… it should not be thought for one second that Gandhi’s finally full-blown desire to detach India from the British empire gave him the slightest sympathy with other colonial peoples pursuing similar objectives. Throughout his entire life Gandhi displayed the most spectacular inability to understand or even really take in people unlike himself — a trait which V.S. Naipaul considers specifically Hindu, and I am inclined to agree. Just as Gandhi had been totally unconcerned with the situation of South Africa’s blacks (he hardly noticed they were there until they rebelled), so now he was totally unconcerned with other Asians or Africans. In fact, he was adamantly opposed to certain Arab movements within the Ottoman empire for reasons of internal Indian politics.
At the close of World War I, the Muslims of India were deeply absorbed in what they called the “Khilafat” movement — “Khilafat” being their corruption of “Caliphate,” the Caliph in question being the Ottoman Sultan. In addition to his temporal powers, the Sultan of the Ottoman empire held the spiritual position of Caliph, supreme leader of the world’s Muslims and successor to the Prophet Muhammad. At the defeat of the Central Powers (Germany, Austria, Turkey), the Sultan was a prisoner in his palace in Constantinople, shorn of his religious as well as his political authority, and the Muslims of India were incensed. It so happened that the former subject peoples of the Ottoman empire, principally Arabs, were perfectly happy to be rid of this Caliph, and even the Turks were glad to be rid of him, but this made no impression at all on the Muslims of India, for whom the issue was essentially a club with which to beat the British. Until this odd historical moment, Indian Muslims had felt little real allegiance to the Ottoman Sultan either, but now that he had fallen, the British had done it! The British had taken away their Khilafat! And one of the most ardent supporters of this Indian Muslim movement was the new Hindu leader, Gandhi.
Richard Grenier, “The Gandhi Nobody Knows”, Commentary, 1983-03-01.
November 7, 2018
QotD: Gandhi and the fall of the Caliphate
October 9, 2018
Kingdom of Majapahit – Changing Winds – Extra History – #5
Extra Credits
Published on 6 Oct 2018When Islam arrived in Indonesia, life changed — except within Majapahit, where court drama kept them focused on themselves and unaware of the visits and alliances between Admiral Zheng He and the Sultanate of Malacca — forming new powers in the southern seas.
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As we finished this episode, an even more devastating earthquake and tsunami struck the island of Sulawesi. Once again we’ve linked two fundraising efforts—one international aid organization, and another for a local effort. Any help would be deeply appreciated.
https://secure2.oxfamamerica.org/page…
https://kopernik.info/en/donate/palu-…
September 27, 2018
“Oops” indeed!
Colby Cosh has a bit of good-natured fun-poking at the great and the good of the Canadian Establishment as an honorary Canadian turns out to be presiding over something that might be described as genocide:
President Barack Obama and Aung San Suu Kyi in 2014
Photo via Wikimedia Commons
Sometimes I am convinced that Canada is a name that will endure through the ages and travel with mankind throughout the galaxy. Sometimes I am convinced that we should be considered exclusively as a subject for absurdist fairy tales, a real-life Ruritania or Grand Fenwick. I guess it goes about 50-50. But I am afraid the emerging controversy over Aung San Suu Kyi’s honorary Canadian citizenship puts us firmly in kooky Zembla territory.
The present State Counsellor of Burma was the fourth person ever to receive this distinction. Now we are talking about withdrawing her honorary citizenship because, as first minister of Burma, she has been heavily implicated in massacres and ethnic cleansing of the Muslim Rohingya people of the country’s Rakhine state.
One in four: not such a great batting average, is it? Our political class devised the highest and most permanent form of honour that could be envisioned for a foreign do-gooder, and literally the fourth person on the entire surface of the planet who was deemed to have met the criteria went and became CEO of a genocide. What does this suggest about the collective judgment of Canada’s elite? You don’t suppose anyone is going to lose a job over this, do you?
[…]
Our prime minister is now spitballing the idea of having Aung San Suu Kyi’s honorary citizenship withdrawn, and one supposes that if this might help save innocent lives, it ought to be considered, even at the price of turning this concocted showpiece institution of “honorary citizenship” into garbage. One of the essential meanings of citizenship is that it cannot be withdrawn, even with due process, even when a citizen has perpetrated unspeakable crimes. “Honorary citizenship” does not confer the legal rights of the real thing, but surely it is at least supposed to resemble the real thing — to represent a commitment of analogous significance and irreversibility as that which we enter into with immigrants taking the oath and joining the club over at the courthouse.
Since honorary citizenship is not conferred by Parliament, it is not clear that it could be revoked by Parliament. Probably an Order-in-Council would do (because, again, no enforceable rights are at stake). If this is done in the case of Aung San Suu Kyi, it seems obvious that we should just put the institution in abeyance for a century or so. Let later generations see if they can manage not to screw up this honorary citizenship thing so thoroughly.
September 16, 2018
Early Arab Conquests | 3 Minute History
Jabzy
Published on 13 Dec 2015Covering the conquests during the Rashidun Caliphate. I will probably do a separate video on the First Fitna.
Thanks for the 15,000 subs. And thanks to Xios, Alan Haskayne, Lachlan Lindenmayer, Derpvic, Seth Reeves and all my other Patrons. If you want to help out – https://www.patreon.com/Jabzy?ty=h
August 31, 2018
How did Britain Conquer India? | Animated History
The Armchair Historian
Published on 10 Aug 2018Check out History With Hilbert: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hs1sw…
Our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/armchairhistory
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Sources:
https://dailyhistory.org/Why_was_Brit…
1857 Indian War of Independence: 1857 Indian Sepoys’ Mutiny, Shahid Hussain Raja
The East India Company, Brian Gardner
The Corporation that Changed the World: How the East India Company Shaped the Modern Multinational, Nick Robins
A History of India, Peter Robb
August 13, 2018
Blasphemy in modern Britain
Once upon a time, blasphemy was prosecuted by the Crown as an attack on the very basis of English law: “[blasphemy] law is needed to uphold the national law, which is based on Christianity. Thus, targeting Christianity is targeting the very foundation of England.” The last successful prosecution was in 1977. Modern prosecutions for blasphemy do not get filed under the old law, but the mechanism of the police, the courts, and the media are directed against those who dare to insult one particular faith:
Religious freedom is one of the core principles of any modern liberal society. As a secularist, I defend the right of religious people to send their children to faith schools, have their children circumcised, or wear the burqa. This does not mean I approve of any of these practices; they should be permissible but not protected from criticism. We should be free to ridicule, lampoon, chastise, critique, etc. every aspect of religious belief that we tolerate.
This is, more or less, what the U.K.’s former Conservative Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson wrote in his now infamous newspaper column in the Telegraph last week. Yet all hell has broken loose. It was greeted by near-hysterical outrage and shrill denunciations of Johnson’s alleged dog whistle racism; reports of civil war in the Tory Party over the matter; the now ubiquitous demands for an apology for causing offence (or else), which was backed in this instance by the Prime Minister. Boris’s is now the subject of an internal Party inquiry. It’s worth untangling this sorry tale as a snap-shot of today’s offence culture and how chilling it can be to a free society.
Johnson has been ‘called out’ as Islamophobic for arguing against – yes against – a ban on the burqa and for defending – yes defending – the right of any “free-born adult woman” to wear what she wants “in a public place, when she is simply minding her own business”. His column is predominantly an excoriating critique of Denmark’s betrayal of its own “spirit of liberty” and “the spirit of Viking individualism” by its decision to impose a state ban on the burqa or niqab (although he is not being indicted for caricaturing Danish culture). He rightly notes that being opposed to a ban should not be interpreted as approval and goes on to say – albeit in a somewhat crass manner – that “Muslim head-gear that obscures the female face… looking like letterboxes… like a bank robber…is absolutely ridiculous”.
As similes go, no doubt Boris could have been more tactful. I am no fan of BoJo-style private school wit. Indeed, I can understand that veil-wearing Muslim women – whom myriad journalists throughout the country have stopped on streets to ask if they like being compared to criminals or inanimate objects – would find the analogy offensive. But should all political comment on religion have to pass an offense test to be allowed? I am pretty sure that my two aunts – who are Catholic nuns – would be pretty offended if they heard my atheist mates’ denouncing as backward mumbo-jumbo a religion that believes the host and wine is literally the body and blood of Christ. But that’s the deal – a free society affords religious tolerance for nuns, imams, rabbis; and conversely liberty for others to stick the metaphorical boot into their beliefs.
Are Boris’s critics demanding respect for all religious practices regardless of whether they consider them backward, wrong-headed, or oppressive? Should we bite our lip in case we offend? We seem to have forgotten that we once all declared #JeSuisCharlie – a brief but inspiringly unapologetic defense of free speech after cartoonists for the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo were brutally butchered in Paris for daring to publish cartoons deemed offensive to Islam. Should they have shut up until they learned to become more tactful?
Naturally, cheap sectarian Tory-bashing has driven some of the outrage. Supporters of the Labour Party, recently afflicted by an anti-Semitism scandal that is still rumbling on, were quick to denounce the “gross Islamophobia” in the article, even though criticism of the burqa has been commonplace in Labour and feminist ranks over the years. Emily Thornberry, Labour’s Shadow Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (and Boris’s shadow until his recent resignation), declared on BBC’s Question Time in 2013 that “I wouldn’t want my four-year-old looked after by somebody wearing a burka. I wouldn’t want my elderly mum looked after by somebody wearing a burka. They need to be able to show their face. I wouldn’t mind if they worked in records in the hospital.”
August 7, 2018
QotD: Sailing past Byzantium
To those who know nothing about the mediaeval, “byzantine” East of Christendom (and what do I know about anything?) a book by the respectable Oxford scholar, Averil Cameron, is worth mentioning. It is a short survey of developments in her academic field, entitled, Byzantine Matters (2014). It poses five basic questions on which our common assumptions are mostly wrong, and provides succinct directions for thinking again.
Mediaeval Greece, the Byzantine dynasties, and Orthodox Christianity: these are far from interchangeable concepts. Moreover, “Byzantine art” — the focus of enthusiasm in the anglosphere through the last century or so — is misunderstood. The term “Byzantine” itself — conceived from late antiquity as a deprecation — persists in the academy as an intelligence neutralizer. The vanity of “the West” gets in the way of appreciating a parallel Christian realm, which flourished for more than a thousand years, and never succumbed to the Arabs. (It finally succumbed to the Turks.) We disdain what amounts to an alternative universe of Christian witness and high culture, of great variety and depth, even more obtusely than we disdain our own Middle Ages.
We are narrowed and prejudiced by the attitudinizing of Edward Gibbon, and the inheritance (or disinheritance) of our Western “Enlightenment,” to view as backward a civilization in most ways superior to our “modern” own, from pride in the tinsel of technology. From AD 330 (the founding of Constantine’s capital) to 1453 (when it fell into Ottoman hands), we see only a continuous story of “decline.” But there were many declines over this vast period, and in the intervals between them, many recoveries.
David Warren, “Sailing past Byzantium”, Essays in Idleness, 2016-11-07.
July 13, 2018
Lee Kuan Yew and the Muslim minority in Singapore
I must admit that I know very little about Singapore’s late long-serving Prime Minister, or that he’d been quite outspoken in his views on Islam and how Muslims must fit in to Singapore’s future (and not the other way around):
Singapore has been in the news for other reasons recently, but its appearance on the world stage, however brief, may provide us with an excuse to consider the views on Islam of the founding father of Singapore, and its longest-serving Prime Minister, Lee Kuan Yew, who died in 2015. Lee Kuan Yew lived in a multicultural city, with a Chinese majority and Indian and Muslim Malay minorities. All his political life, Lee Kuan Yew was aware of the need to keep the Muslim population in check. The laws he had passed, the regulations he enforced, were directed in large part to that end. He knew about Muslim efforts to convert others, and he made sure that any convert had to immediately register with the government, so such efforts could be monitored, and then countered, by the government. A study of all the ways that Lee Kuan Yew dealt with Muslims, and took careful note of, and combated, their natural aggressiveness and political machinations in tiny Singapore, an island of mostly Unbelievers — 3/4 of whom are Chinese — in a Muslim sea, should be instructive for Western leaders, who have the same problem and as yet only timid and confused ideas as to how to solve it.
Wikileaks revealed that Lee Kuan Yew had called Islam “a venomous religion.” He made sure to limit the numbers of Muslims in Singapore’s armed forces, suggesting their religion made them a possible danger to their non-Muslim fellow soldiers. In his “The Malays in Singapore,” he wrote that “if, for instance, you put in a Malay officer who’s very religious and who has family ties in Malaysia in charge of a machine gun unit, that’s a very tricky business.” It was under his leadership that the government instituted a ban on hijabs and other Muslim headscarves in both the police forces and nursing jobs. Lee Kuan Yew also substantially reduced government funding for madrasas, while increasing support for secular education. His government carefully monitored the mosques, both for the content of the imam’s sermons, and for any foreign (especially Saudi) sources of financial support that might lead to a mosque being “radicalized.” Clearly he understood the danger of Islam.
Lee Kuan Yew had, after all, originally declared Singapore’s independence from Malaysia because the Muslim Malays rejected meritocracy, and insisted on giving economic advantage to themselves. All Malays were required to be counted as Muslims (even if some were not), and all Muslims benefited from a disguised jizyah tax on non-Muslims which is called the “Bumiputra.” Although the word means “sons of the soil,” it is not the indigenous Malaysian tribes that benefit from the “Bumiputra” policy, but Malay Muslims alone.
Singapore has been an economic miracle since independence, but it has been ruled with an authoritarian iron hand in many ways.
July 3, 2018
French North Africa in World War 1 I THE GREAT WAR Special
The Great War
Published on 2 Jul 2018Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco were all part of French North Africa before and during World War 1. They all contributed in material and men to the war effort and the French colonial soldiers were praised for their bravery.
June 27, 2018
Canada’s euphemistically named “High Risk Returnees”
Judith Bergman on the Canadian government’s kid-gloves approach to dealing with Canadian citizens who return to Canada after volunteering to serve with terrorist organizations:
Canadians who go abroad to commit terrorism – predominantly jihadists, in other words – have a “right to return” according to government documents obtained by Global News. They not only have a right of return, but “… even if a Canadian engaged in terrorist activity abroad, the government must facilitate their return to Canada,” as one document says.
According to the government, there are still around 190 Canadian citizens volunteering as terrorists abroad. The majority are in Syria and Iraq, and 60 have returned. Police are reportedly expecting a new influx of returnees over the next couple of months.
The Canadian government is willing to go to great (and presumably costly) lengths to “facilitate” the return of Canadian jihadists, unlike the UK, for example, which has revoked the citizenship of ISIS fighters so they cannot return. The Canadian government has established a taskforce, the High Risk Returnee Interdepartmental Taskforce, that, according to government documents:
“… allows us to collectively identify what measures can mitigate the threat these individuals may pose during their return to Canada. This could include sending officers overseas to collect evidence before they depart, or their detention by police upon arrival in Canada.”
Undercover officers may also be used “to engage with the HRT [High Risk Traveler] to collect evidence, or monitor them during their flight home.”
In the sanitizing Orwellian newspeak employed by the Canadian government, the terrorists are not jihadis who left Canada to commit the most heinous crimes, such as torture, rape and murder, while fighting for ISIS in Syria and Iraq, but “High Risk Travelers” and “High Risk Returnees”.
The government is fully aware of the security risk to which it is subjecting Canadians: According to the documents, “HRRs [High Risk Returnees] can pose a significant threat to the national security of Canada”. This fact raises the question of why the government of Canada is keen to facilitate these people’s “right of return” — when presumably the primary obligation of the government is to safeguard the security of law-abiding Canadian citizens.
June 4, 2018
The History of Non-Euclidian Geometry – The Great Quest – Extra History – #2
Extra Credits
Published on 2 Jun 2018For hundreds of years, Euclid’s geometry disappeared with the fall of the Roman Empire. But in Constantinople, Islamic mathematicians, including Al-Khwarizmi (who gave us the word “algebra”) worked long and hard on proving the Fifth Postulate.
June 2, 2018
The Robinson Affair (that the British establishment would like to “disappear”)
If you haven’t been paying attention to the British media, you might not have heard about Tommy Robinson and his crusade to expose the “Asian grooming gangs” that have been left almost undisturbed by the British police, prosecutors and (until very recently indeed) the media:
The controversy around him continued. In March, Robinson was suspended from Twitter, where he had almost half a million followers. The social-media site (which merrily allows terrorist groups like Lashkar e-Taiba to keep accounts) decided that Robinson should be suspended for tweeting out a statistic about Muslim rape gangs that itself originated from the Muslim-run Quilliam foundation. And it is on this matter that the latest episode in the Robinson drama started — and has now drawn worldwide attention.
Ten years ago, when the EDL was founded, the U.K. was even less willing than it is now to confront the issue of what are euphemistically described as “Asian grooming gangs” (euphemistic because no Chinese or Koreans are involved and what is happening is not grooming but mass rape). At the time, only a couple of such cases had been recognized. Ten years on, every month brings news of another town in which gangs of men (almost always of Pakistani origin) have been found to have raped young, often underage, white girls. The facts of this reality — which, it cannot be denied, sounds like something from the fantasies of the most lurid racist — have now been confirmed multiple times by judges during sentencing and also by the most mainstream investigative journalists in the country.
But the whole subject is so ugly and uncomfortable that very few people care to linger over it. Robinson is an exception. For him — as he said in a 2011 interview with the BBC’s Jeremy Paxman — the “grooming gangs” issue isn’t something that afflicts some far-off towns but people in the working-class communities that he knows. And while there are journalists (notably the Times’ Andrew Norfolk) who have spent considerable time and energy bringing this appalling phenomenon to light, most of British society has turned away in a combination of embarrassment, disgust, and uncertainty about how to even talk about this. Anyone who thinks Britain is much further along with dealing with the taboo of “grooming gangs” should remember that only last year the Labour MP for Rotherham, Sarah Champion, had to leave the shadow cabinet because she accurately identified the phenomenon.
Which brings me to last Friday. That was when Robinson was filming outside Leeds Crown Court, where the latest grooming-gang case was going on. I have to be slightly careful here, because although National Review is based in the U.S., I am not, and there are reporting restrictions on the ongoing case. Anyhow, Robinson was outside the court and appeared (from the full livestream) to be filming the accused and accosting them with questions on their way in. He also appeared to exercise some caution, trying to ensure he was not on court property.
But clearly he did not exercise enough caution, a strange fact given that last year Robinson had been found guilty of “contempt of court” for filming outside another rape-gang trial, one involving four Muslim men at Canterbury Crown Court. On that occasion Robinson was given a three-month prison sentence [PDF], which was suspended for a period of 18 months. Which meant he would be free so long as he did not repeat the offense.
Although Robinson appeared to be careful at Leeds Crown Court last Friday, to dance along the line of exactly what he could or could not livestream outside an ongoing trial with a suspended sentence hanging over his head was extraordinarily unwise. What happened next went around the world: The police turned up in a van and swiftly arrested Robinson for “breach of the peace.” Within hours Robinson had been put before one Judge Geoffrey Marson, who in under five minutes tried, convicted, and sentenced Robinson to 13 months. He was immediately taken to prison.
From that moment it was not just Robinson but the U.K. that entered a minefield of legal problems. In addition to the usual reporting restrictions on the ongoing trial, a reporting ban was put on any mention of Robinson’s arrest, swift trial, and conviction, meaning that for days people in the blogosphere and the international media got free rein to claim that Tommy Robinson had been arrested for no reason, that his arrest was a demonstration of a totalitarian state cracking down on free speech, and even (and this one is remarkably clueless as well as careless) that the recent appointment to the position of home secretary of Sajid Javid — who was born to Muslim parents — is the direct cause of Robinson’s recent arrest.
May 28, 2018
Middle East: Palmyra Today – Afterword – Extra History
Extra Credits
Published on 31 Oct 2015Learn about Odenathus, King of Palmyra: http://bit.ly/1GDsDvz
____________Palmyra is an embodiment of our shared past, but right now it’s under the control of ISIS. They have destroyed the antiquities that remind us of our shared past. We would like to take a moment to honor Dr. Khaled al-Assad, the museum director who gave his life rather than reveal the locations of more Palmyrene relics for ISIS to destroy.
May 2, 2018
QotD: Islam and the “golden rule”
Let’s examine the ethical basis of our civilization. All of our politics and ethics are based upon a unitary ethic that is best formulated in the Golden Rule:
Treat others as you would be treated.
The basis of this rule is the recognition that at one level, we are all the same. We are not all equal. Any game of sports will show that we do not have equal abilities. But everyone wants to be treated as a human being. In particular, we all want to be equal under the law and be treated as social equals. On the basis of the Golden Rule — the equality of human beings — we have created democracy, ended slavery and treat women and men as political equals. So the Golden Rule is a unitary ethic. All people are to be treated the same. All religions have some version of the Golden Rule except Islam.
FP: So how is Islam different in this context?
Warner: The term “human being” has no meaning inside of Islam. There is no such thing as humanity, only the duality of the believer and unbeliever. Look at the ethical statements found in the Hadith. A Muslim should not lie, cheat, kill or steal from other Muslims. But a Muslim may lie, deceive or kill an unbeliever if it advances Islam.
There is no such thing as a universal statement of ethics in Islam. Muslims are to be treated one way and unbelievers another way. The closest Islam comes to a universal statement of ethics is that the entire world must submit to Islam. After Mohammed became a prophet, he never treated an unbeliever the same as a Muslim. Islam denies the truth of the Golden Rule.
By the way, this dualistic ethic is the basis for jihad. The ethical system sets up the unbeliever as less than human and therefore, it is easy to kill, harm or deceive the unbeliever.
Now mind you, unbelievers have frequently failed at applying the Golden Rule, but we can be judged and condemned on its basis. We do fall short, but it is our ideal.
There have been other dualistic cultures. The KKK comes to mind. But the KKK is a simplistic dualism. The KKK member hates all black people at all times; there is only one choice. This is very straightforward and easy to see.
The dualism of Islam is more deceitful and offers two choices on how to treat the unbeliever. The unbeliever can be treated nicely, in the same way a farmer treats his cattle well. So Islam can be “nice”, but in no case is the unbeliever a “brother” or a friend. In fact, there are some 14 verses of the Koran that are emphatic — a Muslim is never a friend to the unbeliever. A Muslim may be “friendly,” but he is never an actual friend. And the degree to which a Muslim is actually a true friend is the degree to which he is not a Muslim, but a hypocrite.
Bill Warner, interviewed by Jamie Glazov in “The Study of Political Islam”, FrontPage Magazine, 2007-02-05.
April 30, 2018
The Empire of Mali – Mansa Musa – Extra History – #3
Extra Credits
Published on 28 Apr 2018Mansa Musa is remembered as the richest person in the entire history of the world, but he also worked hard to establish the empire of Mali as a political and even religious superpower. However, his excessive wealth started creating bigger problems…
