April 2020
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The Sintashta shamans
Razib Khan wonders whether the Kalash of Chitral, about 30 per cent Sintashta in ancestry, can show what early Indo-Aryan belief was like, noting their mountain shamanism resembles steppe shamanism…
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Irfan Khan, 1967-2020
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The Abbasid invention of Islam
Razib Khan argues that Sunni Islam as we know it was strongly shaped by Iranian-Indian religious and social thought maturing in Central Asia under the Abbasids, with the hadith culture…
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The myth of Arabian paganism, and the Jewish-Christian origins of the Umayyads
Citing a Twitter thread, the author notes that religious inscriptions from sixth-century Arabia appear invariably Christian rather than pagan, which sits uneasily with Islamic tradition and the Book of Idols’…
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Hindu racism against Muslims
Prompted by Mindy Kaling’s use of ‘racism’ for prejudice against Muslims, Razib Khan argues that both some Hindu nationalists and some Muslims treat Muslims as an alien race, although genetics…
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Never Have I Ever
Razib Khan calls Netflix’s Never Have I Ever pretty good and not really political, praising its realistic Southern California setting and the diverse non-Indian love interests that avoid the assumption…
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COVID-19 in India, one week before the easing…
A note on India’s COVID-19 figures a week before easing: huge regional differences, with Kerala and Tamil Nadu having more recovered patients than active cases.
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Browncast Episode 96: From Vietnam with Phở
In Browncast Episode 96, Razib talks to Jasper Gregory, an expat in Danang emerging from lockdown, about how Vietnam beat COVID-19, what normality looks like, Vietnamese geopolitics, religion and culture,…
