...] Religion controls every aspect of people who live in the Arab world.”

The polls and research suggest that youth are increasingly skeptical towards religious and worldly authority. They aspire to more individual, more spiritual experiences of religion. Their search leads them in multiple directions that range from changes in personal religious behavior that deviates from that proscribed by the state to conversions in secret to other religions even though apostasy is banned and punishable by death, to an abandonment of organized religion all together in favor of deism, agnosticism, or atheism.

“The youth are not interested in institutions or organizations. These do not attract them or give them any incentive; just the opposite, these institutions and organizations and their leadership take advantage of them only when they are needed for their attendance and for filling out the crowds,” said Palestinian scholar and former Hamas education minister Nasser al-Din al-Shaer.

Atheists and converts cite perceived discriminatory provisions in Islam’s legal code towards various Muslim sects, non-Muslims, and women as a reason for turning their back on the faith. “The primary thing that led me to atheism is Islam’s moral aspect. How can, for example, a merciful and compassionate God, said to be more merciful than a woman on her baby, permit slavery and the trade of slaves in slave markets? How come He permits rape of women simply because they are war prisoners? These acts would not be committed by a merciful human being much less by a merciful God,” said Hicham Nostic, a Moroccan atheist, writing under a pen name.

Revival, Reversal

The recent research and polls suggest a reversal of an Islamic revival that scholars like John Esposito in the 1990s and Jean-Paul Carvalho in 2009 observed that was bolstered by the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran, the results of a 1996 World Values Survey that reported a strengthening of traditional religious values in the Muslim world, the rise of Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and the initial Muslim Brotherhood electoral victories in Egypt and Tunisia in the wake of the 2011 popular Arab revolts.

“The indices of Islamic reawakening in personal life are many: increased attention to religious observances (mosque attendance, prayer, fasting), proliferation of religious programming and publications, more emphasis on Islamic dress and values, the revitalization of Sufism (mysticism). This broader-based renewal has also been accompanied by Islam’s reassertion in public life: an increase in Islamically oriented governments, organizations, laws, banks, social welfare services, and educational institutions,” Esposito noted at the time.

Carvalho argued that an economic “growth reversal which raised aspirations and led subsequently to a decline in social mobility which left aspirations unfulfilled among the educated middle class (and) increasing income inequality and impoverishment of the lower-middle class” was driving the revival. The same factors currently fuel a shift away from traditional, Orthodox, and ultra-conservative values and norms of religiosity.

The shift in Muslim-majority countries also contrasts starkly with a trend towards greater religious Orthodoxy in some Muslim minority communities in Europe. A 2018 report by the Dutch government’s Social and Cultural Planning Bureau noted that the number of Muslims of Turkish and Moroccan descent who strictly observe traditional religious precepts had increased by approximately eight percent. Dutch citizens of Turkish and Moroccan descent account for two-thirds of the country’s Muslim community. The report suggested that in a pluralistic society in which Muslims are a minority, “the more personal, individualistic search for true Islam can lead to youth becoming more strict in observance than their parents or environment ever were.”

Changing attitudes towards religion and religiosity that mirror shifting attitudes in non-Muslim countries are particularly risky for leaders, irrespective of their politics, who cloak themselves in the mantle of religion as well as nationalism and seek to leverage that in their geopolitical pursuit of religious soft power. The 2011 popular Arab revolts as well as mass anti-government protests in various Middle Eastern countries in 2019 and 2020 spotlighted the subversiveness of the change. “The Arab Spring was the tipping point in the shift [...]. It was the epitome of how we see the change. The calls were for ‘dawla madiniya,’ a civic state. A civic state is as close as you can come to saying [...], we want a state where the laws are written by people so that we can challenge them, we can change them, we can adjust them. It’s not God’s law, it’s madiniya, it’s people’s law,” Oweidat, the Islamic thought scholar, said.

Akyol went further, noting in a journal article that “too many terrible things have recently happened in the Arab world in the name of Islam. These include the sectarian civil wars in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen, where most of the belligerents have fought in the name of God, often with appalling brutality. The millions of victims and bystanders of these wars have experienced shock and disillusionment with religious politics, and more than a few began asking deeper questions.”

The 2011 popular Arab revolts reverberated across the Middle East, reshaping relations between states as well as domestic policies, even though initial achievements of the protesters were rolled back in Egypt and sparked wars in Libya, Yemen, and Syria.

Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, and Egypt imposed a 3.5 year-long diplomatic and economic boycott of Qatar in part to cut their youth off from access to the Gulf state’s popular Al Jazeera television network that supported the revolts and Islamist groups that challenged the region’s autocratic rulers. Seeking to lead and tightly control a social and economic reform agenda driven by youth who were enamored by the uprisings, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman “sought to recapture this mandate of change, wrap it in a national mantle, and sever it from its Arab Spring associations. The boycott and ensuing nationalist campaign against Qatar became central to achieving that,” said Gulf scholar Kristin Smith Diwan.

Referring to the revolts, Moroccan journalist Ahmed Benchemsi suggested that “the Arab Spring may have stalled, if not receded, but when it comes to religious beliefs and attitudes, a generational dynamic is at play. Large numbers of individuals are tilting away from the rote religiosity Westerners reflexively associate with the Arab world.”

Benchemsi went on to argue that “in today’s Arab world, it’s not religiosity that is mandatory; it’s the appearance of it. Nonreligious attitudes and beliefs are tolerated as long as they’re not conspicuous. As a system, social hypocrisy provides breathing room to secular lifestyles, while preserving the façade of religion. Atheism, per se, is not the problem. Claiming it out loud is. So those who publicize their atheism in the Arab world are fighting less for freedom of conscience than for freedom of speech.” The same could be said for the right to convert or opt for alternative practices of Islam.

Syrian journalist Sham al-Ali recounts the story of a female relative who escaped the civil war to Germany where she decided to remove her hijab. Her father, who lives in Turkey, accepted his daughter’s decision but threatened to disown her if she posted pictures of herself uncovered on Facebook. “His issue was not with his daughter’s abandonment of religious duty, but with her publicizing that before her family and society at large,” Al-Ali said.

Neo-patriarchism

Neo-patriarchism, a pillar of Arab autocratic rule, heightens concern about public appearance and perception. A phrase coined by American-Palestinian scholar Hisham Sharabi, neo-patriarchism involves projection of the autocratic leader as a father figure. Autocratic Arab society, according to Sharabi, was built on the dominance of the father, a patriarch around which the national as well as the nuclear family are organized. Relations between a ruler and the ruled are replicated in the relationship between a father and his children. In both settings, the paternal will is absolute, mediated in society as well as the family by a forced consensus based on ritual and coercion.

As a result, neo-patriarchism often reinforces pressure to abide by state-imposed religious behavior and at the same time fuels changes in attitudes towards religion and religiosity among youth who resent their inability to chart a path of their own. Primary and secondary schools have emerged as one frontline in the struggle to determine the boundaries of religious expression and behavior. Recent developments in Egypt, a brutal autocracy, and Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim-majority democracy, offer contrasting perspectives on how the tug of war between students and parents, schoolteachers and administrations, and the state plays out.

Mada Masr, Egypt’s foremost independent news outlet, documented how in 2020 Egyptian schoolgirls who refused to wear a hijab were being coerced and publicly shamed in the knowledge that the education ministry was reluctant to enforce its policy not to mandate the wearing of a headdress. “The model, decent girl is expected to dress modestly and wear a hijab to signal her pride in her religious identity, since hijab is what distinguishes her from a Christian girl,” said Lamia Lotfy, a gender consultant and rights activist. Teachers at public high schools said they were reluctant to take boys to task for violating dress codes because they were more likely to push back and create problems.

In sharp contrast, Indonesian Religious Affairs Minister Yaqut Cholil Qoumas issued in early 2021 a decree together with the ministers of home affairs and education threatening to sanction state schools that seek to impose religious garb in violation of government rules and regulations. The decree was issued amid a public row sparked by the refusal of a Christian student to obey her school principal’s instructions requiring all pupils to wear Islamic clothing. Qoumas is a leader of Nahdlatul Ulama, the world’s largest Muslim movement and foremost advocate of theological reform in line with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. “Religions do not promote conflict, neither do they justify acting unfairly against those who are different,” Qoumas said.

A Muslim nation that replaced a decades long autocratic regime with a democracy in a popular revolt in 1998, Indonesia is Middle Eastern rulers’ worst nightmare. The shifting attitudes of Middle Eastern youth towards religion and religiosity suggest that experimentation with religion in post-revolt Indonesia is a path that it would embark on if given the opportunity. Indonesia is “where the removal of constraints imposed by an authoritarian regime has opened up the imaginative terrain, allowing particular types of religious beliefs and practices to emerge [...]. The Indonesian cases study [...] brings into sharper relief processes that are happening in ordinary Muslim life elsewhere,” said Indonesia scholar Nur Amali Ibrahim.

A 2019 poll of Arab youth showed that two-thirds of those surveyed felt that religion played too large a role in their lives, up from 50 percent four years earlier. Nearly 80 percent argued that religious institutions needed to be reformed while half said that religious values were holding the Arab world back. Surveys conducted over the last decade by Arab Barometer, a research network at Princeton University and the University of Michigan, showed a growing number of youths turning their backs on religion. “Personal piety has declined some 43 percent over the past decade, indicating less than a quarter of the population now define themselves as religious,” the survey concluded.

With the trend being the strongest among Libyans, many Libyan youth gravitate towards secretive atheist Facebook pages. They often are products of the UAE’s failed attempt to align the hard power of its military intervention in Libya with religious soft power. Said, a 25-year-old student from Benghazi, the stronghold of the UAE and Saudi-backed rebel forces led by self-appointed Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar, turned his back on religion after his cousin was beheaded in 2016 for speaking out against militants. UAE backing of Haftar has involved the population of his army by Madkhalists, a branch of Salafism named after a Saudi scholar who preaches absolute obedience to the ruler and projects the kingdom as a model of Islamic governance. “My cousin’s death occurred during a period when I was deeply religious, praying five times a day and studying ten new pages of the Qur’an each evening,” Said said.

A majority of respondents in Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Turkey, and Iran said in a 2017 poll conducted by Washington-based John Zogby Associates that they wanted religious movements to focus on personal faith and spiritual guidance and not involve themselves in politics. Iraq and Palestine were the outliers with a majority favoring a political role for religious groups.

The response to polls in the second half of the second decade of the twenty-first century contrasts starkly with attitudes expressed in a survey of the world’s Muslims by the Pew Research Center several years earlier. Pew’s polling suggested that ultra-conservative attitudes long promoted by Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar that legitimized authoritarian and autocratic regimes remained popular. More than 70 percent of those surveyed at the time in South Asia, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa favored making Sharia the law of the land and granting Sharia courts jurisdiction over family law and property disputes.

Those numbers varied broadly, however, when respondents were asked about specific issues like apostasy and corporal punishment. Three-quarters of South Asians favored the death sentence for apostasy as opposed to 56 percent in the Middle East and only 27 percent in Southeast Asia, while 81 percent in South Asia supported physical punishment compared to 57 percent in the Middle East and North Africa and 46 percent in Southeast Asia. South Asia emerged as the only part of the Muslim world in which respondents preferred a strong leader to democracy while a majority of the faithful in all three regions viewed religious freedom as positive. Between 65 and 79 percent in all regions wanted to see religious leaders have political influence.

Honor killings may be the one area where attitudes have not changed that much in recent years. Arab Barometer’s polling in 2018 and 2019 showed that more people thought honor killings were acceptable than homosexuality. In most countries polled, young Arabs appeared more likely than their parents to condone honor killings. Social media and occasional protests bear that out. Thousands rallied in early 2020 in Hebron, a conservative city on the West Bank, after the Palestinian Authority signed the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women.

Nonetheless, the assertions by Saudi Arabia that projects itself as the leader of an unidentified form of moderate Islam that preaches absolute obedience to the ruler and by advocates of varying strands of political Islam such as Turkey and Iran ring hollow in light of the dramatic shift in attitudes towards religion and religiosity.

Acknowledging Change

Among the Middle Eastern rivals for religious soft power, the United Arab Emirates, populated in majority by non-nationals, may be the only one to emerge with a cleaner slate. The UAE is the only contender to have started acknowledging changing attitudes and demographic realities. Authorities in November 2020 lifted the ban on consumption of alcohol and cohabitation among unmarried couples. In a further effort to reach out to youth, the UAE organized in 2021 a virtual consultation with 3,000 students aimed at motivating them to think innovatively over the country’s path in the next 50 years.

Such moves do not fundamentally eliminate the risk that the changing attitudes may undercut the religious soft power efforts of the UAE and its Middle Eastern competitors. The problem for rulers like the UAE and Saudi crown princes, Mohammed bin Zayed and Mohammed bin Salman, respectively, is that the loosening of social restrictions in Saudi Arabia—including the emasculation of the kingdom’s religious police, the lifting of a ban on women’s driving, less strict implementation of gender segregation, the introduction of Western-style entertainment and greater professional opportunities for women, and a degree of genuine religious tolerance and pluralism in the UAE—are only first steps in responding to youth aspirations.

“People are sick and tired of organized religion and being told what to do. That is true for all Gulf states and the rest of the Arab world,” quipped a Saudi businessman. Social scientist Ellen van de Bovenkamp describes Moroccans she interviewed for her PhD thesis as living “a personalized, self-made religiosity, in which ethics and politics are more important than rituals.”

Nevertheless, religious authorities in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Turkey, Qatar, Iran, and Morocco continue to project interpretations of the faith that serve the state and are often framed in the language of tolerance and inter-faith dialogue but preserve outmoded legal categories, traditions, and scripture that date back centuries. Outdated concepts of slavery, who is a believer and who is an infidel, apostasy, blasphemy, and physical punishment that need reconceptualization remain in terms of religious law frozen in time. Many of those concepts, with the exception of slavery that has been banned in national law yet remains part of Islamic law, have been embedded in national legislations.

While Turkey continues to, at least nominally, adhere to its secular republican origins, it is no different from its rivals when it comes to grooming state-aligned clergymen, whose ability to think out of the box and develop new interpretations of the faith is impeded by a religious education system that stymies critical thinking and creativity. Instead, it too emphasizes the study of Arabic and memorization of the Qur’an and other religious texts and creates a religious and political establishment that discourages, if not penalizes, innovation.

Widening the gap between state projections of religion and popular aspirations is the fact that governments’ subjugation of religious establishments turns clerics and scholars into regime parrots and fuels youth skepticism towards religious institutions and leaders.

“Youth have [...] witnessed how religious figures, who still remain influential in many Arab societies, can sometimes give in to change even if they have resisted it initially. This not only feeds into Arab youth’s skepticism towards religious institutions but also further highlights the inconsistency of the religious discourse and its inability to provide timely explanations or justifications to the changing reality of today,” said Gulf scholar Eman Alhussein in a commentary on the 2020 Arab Youth Survey.

Pooyan Tamimi Arab, the co-organizer of an online survey in 2020 of Iranian attitudes towards religion that revealed a stunning rejection of state-imposed adherence to conservative religious mores as well as the role of religion in public life noted the widening gap “becomes an existential question. The state wants you to be something that you don’t want to be [...]. “Political disappointment steadily turned into religious disappointment [...]. Iranians have turned away from institutional religion on an unprecedented scale.”

In a similar vein, Turkish art historian Nese Yildiran recently warned that a fatwa issued by President Erdogan’s Directorate of Religious Affairs or Diyanet declaring popular talismans to ward off “the evil eye” as forbidden by Islam fueled criticism of one of the best-funded branches of government. The fatwa followed the issuance of similar religious opinions banning the dying of men’s moustaches and beards, feeding dogs at home, tattoos, and playing the national lottery as well as statements that were perceived to condone or belittle child abuse and violence against women.

Although compatible with a trend across the Middle East, the Iranian survey’s results, which is based on 50,000 respondents who overwhelmingly said they resided in the Islamic republic, suggested that Iranians were in the frontlines of the region’s quest for religious change.

Funded by Washington-based Iranian human rights activist Ladan Boroumand, the Iranian survey, coupled with other research and opinion polls across the Middle East and North Africa, suggests that not only Muslim youth, but also other age groups, who are increasingly skeptical towards religious and worldly authority, aspire to more individual, more spiritual experiences of religion.

Their quest runs the gamut from changes in personal religious behavior to conversions in secret to other religions because apostasy is banned and, in some cases, punishable by death, to an abandonment of religion in favor of agnosticism or atheism. Responding to the survey, 80 percent of the participants said they believed in God but only 32.2 percent identified themselves as Shiite Muslims—a far lower percentage than asserted in official figures of predominantly Shiite Iran.

More than one third of the respondents said that they either did not belong to a religion or were atheists or agnostics. Between 43 and 53 percent, depending on age group, suggested that their religious views had changed over time with 6 percent of those saying that they had converted to another religious orientation.

In addition, 68 percent said they opposed the inclusion of religious precepts in national legislation. Moreover 70 percent rejected public funding of religious institutions while 56 percent opposed mandatory religious education in schools. Almost 60 percent admitted that they do not pray, and 72 percent disagreed with women being obliged to wear a hijab in public.

An unpublished slide of the survey shows the change in religiosity reflected in the fact that an increasing number of Iranians no longer name their children after religious figures.

A five-minute YouTube clip uploaded by an ultra-conservative channel allegedly related to Iran’s Revolutionary Guards attacked the survey despite having distributed the questionnaire once the pollsters disclosed in their report that the poll had been supported by an exile human rights group.

“Tehran may well be the least religious capital in the Middle East. Clerics dominate the news headlines and play the communal elders in soap operas, but I never saw them on the street, except on billboards. Unlike most Muslim countries, the call to prayer is almost inaudible [...]. Alcohol is banned but home delivery is faster for wine than for pizza [...]. Religion felt frustratingly hard to locate and the truly religious seemed sidelined, like a minority,” wrote journalist Nicholas Pelham based on a visit in 2019 during which he was detained for several weeks.

In yet another sign of rejection of state-imposed expressions of Islam, Iranians have sought to alleviate the social impact of COVID-19 related lockdowns and restrictions on face-to-face human contact by acquiring dogs, cats, birds, and even reptiles as pets. The Islamic Republic has long viewed pets as a fixture of Western culture. One of the main reasons for keeping pets in Iran is that people no longer believe in the old cultural, religious, or doctrinal taboos as the unalterable words of God. “This shift towards deconstructing old taboos signals a transformation of the Iranian identity—from the traditional to the new,” said psychologist Farnoush Khaledi.

Pets are one form of dissent; clandestine conversions are another. Exiled Iranian Shiite scholar Yaser Mirdamadi noted that “Iranians no longer have faith in state-imposed religion and are groping for religious alternatives.”

A former Israeli army intelligence chief, retired Lt. Col. Marco Moreno, puts the number of converts in Iran, a country of 83 million, at about one million. Moreno’s estimate may be an overestimate. Other studies in put the figure at between 100,000 and 500,000. Whatever the number is, the conversions fit a trend not only in Iran but across the Muslim world of changing attitudes towards religion, a rejection of state-imposed interpretations of Islam, and a search for more individual and varied religious experiences. Iranian press reports about the discovery of clandestine church gatherings in homes in the holy city of Qom suggest conversions to Christianity began more than a decade ago. “The fact that conversions had reached Qom was an indication that this was happening elsewhere in the country,” Mirdamadi, the Shiite cleric, said.

Seeing the converts as an Israeli asset, Moreno backed production of a two-hour documentary, Sheep Among Wolves Volume II, produced by two American Evangelists, one of which resettled on the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, that asserts that Iran’s underground community of converts to Christianity is the world’s fastest growing church.

“What if I told you the mosques are empty inside Iran?” said a church leader in the film, his identity masked and his voice distorted to avoid identification. Based on interviews with Iranian converts while they were travelling abroad, the documentary opens with a scene on an Indonesian beach where they meet with the filmmakers for a religious training session.

“What if I told you that Islam is dead? What if I told you that the mosques are empty inside Iran? [...] What if I told you no one follows Islam inside of Iran? Would you believe me? This is exactly what is happening inside of Iran. God is moving powerfully inside of Iran?” the church leader added. Unsurprisingly, given the film’s Israeli backing and the filmmaker’s affinity with Israel, the documentary emphasizes the converts’ break with Iran’s staunch rejection of the Jewish State by emphasizing their empathy for Judaism and Israel.

Reduced Religiosity

The Iran survey’s results as well as observations by analysts and journalists like Pelham stroke with responses to various polls of Arab public opinion in recent years and fit a global pattern of reduced religiosity. A 2019 Pew Research Center study concluded that adherence to Christianity in the United States was declining at a rapid pace.

The Arab Youth Survey found that, despite 40 percent of those polled defining religion as the most important constituent element of their identity, 66 percent saw a need for religious institutions to be reformed. “The way some Arab countries consume religion in the political discourse, which is further amplified on social media, is no longer deceptive to the youth who can now see through it,” Alhussein, the Gulf scholar, said.

A 2018 Arab Opinion Index poll suggested that public opinion may support the reconceptualization of Muslim jurisprudence. Almost 70 percent of those polled agreed that “no religious authority is entitled to declare followers of other religions to be infidels.” Similarly, 70 percent of those surveyed rejected the notion that democracy was incompatible with Islam while 76 percent viewed it as the most appropriate system of governance.

What that means in practice is, however, less clear. Arab public opinion appears split down the middle when it comes to issues like separation of religion and politics or the right to protest.

Arab Barometer director Michael Robbins cautioned in a commentary in the Washington Post, co-authored with international affairs scholar Lawrence Rubin, that recent moves by the government of Sudan to separate religion and state may not enjoy public support.

The transitional government brought to office in 2020 by a popular revolt that topped decades of Islamist rule by ousted President Omar al-Bashir agreed in peace talks with Sudanese rebel groups to a “separation of religion and state.” The government also ended the ban on apostasy and consumption of alcohol by non-Muslims and prohibited corporal punishment, including public flogging.

Robbins and Rubin noted that 61 percent of those surveyed on the eve of the revolt believed that Sudanese law should be based on the Sharia or Islamic law defined by two-thirds of the respondents as ensuring the provision of basic services and lack of corruption. The researchers, nonetheless, also concluded that youth favored a reduced role of religious leaders in political life. They said youth had soured on the idea of religion-based governance because of widespread corruption during the region of Al-Bashir who professed his adherence to religious principles.

“If the transitional government can deliver on providing basic services to the country’s citizens and tackling corruption, the formal shift away from Sharia is likely to be acceptable in the eyes of the public. However, if these problems remain, a new set of religious leaders may be able to galvanize a movement aimed at reinstituting Sharia as a means to achieve these objectives,” Robbins and Rubin warned.

Writing at the outset of the popular revolt that toppled Al-Bashir, Islam scholar and former Sudanese diplomat Abdelwahab El-Affendi noted that “for most Sudanese, Islamism came to signify corruption, hypocrisy, cruelty, and bad faith. Sudan is perhaps the first genuinely anti-Islamist country in popular terms. But being anti-Islamist in Sudan does not mean being secular.”

It is a warning that is as valid for Sudan as it is for much of the Arab and Muslim world.

Saudi columnist Wafa al-Rashid sparked fiery debate on social media after calling in a local newspaper for a secular state in the kingdom. “How long will we continue to shy away from enlightenment and change? Religious enlightenment, which is in line with reality and the thinking of youth, who rebelled and withdrew from us because we are no longer like them. [...] We no longer speak their language or understand their dreams,” Al-Rashid wrote.

Asked in a poll conducted by The Washington Institute of Near East Policy whether “it’s a good thing we aren’t having big street demonstrations here now the way they do in some other countries”—a reference to the past decade of popular revolts in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Algeria, Lebanon, Iraq and Sudan—Saudi public opinion was split down the middle. The numbers indicate that 48 percent of respondents agreed and 48 percent disagreed. Saudis, like most Gulf Arabs, are likely less inclined to take grievances to the streets. Nonetheless, the poll indicates that they may prove to be more empathetic to protests should they occur.

Tamimi Arab, the Iran pollster, argued that his Iran survey “shows that there is a social basis” for concern among authoritarian and autocratic governments that employ religion to further their geopolitical goals and seek to maintain their grip on potentially restive populations. His warning reverberates in the responses by governments in Iran, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere in the Middle East to changing attitudes towards religion and religiosity. They demonstrate the degree to which they perceive the change as a threat, often expressed in existential terms.

Mohammad Mehdi Mirbaqeri, a prominent Shiite cleric and member of Iran’s powerful Assembly of Experts that appoints the country’s supreme leader, described COVID-19 in late 2020 as a “secular virus” and a declaration of war on “religious civilization” and “religious institutions.”

Saudi Arabia went further by defining the “calling for atheist thought in any form” as terrorism in its anti-terrorism law. Saudi dissident and activist Rafi Badawi was sentenced on charges of apostasy to ten years in prison and 1,000 lashes for questioning why Saudis should be obliged to adhere to Islam and asserting that the faith did not have answers to all questions.

Analysts, writers, journalists, and pollsters have traced changes in attitudes in the Middle East and North Africa as well as the wider Muslim world for much of the past decade, if not longer. A Western Bangladesh scholar resident in Dacca in 1989 recalled Bangladeshis looking for a copy of Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses as soon as it was banned by Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini, who condemned the British author to death. “It was the allure of forbidden fruit. Yet, I also found that many were looking for things to criticize, an excuse to think differently,” the scholar wrote.

Widely viewed as a bastion of ultra-conservatism. Malaysia’s top religious regulatory body, the Malaysian Islamic Development Department (Jakim), which responsible for training Islamic teachers and preparing weekly state-controlled Friday sermons, has long portrayed liberalism and pluralism as threats, pointing to a national fatwa that in 2006 condemned liberalism as heretical. “The pulpit would like to state today that many tactics are being undertaken by irresponsible people to weaken Muslim unity, among them through spreading new but inverse thinking like Pluralism, Liberalism, and such. The pulpit would like to state that the Liberal movement contains concepts that are found to have deviated from the Islamic faith and shariah,” read a 2014 Friday sermon drafted and distributed by Jakim.

The fatwa echoed a similar legal opinion issued a year earlier by Indonesia’s semi-governmental Council of Religious Scholars (MUI) labelled with SIPILIS as its acronym to equate secularism, pluralism, and liberalism with the venereal disease. The council was headed at the time by current Vice President Ma’ruf Amin, a prominent Nahdlatul Ulama figure.

Challenging attempts by governments and religious authorities to suppress changing attitudes rather than engage with groups groping for greater religious freedom, Kuwaiti writer Sajed al-Abdali noted in 2012 that “it is essential that we acknowledge today that atheism exists and is increasing in our society, especially among our youth, and evidence of this is in no short supply.”

Al-Abdali sounded his alarm three years prior to the publication of a Pew Research Center study that sought to predict the growth trajectories of the world’s religions by the year 2050. The study suggested that the number of people among the 300 million inhabitants of the Middle East and North Africa that were unaffiliated with any faith would remain stable at about 0.6 percent of the population.

Two years later, the Egyptian government’s religious advisory body, Dar al-Ifta Al-Missriya, published a scientifically disputed survey that sought to project the number of atheists in the region as negligible. The survey identified 2,293 atheists, including 866 Egyptians, 325 Moroccans, 320 Tunisians, 242 Iraqis, 178 Saudis, 170 Jordanians, 70 Sudanese, 56 Syrians, 34 Libyans, and 32 Yemenis. It defined atheists as not only those who did not believe in God but also as encompassing converts to other religions and advocates of a secular state. A poll conducted that same year by Al Azhar, Cairo’s ancient citadel of Islamic learning, concluded that Egypt counted 10.7 million atheists. Al Azhar’s Grand Imam, Ahmad al-Tayyeb, warned at the time on state television that the flight from religion constituted a social problem.

A 2012 survey by international polling firm WIN/Gallup International reported that 5 percent of Saudis—or more than one million people—identified themselves as “convinced atheists” on par with the percentage in the United States; while 19 percent described themselves as non-religious. By the same token, Benchemsi, the Moroccan journalist, found 250 Arab atheism-related pages or groups while searching the internet, with memberships ranging from a few individuals to more than 11,000. “And these numbers only pertain to Arab atheists (or Arabs concerned with the topic of atheism) who are committed enough to leave a trace online,” Benchemsi said, noting that many more were unlikely to publicly disclose their beliefs.

The picture is replicated across the Middle East. The number of atheists and agnostics in Iraq, for example, is growing. Iraqi writer and one-time Shiite cleric Gaith al-Tamimi argued that religious figures have come to represent all that’s inherently wrong in Iraqi politics society. Iraqis of all generations seek to escape religious dogma, he says, adding that “Iraqis are questioning the role religion serves today.” Fadhil, a 30-year-old from the southern port city of Basra complained that religious leaders “overuse and misuse God’s name, police human bodies, prohibit extramarital sex, and police the bodies of women.” Changing attitudes towards religion figured prominently in mass anti-government protests in Iraq in 2019 and 2020 that rejected sectarianism and called for a secular national Iraqi identity.

Even in Syria, a fulcrum of militant and ultra-conservative forms of Islam that fed on a decade of brutal civil war and foreign intervention, many concluded in the words of Al-Ali, the Syrian journalist, that “religious and political authorities are ‘protective friends one of the other,’ and that political despotism stems from religious absolutism. [...] In Syria, the prestige sheikhs had enjoyed was undermined alongside that of the regime.” Religion and religious figures’ inability to explain the horror that Syria was experiencing and that had uprooted the lives of millions drove many forced to flee to question long-held beliefs.

Multiple Turkish surveys suggested that Erdogan’s goal of raising a religious generation had backfired despite pouring billions of dollars into religious education. Students often rejected religion, described themselves as atheists, deists, or feminists, and challenged the interpretation of Islam taught in schools. A 2019 survey by polling and data company IPSOS reported that only 12 percent of Turks trusted religious officials and 44 percent distrusted clerics. “We have declined when religious sincerity and morality expressed by the people is taken into account,” said Ali Bardakoglu, who headed Erdogan’s Religious Affairs Department or Diyanet from 2003 to 2010.

Unaware that microphones had not been muted, Erdogan expressed concern a year earlier to his education minister about the spread of deism, a belief in a God that does not intervene in the universe and that is not defined by organized religion, among Turkish youth during a meeting of his party’s parliamentary group. “No, no such thing can happen,” Erdogan ordained against the backdrop of Turkish officials painting deism as a Western conspiracy designed to weaken Turkey. Erdogan’s comments came in response to the publication of an education ministry report that, in line with the subsequent survey, warned that popular rejection of religious knowledge acquired through revelation and religious teachings and a growing embrace of reason was on the rise.

The report noted that increased enrollment in a rising number of state-run religious Imam Hatip high schools had not stopped mounting questioning of orthodox Islamic precepts. Neither had increased study of religion in mainstream schools that deemphasized the teaching of evolution. The greater emphasis on religion failed to advance Erdogan’s dream of a pious generation that would have a Qur’an in one hand and a computer in the other. Instead, reflecting a discussion on faith and youth among some 50 religion teachers, the report suggested that lack of faith in educators had fueled the rise of deism. Teachers were unable to answer the often-posed question: why does God not intervene to halt evil and why does he remain silent? The report’s cautionary note was bolstered by a flurry of anonymous confessions and personal stories by deists as well as atheists recounted in newspaper interviews.

Acting on Erdogan’s instructions, Ali Erbas, the director of Diyanet, declared war on deism. The government’s top cleric, Erbas blamed Western missionaries seeking to convert Turkish youth to Christianity for deism’s increased popularity. Erbas’ declaration followed a three-day consultation with 70 religious scholars and bureaucrats convened by the Directorate that identified “Deism, Atheism, Nihilism, Agnosticism” as the enemy. Erdogan’s alarm and Erbas’ spinning of conspiracy theories constituted attempts to detract attention from the fact that youth in Tukey, like in Iran and the Arab world, were turning their back on orthodox and classical interpretations of Islam on the back of increasingly authoritarian and autocratic rule. Erdogan thundered that “there is no such thing” as LGBT and added that “this country is national and spiritual, and will continue to walk into the future as such” when protesting students displayed a poster depicting one of Islam’s holiest sites, the Kaaba shrine in Mecca, with LGBT flags.

“There is a dictatorship in Turkey. This drives people away from religion,” said Temel Karamollaoglu, the leader of the Islamist Felicity Party that opposes Erdogan’s AKP because of its authoritarianism. Turkey scholar Mucahit Bilici described Turkish youths’ rejection of Orthodox and politicized interpretations of Islam as “a flowering of post-Islamist sentiment” by a “younger generation (that) is choosing the path of individualized spirituality and a silent rejection of tradition.”

Saudi authorities view the high numbers in the WIN/Gallup International as a threat to the religious legitimacy that the kingdom’s ruling Al-Saud family has long cloaked itself in. The groundswell of aspirations that have guided youth away from the confines of ultra-conservatism highlight failed efforts of the government and the religious establishment going back to the 1980s. The culture and information ministry banned the word ‘modernity’ at the time in a bid to squash an emerging debate that challenged the narrow confines of ultra-conservatism as well as the authority of religion and the religious establishment to govern personal and public life.

False Equation

The threat perceived by Saudi and other Middle Eastern autocrats and authoritarians as well as conservative religious voices is fueled by an implicit equation of atheism and/or rejection of state-imposed conservative and ultra-conservative strands of the faith with anarchy.

“Any calls that challenge Islamic rule or Islamic ideology is considered subversive in Saudi Arabia and would be subversive and could lead to chaos,” said Saudi ambassador to the United Nations Abdallah al-Mouallimi. Echoing journalist Benchemsi, Muallimi argued that “if (a person) was disbelieving in God, and keeping that to himself, and conducting himself, nobody would do anything or say anything about it. If he is going out in the public, and saying, ‘I don’t believe in God,’ that’s subversive. He is inviting others to retaliate.”

Similarly, Sheikh Ahmad Turki, speaking as the coordinator of the anti-atheism campaign of the Egyptian Ministry of Endowments, asserted that atheism “is a national security issue. Atheists have no principles; it’s certain that they have dysfunctional concepts—in ethics, views of the society and even in their nationalistic affiliations. If [atheists] rebel against religion, they will rebel against everything.’’

Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have sought to experiment with alternatives to orthodox and ultra-conservative strands of Islam without surrendering state control by encouraging Al Azhar to embrace legal reform that is influenced by Sufism, Islam’s mystical tradition. “There is a movement of renewal of Islamic jurisprudence. [...] It’s a movement that is funded by the wealthy Gulf countries. Don’t forget that one reason for the success of the Salafis is the financial power that backed them for decades. This financial power is now being directed to the Azharis, and they are taking advantage of it. [...] Don’t underestimate what is happening. It might be a true alternative to Salafism,” said Egyptian Islam scholar Wael Farouq.

By contrast, Pakistan, a country influenced by Saudi-inspired ultra-conservatism, has stepped up its efforts to ringfence religious minorities. In an act of overreach modelled on American insistence on extra-territorial abidance by some of its laws, Pakistan laid down a gauntlet in the struggle to define religious freedom by seeking to block and shut down a U.S.-based website associated with Ahmadis on charges of blasphemy.

Ahmadis are a minority sect viewed as heretics by many Muslims that have been targeted in Indonesia and elsewhere, but nowhere more so than in Pakistan where they have been constitutionally classified as non-Muslims. Blasphemy is potentially punishable in Pakistan with a death sentence.

The Pakistani effort was launched at a moment that anti-Ahmadi and anti-Shiite sentiment in Pakistan, home to the world’s largest Shia Muslim minority, was on the rise. Mass demonstrations denounced Shiites as “blasphemers” and “infidels” and called for their beheading as the number of blasphemy cases being filed against Shiites in the courts mushroomed.

Shifting attitudes towards religion and religiosity raise fundamental chicken and egg questions about the relationship between religious and political reform, including what comes first and whether one is possible without the other. Indonesia’s Nahdlatul Ulama argues that religious reform requires recontextualization of the faith as well as a revision of legal codes and religious jurisprudence. The only Muslim institution to have initiated a process of eliminating legal concepts in Islamic law that are obsolete or discriminatory—such as the endorsement of slavery and notions of infidels and dhimmis or People of the Book with lesser rights—Nahdlatul Ulama, a movement created almost a century ago in opposition to Wahhabism, the puritan interpretation of Islam on which Saudi Arabia was founded, is in alignment with advocates of religious reform elsewhere in the Muslim world.

Said Mohammed Sharour, a Syrian Quranist who believed that the Qur’an was Islam’s only relevant text, dismissed the Hadith—the compilation of the Prophet’s sayings and the Sunnah, the traditions, and practices of the Prophet that serve as a model for Muslims: “The religious heritage must be critically read and interpreted anew. Cultural and religious reforms are more important than political ones, as they are the preconditions for any secular reforms.” Shahrour went on to say that the reforms, comparable to those of 16th century scholar and priest Martin Luther’s reformation of Christianity, “must include all those ideas on which the people who perpetrated the 9/11 attacks based their interpretations of sources. [...] We simply have to rethink the fundamental principles. It is [...] said that the fixed values of religion cannot be rethought. But I say that it is exactly these values that we must study and rethink.”

The thinking of Nahdlatul Ulama’s critical mass of Islamic scholars and men like Shahrour offers little solace to authoritarian and autocratic leaders and their religious allies in the Muslim world at a time that Muslims are clamoring not only for political and religious change. If anything, it puts them on the spot by offering a bottom-up alternative to state-controlled religion that seeks to ensure the survival of autocratic regimes and the protection of vested interests.

James M. Dorsey is Senior Fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies of Nanyang Technological University, Senior Research Fellow at the National University of Singapore’s Middle East Institute, and an Honorary Senior Non-Resident Fellow at Eye on ISIS. You may follow him on Twitter @mideastsoccer.

#saudi arabia #uae #iran #turkey #indone

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buzzesquenews · 4 years

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How did the Ancient Mayans Discover Zero?

In the history of mathematics, the concept of the number zero is a real revolution and has only been discovered a handful of times. The Ancient Greeks did not have a number for zero and the ancient civilizations of Sumeria and Babylon only used it partially. How did the Mayans happen upon it 2,000 years ago?

Why do we need a number for nothing?

Zero is a debatable concept and was famously debated by Ancient Greeks (who ultimately decided against the entire idea) all the way down through the medieval period. However, all modern numerical systems depend on it. Zero is important because of its use as a placeholder, at least initially. In any numerical system with a base, a number indicating no numbers for that placeholder value is important so that the numerical system can easily expand.

Mayan numbers, using a base-20 system. For example, if I have a base-10 system, like we use today, and I say that I want 1 tens of horses but not eleven horses or nine horses, I need to be able to place a number indicating no ones in that column. We famously use the Arabic numbering system and zero came to us through the Arabic-Indian system in the 11th century via the Islamic scholar Al-Andalus, who was living in Muslim occupied Spain at the time. Prior to that, Westerners had been using the Roman numeral system, which was inferior in many ways.

The Mayan Numerical System

Rather than using a base-10 system, the Mayans used a base-20 system to count. For their calendars, they adapted it to a base-18 system since it would fit more closely with their calendar year. The Mayan system was very easy to use since adding and subtracting was as simple as transposing dots or lines.

Addition in Mayan. In fact the oldest example of the use of the system is found outside of the Mayan territory. Known as Stela 2 at Chiapa de Corzo.

Diagram of Stela 2. However, they realized that they needed a placeholder to indicate no value for that position and they chose to use a seashell for this position. The reason for the seashell may be unclear but it could represent an empty shell, which could have contained a pearl or oyster. This was a part of their numerical system as far back as the very beginnings of their civilization and some scholars think that it may have come to them through the Olmec civilization, a civilization older than the Mayan.

The Mayan Calendar

The numerical system used by the Mayans was used extensively and most commonly used for dates. They believed that the beginning of time occurred on August 11, 3114 BC (according to our calendar) and marked all dates relative to that prehistoric date. Through an elaborate and complex astrological-calendrical system, they devised what is now known as the Long Count Calendar System which was possibly used by the Olmecs but definitely in the early Mayan period and was later used by the Aztecs in Northern Mexico. Bizarrely, we now visualize the Mayan calendar system as a series of turning wheels, even though the Mayans themselves never discovered the wheel or axle. They did, however, have extremely advanced astronomical knowledge, famously exemplified by the fact that their estimation of the solar year at 365.2422 days is much more accurate than anything used until the 20th century and is much more accurate than our current leap-year system. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-LRNVqWDeg

A Destroyed History

The Mayan writing system, a hieroglyphic system, was the most advanced of the writing systems in the Americas. The Spanish conquest of the "New World" was particularly brutal on Mesoamerica. As missionaries, led primarily by Bishop Diego de Landa, tried to convert the indigenous peoples of the region, they worked tirelessly to destroy their works of art and records.

Example page from the Dresden Codex, one of the only surviving books from the Mayans. We found a large number of books in these characters and, as they contained nothing in which were not to be seen as superstition and lies of the devil, we burned them all, which they regretted to an amazing degree, and which caused them much affliction.Bishop Diego de Landa It is estimated that Mayans had thousands of codices, chronicling their history for 800 years. Many missionaries from the time reported that there were still priests who could read the books to them. However, every known codex was destroyed except for four that remain and all of them are from the post-classical period. We may never know how they discovered zero or many of the details of their works since so much was lost to religious intolerance. Before you go: https://buzzesque.com/why-did-the-ancient-egyptians-mummify-millions-of-sacred-birds/ Read the full article

#AncientMystery #history #Mayans

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johnjankovic · 5 years

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IN NOMINE PATRIS, ET FILII, ET SPIRITUS SANCTI

Going on from there, they passed through Galilee. But Jesus did not want anyone to know, because He was teaching His disciples. He told them, ‘The Son of Man will be delivered into the hands of men. They will kill Him, and after three days He will rise’. But they did not understand this statement, and they were afraid to ask Him about it.

Mark 9:30-2

The object of scorn, a workman whose labour is reciprocated with prosperity is rebuked as of late by the Catholic Pope himself which by implication does wealth become sin, ownership deemed wicked, and riches thought to be more equitably distributed without discrimination whatsoever. What of the sloth, or the idle, or the man who loves to sleep? That this man knows poverty is not the fault of the other who toils at the outset of spring and harvests in the autumn. Such it is that Marxist doctrine infiltrates the Church issuing from sheer ignorance of worldly matters. One of the Ten Commandments asserts ‘Thou shall not steal’ to the implicit affirmation of such a thing called private property lest the fruits of my labour never be my own but yours to take with impunity. So whereas a man who labours on end appreciates the real value of his work and is made honest for it, he who eschews such activity justifies his theft by distorting the words of Scripture for his proper ends. The righteous man is then charitable indeed because he labours so hard, the sinful man is not because he is lazy and with nothing to spare. Yet to unnerving pacifism, many within the Church agitate for a system rewarding this same loafer who, neither infirm nor lame, arrogates to himself the wealth of the workman.

Now to be well ensconced behind seminary walls for you shepherds immersed in the Catechism is of no utility if illiterate to the mores and misgivings of your flock. It is incumbent upon you to be factotums versed not only in the preserve of the divine but equally in the practicalities of life whereby everyday pragmatism ought to inform your ministry. To work hard is to be virtuous, to be indolent is not. A virtuous man, austere in temperament, averse to avarice, and entrepreneurial in spirit, creates wealth for both himself and others in what is christened a providential force for the good of society. Ethics of such individualism and free will begot what we know as Western civilization upon Christianity fostering moral opposition to slavery then widely prevalent in the Mediterranean and early medieval Europe when, under its rationale of our likeness to Father (Genesis 1:27), freedom thereafter came to be understood as nothing less than an inalienable right. The result was how capitalism became an epiphenomenon of Christian thought rather than anathema to it originating in Italy’s city-republics from Venice to Genoa until finally the Reformation codified it.

Unlike Judaism or Islam which frame faith under the yoke of law and obedience, Christianity seeks to understand Father through step-by-step reason by exploitation of the critical thinking He vouchsafed to us. Christianity, therefore, is inherently concerned with development, progress, and growth, not dogma. Whereas Moses and Muhammed issued directives, Jesus authored nothing of the sort and left chronicles of His life at the discretion of the Apostles. Whereas literalism is demanded from acolytes of either the Torah or Quran, the New Testament remains by and large open to an exegesis of one’s own since Father desires the same love as from a son or daughter not the fealty of an automaton. The New Testament is imperfect and admittedly so (1 Corinthians 13:9), the Quran by contrast proclaims itself to be the law (32:2), much like the Torah which is likewise authoritative. The teachings of Jesus, a foil to these Abrahamic religions, are not to be learned by rote but rather lived by emulation and reason. What Christianity went on to become was the foremost patron of freedom giving countenance to discovery and science so that with each generation as suggested by Saint Thomas Aquinas our love for Father deepened whereby the more educated we grew, the better we understood Creation, and the closer we were to Him.

Unlike Buddhism which sets great store in the narcissism of meditation to attain wisdom, or the paganism of Hindus in their propitiation of numerous gods, or the belief in the cosmic forces of Taoism which balance mystic energies, monks of Christendom resolved to make Father’s handiwork intelligible by way of empirical evidence together with their inauguration of the universities Bologna, Sorbonne, Oxford, and Cambridge amid the twelfth century. The Scientific Revolution by the sixteenth century became an intimate bedfellow of Christian theology in virtue of how renowned scientists like Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Galileo Gallilei, or René Descartes each sought to understand Father through their rational vocations. Amongst all the aforesaid religions, none were so dialectical or curious enough to contest the status quo of the universe’s mysteries which hitherto had been too esoteric for comprehension until their respective cultures inherited the physical sciences from Christians. Neither was the polytheism of the Greeks like Socrates, Plato, or Aristotle able to concoct similar advances in spite of its rich legacy of classical learning and geometry. It follows therefore that faith in Jesus begot the West whose quest for personal salvation has been perennially wedded to the search for truth (John 8:32).

Rational theology inspired by the Church is the provenance for the truths Christians hold dear and its application to commerce by medieval monasteries in Europe made the modern world. Asceticism of other religions, their condemnation of wealth, or their prostration before a deity effectively hamstrung them from impacting humanity in the same way Christianity did. Father is not of the mind that you should comport yourselves like little drones dispossessed of free will. Whereas Judaism and Islam apply their morality akin to an ironclad diktat governing a conquered people, Christianity is an inquiry into the meaning of the universe. Determinism for this reason does not substantially figure in the life of a Christian since it runs afoul of her choice in the person she chooses to be whether good or bad. Thus the teachings of Jesus are not laws but a compass and nothing else. From this premise our progress as a civilization remains a function of our attempt to rationalize Father’s omniscience upon a very long yet winding road in stark departure of our primeval ways whose enlightenment has inspired the material comforts we enjoy today.

Not until the end to Rome’s despotism, falsely denominated the Dark Ages when canons of Christianity underwrote freedom from bondage for the first time in world history, were new technologies disseminated for the masses once beholden to the social strata of elites. This sudden void of slave labour predicated upon Christian enlightenment hence spurred mechanical production with the help of energy begotten from waterwheels and windmills which monasteries exploited to great effect for local economies, furthermore agriculture of the Middle Ages would yield foodstuff surpluses ascribed to innovations in plows across Europe, and the clergy would author hagiographies in French to bolster literacy instead of Latin which was in the monopoly of the upper echelons of society. Better fed, educated, and housed were Christians during this precursor to the Renaissance than Roman plebeians who had yet to invent the horse collar for husbandry, printing press for erudition, or chimney for ventilated warmth. Medieval Europe would go on to erect soaring cathedrals in tribute to Father far more sophisticated in architecture than pantheons, colosseums, or bathhouses strewn about the empire. Our febrile search for truth in escaping ignorance ensured greater inventions were perpetually forthcoming as Saint Augustine legitimized commerce so long as the antidote to the corrupting effects of money was the righteousness and thrift of Jesus.

Dependent on this precept did the Church procure riches eclipsing those of royalty and straddle Europe as the largest landowner when profits were ploughed back for the acquisition of more acreage. Herein began capitalism’s first division of labour between Catholic estates like the Cistercians, Franciscans, or Benedictines whose specialization in crops, winemaking, livestock, textiles, blacksmithing, and pottery led to burgeoning trade. Their ethos of hard work precipitated the rapid growth of Europe as a juggernaut of a civilization compared to the peoples of the East and was chronicled by Saint Benedict who in the sixth century made expressly known how, ‘Idleness is the enemy of the soul. Therefore the brothers should have specified periods of manual labour as well as prayerful reading…When they live by the labour of their hands, as our fathers and the apostles did, then they are really monks’. Moneymaking became an avatar for the work ethic of a man’s labour whose fruits were checked by his self-denial and in this sense there was a token of nobility in pain that coronated us kings and queens amongst men: we are good and honest in virtue of how this same self-affliction endows us with the empathy we rely upon to help our brethren.

#Father #Son

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militant-holy-knight · 5 years

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Re-Thinking the So-Called “Islamic Golden Age”

During the Middle Ages, the Islamic world glowed brighter than Europe. Or did it really?

It’s pretty unavoidable to hear the topic of the Islamic Golden Age whenever someone observes how Islamic countries today have lagged behind to everyone else where back in medieval times, Muslims were ahead culturally and scientifically than European Christians. By some measures, it’s an correct assertion because they did have some advantages that their counterparts did not at the time. However, most people tend to exaggerate or give them the wrong credit they don’t deserve. Which is I intend to clarify in this blog post as competently as I can.

Historical Context

To give you a brief overview on the rise of Islam that is closely associated with this period: Shortly after the death of Muhammad, the Rashidun Caliphate led by his companions (also known as the rightly-guided caliphs) lasted only 25 years and had only 4 leaders, but succeeded in conquering all of the Levant, Egypt, the Caucasus, Eastern Anatolia and Persia. The following dynasty, the Umayyad Caliphate formed after the death of the final Rashidun caliph Ali (Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law), grew even larger and to this day remains the largest Islamic empire to have existed stretching all the way from modern-day Spain to India.

This is all very impressive for an nomadic people from the desert that had supposedly existed since the Biblical times as descendants of Ishmael but never represented a real challenge to superpowers like the Greeks, Romans or Persians before them. Even more impressive that they’d be considered so advanced compared to other cultures at the same time, in spite of the ideology they created being the most antithetic to science that has ever been produced. It almost looks like it was designed to stump any attempt to better understand our world (pure coincidence, kafir). It achieves this wonderful result thanks to its two fundamental principles.

Divine Revelations Are Superior to Empiricism

From Wikipedia: “Empiricism [says] that all hypotheses and theories must be TESTED against observations of the natural world rather than resting solely on a priori reasoning, intuition, or revelation.” You might recognize empiricism as "the foundation of the scientific method", or "the main reason western civilization invented everything it has invented". Well, Islam rejects it and states that divine revelations MUST have the priority, always and in every circumstance. After all, divine revelations come from the all-knowing, mistake-proof Allah, so of course they can't be wrong. The Quran is right because it comes from the perfect Allah, and Allah is perfect because the Quran says so.

This lovely piece of circular logic lies at the very core of Islam, and if it ever were to be rejected, the entire house of Islam would crumble like a sandcastle hit by a wave. It has influenced every Muslim thought, theory and practice for the past 1400 years, and still does. As a result of this principle, if facts and divine revelations clash, the facts are wrong:

A man came to the prophet and said, 'My brother has got loose motions'. The Prophet said, 'Let him drink honey.' The man again (came) and said, 'I made him drink (honey) but that made him worse.' The Prophet said, 'Allah has said the Truth, and THE ABDOMEN OF YOUR BROTHER HAS TOLD A LIE.' (Sahih Bukhari 5716)

What about dangerous shit like putting toxic antimony in your eyes? Lots of doctors say it's bad, even though Muhammad said it was beneficial. This fatwa clarifies the issue:

Ithmid (antimony) is known to be very good for the eyes. […] Trustworthy doctors are the ones whom we should consult on this matter (https://islamqa.info/en/answers/44696/pure-kohl-is-beneficial-to-the-eyes-and-is-not-harmful)

“Trustworthy” is code for “Muslim”. After all, medicine comes from human minds, and human minds are flawed and subject to constant changes, so medicine is also flawed and constantly changing, while revelations come from the perfect and timeless mind of Allah (actual argument you'll hear in debates). Plus, we all know kuffar are all liars hellbent on pushing Muslims on the wrong path. The “revelation over empiricism” principle is at the root of much Islamic (hilarious) retardation. Such as:

Scantily clad women cause earthquakes.

Evolution is a lie from Shaytan.

The Earth is flat and the Sun revolves around it

youtube

Still in 2017, a Tunisian PhD student wrote a doctoral thesis that said that the Earth is flat, only 13,500 years old, and the center of the universe. Oh, also relativity is wrong. And Newton too. The thesis (which took 5 years of work) was accepted by two assessors. Only after passing the first approval stage did its retardation come to light (thanks to a leak) and the faculty stepped in to reject it, but it was too late to avoid the media shitstorm. The student claimed that all she did was unmasking the kuffar lies and reshape science in a way respectful of the Quran's divine revelations, so her conclusions were right. Every time it's accused of being an intellectually crippling religion, Islam claims that it's a kuffar lie. In fact, Muslims say, Islam ENCOURAGES rational thought. Problem is, Islam likes to play with words and change their definitions to fit its agenda. In this case, it has traced a fictitious distinction between "critical" and "rational" thought. This glorious essay explains it clearly:

There are two different things; critical thinking and rational or independent thinking. There are categories where the mind should play its role and where it should not poke its nose. The clear and apparent meanings of the Glorious Qur'aan and the Hadith [...] have no place for criticism. Here, rational thinking to find out the depth is not only permissible but also encouraged in Islam [...] but it is not allowed to criticize since the mind has its own limitation as other human faculties have. (http://www.irfi.org/articles/articles_351_400/does_islam_permit_critical_think.htm)

Get that? It's fine if you use your brain to analyze the scriptures and understand how to better please Allah and fully respect his rules... but you're not allowed to question them, point out logical or factual flaws, or criticize them because they run contrary to your morality.

This is why other Muslim talking points thrown around in every discussion, like this hadith which supposedly encourages scientific research...

The Messenger of Allah (pbuh) said: Seeking knowledge is obligatory upon every Muslim.

...don't really mean what a Western reader might think they mean. As explained in this fatwa, “What is meant by knowledge here is knowledge of sharee’ah (Islamic knowledge)”. (See here, which also specifies that hadith is probably false anyway.)

This is what Islam says when they talk about “knowledge”. They mean the wisdom of Allah revealed in the Quran and (through the words and actions of Muhammad) in the Sunnah. Nothing else is worthy of being considered actual knowledge, because science is achieved through the workings of the human mind, which is flawed and subject to mistakes. Muslims always point at past scientific theories that are now recognized as wrong to “prove” that science is inferior to divine revelations, not realizing that the ability to distinguish right from wrong and discard the latter is precisely that which makes science superior to revelations. Science realizes its mistakes and grows, constantly improving. Divine revelations CANNOT change, because that would imply accusing Allah of being imperfect. Which brings us to the second principle.

Progress is Actually Regress

This second principle is a logical consequence of the first. Since divine revelations are perfect and forever valid in every time and place, this means that our scientific, philosophical and moral knowledge have all peaked 1400 years ago, when Muhammad transmitted us Allah's wisdom. Islam calls Muhammad “the perfect man” and considers his generation the best that ever existed:

[Muhammad said:] The best among you (are) the people (who belong to) my age. Then those next to them, then those next to them, then those next to them. [...] Then after them would come a people who would give evidence before they are asked for it, and would be dishonest and not trustworthy... (Sahih Muslim 2535. Also, Sahih Bukhari 6429).

Since the Quran and the Sunnah that Muhammad gave us are perfection, changing a single thing from them is regress, not progress. And it's considered apostasy:

ACTS THAT ENTAIL LEAVING ISLAM:

to deny the existence of Allah, His eternality, or to deny any of His attributes which the consensus of Muslims (ijma) ascribes to Him;

to deny any verse of the Koran or anything which by scholarly consensus (ijma) belongs to it;

to deny the obligatory character of something which by the consensus of Muslims (ijma) is part of Islam, even one rak'a [bow] from one of the five obligatory prayers. (Reliance of the Traveller, paragraph o8.7)

As a consequence, the role of the Islamic “scholar” is reduced to that of a broken record: all he can and must do is repeat his predecessors' opinions. Old ideas and interpretations of the scriptures are considered more valid than new ones BY DEFINITION. Current scholars simply can't contradict the ijma (the established consensus of ancient scholars we've discussed in the previous lesson). This makes Islamic theology a desiccated corpse.

This is an essential point that western liberals have a very hard time understanding, because they grew up in a culture (ours) where scholars have the freedom, and even the expectation, to subvert old thinking and innovate the intellectual landscape. But Islamic scholars are the exact opposite. Chained by every intellectual restriction imaginable, incapable of denying, questioning, criticizing or ignoring even the smallest rule of Allah or of his prophet on pain of apostasy, the Islamic scholar has the role of PREVENTING innovations. Of preserving Islam during the centuries like a mosquito in amber.

Which is why a fiqh manual of 800 years ago like “Reliance of the Traveller” is pretty much identical to a manual written in 2001 like “A Summary of Islamic Jurisprudence”, despite belonging to a different fiqh school. Individual fiqh schools almost can't deviate from each other because of the intrinsic limits of Islamic theology, and indeed, they all agree on the most essential questions: the treatment of infidels, women and gays, admissibility of pedophilia and slavery, refusal of the scientific method, obligatoriness of aggressive jihad even without provocation, etc. All the things that make Islam problematic are clearly stated by every fiqh school.

This doctrinal rigidity is also the reason why the objection “anybody can write a fatwa” is not a valid reason to reject its content. First of all, no, not anybody can write a fatwa. You need a specific license to issue them (not even Osama bin Laden was considered a qualified jurist - he was a businessman - despite issuing two fatwas in the late 90s calling for war against the USA). But the most important point is that fatwas are NOT PERSONAL OPINIONS of the issuing scholar. They're always expression of orthodox Islam. They MUST be, because Islamic scholars can't state their personal opinions if they differ from the orthodoxy. That would be apostasy. Proof is that fatwas are always very well sourced with a profusion of sahih hadiths and Quranic verses (ayat). To reject a fatwa, you need to explain why the hadiths and the ayat it's based on are not valid. Good luck.

This rigidity also invalidates the common objection “but there is an imam in [liberal country] who says [liberal opinion which contradicts orthodox Islam]”. Some Western imams even claim that homosexuality is fine. In Germany they have a female imam who spouts all kinds of liberal feel-good stuff, and is portrayed by the media as the face of “modern Islam”. The problem is that in this case we are truly talking about ENTIRELY PERSONAL OPINIONS, which not only are not supported by the holy texts, but directly contradict them. So what these liberal imams say (either out of ignorance or because they're looking for attention), doesn't change Islam in the slightest. Orthodox Islam still states that gays must be killed and that women can't be imams. The principle is very simple: if a fatwa or a statement from a Muslim scholar are supported by sahih hadiths, excerpts from the Sirat and/or (not abrogated) Quranic verses, they're theologically valid, otherwise they're not. It should be obvious, but liberals don't seem to get it and regularly choose to believe only the unfounded claims and to ignore the theologically solid ones.

As we were saying, according to Islam itself, our understanding of Islam (and therefore of the universe and of morality) is constantly DECREASING instead of increasing. The further we go from the time of the Prophet, the more we deviate from the perfect path. This view is in direct opposition with the Western one, which considers every scientific discovery an improvement. The time of the Prophet was considered the best period of time in existence, which explains why groups like the Taliban want to revert whatever societies they operate to one from 1400 years ago.

“But wait”, you might say. “Muslims are not like the Amish, they don't seem to have any problems using technology. They gladly and immediately accepted our cars, fridges, electricity, computers, automatic rifles and cellphones. How can you say they're against scientific progress?”

Once again, Islam avoids this schizophrenic contradiction by playing with words, twisting concepts and, if it needs to, inventing new ones. Islam distinguishes between IDEOLOGICAL innovations (bid'ah), which are negative until proven otherwise, and MATERIAL innovations, which are positive until proven otherwise (proof that can only be found in the scriptures, of course, not derived by logic or facts):

Allah's Messenger (pbuh) said, "If somebody innovates something which is not in harmony with the principles of our religion, that thing is rejected."» (Sahih Bukhari 2697)

[Bid'ah] means anything that is not referred to specifically in Sharee'ah, and for which there is no evidence (daleel) in the Qur'aan or Sunnah, and which was not known at the time of the Prophet and his Companions.

At the same time, it is quite obvious that this definition of religious inventions or innovations, which are condemned, DOES NOT INCLUDE WORDLY INVENTIONS [such as cars and washing machines, etc. – Translator].» (https://islamqa.info/en/answers/864/bidah-hasanah-good-innovations)

Muslims always quote this hadith where Muhammad said:

Whoever starts a good thing and is followed by others, will have his own reward and a reward equal to that of those who follow him.

...and this should prove that Islam just LOVES innovations. Problem is that once again Islam gives a different meaning to words. As clarified in the above quoted fatwa:

From the context of the story, it is clear that what is meant by the words "whoever starts a good thing (sunnah hasanah)" is: Whoever revives a part of the Sunnah of the Prophet (pbuh), or teaches it to others, or commands others to follow it, or acts according to it so that others follow his example. [...] It should be clear from the above, with no room for doubt, that the Prophet (pbuh) was not allowing innovation in matters of deen (religion)

So only teaching somebody an islamic rule that he might not know is "a good thing". To sum it up: ideas, theories and philosophies which were “not known at the time of the Prophet” are bad, but “wordly inventions” are good. This very convenient distinction allows Islam to take all the fruits of the infidels' work, all the electronics, the factories, the medicines, the weapons, etc., while rejecting their ideas, which have the naughty tendency of disproving some part or another of Islam's “perfect” revelations. As a result, Islam creates very obtuse but dangerous cultures.

Islamic societies are scientifically stagnant, because science is first of all a specific MINDSET that says everything can and should be questioned and nothing should be accepted without valid evidence. You simply can't do science without this mindset, and Islam utterly kills it... But Muslims are also armed with all the latest gadgets and convinced they have the right to own them (since the kuffar were created to serve Muslims, their achievements are gifts from Allah to them – actual argument I've heard) and even to use them against the same kuffar who created them.

What About That “Islamic Golden Age”?

That Islam inevitably generates scientifically infertile cultures might appear like a preposterous statement. In which case, you're probably squealing: “But what about the Islamic Golden Age? Without Islam we wouldn't have our science because Muslims were inventing shit and Wakandin' around while our ancestors were still in caves and didn't even know how to bathe” yadda yadda. This apparent contradiction ceases to exist when we realize that the so-called “Islamic Golden Age” never existed. At least not as it's commonly meant, as a time when innumerable Muslim scientists were creating whole new scientific disciplines and discovering the secrets of the cosmos.

What REALLY happened was that Muslims invaded and conquered scientifically advanced but militarily weak societies like Persia, India and eventually Greece, and then absorbed all their useful infidel knowledge. The “Islamic Golden Age” should be more accurately called the Greek-Hindu-Persian-Dhimmi Golden Age, since it started when in the 9th century caliph Abu Jafar al-Mamun ordered that all the scientific and philosophical treaties written by the infidels be translated in Arabic (which is actually commendable considering some of his predecessors burned down the Christian Library of Alexandria or erased whatever traces of Zoroastrianism in Persia by destroying pretty much all its sacred texts and killing all their priests). All the translators were Christians or Jews (like abbott Probus of Antioch and Hunayn ibn Ishaq and his son) which translated and released into Islamic societies the works of Aristotle, Plato, Archimedes, Euclid, Hippocrates, Ptolemy, Galen, and many other Greek mathematicians, thinkers, astronomers and doctors.

Many Indian discoveries were also appropriated by Islam. Like the number zero, invented by Brahmagupta in 628 AD and described in his book “Brahmasphuta Siddhanta”. Or the so called “arabic numerals”, which Muslims keep telling us we owe to them... even though they were invented in India in 700 AD. (http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/HistTopics/Indian_numerals.html) Arab societies don't even use our same numbers, but very different ones. Islam even brags about giving us coffee, even though it was already well known by their black slaves. Yeah, Muslims had black slaves. Oh, they had so fucking MANY black slaves.

This massive translation enterprise had the positive effect of preserving many treaties that otherwise we might have lost, but the Islamic Golden Age didn't really generate anything new. Consider this: Pre-Islamic India was renowned for its universities: Takshashila, Vikramashila, Nalanda, Ujjain and other places attracted students and scholars alike from far and wide, much like the United States of today .After the establishment of the Delhi Sultanate, not a single center of learning (other than Islamic seminaries) was established for over seven centuries.

In 1400 years, Islam produced no relevant scientific discovery, no new paradigm, no major breakthrough, no revolution even remotely comparable to the Copernican or the relativistic one. Or the germ theory of diseases. Or the Newtonian laws of physics. Or the atomic theory. Or the discovery of continental drift. Or the taming of electricity. Or the development of the theory of evolution. Or the periodic table. Or the discovery of DNA. Or, hell, the goddamn SCIENTIFIC METHOD, which Islam keeps rejecting to this day. And of course, even in the philosophical, political and social realms, Islam has rejected every major breakthrough, from freedom of speech, to inalienable human rights, to the idea that authorities should not be above the law, to independence of scientific research. Hell, they didn’t even make any military breakthroughs: the Turks may have used gunpowder to take Constantinople down, but they were given by the Chinese, who discovered it ages ago while the Europeans improved it, many, many times and now we have modern weapons because of them. For a religion that revolves created around and for warfare, that is quite an unimaginable slip up.

As we've seen, fiqh manuals state clearly that denying the smallest rule of islam is apostasy. But they don't stop there: even believing that natural phenomenons might have causes which don't depend on the will of Allah is enough to be considered an apostate:

ACTS THAT ENTAIL LEAVING ISLAM:

to believe that things in themselves or by their own nature have any causal influence independent of the will of Allah. (Reliance of the Traveller, Shafi school of law, paragraph o8.7)

The same manual, on paragraph o8.1, adds that apostates must be killed. The other fiqh schools agree:

Maliki school: Malik Ibn Anas, “Al-Muwatta”, book 36, paragraphs 36.18.15-16. (PDF:http://traditionalhikma.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Al-Muwatta-by-Imam-Malik.pdf)

Hanbali school: Saleh Al-Fawzan, "A Summary of Islamic Jurisprudence", Al-Maiman Publishing House, Riyadh, 2005, Vol. 2, Part X, chapter 9, pp. 637-8.

Hanafi school: Mawlana Ashraf Ali Thanvi, “Bahishti Zewar”, Zam Zam Publishers, Karachi, 2005, p. 375. (PDF:https://archive.org/details/BahishtiZewar_201307)

See also this fatwa: http://www.askimam.org/public/question_detail/34653

How can you have science when you get killed for even attempting to understand the world without assuming the existence of an omnipotent puppeteer directly controlling every atom? The Islamic concept of the universe is that of an ultimately unknowable concoction whose workings depend on the whims of Allah. The universe might respect the laws of physics 999,999,999 times in a row, but there's never any guarantee that on the one billionth time, Allah wont decide to violate them. So every conclusion reached by observation and experimenting is inevitably uncertain. This view of the universe is in direct opposition with the western one of an ordered machinery that can be understood and predicted by analyzing it with our reason.

In 14 centuries, Islam produced nothing besides some minor advancements in optics, algebra, astronomy, medicine and trigonometry, and some new words: nadir, zenith, elisir, assassin, algebra, etc. (Note: algebra was invented in India and developed by Europeans, Muslims simply invented its name.) Not a very impressive trophy room for such a massive culture, so widespread, so old and which counted untold billions of followers since its birth. I wonder what could've caused this intellectual drought...

How About Any Scholars?

Muslims love to name-drop lots of amazing Islamic scientists which supposedly taught us lowly infidels all our science. Too bad basically none of those were actually Muslims. They were heretical thinkers which achieved their results precisely by REJECTING Islam's suffocating dogmas. And sure enough, if they lived even today, there would have been calls for their deaths.

Avicenna (Ibn Sina): He credited his achievements in medicine and logic to Aristotle and Hippocrates. His theology was a fusion of Plato’s and Islam. He denied physical resurrection and thought prophets were simply "inspired philosophers". Also, he believed Allah only knew the universal principles of the workings of the universe, but couldn't or didn't care about controlling the small daily events in our lives, which denied his omniscience. (Arthur J. Arberry, “Avicenna on Theology”, John Murray, 1951.) For these ideas, he was accused of blasphemy by Ibn al-Qayyim and Ibn Taymiyyah (both of whom are considered the most influential Islamic theologians today) and other major scholars, who considered him even more deviant than the pagans who opposed Muhammad! Nowadays, the Muslim scholars who aren't too busy taking credit for his discoveries are busy accusing him of apostasy and forbidding Muslims to respect him. (See for example: https://www.bakkah.net/en/the-reality-of-ibn-sina-avicenna-famous-scientist-and-philosopher.htm)

Averroes: Also strongly influenced by Greek philosophy. Dared to say that truth could also be discovered using reason and logic and not only the holy texts, and that Muhammad's way of treating women was disgusting. Was accused of blasphemy, persecuted and forced in exile by the Almohad Caliphate in the 12th century. He also wasn't considered a Muslim in his time (before Muslims started to feel the need to repaint their blasphemers so they could have some scientist to brag about).

Abu Bakr al-Razi: Often considered the best Muslim thinker who ever lived, he called himself a disciple of Socrates and Plato, denied that the world was created from nothing, that faith is superior to reason, that Muhammad only taught the truth, and that revealed religions in general are of much use, besides igniting avoidable conflicts for retarded reasons. He considered them needlessly nitpicky and irrational. He had the balls to write 3 books on the subject:

"The Prophet's fraudulent tricks",

"The stratagems of those who claim to be prophets",

"On the refutation of revealed religions".

He also called the Quran "a collection of absurd fables". Was obviously accused of apostasy and NOT considered a Muslim, despite his titanic testicles. (Source: Deuraseh, Nurdeng, "A Comprehensive Bibliography of the Works of Abu Bakr Al-Razi and Al-Biruni", 2008, Journal of Aqidah and Islamic Thought, 9:51–100.)

Al-Sarakhsi: Philosopher. Studied the Greeks and dared to apply rationality to the study of the holy books and to deny the veracity of prophets. Was executed in 899 AD for apostasy by the Abbasids.

Al-Farabi: Philosopher. Thought that reason was superior to faith and that the body couldn't resurrect. Was accused of apostasy.

These were only the most famous (and most name-dropped) """Islamic""" thinkers, but the trend should be evident. Some heretics managed to get away with it because the ruler at the time wasn't too stringent about following Islam himself and preferred to enjoy the fruits of their labor. Islam wasn't imposed with the exact same severity in every Muslim culture and in every age. Others had to spend their entire lives using deliberately ambiguous language in their writings in order to maintain plausible deniability. Others still simply hid their heretic work while fronting as strict Muslims. The intellectual sterility of Islam is made evident by the fact that his ideas about the scientific method were completely IGNORED by Islamic societies, and continue to be so.

With very few exceptions, like the historian Ibn Khaldun, the mathematician Al-Khwarizmi, the polymath Al-Tusi and a few others (whose actual faith we have no way of knowing since they weren't suicidal enough to openly reject Islam), every supposed Muslim genius was actually not a Muslim at all, according to Islam's own rules. To do good work, they needed the freedom to explore new ideas, and to have that, they had no choice but to reject Islam's stringent limitations. They were persecuted, exiled, tortured, killed and had most of their work burned by the same kind of obtuse Muslims whose intellectual heirs now brag about the very achievements they couldn't destroy. As Ernest Renan said:

Whatever science managed to flourish within Islam during the Middle Ages did so IN SPITE of Islam, not thanks to it. Giving Islam the credit for these discoveries would be like giving the Inquisition credit for Galileo's. (Ernest Renan, "Islamisme et la science", lecture given at the Sorbonne on march 29, 1883)

Apologists always blame the Crusades and the Mongol invasions for ending their Golden Age. But even before Mongols sacked Baghdad (the intellectual capital of the Islamic world) in the 13th century, and before the Crusaders took Jerusalem, Muslims could never really achieve any scientific breakthrough in their centuries of almost uncontested hegemony. Maybe because Muhammad really hated people who questioned his divine revelations and tried to improve on them, and has explicitly forbidden it:

The Prophet (pbuh) said, “Leave me as I have left you (i.e., do not ask me questions that go beyond what I’ve already told you). For those who came before you were doomed because of their questions and differences with their Prophets. If I forbid you from doing something, then abstain from it. And if I command you to do something, then do of it as much as you can." (Sahih Bukhari 7288.)

Just asking questions about something is enough to make that something haram (forbidden) even though before it was allowed:

The Prophet (pbuh) said, "The most sinful person among the Muslims is the one who asked about something which had not been prohibited, but was prohibited because of his asking." (Sahih Bukhari 7289.)

This obviously made Muslims fearful to question and to investigate. As Rodney Stark said:

What killed Islam's science was Islam itself. How can you do research in biology, chemistry, physics or philosophy, when the law explicitly forbids it?

Unlawful knowledge includes:

philosophy;

the sciences of the materialists.

and anything that is a means to create doubts (n: in eternal truths) (Reliance of the Traveller, paragraph a7.2)

This little paragraph is enough to kill any hope of scientific development and to qualify Islam as the most backward religion currently in existence.

Imminent Christian Apologetic

For all the shit people give Christianity and accusing us of “holding back progress”, the development of Western civilization is intrinsically tied to it. The first modern universities established in India after centuries of Muslim occupation were made during Anglican British rule. The Jesuit order were regarded the Catholic Church’s best educational system in its most innovative thinkers and their suppression was considered an unmitigated disaster for Catholicism. The Earth being spherical was already a consensus among Christian scholars before Galileo Galilei (which I will get to it in the future). Even things we take for granted like question marks, upper and lowercase letters were created as a result of Charlemagne’s policy to make his people literate. Muslims themselves benefited from their Christian dhimmis translating texts for them. It was Christian scholars like Mendel, Copernicus, Bacon, Magnus, Ockham and countless others that developed biology, chemistry, mathematics and physics and the list goes on.

Meanwhile, their Muslim counterparts were too busy memorizing doubtful anecdotes about Muhammad, even more doubtful “divine revelations”, and writing obsessively detailed rules about the most mundane daily act, from the right way to sit to how to wash your ass. The difference is striking, and mostly due to the Christian view of the cosmos not as something subjected to the whims of Allah, therefore unpredictable, but as a collection of stable, harmonic mechanisms which could be studied and understood. An act which, rather than irritating God, would reveal His glory. Even during the so-called Dark Ages, Christianity was still doing seminal scientific work while Muslim clerics today issue fatwas against building snowmen because it's an act of creation which challenges Allah's power (Drawing pictures or creating sculptures is considered illegal because muh idolatry).

Conclusion

Islam's problem with science, which unfortunately is the most basic belief at the core of the entire doctrine is therefore unfixable: the belief that Islam is PERFECT. This inevitably creates a mentality where science is impossible, because progress and research are seen as not only useless but harmful. A step back from the perfect path. When Muslims claim to believe that the universe is ordered and harmonic, what they mean is that every atom is under the complete control of Allah, so there is no chaos. The Islamic Golden Age is a giant meme, they were only ahead of the Europeans during the Middle Ages because they stole information from the peoples they conquered rather than producing anything new and was the job of infidels to do that shit for them. It’s no wonder that Islam's scientific progress stopped so abruptly once they exhausted the Indo-Greek bag of gifts they stole with their bloody wars of conquest and even now, rather than training actual scientists, Islam is too busy misunderstanding science (and Christianity for that matter) in an attempt to prove the “scientific miracles” in the Quran (like a Grand Mufti who insisted the Earth was flat and the Sun rotated it, only changing his mind after a Saudi prince who went to space told him himself), while at the same time accepting all the useful trinkets and rejecting the ideas and the mindset which generated them.

This intellectual poverty, inability and unwillingness to question old dogmas and research new ideas are inevitable in a culture ruled by Islam, and explain why the entire Muslim world, with all its 1,7 billion people, is still so insignificant in the scientific community, and can claim virtually no achievement to its name. In its entire history, Islam has produced only three Nobel prizes in scientific disciplines: Abdus Salam (physics), Ahmed Zewail and Aziz Sancar (both chemistry). Not surprisingly, all three of them received their education and did their research in Western countries. I will also make an separate blogpost in the future showing how the Islamic world “rewards” the geniuses it produces.

But you know what? Maybe refuting the so-called Islamic Golden Age is an exercise in futility because as Salafism proliferates and festers in the Islamic world, they don’t really genuinely care about that period (they only use it to rub in the face of infidels and make up for their loss in prestige) because this era as its understood peaked during the Abbasid Caliphate. The only period they most want to emulate is one of Muhammad’s time and the Rashidun Caliphate (the so called “rightly guided”) - i.e. the one where Islam was mostly spread by the sword - since all the following ones: the Umayyads, the Abbasids and the Ottomans were considered “corrupted” and “non-Islamic”. You might be familiar with that better as what Taliban and ISIS were trying to do. So yeeeeahh....

#history

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wymanthewalrus · 7 years

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I think I'm going to go on a bit of an educated and probably pretentious-sounding rant about popular perceptions of both current and historical events in, for lack of a better term, the Middle East. It's gonna be LONG.

FOREWARNING: I'm not a published expert on the subject and this isn't intensively cited or peer-reviewed. I may get facts wrong. TAKE EVERYTHING I SAY HERE WITH A GRAIN OF SALT.

So this post has been brewing for a while, but was specifically set off by something I saw on Reddit today. Someone, in a discussion about ISIS and the Syrian Civil War, said, and I quote: "We need a new Crusade." It's a sentiment I've seen a lot in the past few months in various forms all around the internet and the news, and it reflects, in my opinion, the complete and total ignorance of both history and politics of the people making those statements.

Now I'm going to start with the modern and geopolitical problems with that statement first because they're the simplest to explain and observe.

PROBLEM THE FIRST: Do we need a "new Crusade" to bring down ISIS? Not at all. The Iraqis and Kurds are currently in the process of winning the conflict. By quite a lot. The question is not IF ISIS will collapse, but WHEN. The big problem is that the conflict with ISIS is part of a much larger and more complicated quagmire of violence in Iraq and Syria. There are dozens of factions fighting amongst themselves for a dozen different reasons, which is complex enough, but the greater Syrian Civil War conflict has extended further into a sort of proxy war between local powers. Every neighboring country, and some that aren't even close, has a stake.

There are several important players and power blocs to consider. The first is Turkey. With the 8th largest military on Earth, and still riding a wave of popularity following the recent failed coup, Turkey's government has several goals. The first is to prevent Turkish Kurds from seceding in the even that the inevitable defeat of ISIS gives rise to an independent Kurdistan. Second, Turkey wants to keep the wider conflict from crossing over its borders.

Saudi Arabia and its Gulf State allies, being primarily Sunni Muslim, are treating the war as a way to gain a leg up over the primarily Shia Muslim Iran in regional influence, so different militias supported by both factions are thrown into the mix.

Add in the Syrian Government and its brutal human rights abuses and recent Russian Interference on the regime's side, targeting non-ISIS rebels more often than ISIS troops and a resultant spike in tensions with the US and Turkey. In the middle of it all are the Kurds and Iraqis, operating with US and Iranian support in Northern Iraq and Syria. These guys are the ones who are currently doing most of the winning against ISIS, as far as I am currently aware.

The entire situation is a tangled mess of alliances, ambitions, angry rebels, and zero foresight. Anyone who has studied history can point to another specific war that highlights just how bad an unnecessary escalation would be: The First World War. It all started as a regional conflict between independence-seeking rebels and Austria-Hungary, but escalated when other European powers started treating it as a way to advance their own interests. A tangle of alliances and treaties fired off and BAM, Europe was in chaos.

An escalation of the greater Syrian Civil War conflict, could easily result in something similar. Besides ALL of that, the most often-cited reason for an invasion is ISIS, the ones who are currently losing to the Kurds and Iraqis. So an escalation would not only be potentially devastating, it would also be completely pointless.

Which brings me back to the idea of the Crusades.

The implication of a "new Crusade" would be a religiously-justified war against a specific religious group, in this case Christian armies attacking Muslims. Now aside from the fact that this would be, according to a 2010 study, declaring war on 1.6 billion people and would almost certainly result in nothing but a further downward spiral in stability in the Middle East and a continuing cycle of violence, poverty, migration, and xenophobia, there is a much deeper issue with this Reddit post.

The Crusades are commonly portrayed in Western, European-descended cultures as a cut-and-dry series of wars waged by Christian Europe with the intent to return the holy land to Christian hands.

This explanation skims the surface of the reality of the Crusades and adds a cultural bias for good measure. It has parts that could be construed as accurate from a certain standpoint, but obscures massive amounts of complexity for the sake of a specific narrative.

To understand the Crusades, we have to understand the time period. The First Crusade was called by Pope Urban II in 1095. The world at the time, and the way religion was treated, was vastly different from the modern world. The previous four hundred years had seen the rise of a series of vast, immensely powerful Arabic Islamic Empires - the Caliphates. Following directly in the wake of the founding of Islam and the death of the Prophet Muhammad, the first of these empires quickly expanded from a small realm around Mecca and Medina all the way into North Africa and Central Asia.

I would argue that these conquests were not religiously motivated, but rather the same natural drive for expansion that every large Empire in history has required to remain intact, but that's an argument for another time.

Of immediate relevance to this rant is the interactions between the Islamic Empires and Europe. At the time of their first appearance, Christian Europe was in the midst of what we know of as the Dark Ages. Literacy rates and urban populations were at rock bottom and most people relied on farming to survive. There really weren't any powerful countries in Western Europe, but in Greece and Turkey the Byzantine Empire - the last vestige of Rome - reigned supreme as the sole bastion of civilization in a dark, dark Europe.

The Caliphate entered the scene while the Byzantines were locked in conflict with their rivals, the Sassanid Empire of Persia. In a relatively short amount of time, the Sassanids had been destroyed and the Byzantines had lost control of Egypt and North Africa to what became known as the Rashidun Caliphate. Byzantium was still powerful, though, and resisted multiple invasions over the next several centuries.

In essence, the Byzantine Empire became a sort of barrier preventing the Caliphates from pushing into Eastern Europe. Eventually, however, Spain came under Arabic control as well, and the initial wave of conquest was stopped by a Frankish army at the Battle of Tours in 732.

For the next three centuries, the rising Christian Kingdoms of Europe remained sheltered from conquest by the natural barriers of the Pyrenees Mountains and the Byzantine Empire. During this time, the Islamic Caliphates were HIGHLY tolerant of other religions and cultures, creating special ordinances and codes that protected non-Muslims' rights and encouraged their participation in local government. The Europeans were too busy slaughtering pagans and heathens to take note, but Christian and Jewish pilgrims were free to travel to their holy sites.

Fast forward to 1071. A nomadic people from Central Asia, the Seljuqs, have taken control of Persia and Iraq and crushed the Byzantine army at the Battle of Manzikert. The Byzantines barely retain control of the coast of modern-day Turkey, with everything in the interior and East falling into Seljuq hands. The Seljuqs, although Islamic like their Caliphate neighbors, have less-pleasant policies towards other religions, and cut off the main overland pilgrimage route to the Holy Land.

The Byzantines appealed to the Pope for aid. I could go into the whole Catholic/Orthodox nature of this in detail, but it's not really worth the space. Suffice to say that Catholic and Orthodox Christians didn’t see eye to eye, and getting them to cooperate was nigh-impossible. What IS important is that the Byzantines were requesting help with the reasoning that is Byzantium fell, Europe would as well.

The problem for the Pope, thanks to the Catholic/Orthodox issue that I'm skimming over, was that "Help the Byzantines" wasn't a good reason to call for a holy war. Because his only influence over Europe was through the lens of religion, he needed a good enough religious reason to rally the European Kingdoms and get them fired up to invade. Fortunately for the Pope, the Seljuqs had cut off the pilgrimage routes and he could ask the European Kings and Nobles to invade for the purpose of "returning the Holy Land to Christian hands."

That right there is the important part. The Crusades did NOT start for religious purposes, they simply used them as a convenient excuse and rallying cry. Amusingly, although the Crusaders DID invade through Seljuq-controlled lands, the First Crusade also targeted lands and cities that weren't even under Seljuq control. Jerusalem, for instance, was controlled by the Fatimid Caliphate.

While I'm on the subject of Jerusalem, I should mention that the super-Christian Crusaders, upon taking the city, slaughtered pretty much every non-Christian they could find. Although massacres were relatively commonplace in medieval warfare, the Massacre of Jerusalem is often said to have exceeded even the standards of the time.

Eyewitnesses reported that the Crusaders waded through blood as high as their ankles or even knees in some places. The Jewish synagogue was burned with the Jews who took refuge there still trapped inside. On the Temple Mount, one crusader stated that over 10,000 innocents, including women and children, were butchered. Some Muslims were spared as captives and made to drag the corpses out of the city into massive, house-sized piles.

Ultimately, the Crusades were useless. They accomplished nothing and served only to spill the blood of thousands upon thousands upon thousands of people. The Fourth Crusade even ended up as an invasion of the Byzantine Empire, sealing the coffin of the declining Empire's fate with a betrayal by supposed allies. So, in conclusion, the crusades were ineffective wars fought in the name of a religion by highly-religious warriors for a completely non-religious purpose that the failed at more miserably than just about anyone has ever failed in history while at the same time committing stomach-churning atrocities.

Do we "Need a new Crusade?"

No.

No, we absolutely don't.

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myongfisher · 6 years

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A brief history of graphic design

Graphic design is so much a part of our modern world that it is hard to imagine living without it. And in some ways, we never have: visual communication is about as old as our opposable thumbs, though it’s been a long journey from stone tools to digital tablets. In short, the history of graphic design is a story that spans the entirety of human existence and it has the power to inspire and inform even modern graphic designers.

For one thing, knowing where, why and how this industry came about helps designers understand their place alongside history. In more practical terms, stylistic trends are cyclical, and studying the past can inspire some innovative ideas in the present. So join us as we trace the roots of design from pre-industrial history into the industry we know today. With any luck, you might just leave your own footprint along the way!

3D caveman character by Emanuel Barros

Before the Printing Press: Prehistory to the Renaissance

Cave paintings

Sumerian written language

Chinese printing

Medieval calligraphy

European heraldry

Storefronts

The birth of graphic design: Renaissance and Industrial Era

Gutenberg press

First logos

First Print Advertisements

Chromolithography

Graphic design in the modern era

The Wiener Werkstätte

Paul Rand

A glimpse into the digital era

The history of graphic design is ongoing

Before the printing press: Prehistory to the Renaissance —

Graphic design proper really began after the invention of the printing press in 1440, but the roots of visual communication stretch all the way back to caveman times. In this section, we’ll run down the events of early history that paved the way for graphic design centuries before the world was ready for it.

Cave paintings ~38,000 BCE

It seems like humans have always had an inherent drive towards art, evidenced by the early cave paintings dating back to prehistoric times. Subjects vary from animals to hand imprints to events like hunting, and they’ve been found all over the world (Australia, Spain, Indonesia, France, Argentina, just to name a few). Historians debate the fine details as to who these were meant to communicate with (whether each other or their gods), but one thing that’s clear is, right from the start, humanity displayed a knack for communicating with visuals.

Cueva de las Manos in Perito Moreno, Argentina. Via Wikipedia

Sumerian written language – 3300 – 3000 BCE

An ancient Sumerian tablet bearing sad news: a letter written to the king of Lagash informing him of his son’s death in battle.

As you read this article, interpreting all these tiny, abstract marks of the Latin Alphabet into words and sentences, it’s easy to forget that alphabets are a man-made invention. As far as we know, the Sumerians created one of the first written languages, most likely as a means of recording trader inventories to ensure couriers didn’t steal anything on deliveries.

These earliest languages were logographic—icons represented entire words instead of phonetic sounds. This suggests a natural ability of humans to use visual representation to communicate complex ideas, a cornerstone of modern graphic design. And in the last few millennia, not much has changed: designers still rely on icons like hamburger menus or magnifying glasses to represent entire words and concepts in limited space.

Advancements in Chinese printing 200 CE – 1040 CE

A woodblock print of a Chinese play from the Yuan dynasty.

China holds most of the records for printing discoveries, including non-papyrus paper making, woodblock printing, and movable type—all of which occurred earlier than you might have guessed.

As far back as 200 CE, China used wood reliefs to print and stamp designs on silk clothes, and later paper. In 1040, Bi Sheng invented the world’s first movable type printing press out of porcelain, more than 400 years before Gutenburg brought a similar technology to Europe.

Medieval calligraphy – 700s

In the Middle Ages, typography started to take off as humanity started expanding its aesthetic horizons into the letters and words themselves. Because texts in this period were produced and replicated by hand, a little artistry made the books more valuable and set certain scholars apart from others. In Islamic cultures, typography was doubly important because figurative art was seen as sacrilegious, meaning typography was one of only a few permissible ways of artistic expression.

Famous sixteenth-century Persian calligrapher Mir Emad Hassani, demonstrating the Nasta’liq style.

15th century German coats-of-arms. Via Wikipedia

European heraldry – ~1100

Technically, the world’s first logo is the coat of arms, used as a symbol to represent family houses or territories. Scholars theorize the practice was popularized during the Crusades, where intermingling soldiers from different countries and houses incentivized a means to tell everyone apart, particularly on armor and battle flags.

Like logos, a house’s coat of arms aimed to represent the values, characteristics and styles of the people. Later, these emblems took on more practical purposes, such as wax seals to reflect authenticity.

Storefront signage – 1389

Sign outside the Green Dragon pub. Via Pinterest

In the 14th century, beer and ale were viable if not preferable alternatives for drinking water at a time when most water sources were polluted. King Richard II of England made a law that ale houses must have signs out front so the public could find them easier.

Not only were these the first signage that actually represented companies rather than houses, but they’re also the origin of a beautiful tradition that survives to this day.

The birth of graphic design: Renaissance and Industrial Era —

With the advent of the printing press in Europe, humanity was able to recreate text, art and design on a massive scale, and for relatively cheap. The ancestors of modern companies—also on the rise—soon took notice of how such visuals could affect shopping behaviors and increase profits, thus modern graphic design was born.

The early printing process circa 1568. Via Wikipedia

Invention of the Gutenberg press – 1439

Johannes Gutenberg brought moveable type to Europe in 1439, introducing mass communication to Western culture and forever changing civilization. With the Gutenberg press, people no longer had to rely on lengthy scholarly reproductions of books, opening up literature (and literacy) to the masses and making it affordable. The Gutenberg press paved the way for more commercial uses of design, which ushered in the era of graphic design as we know it.

Printers’ marks from the 15th century. Via Smashing Magazine

First logos – late 1400s

It was the printing industry that first used logos, although they were limited to just marks on their own documents. It wasn’t just a branding device, but also a means to show off your printing skill—how well your logo was printed reflected how well everything was printed.

One of the earliest known print advertisements Via the Brent Museum and Archive

First print advertisements – 1620s

The printing press gave way to the “coranto,” the precursor to the newspaper. And in the early 1600s, these corantos featured the first printed advertisements.

(To be fair, written advertisements date back to ancient Egypt, but this is the first time we see images in mass-produced ads.)

Chromolithography – 1837

Early advertising isn’t known for its subtlety.

Technological advancements continued to fuel the progression of graphic design, such as the ability to print in color, or chromolithography. While used primarily for recreating paintings for home decor, chromolithography also opened new doors for advertising.

An early Dr. Pepper chromolithograph ad. Via Tim Broadwater

Brands were now able to use a lot of the familiar marketing tools we know today, such as characteristic color schemes and building emotional connections through slice-of-life scenes. Before, visuals were stilted by the tech of the time (see the ink blot coranto image in the previous section) and prioritized basic clarity instead of touching on complex emotions. But chromolithography enabled some degree of realism, allowing advertising to capitalize on attractive models, fashions of the day and artistic usage of colors.

Graphic design in the modern era —

Graphic design as we know it today really started developing in the modern era, roughly the late 1800s up until the end of World War II. While the 19th century was more about technological advancements and new capabilities, the modern era was about learning how to exploit these advancements for more artistic aims. With printing now a common tech and competition fueling innovation, artists and designers were pushed to explore new styles and techniques, which quickly trickled into advertising and branding.

The Wiener Werkstätte (first graphic design agency) – 1903

With more and more companies recognizing the benefit of graphic design, it was just a matter of time before the first graphic design agency emerged. That honor belongs to Austria’s Wiener Werkstätte, an organization who made contributions to design style and business alike.

Left to right: Werkstätte monogram, rose logo and the Galerie Miethke logo. Via Smashing Magazine

Meaning simply “Vienna workshop,” the Wiener Werkstätte was the first such organization of visual artists, including painters, architects, and early graphic designers. Organizationally, it set the precedent for all other collaborative agencies to follow.

Perhaps its greatest legacy was stylistic innovation, such as cubism. And as a group of professional artists working together, they held great influence over establishing design standards for upcoming generations of artists, particular those after World War I when cultural attitudes were changing worldwide. The work done at the Wiener Werkstätte set the stage for the popular Bauhaus and Art Deco styles that soon followed.

Staatliches Bauhaus founded – 1919

Part of the “See America” series of tourism posters in the 1930s by Alexander Dux. Via National Geographic

Furthering what the Wiener Werkstätte started, the Staatliches Bauhaus, or just simply “Bauhaus,” first opened its doors in Weimar, Germany in 1919. Theirs was an ambitious goal: to create a Gesamtkunstwerk, an artistic ideal that encompasses or synthesizes existing art forms into one perfect work. The interesting thing is they actually succeeded: Bauhaus was one of the central driving forces behind the popularization of the modernist style.

The term “graphic design” appears for the first time – 1922

William Addison Dwiggins. Via Wikipedia

In his article “New Kind of Printing Calls for New Design” (printed in the Boston Evening Transcript, August 29, 1922), book designer William Addison Dwiggins first used the term “graphic design” to describe exactly what his role was in structuring and managing the visuals in book design. From day one, designers were struggling to explain to non-designers what, exactly, they did.

Paul Rand publishes Thoughts on Design – 1947

With one foot in modernism and the other in post-modernism, legendary designer Paul Rand helped lead graphic design into its current form. He posted his theories and ideologies in the seminal work Thoughts on Design, which largely shaped the future of the entire graphic design industry.

One of the top designers in history, Paul Rand left his mark on the logos of many everyday brands. Via the Brandthropologist

His book candidly explains his design philosophies he used throughout the latter half of the twentieth century, namely a call for “functional-aesthetic perfection,” an ideal balance between a logo looking good and communicating its points effectively, seen in his popular logo designs for brands like Ford, Westinghouse, Yale, ABC, UPS, and IBM.

A glimpse into the digital era —

From the 1950s onward, the world began its slow approach to the digital era we’re currently enjoying. The mass-adoption of home computers is a technological advancement comparable to the invention of the printing press, ushering in a new age for mass communication and granting access to esoteric art styles and digital software for new methods of creating art.

MTV’s usage of logos.

Adobe Photoshop—first released in 1990—even on its own changed the face of graphic design. Photo manipulation created a whole new subcategory of graphic design, blending together elements of photography, illustration, and CGI (it would have made the Gesamtkunstwerk artists proud).

Simultaneously, the nature of branding also evolved to meet the changing times. We partially have MTV to thank for this—they brought a fresh new take on logo usage, particularly in constantly changing theirs while retaining recognizable characteristics.

A perfect example of modern flat design. By KR Designs

When the internet came into prominence around the turn of the century, designers took a page out of MTV’s book and adopted youthful and at times edgy designs to draw the younger generation into the world wide web. This can be seen in online trends like flat design, which incorporates bright colors and cartoonish figures.

Graphic design trends are cyclical, as the new-meets-old logo for Carretto Gelato. By ssnastasia

The history of graphic design is ongoing —

That pretty much brings us up to date with graphic design, but one area still remains a mystery: what is the future of graphic design?

The progression of visual communication from cave paintings to digital software can serve as great inspiration, but what fruit that bears is up to you, whether you’re the next generation of designer or the client whose brand might lend itself to a new leap in design thinking. Though today the process is hard work, tough feedback, countless late nights in front of a glowing screen, the result might just bring about the Bauhaus or Thoughts on Design of tomorrow…

Want to explore amazing designs and designers?

Browse a wide range of amazing designer portfolios and find the right one for your next project.

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The post A brief history of graphic design appeared first on 99designs.

A brief history of graphic design published first on https://www.lilpackaging.com/

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hellofastestnewsfan · 6 years

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The Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci was born in 1929, before the outbreak of World War II, and died in 2006, after 9/11. These two horrifying events shaped her writing and worldview. Traveling the world, she covered some of its worst conflicts as a war reporter, with a tone fans would call incisive and critics would call caustic. In the process, she developed a deep fear of Islam’s influence in Europe.

She is most remembered—and often reviled—for the views informed by this fear. Fallaci believed that the Western world was in danger of being engulfed by radical Islam and, toward the end of her career, she wrote three books advancing this argument. She claimed that Muslims were colonizing Europe through immigration and high fertility, and that the passivity of the European left to the dangers she saw would soon turn Europe into a “colony of Islam,” a place she called “Eurabia.”

Her views have led her to posthumously develop a reputation as a darling of the far right—a dubious honor that would have troubled the woman who was in life an anti-fascist activist. A new biography, Oriana Fallaci: The Journalist, the Agitator, the Legend, emphasizes the diversity of Fallaci’s colorful career, and makes the case that her critics are mistaken in judging her based on her writings about Islam.

Fallaci was, for one thing, an interviewer of great men and women. She was wary of power, having grown up under authoritarian rule, and she took pleasure in challenging it. In one of the most famous examples, while she was interviewing Ayatollah Khomeini before the Iranian Revolution of 1979, she so irritated him with questions about women’s rights that Khomeini exclaimed, “If you do not like Islamic dress you are not obliged to follow it. The chador is only for young and respectable women.” Fallaci then tore the chador off her head, saying, “I’m going to take off this stupid, medieval rag right now.”

For a public figure and provocateur, she could be a private person, which makes the publication of her first authorized biography especially noteworthy. Her biographer, Cristina De Stefano, drew on unprecedented access to the journalist’s personal records. I spoke with De Stefano about Fallaci’s legacy, the manipulation of her memory, and what she got right—and wrong—about Islam in Europe. Below is a condensed and edited transcript of our conversation.

Annabelle Timsit: How did Oriana’s views on Islamism in Europe affect her career?

Cristina De Stefano: Oriana’s last trilogy almost destroyed her career, so she took a great risk in publishing it. She went from being a respected left-wing intellectual to being considered an Islamophobic icon of the far-right.

But Oriana Fallaci was not a political commentator—she was a novelist, she was a writer. I think that, in talking about politics, she often asked the right questions, like: What is Europe’s position toward Islamic culture within its borders? Is Europe ready to stand up for its values? How can two such different cultures meet?

But I am not sure she provided the right answers. She made often-simplistic accusations against European Muslims; she was violent in her expressions and negative in her view of the future. She was more a prophetess of catastrophe—a Cassandra, as she used to say—than a provider of concrete suggestions. Let’s keep in mind that we are talking about an artist here, someone who was, first of all, inhabited by her creativity.

Timsit: Can you tell me about her identity as a feminist and her views about Muslim women?

De Stefano: Oriana had a first-hand experience of Islam. She was a war reporter and covered a lot of conflicts in the Middle East. She was one of the first to understand that the Iranian Revolution of 1979 marked the return of political Islam on the world scene.

She [witnessed] the condition of women in Islam very early, in the ’60s, while traveling across the world for her book, The Useless Sex. In it, she wrote that Islamic countries were prisons for women. At the same time, she was never in a position of proselytism, she never tried to bring equality to these countries—she just said she didn’t like it, but if they wanted to live like this, in their own countries, it was fine by her.

The problem she pointed out was the danger of these different values coming to [Europe] through immigration. She stressed that we have to stand up for our values, and we have to say very clearly that immigrants have to accept our rules.

Timsit: But did she really think Islamic values were an existential threat to Europe? Do you?

De Stefano: I don’t believe that [Islamic values] are incompatible [with European values]. There are difficulties with integrating highly-religious immigrants into secular societies, and that can create problems. We need time to find a way to coexist. In the long run, I am optimistic. On this matter, I am in a completely different position than Oriana [who], on the contrary, was very pessimistic. She was particularly worried about the role of religion in society and about the condition of women.

Her declarations and writings after 9/11 were not the fruit of a mature political reasoning, but of a mix of rage, solitude, and illness. She was dying of cancer, alone, struggling with time and writing her last book. She was at the end of her life and she considered the attack on America, and then on Europe, as the end of the world.

Was she Islamophobic? Yes. Do I agree with her? No. But are the last words of a person a good reason to [negate] their whole life? Also no. That’s why I wrote the book and that’s why I hope people will read it: I wanted to show that there was another Oriana before, a person who accomplished great things, and was an inspiration for many women.

Timsit: Can she really be considered feminist, if she excludes Muslim women from her views?

De Stefano: Oriana’s position as a feminist was very interesting, because she was not a part of the movement of feminism, and she was often critical [of it]. She pointed out the contradiction within feminism. For example, after the [2015] New Year’s Eve sexual attacks in Cologne, many feminists in Europe were afraid to encourage xenophobia, so they kept silent. If Oriana was there she would have been furious at this silence. She would have considered it a lack of courage—and she praised courage above all.

She never took a stand for Muslim women, but she never did for Italian women either. She wasn't an activist. I would say she was a feminist in her actions, in her own life.

Timsit: What was it about her actions that was feminist?

De Stefano: Her [feminist] legacy is her story as a woman who was able to become a world-renowned journalist during a time when journalism was a man’s profession; it is her invention of a new and personal way of doing political interviews; and it is the millions of novels she sold all over the world.

Timsit: What can her writings teach us about the resurgence of the far right in Europe?

De Stefano: When we think about Oriana and politics, we tend to think about Islam. But in fact, the center of her political ideas and her obsession was not Islam—it was fascism. For her, the first stage of fascism is to silence people; and for her, political Islam is another form of fascism.

[She] would be very shocked by what is happening in Europe today. She would have said that we have to be vigilant, because the freedom we have can be taken back from us.

Timsit: Doesn’t this fail to take into account the different ways in which political Islam expresses itself across the Muslim world?

De Stefano: She did not explore the whole range of today’s Islam. She underlined the extremes [because] she considered herself in a battle for civilization, and for this reason she was often too extreme herself, [hence] the accusations of Islamophobia. The central focus of her writing wasn’t against a race or a religion, but rather an attitude. She claimed that political Islam is aggressive, while Europe is too shy to react to it. She was worried that Islamic culture isn’t afraid to claim its own cultural and religious superiority, while European culture is uncomfortable about defending its own values and achievements.

I think there are a lot of attacks on Oriana that are hypocritical, in the sense that they focus on the form but they don’t discuss what she said. Of course, you can be opposed to what she said, but you can’t deny that she asked some very important, uncomfortable questions that still need to be answered today. That was the main point of her trilogy, [to ask]: Europe, are you ready to fight for your values? And Europe has no answer to this question.

You can love or hate what she wrote, but she was quite right in pointing out what the future would bring. Today, Europe is facing a real crisis from migrants and she saw this coming.

Timsit: So, for her, immigration was a tool of invasion?

De Stefano: Yes. She wrote the famous, awful phrase, “The sons of Allah breed like rats.” Of course, it’s awful. But she was saying that Muslims don’t need to kill [non-Muslims]—they will just outnumber [non-Muslims].

The problem with Oriana, and the reason why a lot of readers don’t like her, is that she said a lot of uneasy things. [After World War II] the continent decided that war was over and that we would never fight again. Oriana told Europe that, in fact, war was not over; that political Islam is bringing war back to the continent.

Timsit: What is the most striking thing that you learned about Oriana in writing her biography?

De Stefano: Oriana made a feminist out of me. I was born in 1967, and I was convinced that feminists were old and out of fashion. Writing about her life, I realized how much women before me had to fight to work and live like men did, to be accepted and recognized. And through her writings, she convinced me that the rights that women [achieved] in the past can be taken away from them—so we have to be vigilant all the time. I am a different person now.

from The Atlantic http://ift.tt/2Ch9pLg

#Blogger

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nebris · 6 years

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How climate change and disease helped the fall of Rome

At some time or another, every historian of Rome has been asked to say where we are, today, on Rome’s cycle of decline. Historians might squirm at such attempts to use the past but, even if history does not repeat itself, nor come packaged into moral lessons, it can deepen our sense of what it means to be human and how fragile our societies are.

In the middle of the second century, the Romans controlled a huge, geographically diverse part of the globe, from northern Britain to the edges of the Sahara, from the Atlantic to Mesopotamia. The generally prosperous population peaked at 75 million. Eventually, all free inhabitants of the empire came to enjoy the rights of Roman citizenship. Little wonder that the 18th-century English historian Edward Gibbon judged this age the ‘most happy’ in the history of our species – yet today we are more likely to see the advance of Roman civilisation as unwittingly planting the seeds of its own demise.

Five centuries later, the Roman empire was a small Byzantine rump-state controlled from Constantinople, its near-eastern provinces lost to Islamic invasions, its western lands covered by a patchwork of Germanic kingdoms. Trade receded, cities shrank, and technological advance halted. Despite the cultural vitality and spiritual legacy of these centuries, this period was marked by a declining population, political fragmentation, and lower levels of material complexity. When the historian Ian Morris at Stanford University created a universal social-development index, the fall of Rome emerged as the greatest setback in the history of human civilisation.

Explanations for a phenomenon of this magnitude abound: in 1984, the German classicist Alexander Demandt catalogued more than 200 hypotheses. Most scholars have looked to the internal political dynamics of the imperial system or the shifting geopolitical context of an empire whose neighbours gradually caught up in the sophistication of their military and political technologies. But new evidence has started to unveil the crucial role played by changes in the natural environment. The paradoxes of social development, and the inherent unpredictability of nature, worked in concert to bring about Rome’s demise.

Climate change did not begin with the exhaust fumes of industrialisation, but has been a permanent feature of human existence. Orbital mechanics (small variations in the tilt, spin and eccentricity of the Earth’s orbit) and solar cycles alter the amount and distribution of energy received from the Sun. And volcanic eruptions spew reflective sulphates into the atmosphere, sometimes with long-reaching effects. Modern, anthropogenic climate change is so perilous because it is happening quickly and in conjunction with so many other irreversible changes in the Earth’s biosphere. But climate change per se is nothing new.

The need to understand the natural context of modern climate change has been an unmitigated boon for historians. Earth scientists have scoured the planet for paleoclimate proxies, natural archives of the past environment. The effort to put climate change in the foreground of Roman history is motivated both by troves of new data and a heightened sensitivity to the importance of the physical environment. It turns out that climate had a major role in the rise and fall of Roman civilisation. The empire-builders benefitted from impeccable timing: the characteristic warm, wet and stable weather was conducive to economic productivity in an agrarian society. The benefits of economic growth supported the political and social bargains by which the Roman empire controlled its vast territory. The favourable climate, in ways subtle and profound, was baked into the empire’s innermost structure.

The end of this lucky climate regime did not immediately, or in any simple deterministic sense, spell the doom of Rome. Rather, a less favourable climate undermined its power just when the empire was imperilled by more dangerous enemies – Germans, Persians – from without. Climate instability peaked in the sixth century, during the reign of Justinian. Work by dendro-chronologists and ice-core experts points to an enormous spasm of volcanic activity in the 530s and 540s CE, unlike anything else in the past few thousand years. This violent sequence of eruptions triggered what is now called the ‘Late Antique Little Ice Age’, when much colder temperatures endured for at least 150 years. This phase of climate deterioration had decisive effects in Rome’s unravelling. It was also intimately linked to a catastrophe of even greater moment: the outbreak of the first pandemic of bubonic plague.

Disruptions in the biological environment were even more consequential to Rome’s destiny. For all the empire’s precocious advances, life expectancies ranged in the mid-20s, with infectious diseases the leading cause of death. But the array of diseases that preyed upon Romans was not static and, here too, new sensibilities and technologies are radically changing the way we understand the dynamics of evolutionary history – both for our own species, and for our microbial allies and adversaries.

The highly urbanised, highly interconnected Roman empire was a boon to its microbial inhabitants. Humble gastro-enteric diseases such as Shigellosis and paratyphoid fevers spread via contamination of food and water, and flourished in densely packed cities. Where swamps were drained and highways laid, the potential of malaria was unlocked in its worst form – Plasmodium falciparum – a deadly mosquito-borne protozoon. The Romans also connected societies by land and by sea as never before, with the unintended consequence that germs moved as never before, too. Slow killers such as tuberculosis and leprosy enjoyed a heyday in the web of interconnected cities fostered by Roman development.

However, the decisive factor in Rome’s biological history was the arrival of new germs capable of causing pandemic events. The empire was rocked by three such intercontinental disease events. The Antonine plague coincided with the end of the optimal climate regime, and was probably the global debut of the smallpox virus. The empire recovered, but never regained its previous commanding dominance. Then, in the mid-third century, a mysterious affliction of unknown origin called the Plague of Cyprian sent the empire into a tailspin. Though it rebounded, the empire was profoundly altered – with a new kind of emperor, a new kind of money, a new kind of society, and soon a new religion known as Christianity. Most dramatically, in the sixth century a resurgent empire led by Justinian faced a pandemic of bubonic plague, a prelude to the medieval Black Death. The toll was unfathomable – maybe half the population was felled.

The plague of Justinian is a case study in the extraordinarily complex relationship between human and natural systems. The culprit, the Yersinia pestis bacterium, is not a particularly ancient nemesis; evolving just 4,000 years ago, almost certainly in central Asia, it was an evolutionary newborn when it caused the first plague pandemic. The disease is permanently present in colonies of social, burrowing rodents such as marmots or gerbils. However, the historic plague pandemics were colossal accidents, spillover events involving at least five different species: the bacterium, the reservoir rodent, the amplification host (the black rat, which lives close to humans), the fleas that spread the germ, and the people caught in the crossfire.

Genetic evidence suggests that the strain of Yersinia pestis that generated the plague of Justinian originated somewhere near western China. It first appeared on the southern shores of the Mediterranean and, in all likelihood, was smuggled in along the southern, seaborne trading networks that carried silk and spices to Roman consumers. It was an accident of early globalisation. Once the germ reached the seething colonies of commensal rodents, fattened on the empire’s giant stores of grain, the mortality was unstoppable.

The plague pandemic was an event of astonishing ecological complexity. It required purely chance conjunctions, especially if the initial outbreak beyond the reservoir rodents in central Asia was triggered by those massive volcanic eruptions in the years preceding it. It also involved the unintended consequences of the built human environment – such as the global trade networks that shuttled the germ onto Roman shores, or the proliferation of rats inside the empire. The pandemic baffles our distinctions between structure and chance, pattern and contingency. Therein lies one of the lessons of Rome. Humans shape nature – above all, the ecological conditions within which evolution plays out. But nature remains blind to our intentions, and other organisms and ecosystems do not obey our rules. Climate change and disease evolution have been the wild cards of human history.

Our world now is very different from ancient Rome. We have public health, germ theory and antibiotic pharmaceuticals. We will not be as helpless as the Romans, if we are wise enough to recognise the grave threats looming around us, and to use the tools at our disposal to mitigate them. But the centrality of nature in Rome’s fall gives us reason to reconsider the power of the physical and biological environment to tilt the fortunes of human societies. Perhaps we could come to see the Romans not so much as an ancient civilisation, standing across an impassable divide from our modern age, but rather as the makers of our world today. They built a civilisation where global networks, emerging infectious diseases and ecological instability were decisive forces in the fate of human societies. The Romans, too, thought they had the upper hand over the fickle and furious power of the natural environment. History warns us: they were wrong.

Kyle Harper is professor of classics and letters, and senior vice president and provost at the University of Oklahoma. His latest book is The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire (2017).

https://aeon.co/ideas/how-climate-change-and-disease-helped-the-fall-of-rome

#ancient rome #climate change

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rdlogo · 7 years

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Liked on YouTube:Islam Religion of Peace LMFAO Not so much.

Why do Muslims hate us? It is a complex question that most Americans do not understand. One reason the subject is so difficult to comprehend is that we make the mistake of using Western reasoning to find solutions. In an article by Nicolai Sennels titled “Cultural psychology: How Islam managed to stay medieval for 1,400 years” the former psychologist who dealt with Muslim prisoners reveals some astonishingly simple answers. First, the question changes significantly by removing the word “us” to more accurately become “Why do they hate?” From there Sennels analyzes six basic factors which are not individually complicated, but taken in their entirety paint a clear picture of why it is virtually impossible to deal with a religion that refuses to evolve. Sennels starts with the premise, “The majority of Muslims prefer to live by values that can be traced all the way back to the desert tribes in which the founder of their religion lived. Getting to know life in Muslim families and societies is like traveling back in time to the time of Muhammad.” “Desert” and “tribes” are two important words to consider. Islam is first and foremost a product of a punishing environment of relentless sand and unforgiving sun. Combined with a tribal mentality that remains a major characteristic of the Arab world today and the result is like dropping a lighted match into a can of gasoline. Sennels simplifies Islam itself by pointing out, “One main factor is that while all other religions allow their followers to interpret their holy scriptures, Islam categorizes Muslims who do not take the Quran literally as apostates. According to Islamic law, the sharia, apostasy is to be punished with death. The sharia thus makes it impossible for Islamic societies ever to develop into modern, humanistic civilizations. “Together with massive inbreeding — 70 percent of Pakistanis, 45 percent of Arabs and at least 30 percent of Turks are from first cousin-marriages — this has resulted in the embarrassing fact that the Muslim world produces only one tenth of the world average when it comes to scientific research.” Inbreeding is a lesser known aspect of Arabic societies, but it is rampant throughout the region because it is part of the inherent mistrust that exists in a tribal desert culture. Westerners cannot relate to the threat of death that pervades many Muslim families. Children are often indoctrinated to recite the hate passages of the Koran long before they can read and write. Says Sennels, “A very real threat of violence and even death is over every Muslim child’s head, should he or she decide to choose another life style than that of its parents. Many of them are subjected to mind-numbing repetitions of Islam’s exceedingly violent scriptures, making many of them ticking time bombs wherever they live.” Regarding marriage, Sennels explains the slave-like atmosphere many Muslim women endure, which severely limits their ability to escape the religion or their family. “Muhammad’s teaching that Muslim females can only marry Muslim males — often within their own bloodline — further bolster the culture of his followers against outside influence.” More familiar to Westerners says Sennels is a “basic principle within Islam (of) hating and harming non-Muslims. The devaluation and demonizing of non-Muslims can be compared to the propaganda spread about the enemy by governments in wartime in order to remove their soldiers’ psychological hindrances that would otherwise keep them from attacking the opponent. Keeping a mental and physical distance to people from other cultures, Islam prevents its followers from being influenced and inspired by our less barbaric values.” One corollary to that concept is the ancient tribal mentality of the desert which also pits Muslim against Muslim if necessary. Ethnic pride is another factor which emboldens Islamic ideology. Muslims always believe they are victims, which therefore, justifies their intolerance. According to Sennels, “No matter how ridiculous or embarrassing it may seem to the outsider, most Muslims are proud of being Muslim and a follower of Islam. According to Islam they are destined to dominate the rest of us, and we are so bad that we deserve the eternal fire.” Finally, Sennels suggests that Muslims are reinforced by an evolving politically correct society where the Islamic world is not required to adapt or advance. “We in the West have a longstanding tradition of tolerance and openness, together with the multicultural agenda pushed by the Left, the Media, EU and UN. The cultural osmosis can therefore go only one way: Islam stays where it is, while it drags the West back into medieval darkness, with its limitation of free speech and pre-enlightenment-style acceptance of religious dogmas and sensitivities.” Nicolai Sennels’ ideas are not revolutionary or unheard of but, taken as a whole, they present a clear, concise explanation of why the problems with Islam are global, infinite and confounding. via YouTube https://youtu.be/u3d5OMM_XpA

#IFTTT #Blogger

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idlnmclean · 7 years

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Something I've been thinking about, that doesn't get talked about enough... I've seen a few explanations given for the advancements made in medical science in the last couple hundred years. There are always the traditional reasons: the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution. Even heard people say that advancements in science happened because folks started drinking more coffee and tea than alcohol. Now, there's already a severe European bias in that way of thinking, as people often ignore (or are unaware) that advancements in *European* medicine relied a LOT on exposure to other advances made by non-European societies. These are medical advances that certainly fall under the category of what most people would consider modern (or "Western") medicine, like inoculation, various forms of surgery, assistance in childbirth, medications, etc. Many of what are commonly thought to be more recent medical breakthroughs have existed for hundreds if not thousands of years -- they were only recent to Europeans. (Now, granted, people do attribute some of the advancement in science and medicine to increased contact with the Islamic world. However, it's nearly always in the context of "Islamic scholars had preserved Ancient Greek and Roman texts on medicine, allowing Europeans to rediscover them." And while there is some truth to that, it's only a small part of the story. Yes, they preserved many ancient books...but a lot of that information had been preserved by monks in the West, as well. Medicine in medieval Europe was firmly rooted in the medical philosophies of the Ancient Greeks. Arguably *far* more important to the advancement of European medical thought were the Arabic texts from scholars and scientists who had *built* on those old ideas -- or discarded them. Yet so often, these scientists are reduced to mere copyists.) Of the advances that *were* developed in Western Europe and America, most owe their entire *existence* to colonialism and slavery. I'd go so far as to say that almost all of what we think of as modern medicine wouldn't exist without the foundation of colonialism and slavery supporting it. And this is NOT discussed or acknowledged. (I honestly cannot think of a white scientist or historian who acknowledged this connection, when discussing what caused and contributed to the development of modern medicine.) Sometimes this is absolutely a DIRECT connection. Much of modern gynecology, for example, owes its *existence* to the horrific torture of enslaved black women, performed by "father of modern gynecology" J. Marion Sims. Sometimes this is a less direct connection, but still absolutely instrumental -- the added wealth gained by exploiting the people and resources in colonized areas allowed the investment in education and experimentation that resulted in modern medical practices and technology. (Should note that it wasn't just the exploitation of colonies, or of enslaved people and their decedents, that fueled the incredible advancements of modern medicine -- it was also dependent on the exploitation of the poor, disabled and mentally ill, and the prison population. Though all of those categories -- people of color, the poor, disabled, imprisoned -- have a great deal of overlap, and being part of a colonized and/or enslaved group makes it much more likely that you' find yourself impoverished or imprisoned, as well.) Nor is this something that is only part of the past. I think that's the most important thing to point out, actually -- this exploitation, the *dependence* modern medicine has on exploiting vulnerable populations, is still very much ongoing. The VAST MAJORITY of drug trials now take place in the formerly colonized world, where drug companies are often free of the regulations designed to try and safeguard the participants in clinical trials. Even the comparably few trials that take place in America still depend on exploiting primarily poor and disabled individuals. Even though this might be tangential to the overall point I'm making, this is so important to me that I'm going to say it again: Right now, modern medicine is utterly DEPENDENT on the exploitation of vulnerable populations. This isn't a occasional aberration, or something a few "bad apples" are doing. It's an integral part of how the medical industry functions. (I know I've recommended "Bad Pharma" by Ben Goldacre before, but I'm gonna say it again: this book is a must-read, and does a brilliant job of meticulously laying out the ethical horror show modern drug trials have become. I'd definitely put it high up on my list of the most important books in the last decade.) I really don't have the ability right now to do this subject justice -- to do it *right*, I'd need to put in a lot more research, include multiple citations. This subject definitely deserves that level of meticulous attention. It's on my list, it's something I want to work on and I think it's important...but it's gonna be a while before I'm able to do so. (And hey, if this is interesting to you, and you want to go for it, you absolutely have my blessing to take my idea. It's not like it'd be a bad thing if *multiple* people to get interested in this subject and start writing about it. Drop me a link if you do -- I'd love to read and share it!)

Erin Branscome

#medical #abuse

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repwincoml4a0a5 · 7 years

Text

How YouTube Serves As The Content Engine Of The Internet's Dark Side

YouTube

David Seaman is the Pizzagate King of the Internet.

On Twitter, Seaman posts dozens of messages a day to his 66,000 followers, often about the secret cabal — including Rothschilds, Satanists, and the other nabobs of the New World Order — behind the nation’s best-known, super-duper-secret child sex ring under a DC pizza parlor.

But it’s on YouTube where he really goes to work. Since Nov. 4, four days before the election, Seaman has uploaded 136 videos, more than one a day. Of those, at least 42 are about Pizzagate. The videos, which tend to run about eight to fifteen minutes, typically consist of Seaman, a young, brown-haired man with glasses and a short beard, speaking directly into a camera in front of a white wall. He doesn’t equivocate: Recent videos are titled “Pizzagate Will Dominate 2017, Because It Is Real” and “#PizzaGate New Info 12/6/16: Link To Pagan God of Pedophilia/Rape.”

Seaman has more than 150,000 subscribers. His videos, usually preceded by preroll ads for major brands like Quaker Oats and Uber, have been watched almost 18 million times, which is roughly the number of people who tuned in to last year’s season finale of NCIS, the most popular show on television.

His biography reads, in part, “I report the truth.”

In the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election, the major social platforms, most notably Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit, have been forced to undergo painful, often public reckonings with the role they play in spreading bad information. How do services that have become windows onto the world for hundreds of millions of people square their desire to grow with the damage that viral false information, “alternative facts,” and filter bubbles do to a democracy?

And yet there is a mammoth social platform, a cornerstone of the modern internet with more than a billion active users every month, which hosts and even pays for a fathomless stock of bad information, including viral fake news, conspiracy theories, and hate speech of every kind — and it’s been held up to virtually no scrutiny: YouTube.

The entire contemporary conspiracy-industrial complex of internet investigation and social media promulgation, which has become a defining feature of media and politics in the Trump era, would be a very small fraction of itself without YouTube. Yes, the site most people associate with “Gangnam Style,” pirated music, and compilations of dachshunds sneezing is also the central content engine of the unruliest segments of the ascendant right-wing internet, and sometimes its enabler.

To wit, the conspiracy-news internet’s biggest stars, some of whom now enjoy New Yorker profiles and presidential influence, largely live on YouTube. Infowars — whose founder and host, Alex Jones, claims Sandy Hook didn’t happen, Michelle Obama is a man, and 9/11 was an inside job — broadcasts to 2 million subscribers on YouTube. So does Michael “Gorilla Mindset” Cernovich. So too do a whole genre of lesser-known but still wildly popular YouTubers, people like Seaman and Stefan Molyneux (an Irishman closely associated with the popular “Truth About” format). As do a related breed of prolific political-correctness watchdogs like Paul Joseph Watson and Sargon of Akkad (real name: Carl Benjamin), whose videos focus on the supposed hypocrisies of modern liberal culture and the ways they leave Western democracy open to a hostile Islamic takeover. As do a related group of conspiratorial white-identity vloggers like Red Ice TV, which regularly hosts neo-Nazis in its videos.

“The internet provides people with access to more points of view than ever before,” YouTube wrote in a statement. “We're always taking feedback so we can continue to improve and present as many perspectives at a given moment in time as possible.”

YouTube

All this is a far cry from the platform’s halcyon days of 2006 and George Allen’s infamous “Macaca” gaffe. Back then, it felt reasonable to hope the site would change politics by bypassing a rose-tinted broadcast media filter to hold politicians accountable. As recently as 2012, Mother Jones posted to YouTube hidden footage of Mitt Romney discussing the “47%” of the electorate who would never vote for him, a video that may have swung the election. But by the time the 2016 campaign hit its stride, and a series of widely broadcast, ugly comments by then-candidate Trump didn’t keep him out of office, YouTube’s relationship to politics had changed.

Today, it fills the enormous trough of right-leaning conspiracy and revisionist historical content into which the vast, ravening right-wing social internet lowers its jaws to drink. Shared widely everywhere from white supremacist message boards to chans to Facebook groups, these videos constitute a kind of crowdsourced, predigested ideological education, offering the “Truth” about everything from Michelle Obama’s real biological sex (760,000 views!) to why medieval Islamic civilization wasn’t actually advanced.

Frequently, the videos consist of little more than screenshots of a Reddit “investigation” laid out chronologically, set to ominous music. Other times, they’re very simple, featuring a man in a sparse room speaking directly into his webcam, or a very fast monotone narration over a series of photographs with effects straight out of iMovie. There’s a financial incentive for vloggers to make as many videos as cheaply they can; the more videos you make, the more likely one is to go viral. David Seaman’s videos typically garner more than 50,000 views and often exceed 100,000. Many of Seaman’s videos adjoin ads for major brands. A preroll ad for Asana, the productivity software, precedes a video entitled “WIKILEAKS: Illuminati Rothschild Influence & Simulation Theory”; before “Pizzagate: Do We Know the Full Scope Yet?!” it’s an ad for Uber, and before “HILLARY CLINTON'S HORROR SHOW,” one for a new Fox comedy. (Most YouTubers have no direct control over which brands' ads run next to their videos, and vice versa.)

This trough isn’t just wide, it’s deep. A YouTube search for the term “The Truth About the Holocaust” returns half a million results. The top 10 are all Holocaust-denying or Holocaust-skeptical. (Sample titles: “The Greatest Lie Ever Told,” which has 500,000 views; “The Great Jewish Lie”; “The Sick Lies of a Holocaust™ 'Survivor.'”) Say the half million videos average about 10 minutes. That works out to 5 million minutes, or about 10 years, of “Truth About the Holocaust.”

Meanwhile, “The Truth About Pizzagate” returns a quarter of a million results, including “PizzaGate Definitive Factcheck: Oh My God” (620,000 views and counting) and “The Men Who Knew Too Much About PizzaGate” (who, per a teaser image, include retired Gen. Michael Flynn and Andrew Breitbart).

Sometimes, these videos go hugely viral. “With Open Gates: The Forced Collective Suicide of European Nations” — an alarming 20-minute video about Muslim immigration to Europe featuring deceptive editing and debunked footage — received some 4 million views in late 2015 before being taken down by YouTube over a copyright claim. (Infowars: “YouTube Scrambles to Censor Viral Video Exposing Migrant Invasion.”) That’s roughly as many people as watched the Game of Thrones Season 3 premiere. It’s since been scrubbed of the copyrighted music and reuploaded dozens of times.

First circulated by white supremacist blogs and chans, “With Gates Wide Open” gained social steam until it was picked up by Breitbart, at which point it exploded, blazing the viral trail by which conspiracy-right “Truth” videos now travel. Last week, President Trump incensed the nation of Sweden by falsely implying that it had recently suffered a terrorist attack. Later, he clarified in a tweet that he was referring to a Fox News segment. That segment featured footage from a viral YouTube documentary, Stockholm Syndrome, about the dangers of Muslim immigration into Europe. Sources featured in the documentary have since accused its director, Ami Horowitz, of “bad journalism” for taking their answers out of context.

So what responsibility, if any, does YouTube bear for the universe of often conspiratorial, sometimes bigoted, frequently incorrect information that it pays its creators to host, and that is now being filtered up to the most powerful person in the world? Legally, per the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which absolves service providers of liability for content they host, none. But morally and ethically, shouldn’t YouTube be asking itself the same hard questions as Facebook and Twitter about the role it plays in a representative democracy? How do those questions change because YouTube is literally paying people to upload bad information?

And practically, if YouTube decided to crack down, could it really do anything?

YouTube does “demonitize” videos that it deems “not advertiser-friendly,” and last week, following a report in the Wall Street Journal that Disney had nixed a sponsorship deal with the YouTube superstar PewDiePie over anti-Semitic content in his videos, YouTube pulled his channel from its premium ad network. But such steps have tended to follow public pressure and have only affected extremely famous YouTubers. And it’s not like PewDiePie will go hungry; he can still run ads on his videos, which regularly do millions of views.

Ultimately, the platform may be so huge as to be ungovernable: Users upload 400 hours of video to YouTube every minute. One possibility is drawing a firmer line between content the company officially designates as news and everything else; YouTube has a dedicated News vertical that pulls in videos from publishers approved by Google News.

Even there, though, YouTube has its work cut out for it. On a recent evening, the first result I saw under the “Live Now - News” subsection of youtube.com/news was the Infowars “Defense of Liberty 13 Hour Special Broadcast.” Alex Jones was staring into the camera.

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2mnzVve

#DIYS

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