Jafar Isbarov > Recent Status Updates

"...faced with that fork in the intellectual path, Arabic civilization took the route of textual truth, and remained on it. There would, of course, be many great empirical Arabic minds, unrestrained by the language they thought in, but they operated in isolation or at the margins. In general, thought would
remain shackled to the study of texts, and truth rhetorical rather than empirical."

"The Meccan merchant elite, now rebranded as the leaders of the Islamic state of Medina, were directing the tremendous energies released by Muhammad’s revolution, and the unprecedented unity it had generated, to
remould tribal Arabdom into something that was economically, militarily
and even socially more like the former superpowers, Rome/Byzantium and
Persia, in their heyday."

"In those first Islamic centuries, Arabs made up for their lack of numbers. But they did so almost exclusively by concubinage and marriage with women of the conquered lands – Berbers, Copts, Aramaeans, Iranians, Kurds, Turks and many others. The label of ‘Arab’ was passed down the patriline but, generation by generation, the material of the ‘fan’ became even thinner."

"...unified word and united will gave Arabs the potential, at last, to rule others. As yet, however, the potential was unrealized; perhaps even unrecognized. Muhammad is said to have prayed for the fall of Ghassan and Kindah, but not for the fall of Persia and Byzantium. However broad his spiritual horizons were, his political purview seems to have been limited to the arabophone world."

"That Muhammad was so successful in his political and military roles at
Medina should never cause anyone, whether Muslim or not, to forget the
spiritual and moral underpinnings of his mission, the Meccan years. They
are the heart of the faith of Islam; they are what will last."

"...in western Arabia in late pagan times, there was a kind of oral circulating
library – of parables from ancient times, snippets of knowledge about the
Jewish and Christian scriptures, and ideas about creation and the nature of
the monotheistic God. All the hanifs drew from these. ... Muhammad was not alone in his beliefs."

Regarding pre-islamic Arabia:
"Din, rather like Buddhist dharma, is originally a matter not of theology but of keeping society on track: the track is that of the ancestors."

"both Islam and Arabs were part of a very long continuum, one which cannot be pressed into a few prolegomena to a Muslim year zero."

"To sum up, one has to admit there was no such thing as Arabic, singular;
rather there were – and still are – many Arabics. ‘Arabic’ was never a neatly
espaliered sub-branch of Semitic or a homogenous collection of shoots, but a gnarled and multiply engrafted outgrowth bearing some very old and very odd features."

"Arabs have never been united in speech, or in any other way, only in speeches; never in real words in the real world, only on paper."