By Giancarlo Casale. The Ottomans were very active throughout the Indian Ocean world during the 1500s despite having no access to or knowledge of the area at the beginning of the century. The author shows their exploration of the Indian Ocean is closely analogous to the activities of the Portuguese in same period. The most […]
Category Archives: Briefly
Review: Going Postal
By Mark Ames Why do they hate America? Because there is a lot there to hate, says Mark Ames. Going Postal connects a lot of far-flung points to show the creepy similarities that exist between school and workplace rage killings and early American slave rebellions. Among them is that each and every slave rebellion was […]
Illegal Business
… Controls America. Proof emerging that the DEA cooperated with the Sinaloa Cartel to allow drugs into the US in exchange for intelligence against other cartels. Which has got to figure in to why HSBC only got a slap on the wrist for laundering a billion dollars for them.
American Nations: Review
Colin Woodward traces the origins of settlement in the United States to demonstrate that American attitudes, values and politics are highly regional and perpetuate over time. This basis for this is the “Founder’s Effect”, a recognized phenomenon whereby the original settlers of an area have an outsize effect on culture across time. Looking at patterns […]
Knowledge of Self
Theodore W. Allen (1919-2005) told me where white people come from. We like to think we know who we are, and indeed many things about ourselves we can easily define: male, muslim, American. But I am white and I could not explain to myself what that meant. Any meaning I set was either too narrow, […]
Review: The Reluctant Fundamentalist
by Mohsin Hamed. Changez’s personal journey of transformation and the conflicts driving it were believable enough I guess, but not particularly dramatic or striking (and lacking almost entirely in fundamentalism). His critique of American society/empire was also fairly tepid. I suppose that’s where the “Reluctant” comes from in the title, but it made the novel […]
No God But God
… and Reza Aslan is the Author. Tight composition, fast pacing, authoritative tone: it’s no surprise it was a bestseller. Of politics and history it is a good introduction for the non-muslim. But if the intent was to present a vision of how muslims should understand their faith under the challenge of modernity, it falls way […]
Universalising Islam in Malaysia
by Hew Wai Weng in the Malay Mail [Full Text]. “In the past, ethnic Chinese who became Muslims were assumed to lose their Chinese cultural identity and become “Malay”. The recent emergence of Chinese Muslim cultural identities, which combine both Chinese cultural symbols and Islamic messages have challenged this widely held perception that “Chineseness” and Islam […]