Ashraf
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The Long Dark Night for India’s Muslims
X.T.M reads a Bengal order on Vande Mataram in madrasas as a symptom of India’s Muslims being absorbed into a Hindu-Persianate mainstream. It argues Pakistan and upper-caste liberalism accelerated this,…
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On Safety and Hinduphobia
Announcing a ten-day suspension of a commenter who posted another commenter’s personal details, the authors affirm privacy as a house standard. They then argue Hinduphobia is real, theological in form…
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The Shijrah and the Y-Chromosome
A sequel arguing that BB and Qureshi reach the same wrong conclusion on Sayyid ancestry by different routes. The post contends that Y-chromosome evidence retains paternal descent that autosomal arithmetic…
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Arab Fathers are not fabrications (entirely)
Answering BB’s claim that Pakistanis invent foreign fathers, the author argues South Asian Muslims are not one block: Pashtuns, Baloch, Hazaras and Sayyids carry foreign ancestry the genetic record supports,…
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The Partition of Elites: India, Pakistan, and the Unfinished Trauma of 1947
X.T.M argues that India’s central trauma is Partition rather than diversity, framing it as a failure of two elites to share power. He says most Muslims stayed after the League’s…
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Denial Isn’t Just a River in Egypt—It’s a Dammed Indus Too
X.T.M rejects a commenter’s claim that caste does not exist in Pakistan, citing biradari, zaat and ashraf–ajlaf hierarchies, and argues that saying Hindus ‘left’ in 1947 erases a violent dislocation.
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On being an “upper caste” “Muslim”
Razib Khan reflects on being called an ‘upper-caste Muslim’, arguing that although his ancestry may be largely Kayastha and Brahmin, caste is irrelevant to his family’s identity as generic Bengali…
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The Mughals!
After a Clubhouse debate on the Mughals, the author rejects both the ‘great Indians’ and ‘genocidal colonisers’ extremes, arguing they were partly an alien Turco-Mongol presence yet drove changes that…
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West Asian ancestry in South Asian Muslims
Answering complaints about his claim that South Asian Muslims are almost entirely of local descent, the author explains that ’99 per cent indigenous’ concerns DNA, not genealogy, since after about…
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The religion of Hindus before Hinduism
Razib Khan disputes Richard Eaton’s aside that Turk-Indian conflict was not confessional, arguing religious and civilisational identity was robust and that a bundled Hindu identity is older than the 19th…
