Yidir Bentizza > Recent Status Updates

I cannot believe I have found a hard copy of this book. It so happens that I have been wanting to read it. God bless the used bookstores of Bab Doukkala.

Lyons' smooth style of writing really keeps you going. I have already read his 'Language and linguistics' and might as well read the rest of his books.

I think I'll stop here, i have so much reading to do for my courses in uni. but i hope ill get to pick it up again one day. What i have read so far is very interesting (esp the part about the document that talked about the conquest of Palestine as being led by Muhammed not Omar), although the part about the clash between the Persian and Romanian empires is kinda boring and could be tackled more succinctly.

found this copy in a used bookstore in Bab Doukala, Marrakech. I've read somewhere before that it is used as a coursebook to teach linguistics in most universities abroad, so i grabbed it right away.

"In an era dominated by the divisive rhetoric of
shu'ubiyya, by the rivalry between peoples, Arabs would certainly have been tempted to conclude, on the basis of the Quran's revelation in Arabic,
that their own tongue was the best."

where has this been when i was struggling with my intro. to linguistics course in uni?

"Rather as in an Agatha Christie novel, where it is
invariably the suspect with the most ornate alibi who proves to be the
murderer, so similarly, in the field of hadith studies, it turned out that
there was no surer mark of fraud or distortion than a really exacting attention to detail."

"Indeed, so unexpected was what had happened, so utterly jaw-dropping, as to appear self-evidently miraculous. What else but the hand of God could possibly explain the conquest of the world by a people previously scorned as the ultimate in savagery and backwardness: the Arabs?"

"As we wander from province to province and from city to city, and see the poverty and degradation of the inliabitants, it seems difficult to believe that these are the descendants of the people who conquered Spain"