Brendan’s Reviews > A History of the Muslim World: From Its Origins to the Dawn of Modernity > Status Update
Brendan
is on page 264 of 960
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,
— Aug 16, 2026 11:51AM
“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,
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Brendan’s Previous Updates
Brendan
is on page 809 of 960
“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
— Sep 17, 2026 08:14PM
Brendan
is on page 798 of 960
“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
— Sep 16, 2026 09:20PM
Brendan
is on page 759 of 960
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
— Sep 15, 2026 08:15PM
Brendan
is on page 751 of 960
“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.’”
— Sep 15, 2026 07:45PM
Brendan
is on page 524 of 960
“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
— Sep 02, 2026 07:41PM
Brendan
is on page 384 of 960
“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
— Aug 23, 2026 01:21PM
Brendan
is on page 381 of 960
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
— Aug 23, 2026 12:28PM
Brendan
is on page 340 of 960
“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
— Aug 22, 2026 11:56AM
Brendan
is on page 298 of 960
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
— Aug 17, 2026 07:52PM
“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
Brendan
is on page 175 of 960
“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,
— Aug 10, 2026 09:00PM
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Aug 16, 2026 11:53AM
and Buddhists, and from at least the eighth century Jews wrote Persian in the Hebrew script. By the same token, we could expect Muslims to write Persian in the Arabic script and thereby Islamize it. This was the path actually taken. A new Persian literary language developed, based on contemporary spoken Persian and written in the Arabic script. The language is New Persian in contradistinction to Old and Middle Persian, but today it is over a thousand years old…”
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Interesting also to note that medieval Iran contained *many* languages — most of which are now extinct or nearly so — with Persian being the most prominent due to the pre-Islamic Sassanian Empire’s home base in Fars (whence ‘Farsi’). Adoption of Persian increased under Arab rule as a means for the Arabic speaking elites to communicate with their Iranian subjects.
“[New Persian] emerged not in the homeland of Persian in southwestern Iran, but rather in the northeast — in Khurasan, where a few centuries earlier the prevalent language may have been Parthian, and in Transoxania, where the mother tongue of the population was still Sogdian in early Islamic times. In other words, the new literary language was based on the northern dialect, not the southern one. From the northeast it only gradually spread westward [] In due course New Persian would become a vehicle of high culture as far west as the Balkans and as far east as Bengal.”