History

For Int’l Women’s Day, via OCIANA a Safaitic Arabic inscription [c. 1-400 AD], by a wealthy woman calling on two goddesses for peace: “By Shamat daughter of Sar is the mule [owned] and O {Shahqam} —-m—- [and] Allat, [grant] {security} [for] the people of al-Ḍaf.” This inscription from the first centuries after Christ in Arabia […]

Climate Change

European colonisation of the Americas killed 10% of world population and caused global cooling

The Conversation

By Alexander Koch, Chris Brierley, Mark Maslin and Simon Lewis | – While Europe was in the early days of the Renaissance, there were empires in the Americas sustaining more than 60m people. But the first European contact in 1492 brought diseases to the Americas which devastated the native population and the resultant collapse of […]

History

Islamophobia versus World History: Rediscovering Marshall Hodgson

Edmund Burke III

Santa Cruz (Informed Comment) – Published in 1974, Marshall Hodgson’s The Venture of Islam was a watershed moment in the study of Islam. By locating the history of Islamic societies in a global perspective, Hodgson challenged the orientalist paradigms that had stunted the development of Islamic studies and provided an alternative approach to world history. […]

Colonialism

Why do we Revere Malala but Not Ahed Tamimi?

The Conversation

By Sarah Kastner | – After Israeli forces shot her 15-year-old cousin in the head with a rubber bullet last December, Ahed Tamimi, a Palestinian girl from Nabi Saleh in the West Bank, stood up to the occupying Israeli forces and was arrested and charged for slapping a soldier. The story of the activist went […]

Colonialism

Muslim Troops Helped Entente Win WW I, Shaped European Security

Mohammed Samaana

(Informed Comment) – As the world is marking the end of the First World War first centenary and remembering its millions of military and civilian victims, in this article I’m going to focus only on one victim of the Great War and that’s the truth. There are millions of forgotten Arab and Muslim soldiers who […]

Colonialism

Human Zoos in the Age of Trump

Ariel Dorfman

Durham, NC (Tomdispatch.com) – When Donald Trump recently accused “illegal immigrants” of wanting to “pour into and infest our country,” there was an immediate outcry. After all, that verb, infest, had been used by the Nazis as a way of dehumanizing Jews and communists as rats, vermin, or insects that needed to be eradicated. Nobody, […]

Archaeology

How Horse-Riding in Eurasia advantaged Huns, Mongols over Farmers

Mariette Le Roux

Paris (AFP) – Horse domestication changed the face of Eurasia, helping ancient Huns and Mongols supplant western “Indo-European” farmers in an incremental westward drive that also brought Hepatitis B and plague, scientists said Wednesday. In three studies published in the journals Science and Nature, experts reported sequencing the genomes of dozens of humans who lived […]

Ottoman Empire

Turkish Youth, WW I’s Gallipoli Battle, and the Secular-Religious Divide

contributors

By Brad West and Ayhan Aktar | (The Conversation) | – – With ongoing political instability and security concerns in Turkey, we are again likely to see a smaller turnout of Australians and New Zealanders for Anzac Day ceremonies at Gallipoli this year. Turkish soldiers in a trench at Gallipoli. The way Turkish youth commemorate […]

History

‘These are the keys of this paradise’: how 700 years of Muslim rule in Spain came to an end

contributors

By Elizabeth Drayson | (The Conversation) | – – It was the moment which set Spain on a course to become the greatest power in early modern Europe. On January 2, 1492 Abdallah Muhammad bin Ali, or Muhammad XII, known as Boabdil, the last Moorish sultan of Granada and head of the Nasrid dynasty, surrendered […]