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Thomas A. Carlson @medievalmiddleeast.bsky.social · 12h

and the idea of a normative baseline to which newcomers might fail to conform has been supplied by modern nationalism, not medieval conditions. 2/2

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Thomas A. Carlson @medievalmiddleeast.bsky.social · 12h

Of course a famous hadith prohibited imitating (tashabbuh) religious others (cf. Youshaa Patel's book, etc.), which is clearly anxiety of influence. Medieval Armenian and Latin (Andalusi) clergy worried about Christians imitating Muslim elites. But "assimilation" requires a (notional) baseline, +

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Reposted by Thomas A. Carlson

Thomas A. Carlson @medievalmiddleeast.bsky.social · 23h

Okay: a question at the edge of my teaching:
For a world religions survey, I'm assigning a bunch of Islamic sources spanning the 1447 (lunar) years since the Hijra, but I don't know recent stuff as well as I know medieval stuff. Any good recommendations for Islam today that are 1st-year accessible?

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Thomas A. Carlson @medievalmiddleeast.bsky.social · 23h

Geography is open, but of course it must be in English translation.

Recommended primary source readings in contemporary Islam?

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Thomas A. Carlson @medievalmiddleeast.bsky.social · 23h

Okay: a question at the edge of my teaching:
For a world religions survey, I'm assigning a bunch of Islamic sources spanning the 1447 (lunar) years since the Hijra, but I don't know recent stuff as well as I know medieval stuff. Any good recommendations for Islam today that are 1st-year accessible?

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Thomas A. Carlson @medievalmiddleeast.bsky.social · 1d

With all the AI spyware built into Windows 11 and AI's inability to prevent spewing protected information if prompted, some university lawyers should really investigate whether teachers using Windows 11 violates FERPA.

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Reposted by Thomas A. Carlson

Mustafa Kaya @mikaya.bsky.social · 1d

Three years and half a trillion dollars later we still have a dumb AI yet some in academia believe it’s a “research” tool. Imagine the millions of ways the money could have been used to actually serve humanity. AI is nothing meaningful but a stage in the adventures of capitalism.

Ulrike Franke @rikefranke.bsky.social · 1d

And here we go. I never wrote this article, and yet it is cited here.

www.liberalbriefs.com/geopolitics/...

And of course, it sounds so plausible, I seriously checked whether I had forgotten it, or the footnote was slightly wrong.

#AIisnotresearch

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Matthew Thomas Miller (He/Him) @mtmiller.bsky.social · 2d

Big news for Persian Studies and Digital Humanities!

Open Islamicate Texts Initiative @openiti.bsky.social · 2d

"[T]he initiative will provide free, global access to a constantly expanding body of classical and modern Persian texts. The project will also partner with institutions to help safeguard thousands of at-risk manuscripts and rare books from collections in India, Pakistan and beyond."

Roshan Institute to Establish Persian Digital Library | Maryland Today

Supported by $1.8M Private Gift, Project Will Be First of Its Kind

today.umd.edu

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Timothy Snyder @timothysnyder.bsky.social · 3d

This is what freedom of speech sounds like. Also, please consider subscribing to the Philadelphia Inquirer.
www.inquirer.com/opinion/trum...

Why we can’t allow Trump to ban that other f-word | Will Bunch

The column the Trump regime wants to ban: America has to call out surging fascism in order to defeat it.

www.inquirer.com

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Peter Tarras @petertarras.bsky.social · 4d

Copy of an Umayyad wall painting (early 8th c.) from Qusayr Amra, depicting six kings with bilingual Greek and Arabic inscriptions. The copy was made by the Austrian painter Leopold Mielich who was also responsible for the massivly damaged state it's now in.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paintin...

Mielich's copy of the Six Kings painting from Qusayr Amra. Six figures standing next to each other, against a light blue background, wearing colourful Byzantine garb. Four of the six faces are still partly visible. The copy already records a damaged state.

More recent photograph of the Six Kings painting. None of the figures' faces is recognisable anymore.

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Dr. Nick Posegay @nposegay.bsky.social · 4d

Here's an 11th-century Jewish manuscript that refers to God as Allah and wishes for the reader to have "jihad of his soul in love for his Creator"

Torn and crinkled brown-ish parchment manuscript with about 30 lines of Judaeo-Arabic text, set on a light blue grid background. The uploader has highlighted portions with red boxes and transliterated with inserted Arabic text, reading الله and واجهاد نفسه في حب خالقه

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Ebony Elizabeth Thomas @ebonyteach.blacksky.app · 4d

Building a career on punching down is antithetical to becoming and being an effective educator.

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Dr. Rachel Schine @rachelschine.bsky.social · 4d

... And then there's the eponym of the Turkish shadow-play form, Karagöz, who is sometimes said to have been a man who worked on the construction site of a 14th-century mosque and was 'kambur,' or hunched, giving rise to a hunchbacked stock figure in those plays as well...

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Dr. Rachel Schine @rachelschine.bsky.social · 4d

... But there are others. The titular figure of the 13th-century Arabic shadow play, Ṭayf al-Khayāl, is said to be hunched (aḥdab), and hail from Mosul, which was sometimes called the Hunchbacked City (al-Ḥadbā'), because the minaret of one of its central mosques is a little tilty...

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Dr. Rachel Schine @rachelschine.bsky.social · 4d

So, one thing I learned today is that theater loves a hunchback.

Take Pulcinella, of the commedia dell'arte genre. He's said to have antecedents from the Atellan farces, which had characters like Maccus, also hunchbacked. Plautus likely took the nickname Maccius from him...

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Thomas A. Carlson @medievalmiddleeast.bsky.social · 4d

Is this the old minaret before ISIS demolished it in 2017? I haven't seen pictures of the recent reconstruction to see if they rebuilt it at the same angle...

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Thomas A. Carlson @medievalmiddleeast.bsky.social · 5d

With all those bottles in the background, I thought that was the office of one of the three of them... =-)

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Joey Fishkin @fishkin.bsky.social · 5d

News coverage of the Trump administration's proposed "compact" with universities has been, so far, shockingly bad.

I hate to pick on NPR reporter Elissa Nadworny, who's usually a solid reporter, but almost every important thing I heard her say this morning about the proposed "compact" was false.

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Isaac Samuel @rhaplord.bsky.social · 5d

paintings of warrior saints from the church of Faras, Lower Nubia

11th-13th century.
-Sudan National Museum (previously)
#randomxt

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Reposted by Thomas A. Carlson

Amarnath Amarasingam @amaramarasingam.bsky.social · 6d

It's like the Stanford Prison experiment is going on again, except it's the whole country.

Lynda Lopez @lyndab08.bsky.social · 6d

“It looks like hell,” Jones said. “ICE really just a gang.”

South Shore Residents Return To Ransacked Apartments After ICE Raid: 'It Looks Like Hell'

A "now renting" sign outside touts granite countertops. Inside, residents are trying to make sense of the raid that made their already neglected building even worse.

blockclubchicago.org

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Dr. Rachel Schine @rachelschine.bsky.social · 5d

In sincerity I did log on for a reason. A new issue of the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies is out, edited by colleague/friend Marcel Elias. It's about how to do postcolonial medieval studies bigger and better. You'll like it. (I'm in there). Go read.
read.dukeupress.edu/jmems/issue/...

Volume 55 Issue 3 | Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies | Duke University Press

read.dukeupress.edu

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Thomas A. Carlson @medievalmiddleeast.bsky.social · 6d

Really? It seems to me that all the RS departments I've talked to want to ask what my definition of religion is, and I always want to borrow a definition from another context: "I know it when I see it" (Jacobellis v. Ohio 1964)...

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Thomas A. Carlson @medievalmiddleeast.bsky.social · 6d

I think of the category of religion as ad hoc useful for identifying interesting comparanda, but not as analytically useful per se. Perhaps that's why I've never been hired by a Religious Studies department... =-)

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Thomas A. Carlson @medievalmiddleeast.bsky.social · 6d

Aha. I am skeptical (and not only for Asad's reasons) of claims of global cultural homology; I would explain the parallels between Arabic and Latin concepts of religio/din due to cognate developments of shared heritage. 1/2

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Thomas A. Carlson @medievalmiddleeast.bsky.social · 6d

What do you mean by a "universal religious experience"? Asking for clarity, not snark.

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