Brendan > Recent Status Updates

“Lacking gainful employment, these talented young men developed a flamboyant and provocative political style and a tendency to form factions outside normal bureaucratic channels. They centered their activities in such ‘front’ organizations as a ‘poetry club’ [] and a ‘shrine association’ []. Relentless criticism from these bitter and well organized members of the literati helped provoke the

On the global impact of the Columbian Exchange:

“Both sides of the Eurasian continent began to experience ‘modern population growth’ in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, due in part to the introduction of hardy New World crops such as potatoes, sweet potatoes, and peanuts. These countercyclical crops served as brakes on starvation during harvest failures of the more preferred staples, rice and wheat.”

It is once again striking to note the similarities between Qing conquest and settlement of Xinjiang, Southwest China, and Taiwan, and the westward expansion of the United States. Both involved a mix of genocidal wars, reservation systems, reeducation and acculturation projects, and forceable grouping of disparate peoples into a common “savage” identity. Both were often driven by opportunistic settlers from the

“Usually an empire expands up to the point where the costs of maintaining military superiority over its neighbors along increasingly extensive borders, combined with the costs of internal administration and maintenance of stability, become unsustainably great. The economy buckles under the mounting pressure as the imperial government tries to enlarge its share of the realm’s economic product, and the society

“The effect of rising foreign trade [in the 19th c] was not to increase demand for the manufactures of the Muslim world but rather to reduce it, sometimes drastically. Textiles produced by European factories were cheaper if not better, and they tended to crowd out those produced locally. The result was a process of deindustrialization in which these lands became suppliers of raw materials to industrial economies

“There was one feature of the demography of Palestine in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that worked in favor of Zionist settlement: the relative depopulation of the plains, as opposed to the hills. This was a widespread feature of the Mediterranean coastlands at the time, the result of a long term process of environmental degradation whereby the deforestation and erosion of the hillsides led to the spread

The 18th century Saudi/Wahhabi state “effectively closed down the pilgrimage for most Muslims—whom of course they considered to be unbelievers. This was too much for the Ottomans…the Ottoman sultan delegated the task of destroying the Saudi state to the upstart ruler of Egypt, Mehmed Ali Pasha. The invasion that followed ended Saudi rule in 1818, but it did not issue in a permanent conquest of the Najd. The

“As a fifteenth century Egyptian historian put it, ‘In the Yemen, under almost every stone there is a troublemaker, and a rebel in the shade of every tree.’”

“In political terms, the subcontinent was too large under premodern conditions to be brought together under the aegis of a single state. In fact the only state that has ever embraced the whole of India was the British Raj…Before that there had been occasional states of imperial dimensions based in the northern plains…but none of these states extended to the whole subcontinent. The normal condition of pre-Muslim

“To a much greater extent than appears from a glance at a map, Iran is landlocked: the core population and prime resources of the country are located deep in the interior, far from the arid coastlands of the Persian Gulf. Iran was thus less well placed to participate in the growth of trade on the Indian Ocean than the Ottoman Empire was to participate in that of the Mediterranean. The country was a victim of

Under the Safavids “Iran thus became the first and largest country in which Shi’ites were both politically and demographically dominant. One effect of this was to set it apart from the Muslim world at large, a development that gave Iran a certain coherence at the cost of poisoning its relations with its neighbors. This toxicity was not inevitable. When it suited them…the Ottomans could treat the Safavids as

“There are no significant Muslim populations among the non-Turkic peoples in or near the steppes, other than those of settled areas adjoining the Middle East…Whereas Islam swept the band of desert from the Persian gulf to the Atlantic, it did not do the same for the steppes. To the east, the Mongols in their homeland were not receptive to Islam. The 16th century saw their definitive adoption of Tibetan Buddhism

About a quarter of the way through the audiobook, and my love for Grant is reaffirmed each day. A rare ‘Great Man’ who was also a *good* man.

His failures and personal struggles, which lasted until his 40s at the start of the Civil War, are genuinely moving and, I think, especially inspiring for those of us who have failed at many pursuits. Grant should be one of the patron saints of late bloomers everywhere!

On the dependency of Mecca and Medina on foreign financial/material support:

“As late as the mid-11th century a traveler reported extensive ruins in Mecca and a population of a mere two and a half thousand. At this point one might have wondered whether the whole phenomenon of a world religion situating its major pilgrimage site deep in the Arabian desert was impractical to the point of being unsustainable. That it

Fascinating context on the adoption of Arabic script for the Persian language, which previously used the Aramaic script:

“There was a tendency in this part of the world to link choice of script with religious affiliation, no doubt reflecting a pattern whereby the acquisition of literacy took place within religious communities. Sogdian, for example, was written in three different scripts by Christians, Manichaeans,

“As the language of the conquerors, Arabic was the language of power and prestige, and sooner or later it became the language of opportunity for anyone aspiring to political, military, bureaucratic, cultural, or commercial success. And yet at first it was only the language of a small minority in comparison to the masses speaking Persian, Aramaic, Coptic, and the like. [The later coming of the Arab nomads], in turn,

“Mu’awiya’s achievement was to reestablish the empire created by the conquests on a foundation sufficiently viable for it to last for two full centuries. As we have seen, the key geopolitical change was that the state was now ruled from a center outside Arabia, from one of the conquered territories [Syria] where fiscal and military power were concentrated. This shift accelerated a gradual evolution in the

“We have indirect but telling evidence of the imaginative impact of Muhammad’s religion on the Arabs. After his death, and perhaps even before, one form taken by the short-lived rejection of Islam in Arabia was the appearance of no fewer than five false prophets—false, that is to say, in the eyes of our Muslim sources. There was one in the Yemen, one in Yamama, two—including a woman—among the nomads of

“It was the lowlands of Mesopotamia, irrigated by the Tigris and the Euphrates and inhabited by Aramaic-speaking peasants, that provided the [Persian] empire with its fiscal sinews—its tax power. Mesopotamia lived on borrowed rainfall brought to it by rivers rising in eastern Anatolia. As long as it lasted, this combination of highland manpower and lowland tax power provided a firm foundation for an empire based

“I have at times seen all the eastern sky
Becoming rose as day began and seen,
Adorned in lovely blue, the rest of heaven;
And seen the sun’s face rise so veiled that it
Was tempered by the mist and could permit
The eye to look at length upon it; so,
Within a cloud of flowers that were cast
By the angelic hands and then rose up
And then fell back, outside and in the chariot,
A woman showed herself to me…”

Extremely sad in light of current events:
“The failure of the West fully to take advantage of the opportunity offered by a reformist president in Iran already looks like a bad mistake. One such opportunity came after the September 11 attacks in the US when members of the Iranian leadership condemned the terrorist action in forthright terms, and ordinary Iranians showed their sympathies with candlelight vigils…

“The [Pahlavi] monarchy became more remote and disconnected from the attitudes and concerns of ordinary Iranians. In a sense, paradoxically perhaps as a result of combatting underground Marxists for so long, the Shah [Mohammed Reza] made the mistake of a Marxist analysis: he thought that if he could just secure material prosperity through successful development, then everything else would fall happily into place.

So far: Davis’s introduction is brilliant, functioning like a mini-course on Persian poetics and the history of Shiraz.

First impression of the poems: Hafez is absolutely wonderful, even in translation. I can see why he’s so revered by Persians to this day; based on what I’ve read, he might become a new favorite poet of mine.

“Like [Christian] friars, the Sufis were intimately involved in the religious lives of ordinary people and were responsible for missionary activity in the countryside and beyond Persia. Given the low level of literacy at the time, and the fact that the population lived overwhelmingly in the countryside, it becomes plain that the Sufis were central to the diffusion of Islam outside the towns and cities. The center

Machiavelli understood high pressure sales (and diplomatic) tactics:

“When one desires to obtain a thing from another individual, if the opportunity allows he ought not to give him space to deliberate, and ought to act so that he sees the necessity of a quick decision, which is when he who is asked sees that from refusing or delaying arises a sudden dangerous indignation.”

“For when your longings center on things such
That sharing them apportions less to each,
Then envy stirs the bellows of your sighs.

But if the love within the Highest Sphere
Should turn your longings heavenward, the fear
Inhabiting your breast would disappear;

For there, the more there are who would say ‘ours’,
So much the greater is the good possessed
By each…”

(Purgatorio XV)

“Here it is to be considered with this true example how much more a humane act full of charity is sometimes able to do in the spirits of men than a ferocious and violent act, and that often those provinces that arms, warlike instruments, and every other human force have not been able to open have been opened by one example of humanity and of mercy.”

Dante somehow conceived of films more than 600 years before their invention.

Each level of Purgatory contains exemplars of the virtues to which penitents aspire, drawn from history/Biblical narrative, and displayed to the Pilgrim as photorealistic, moving and talking images projected on smooth white marble. His senses are confounded in what can only be described as the first instance of ‘movie magic’

“Hence it arises that a republic has greater life and good fortune longer than a principality, for it can accommodate itself better than one prince can to the diversity of the times through the diversity of the citizens that are in it. For a man who is accustomed to proceed in one mode never changes…and when the times change not in conformity with his mode, he is ruined. [] Two things are causes why we are unable

An aspect of Dante that I love is his choice of similes. They are so apt, and bear such scrutiny within the broader themes of the poem, as only the finest poets can achieve. Here, penitent souls are rebuked for lingering to hear an earthly song (requested by the hapless, blundering Pilgrim) rather than starting on their climb toward the gates of Purgatory: