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Today Zach and I talk about his evolution in relation to Islam. In particular, why Zach has become vocally and unapologetically Islamophobic recently, and what the difference between Islamophobia and anti-Muslim prejudice is. I also ask Zach what his problem white people, and in particular PewDiePie, is.
And he will be a wild man; his hand will be against every man, and every man’s hand against him; and he shall dwell in the presence of all his brethren.
– Genesis 16:12
Topics reminder for Xerxie – jihad, holy war, sharia, 77 virgins, black kkk, taqiya, vahhabism, green transversal (Bosnia – Indonesia) …
I shall try mate..
Zach you came off as very reasonable in this. I actually agreed with almost everything you said.
the way he pronounced pewdiepie was not reasonable.
Freudian slip ?
Thank you!
Xerxes, can you watch:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oliGZiMUpvo
from 3:56 onwards?
The rise of Islamism inside Europe is discussed. Prof Vaidyanathan thinks that much of Europe might collapse if Europe is not saved by the rest of the world.
What are your thoughts about this? Do you agree with Vaiyanathan’s suggestions for what India should do to save Europe and what India should ask from Europe in return?
I saw this interview conducted by R. Malhotra. The analysis is ok although too general without specifics but the proposed solution is a bit naïve. There is no answer who organises the moving of Muslim people to Europe. Soros is only the visible pick of the iceberg, but who is behind him. Maybe the richest people who do not appear on Forbes list leaving Bezos, Gates and Buffet to act as show ponies with their pocket change? US deep state? Who should invite Indians? Junker? Angela? Europe cannot talk in one voice. And what is Europe? EU? Where is Russia in this whole picture? And China with their belt and road already in Europe? Why India needs a place in UN Security Council if this is only an empty shell?
Having cowardly attacked Serbia without UN mandate, US made a precedent and repeated this several times afterwards. And who should give to India a part occupied by Pakistan? And Tibet? What about Chinese? The anticipation that Pakistan will dissolve is founded because they do not have attributes of one separate nation. One guy says that his identity (and identity of people in Pakistan) is islam. It means, they have no identity, what distinguish them from e.g. Indonesians or Nigerians? If the identity is islam it means they do not need separate country, they maybe contemplate Green Transversal Caliphate from Bosnia to Indonesia and to keep conquering the European Union. Having said all this there is a role for India to play but this must be much better conceived. I could suggest some steps (instead of India considering only declining UK) and I may send to R.Malhotra because he is probably well linked with Indian government.
During the war in Bosnia, one commander of UN troops in early days was the general Satish Nambiar from India. He understood what has happening and tried to be impartial. But that was not the reason why he was invited. So-called UN troops, actually US, UK, Germany and other western countries behind them provided logistics to Muslim fighters who fought for Islamic State and expulsion of Serbs, they invited mujahidin from Middle East, even including Iran, gave them transport and weapons and, at the end, got involved directly with US air force attacking Serbian defenders. Satish was sent back to India and they tried not to make such mistake again and all commanders afterwards were Muslim supporters who were daily giving a false picture of the situation in Bosnia.
I think the “death of Paksitan” is much exaggerated; it’s not Yugoslavia per se
Yugoslavia was destroyed by Vatican and US deep state, English ‘divide et impera’ hundreds of years of politics, German revanchism, aggressive ISIS islamism and extraordinary low civilisation level of Albanians. I do not say that it will happen to Pakistan (that guy says in interview) but you, SA guys still do not know how looks like direct outside involvement from global forces when your time comes. It seems that Pakistan is fragile inside, the army cannot defend integrity (Yugoslavia had one of the strongest armies). The main question is their identity (it cannot be islam alone).
I see this as parallel with Bosniacs – they want to be a nation although they do not recognise the concept of nation, they do not have language, no literature, no history (except Turkish terror against Christians), no economy, nothing but they are trying artificially to compensate all deficiencies, inventing new name for Serbian language they speak, inventing non-existent history and non-existent culture (Turks have not left anything worthwhile). Their identity is also only islam, they know that they are converts, traitors of their ancestors and descendants and because of this extremely hate their roots and cousins who resisted terror and pressure to convert.
>they do not have language, no literature, no history
They do make catchy songs, though.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1CBfdxWIeQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjCDAprnVOI
Shall do – I think Islamism is a far way away at the moment.
“I like India but i’m not super into the Bharat/Hindi thing.”
South is always there as a backup 🙂
I go to Chennai 2+ times a year.
I’m very disturbed by Hindi nationalism and I feel it’s hijacked India..
I think you’re overestimating its impact. Twittersphere does not map to real life.
FWIW, it was North India that bore the brunt of Islamic invasions and excesses of Islamic religious fervor. The South was largely spared this. Reasons are varied, but suffice it to say that if the North had not proved to be so difficult to subjugate and convert, the majority of South Asia would have been Islamic by now.
I doubt that very much; the Deccan is a pretty conservative place. Do you classify the Marathas as northern
Zach, what do you base your assertion – “I doubt that very much” on?
Marathas straddle the boundary between North and South. The rise of the Marathas is a phenomena that has not been studied much. Clearly one component was the advent of many individuals – Tukaram, Dnyaneshwar, etc., who actually stepped away from the ritualistic aspects of “Hinduism” and the sanctity of Vedic literature because it was opaque to the common person. They advocated a moral life that was centered around devotion towards a supreme being as represented by one or more Hindu deities. They also did not have much use for caste distinctions.
These individuals who are regarded as “Sants” or “Saints” in modern discourse, really gave the Marathi speaking region a unique religiosity, identity, and sense of community which Shivaji was able to tap into and create the foundation of Maratha power. Most importantly, this accounts for the moral fiber and zeal to not be defeated by the “Turki”. This enabled the Marathas to exhaust the might of the Mughals in the Deccan, and eventually extend beyond the confines of Maratha domains.
BTW, the use of the phrase “Turk” is interesting in that the Marathas – even Shivaji – had many Muslims in their armies. Their ire was directed at the more recent “Turko-Persian” led armies from North India.
So, the Marathas cannot be really called conservative.
P.S. This post may come off as excessively laudatory of thing Maratha. That is not my intention. I am trying to answer your question and provide some context.
“This post may come off as excessively laudatory of thing Maratha. That is not my intention.”
Isn’t it like every marathi guy ever. You worry too much 😛
The North was easy to subjugate, that’s why it was done so often.
Muslim rulers had no interest in converting Hindus to Islam, it had nothing to do with Hindus actively “resisting” conversion.
“it had nothing to do with Hindus actively “resisting” conversion”
…. and you would know that how exactly? Of course from the lack of conversion in Pakistani Punjab obviously.
“How do you know that”
No evidence for it, lots of evidence against it. None of us were there obviously but this is the consensus position of scholars on the topic.
Muslim rulers had no interest in converting Hindus to Islam, it had nothing to do with Hindus actively “resisting” conversion.
these are the comments that make ppl dismiss you.
it is true that muslim elites were often not super interested in converting the masses (this was true to a great extent in places like iran too). but, they were often interested in converting local elites that they had conquered. and muslim elites (often ashraf) would expect that the ppl who ruled over them be muslim, which did induce and encourage some hindus to convert for the sake of ‘career advancement’ (e.g., an early ruler in bengal in the 14th century from a hindu background who converted to obtain assent from muslim conquest elites).
but u know this….
“but u know this….”
And this is exactly the most irritating part
Razib. I disagree.
Muslim rulers generally did not expect anyone to convert, whether elite or commoner. Most of the Mughal elite were Hindu Rajputs. When they integrated the Marathas as the “Rajputs of the south”, none of them were converted.
Lastly, “career advancement” is not serious pressure to convert. Its a feature seen in most societies. If you adopt the ideological bent of the ruling class, you are more likely to advance.
& yes, u r reacting to stupid arguments about mass conversions at the point of a sword.
but try to steel man for a second, even if it is hard. the stupid are already damned, so pretend like they don’t exist for a second (yes, ironic i’m saying this).
The South (or parts of it) was briefly conquered way back during the reign of Alauddin Khilji (circa 1300.) But the Vijayanagara empire rose up shortly after and did a reconquista of sorts. No such thing happened north of the Vindhyas. But Vijayanagara itself lasted only 2 centuries, and by British times, there were Muslim rulers in the deep south (Tipu Sultan, Nawab of Arcot, etc.) It did ensure there was a balance between “Hindu power” and “Muslim power” in the south though; such a balance did not exist in most of the north after the Ghurid invasion.
Geography matters. The Gangetic plain is easy to conquer (by anyone who rules the Delhi area.) The Deccan plateau, not so much. Likewise the deserts of Rajputana, or the mountains of Nepal.
JT, you are absolutely right. The same happened in Europe. Serbs stopped Islam, payed high price and never biologically recovered after that. When Turks came, the number of Serbs and English and German was the same, when they left, the number of Serbs was one fifth of the number of English. By sacrificing themselves to stop the Islam penetration, Serbs saved Europe from Islam conquering, Turks already encircled Vienna and Budapest. There was a Military belt arcade (Vojna Krajina) consisted of Serbs which had almost a state organisation and autonomy where Turks were stopped. This is now the border between Bosnia and Croatia, northern Serbia and great part of Romania. Bosnia was one half islamized but in Croatia, Hungary and Romania there is no one mosque.
The South may not care for Hindi, but “Bharat” is definitely a pan-Indian term, not a purely north Indian one. Tamil people often (at least in my experience) use the term “Bharatha Nadu” for India.
“Tamil people often (at least in my experience) use the term “Bharatha Nadu” for India.”
The Dravidians would like to talk to you 😛
Mahabharata and Ramayana are central to the whole of India, north to south (not to mention parts of south east asia).
More people know about Mahabharata than they know about classical Tamil poetry in Tamil Nadu. In fact references to both epics are embedded in the sangam corpus. Clearly these stories had such an universal and legendary appeal from a very early date.
“More people know about Mahabharata than they know about classical Tamil poetry in Tamil Nadu”
Periyar’s nightmare
Agree, but still is unexplored the place and role of Aryans in these epics. It is simply impossible that everything happened without their involvement and this fact cannot be just passed over. It assumes further exploration of Indian (and European) history, mythology and language. There is no any reason to ignore these facts which are key components of Hindustanian history and culture. I hope that Anan and Arjun are keep researching (I will do, too) these epics considering that they first in the world observed (Mahabharata) from new perspective.
Is there even a India outside “Bharat/Hindi” thing 😛
???
There was!
Most of the Mughal elite were Hindu Rajputs.
do you have numbers on this??? i remember reading 15 years ago on this period and rajputs were 25% of the ones receiving subsidies (the rest split btwn india and non-india born muslims). i could be wrong, and i think this applied to shah jahan’s reign. if you don’t have numbers don’t bother replying, there’s no point.
Lastly, “career advancement” is not serious pressure to convert. Its a feature seen in most societies. If you adopt the ideological bent of the ruling class, you are more likely to advance.
what is this supposed to even mean in a substantive sense? so vague. “ideological bent of the ruling class.”
i mean, “well ackhually muslims weren’t that into dawah” is too clever by a half….
Razib, my understanding is that you are correct. 75% of the senior nobles under Shah Jahan were muslim. 25% nonmuslim.
We should also remember that most historians are marxist or post modernist. These are their estimates and interpretations.
Marxist and post modernist scholars almost completely reject muslim contemporaneous records about what muslims did in SAARC and why.
Another possible interpretation is that ancient SAARC had a larger population and per capita GDP than people now assume. If this is correct then ancient muslim accounts become more believable.
i think indthings is responding/reacting to the stupid propaganda originally put out by muslim chronicles about hundreds of thousands of hindus killed, and now repeated by hindu nationalists. these are almost certainly exaggerations meant to burnish the ‘reputation’ of muslim ghazis who were actually materially motivated (india == rich).
but, in a premodern situation, literal genocide usually occurred through induced famine or disease. one reason the nazis had to invent gas chambers was how expensive using all those bullets on jews and other enemies of the regime were. premodern people with relatively small mobile armies and swords and spears and bows couldn’t rack of those body counts.
otoh, it’s illustrative that the great leap forward and ukrainian famine were genocides that operated through starvation, just like premodern genocides. basically if you are on the malthusian margin, political destabilization and rent extraction may kill you (obv. smart rulers knew not to kill the goose that hatched the golden egg, but mauraders had no such incentives).
the flip side to this is an purely marxist analysis of the motivations of turkic invaders. the problem is purity. the reality is that humans are complex, with both material and ideological motivations.
if marxists were right i don’t think humans would ever have left africa. you need some craziness. but marxist analysis is often useful in the proximate sense.
Bingo! Marxist interpretation of history through historical materialism leaves much to be desired. Human enterprise is driven by far more complex motives than just the material greed. Marxist historians in India are a much reviled lot. They were in fashion during the years of Congress rule, but now obviously losing ground to right wing scholars in the current political regime. But in mind the Hindu right gets it wrong too by swinging to the other extreme and completely rejecting the material motives of historical events. Hence they fumble while explaining incongruities like Maratha sack of Sringeri math, or participation of Rajputs in Mughal armies. The truth is somewhere in between.
In short, it is complicated. 🙂
“I’m passionate about Urdu.”
“I don’t speak it.”
Wtf…
// Geography matters. The Gangetic plain is easy to conquer (by anyone who rules the Delhi area.) The Deccan plateau, not so much. Likewise the deserts of Rajputana, or the mountains of Nepal. //
Too much geographical determinism.
Any region populated by humans is easy/difficult to conquer dependent on how committed the humans in political control living in it are to the status-quo. Geography does help, but it is no guarantee against invasion by humans intent on invading (with arbitrary morality).
mountainous areas give a lot of home-field advantage. take a look at topography and ethnolinguistic diversity….
Yep, it was applicable in Bosnia, too. Turkish invaders brought one parasitic religion which was not interested to build anything nor to develop any kind of economy or culture. Muslim convertites were spending days (and years) in semi-urban environments, smoking and drinking coffee for whole days, not interested to do any work. Serbs were oriented on mountains where they could escape to save their lives and also, fertile lands because they were heavily taxed and had to produce food for coffee drinkers, too. Mountains provided not only biological survival, they were places of constant resistance and places where nations’ memory was preserved during the centuries of occupation. Literature and history were orally transmitted over many generations until they were written and recorded in the 19.cAC. There are now hundreds of books of these old songs and stories, some going back to Aryan times.
Due to historical reasons, long warriors’ tradition and having been in a position to defend their homes against global ISIS jihad supported by US, Serbs militarily held 75% of the territory. When US realised that they cannot militarily win over Serbs after 4 years of war, they decided to split the territory between Muslims and Serbs, according the areas of their majority. Although each corpus was about 40%, Serbs were majority on almost 70% of territory. In the final division, Serbs had to give some their territories to Muslims (Croats were in coalition with Muslims) because they would not have any land for agriculture. Bosnia was split fifty-fifty between them, but Muslims are unhappy and they are now preparing for new war (assisted by US and ISIS) because they want to take 100% of Bosnia for themselves.
Could there be some sort of selection bias at play here?
Fertile plains, in pre-industrial period, had more ‘riches’ than desert and mountains and would in general attract more invasions. Even controlling for terrain etc you might see more conquering going on.
(Only talking of land invasions here)
Which selection bias? You did not understand what I said. It is rugged mountain country. Invaders were in control of cities and fertile (this is not really fertile it is still mountain region) land around rivers, they did not like to go to deep forests. The point is that Serbs lived in these areas as free workforce for rulers who liked and felt more safe to live in the cities around ‘shopping’ malls. When Turks left, converts remained in small semi-urban spaces while Serbs’ villages occupied large territories outside of cities. But Serbs did not have to work for converts anymore. Such territorial division was roughly preserved until the civil war in 90es.
Interesting. Did this division of people in the Balkans along rural/urban and religious lines have an economic and educational component? Were converts to Islam better educated and economically better off?
BTW, are you aware of any genetic studies on population groups in the Balkans that support your assertions? I am not questioning your assertions. Merely trying to gain a better insight.
I find many similarities between the Iberian peninsula, the Balkans, and the Indian Subcontinent. All were borderlands in a sense for the great Islamic expansion. Yet many differences and different outcomes.
// mountainous areas give a lot of home-field advantage //
They do but contingent on technology, in turn a function of culture.
None of the home field advantage helped India in China’s invasion of India in 1962 through the Himalayas. Geography/terrain is incidental detail, only superior knowledge and technology help its use (to one’s advantage) in invasions, and political commitment ensures deploying resources in such technology.
And there’s nothing special about mountains because one can well imagine invasions becoming much harder in fertile riparian land, which are much more likely to support very large urban agglomerations thereby forcing an invading force into urban warfare with terrible attrition rates. In all these cases, what’s operative is how resilient the population is to invasions, their technological resourcefulness and their risk appetite.
I agree with co-location of areas of high linguistic diversity in difficult mountainous terrain. But these are old inherited features – languages develop as super-strata over previous layers as people speaking them interact. Mountains reduce interaction and we have more scope for stochastic linguistic drift in close proximity – but nothing that a caravan route, a train ride, radio waves, or any other human technology cannot overcome.
@उद्ररुहैन्वीय
I kind of disagree. Geography plays a far bigger role in determining the course of history than you are willing to concede. Britain defied both Napoleon and Hitler not because of their inherent character, but because of the fact the Britain is an island. (Same British surrendered meekly to Japanese in Singapore). Russia was saved from both Napolean and Hitler by its arctic cold climate. Pathans of the hills of NWFP (FATA region) challenged the British rule till its very end, but those of the plains (Peshawar valley etc) submitted to the rule of “Kafir” without much fuss. The examples are too many to leave any doubt.
Also, your observation regarding the balance of geographical advantages between China and India at the Himalayan border seems contrary to facts. Conventional wisdom is that China holds all the geographical advantages at the border. They have a flat plateau land of Tibet leading to the border, meaning they can easily construct rail tracks and roads over it and move troops quickly. For India it is literally an uphill struggle to reach the Chinese border from the Gangetic plains.
Lol @ sarpamaugdheya
Slapstik, what is a good Sanskrit coinage for a male eater of scorpions? vRshcika khAdaka/khAdana?
I am more with Slapstik on this one. Specially the difference made about terrain of Deccan wrt to North is not that much. We are not talking about Mountains and plains here . Perhaps the only place where terrain was sort of a deciding factor is India’s N-East , Central India (Jungles) and Nepal. Outside of that the advantages /disadvantages more or less evened out. The Deccan has some rugged terrain but it was not clearly the difference maker wrt to battles and all. (some exceptions but mostly true)
Case in point Vijaynagar who had to routinely fight defensive battles with the Bahmanis (two equal sized powers, better for a comparison),on Vijaynagar land. It was not until the Bahamanis lost the coast (and access to superior arab/turks cavalry) and then further broke apart in different Sultanates that Vijayanagar started winning decisively. No terrain advantage helped the Kakatiyas or the Nayaks when Malik Kafur came calling.
// Slapstik, what is a good Sanskrit coinage for a male eater of scorpions? vRshcika khAdaka/khAdana? //
Too forced. It should simply be alyada 🙂 From alin (scorpion) and ada (eater; ad- to eat)
Regarding the Asia Bibi case. I think one of the most hypocritical things about these Pakistani Islam apologists is how they keep on harping on about Hinduism and the evils of the caste system. The biggest joke is, Pakistani Muslims are incredibly casteist and anti-black. Asia Bibi was attacked because she is from a Dalit background and dared to touch a drinking vessel of a higher caste Muslim. The Dalits who are mainly Hindu and Christian are treated like dirt. So much for Islamic equality.