Leading the vanguard of his armies across India, Genghis Khan suddenly encountered an uncanny animal, blue‑green in colour, with the body of a bull, the tail of a horse, and a single horn. The Great Khan declared this apparition inauspicious, turned his reins, and led his army back to Mongolia.
Author: David Chaffetz
In London’s Victoria and Albert Museum a 16th-century Iranian carpet reigns over the Islamic collection and mesmerizes visitors. In Threads of Empire, Dorothy Armstrong writes, “The carpet transports us away from South Kensington to wherever our personal Arabian Nights dreams are located.” While the beauty of the pile side of her 12 rugs entrances her, she looks deeply at the knotted side, to explore the complex stories of their origins. Through both picture and pattern she teases out the history of these carpets, which, she argues, can reveal much about the history of our world.
A worldly Hungarian informed me in 1976, as I was leaving to take up a scholarship in Iran, “I was at the Shah’s 2,500 year celebration.” Astounded, I asked him what it was like. “Like something out of Buñuel”, he replied. Iran’s ruler had invited to him to the infamous coming out party because he had attended the Shah’s alma mater, Switzerland’s aristocratic Le Rosey. That already tells you a lot about the failings of the imperial regime, which today some wish to see returned to power. Readers of Robert Templer’s The Shah’s Party will be spoiled for choice to find motivations for the revolution of 1978 that drove the monarch into exile, in this Tristram Shandy-esque narrative of venality, sycophancy, ineptitude, hubris and cultural myopia. Yet as Templer makes clear, the Iranians enjoyed no monopoly on these shortcomings.
Slavery underpins so much of the pre-modern Islamicate world, with its slave-sultans, eunuchs, elite dancing girls as well as household servants, and yet we don’t know much about this social institution and what we know is probably wrong. Perhaps because contemporary historians considered slavery so natural, we can glean little insight from their texts about how the institution functioned; who became enslaved, how did the slave trade work; how were its victims treated? Craig Perry seeks answers to those questions by delving deeply into the Cairo Geniza, a trash repository which by serendipity preserves for us tens of thousands of private, legal and commercial documents from the 11th-12th centuries. With these, he comes to a number of surprising conclusions about the workings of medieval slavery in the lands of Islam.
Can grammar function like a machine? Can a set of mechanical procedures, or rules, generate perfectly correct sentences in a given language? This is a question that preoccupies linguists, but not language users. It is natural to assume that language is too sloppy, too idiosyncratic, too human, in the end, to be generated by a machine. When we studied English grammar, we learned there was an exception to every rule. But in India, scholars uphold one monumental grammar as a model of perfect, generative power: that of Panini, who lived in the 4th century BCE. His 4,000 rules in verse are supposed to generate all the required forms of Sanskrit, the classical language of Indian civilization.
In Egypt’s eastern province, the annual Arabian Horse Festival celebrates the deep historical connection between the province, the Arabian horse, and the settlement of Bedouin tribes in Egypt during the 7th century. Except that, according to Yossef Rapoport’s new book, Becoming Arab, this perceived connection doesn’t represent a historical event, but rather a lengthy process of ethnogenesis. For the conquering Arab armies settled in the cities of Egypt, not in the countryside, where Islam remained a minority religion for centuries. Yet today, many Egyptians consider themselves scions of ancient Arab tribes, just as they see their horses as pure blood Arabs. How and when did this Arab identity take hold in Egypt?
You come across them in used book stores, with their fading, cloth covers, their saccharine prose, with black and white photos of palaces and tennis courts. These are the memoirs of princesses from the house of Muhammad Ali of Egypt, of Zog of Albania, or the Dogras of Kashmir. It’s easy to forget that behind the overthrow of these sad, sentimental royal exiles, major political and social forces were at work: Imran Mulla’s The Indian Caliphate takes what would otherwise have been a trite tale of dethroned dynasties and brings to life the passions and controversies that stirred the early 20th century, and which have not really calmed down even in our own.
In few countries is the contrast between buried riches and visible squalor as great as in Afghanistan. Ancient towns like Balkh and Ghazna present scenes of desolation which belie the wonderful objects and architectural elements that archaeologists have recovered from them. Other rich sites, like Ai Khanum, lie below the surface of a featureless plain. Perhaps only Herat recalls to visitors the storied riches of this country, with its grandiose mosque and Sufi shrines. It is in a way surprising that Afghanistan attracted so many archaeological missions, though after the fact they were well rewarded for their efforts. In Ancient Civilizations of Afghanistan, Warwick Ball recounts how Afghanistan has historically been the center of many civilizations, and not the isolated, peripheral land it has become.
Not as well-known as the classic poets of the Tang era, Xie Lingyun (385-433) stands at a turning point in Chinese literature. The long-ruling Han dynasty had a conservative view of culture. Scholars of that dynasty cultivated old fashioned poetic forms and adhered to a tradition-bound Confucian ethic. With the downfall of the Han and the centuries of warfare to restore a single Chinese polity, values, ideas, lineages and even geographic loci were stirred, as it were, in one great swirling pot.
The Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl, never one to shrink from a challenge, visited Gobustan in Azerbaijan for two decades to prove his theory that the ancestors of today’s Scandinavians left behind the mysterious rock carvings near Baku. Uncanny similarities between petroglyphs showing the long, oared boats of Caspian seafarers and those of the Vikings, and between other rock carvings in both Azerbaijan and Norway tantalized Heyerdahl.
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