Shahab Ahmed tells us up front that he is not going to answer the question “what is Islam?”. And of course, he does not really do so, but the title (misleadingly) suggests that he will, and in the course of the book, he comes perilously close to trying (and failing) to do so without outright saying he is going to do it. In short, Shahab himself seems confused about what he is trying to achieve here. The book is a description of some (but certainly not all) aspects of Islamic culture as it developed and expanded, especially AFTER the initial Arab phase of empire building. And it is a long argument with various seen and unseen opponents who want to define Islam as some ONE thing. In the course of this argument, Shahab wants to show that Islam was very varied, but he also wants to show that it is not infinitely varied. In the course of an overly long book, he manages to show that Islamicate societies (a term he does not really approve of) had a very wide variety of beliefs and practices, though they also remained anchored within a certain tradition and in continuous argument with particular foundational texts. All of this may be a surprise to extreme puritanical Islamists AND to more or less ignorant anti-Islamists, but should be no surprise at all to anyone else. Why wouldn’t there be a lot of variety? Anyway, if you happen to spend your life arguing with people who have a very monochromatic view of Islam, then you can keep this book handy in order to prove otherwise. It is good for that.

Beyond that, it is a rich compendium of anecdotes (he has read VERY widely and quotes extensively from hundreds of sources) and you will learn a lot about the “Balkans to Bengal complex”, a cultural zone that Shahab Ahmed is particularly fond of and regards as archetypically Islamic. Incidentally, you will also be able to prove to your friends that Islamic history is characterized by an official/theocratic prohibition of alcohol AND a simultaneous cultural fascination and widespread use and even praise of alcohol, complete with social practices that incorporate regular use of alcohol (e.g. in poetry recitals and courtesan dance performances… though this also being a work of apologetics, the “courtesan” part is not highlighted). What you will NOT find is any mention of how the Islamic empire was created in the first place. Military force and politics are almost completely absent from this cultural history of Islamdom. Make of that what you will. But it is worth keeping in mind that the geographic region extending from the Balkans to Bengal did not just magically happen to switch religions, it was conquered…Still, the the book is worth reading if you want to know more about the cultural history of the core-Islamicate region. It is more or less useless as a book of history. And it is somewhere in between when it comes to theology and philosophy.

Overall, this is high class and erudite apologetics, and the anecdotes collected herein will stand the test of time; but I suspect that the postmodern arguments and apologetics will not age well. When the current phase of history has passed, readers will wonder why Shahab Ahmed is wasting their time with convoluted and wordy arguments about how legitimate or illegitimate this or that simple-minded view of Islam actually is. Then again, maybe postmodernism will not fade away as completely as I imagine (or wish for) and future generations will continue to be fascinated by the verbiage that just seems like waste of space to me.

Time will tell.

Post Script: A friend commented that “you cannot expect him to say more than that..” and I am adding my answer to this review:
I certainly expect a good historian (even a “cultural historian” ) to say much more than that!  I happen to be reading Tomb’s “The English and their history” at the same time and the difference is night and day. With Tomb’s book you actually get an attempt at describing the English and their history and culture and so on, with systematic, rational and evidence-based theorizing and refutation of theories. Whether you agree with his particular view or not, you get what he is saying and you get what he is arguing against. Much of the time, you get something close to a “full picture”. With Shahab Ahmed, you are in much more scattered territory and big aspects of history are skipped entirely; Worth reading, but less for its argument, more for its varied and interesting bits of information.

There is a scene in The Devil Wears Prada, the cerulean one, where a colour chosen by Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep) at the summit of fashion is followed down the seasons, runway to department store to clearance bin, until Andy (Anne Hathaway), who fishes it out is sure her choice owed nothing to any of it.

The subcontinent’s argument works the same way. Bin Qasim’s landing in 711 was a decision taken at the top of history, and it has filtered down through thirteen centuries of conquest, doctrine and memory into a comment thread, where two strangers swapping insults are certain the quarrel is about this week. It is not. It was chosen for them a thousand years ago, and they are wearing it without knowing the name of the colour.

What is new is that the argument is going quiet, and quiet is worse than loud. The subcontinent is partitioning itself a second time, in the mind. Indians increasingly talk only to Indians, Pakistanis only to Pakistanis, each inside a feed built to agree with them. The 1947 line cut the map; the algorithm is cutting the conversation. Against that, the value of Brown Pundits is simple and almost embarrassing to state. It is one of the few open places left where the two sides still argue with each other in public and mean it. That is worth defending even when the argument is ugly, because the alternative is not a calmer argument. It is no argument, and two rooms that never open the door.

Is BP sui generis on the Internet?

Ask the question plainly. Where else are Indians and Pakistanis actually talking to each other, not writing past one another from separate rooms, but going forty rounds in the same thread and coming back the next morning? Sapan News does serious cross-border peace journalism, but it is syndicated reporting, not a contest in public. 3 Quarks Daily is curation, done beautifully, but a reading list is not an argument. The Juggernaut is paywalled and diaspora-facing, more interested in the second generation in Queens than in Lahore arguing with Delhi. Reddit and Substack are individuated by design; everyone gets their own room. We cannot name another. That absence is the whole case. A talking shop can be replaced by a better talking shop; this cannot be replaced by anything, because nothing else is doing it.

The Missing (Indian) Muslim

The composition tells its own story. The two groups that dominate the threads, the North Indian Hindu and the Pakistani Muslim, hold the most bigoted notions of one another that we publish. The cooler register comes from the edges: an Indian Christian in Calvin, a South Indian in girmit, and from the Hindu side Nachiketa, who argues from curiosity rather than from a side. And there is a silence we should name, because it is the loudest thing in the room. We have no Indian Muslims here at all (except when they want to ask about their community genetics). The community the contestation is most about, two hundred million people, is the one voice missing from the argument over its own fate.

Wrong on Balochistan

When the two sides do engage, the failure has a signature, and it is instructive because it is fixable. The Indian commentators are strong on facts and weak on lived experience. Watch the Balochistan argument. Indians flatten Balochistan into Kashmir as though the cases were the same, and the texture vanishes: the Baloch are spread across Sindh and South Punjab, are a minority even within Balochistan, and are mostly not separatist, with the insurgency a thin slice that commands little of the world’s attention. The ancient older unity of the Indus valley, Kashmir included, vanishes with it.

Wrong on Caste in Pakistan

The caste argument this week was the same error in another key. Citing professors on caste in Pakistan is not wrong about the data; it is wrong about the register. The Ashraf categories are largely invisible, salient in a narrow context the way WASP hegemony is salient, not the all-pervasive, ever-present ordering that caste is in the Hindu world. There is a real perniciousness in that invisibility, and Pakistanis are too quick to deny it exists at all, but invisible is not the same as absent, and to equate the two is to argue from low knowledge dressed as citation. The Pakistanis misread in the other direction, reciting tropes about Hindus until the Hinduphobia surfaces and the cycle restarts. Each side feeds the other.

How we hold the Peace between the Factions

This is why the moderation looks as it does. We do not delete much, we do not farm the brawl for traffic, and we rarely enforce a precedent against a single comment. What we read is intentionality. When someone relitigates Balochistan as though the precedent threads were never written, the question is not whether the comment breaks a rule but whether the person is arguing or trolling, and we moderate the person, not the sentence. The one hard line is separation: when two parties cannot speak without acrimony, we keep them apart. These are principles deduced case by case and then kept by everyone, a common law rather than a code. The boundary is wide. It is not wide enough to launder a massacre, and that is where the bridge stops.

Do we all deserve a Nobel Peace Prize?

Kabir asks whether this is an intellectual forum. Perhaps the better question is whether it is a necessary one. Wherever the borders close, the hatred fills the gap, and the threads show that the hatred runs on misinformation that only contact can correct. People arrive carrying their trauma. Given time, they begin to explain it, and explanation is where understanding starts.

We would rather run an imperfect, sometimes ugly bridge than a perfectly curated room with nobody crossing it. A wound thirteen centuries old will not close in a comment section. But it will not close in two sealed rooms either, and a sealed room is what the rest of the internet is quietly building.

The high culture built by the three great gunpowder empires (Ottoman, Safavid, Mughal) is one of the supreme achievements of human civilisation. All three were Turkic in dynastic origin, Persianate in literary and aesthetic register, and Islamic in faith. The Blue Mosque in Istanbul, the Naqsh-e Jahan complex in Isfahan, the Taj Mahal at Agra: these are not regional artefacts. They are a single coherent civilisational signature, expressed in tilework, ghazal, miniature, garden, cuisine, and chancery prose, across a belt that ran from the Bosphorus to the Bay of Bengal.

The question this post is about is simpler than it sounds. Who inherits it?

When we look at the other major civilisational matrices, the answer is usually one polity, or at most two. Western high culture has a clear custodian in the Euro-American complex. Chinese high culture sits, more or less unambiguously, inside the People’s Republic and its Sinosphere periphery. Indian high culture, for all its internal diversity, is held by a single state of 1.4 billion that increasingly understands itself as the civilisational heir. The custodianship is contested at the margins but not at the centre.

Sixty States

Islamicate civilisation has no such custodian. It is split between fifty-five and sixty Muslim-majority states, none of which can credibly claim to be the seat of the inheritance. Turkey has the Ottoman archive but spent a century half-disowning it. Iran has the Persianate aesthetic core but is sealed off by sanctions and theocracy. Pakistan has the Mughal afterlife but lacks the depth of state capacity to project it. The Arab Gulf has the wealth but, conspicuously, has chosen Saint-Tropez over Istanbul. The wealthiest Muslims on earth holiday in the south of France rather than in the capitals of their own past.

A Global Southern Division

This is not unique. It is the recurring pattern of the global South. Latin America shares a language, a religion, and a colonial history, and has produced no meaningful bloc; the Bolivarian project collapsed in the nineteenth century and nothing has replaced it. Sub-Saharan Africa shares a colonial substrate and a thickening pan-African discourse but no operational unity, and the African Union has nothing like the weight of the EU or ASEAN. The Muslim world is the third instance of the same phenomenon: a vast cultural commons fragmented into nation-states, none of which can carry the whole, and an OIC that has never functioned as anything more than a debating chamber. ASEAN is the partial exception, and it is instructive that ASEAN’s coherence is procedural rather than civilisational. Only the West, China, and India have managed to keep the high-cultural inheritance and the political vehicle inside the same container.

Lost Potential for PakIran

We judge Pakistan and Iran by their potential, which is the only honest standard for nations of that historical weight. Both have fallen short of it, and the reasons are structural rather than moral. Iran’s 1979 revolution closed off the country at exactly the moment its Persianate soft power could have become the organising centre of the Islamicate world; the Pahlavi modernisation, whatever its faults, had been pointing in that direction. Pakistan accepted, at partition, a piecemeal share of the Mughal inheritance and then spent seventy-eight years in a posture of conflict with India that has kept it poor and kept the inheritance illegible to the wider world. The Ashraf elites who chose partition accepted, perhaps without fully understanding it, the partitioning of the legacy itself.

Singing in Urdu while banning it

Meanwhile the legacy survives by being appropriated. India, which is the largest single repository of Islamicate material culture outside the Arab world, has formally turned against Urdu and yet cannot stop singing in it. Hindustani classical music is unthinkable without its Muslim lineages. The biryani, the kebab (Persian in origin, Muslim in diffusion), the qawwali, the ghazal: these continue to do civilisational work inside a polity that is officially uninterested in crediting them.

Our own Faith is itself a Qajar-era inheritance, born in Iran in the 1840s and exiled by the late Ottomans to Akka, and its aesthetic sensibility remains moored in that nineteenth-century Persianate world. The Guardianship that followed, from 1921 to 1957, unfolded entirely inside the Anglo-American hegemony, and the Faith’s institutional centre of gravity migrated with it. We are, in a small way, another example of the diffusion.

Islamicate is everywhere but nowhere

This is the paradox. The Islamicate legacy is everywhere and nowhere. It has no capital, no flag, no custodian state, and yet it shapes the food, music, and architecture of half the world. India erases Urdu from its schools and then puts it back into its film songs. The Gulf builds skyscrapers in a global modernist idiom and flies its families to the Côte d’Azur. The inheritance disperses, gets relabelled, gets absorbed, and continues.

If the Ummah is to recover anything resembling civilisational coherence, it will need a socio-cultural-political pole, and at present there is no candidate for it. Until then, the inheritors will be unofficial: a Hindu nationalist humming a ghazal, a Bahá’í drawn to a Persianate aesthetic, a Frenchman ordering a döner. That is not nothing. But it is not custodianship either.

Indians and their gratitude for Partition

You will be hard pressed to find a normal person in India who doesn’t accept this. If you listen to young people talk they would treat the fact that India-Pakistan were once part of the same polity as some kind of surprising trivia. My point is that, while TNT was used to litigate for partition , and the results of that have been accepted by all parties, the *further* application of TNT will find no takers among liberals. An example would be a statement like “Kashmir should have gone to Pakistan because of having a muslim majority”. There are excellent reasons why one can argue for Kashmir as an independent state in 1947 or even part of Pakistan, that don’t depend on TNT. The foremost being the idea that the process of accession was corrupted somehow. J&K had the same exact right to self-determinaton as Travancore for instance. But the underlying principal is self-determination in the Wilsonian sense i suppose, not TNT. (This goes both ways, as Indians use an imperial logic of their own that a fully intact successor state to the british raj was their entitlement, which is quite outageousely grandiose to be fair).

BJP is a broad tent

I’m tempted to disagree here, because BJP is a bigger tent than you estimate. You are imputing “anti-muslim” as the sine non qua of its mission. It is as much a hindi-language supremacist,gangetic culture centric, and anti-communist party hence the original slogan , “hindi, hindu, hindustan”. Unlike other regional parties it exported and adapted well in a few other regions and does well among the educated, urban bougie demographic. Also the RSS/BJP is not earnestly religious, at its most extreme it may be a type of fascism, but not a theocracy like JI. Finally, it does not require separation of religious communities in its vision, let alone partition. It is agnostic to whether India is 35% muslim or 15% muslim.

On the myth of a Universal Millennia-long “Islamic Supremacy”

Fwiw, I think a sufficient number of hindus and others would agree with Kabir’s point here, to make this non-provocative. A 1000 years is a huge stretch in the periodization of islamicate India. It would be very generous to say the second battle of tarain (1192) was a starting point around delhi, and by 1737 we have the regular sackings of delhi by marathas. So even in the most iconic islamicate imperial metropole of India we have <550 years of supremacy. We dig further and we will find that most of this period had sizable inclusion of hindu nobilty, not to mention hindu and jain land revenue officials and banking thriving and wielding immense power over the muslim nobility. Now once we consider that the story in the deccan, deep south , orissa and assam and many other regions had unperturbed native elites practically throughout the entire epoch, to varying degrees, it makes someone as esteemed as a prime minister seem intellectually dishonest to repeat this slogan perpetually. If not, we are dealing with someone with a childlike grasp of history, which I doubt. Moreover, the maximalist claim puts the punjab and gangetic plain at the center of indian historiography, at the expense of 80% of the remaining territory of the country, which raises other questions about national identity and whose history we are interrogating.

The comments on the last post revealed something important: there is a difference between learning about a culture and living inside it. The Indo-Muslim legacy sits precisely in that gap. It is not owned by a census or a successor state. It survives in people whose habits, tastes and instincts are shaped by it, even if they no longer identify with the religion that produced it.

Most arguments in the thread reduced the issue to arithmetic. “India owns the legacy because most Muslims stayed.” “Pakistan can’t own it because Delhi and Lucknow are in India.” These claims are tidy, but they miss the point. Culture does not follow borders. It follows continuity.

My own shift in identity made this clear. As I Hinducised through marriage, I also Persianised. The Islamicate part of me did not vanish; it was absorbed into a Bahá’í frame where contradictions resolved themselves in a Dharmic canvas. It taught me something simple: civilisations are not inherited by territory; they are inherited by people who keep caring.

1. Rushdie and the Islamicate Without Islam

Salman Rushdie is often treated as an outlier, but he illustrates the rule. He abandoned Islam but never abandoned the Islamicate mind; the cadences, humour, metaphors, and inner furniture of a shared civilisational world. His Urdu is not “Indian” or “Pakistani.” It is the Urdu of a class whose geography stretched across northern India and now stretches across the diaspora. That class still exists in scattered form, not in any one nation-state.

2. The Muhajir Fact

Migration is not a census event; it is a cultural filter. The people who left North India for Pakistan were not representative of all Muslims. They were the cultural elite. Their influence was far greater than their numbers, and it still shapes Pakistan’s bureaucracy, language, literature, and urban culture.

They resemble the WASPs in America: a founding stratum whose power declines by shaping the mainstream in its image, not by simply vanishing. A culture does not need a majority to lead. It needs institutions, confidence, and a sense of mission. Pakistan’s national idiom still draws from that stream. India’s does not.

3. India’s Argument: Custody vs Continuity

The claim that “Indian Muslims stayed, so India inherits the tradition” treats inheritance as property law. But culture does not behave like property. Europe maintains Jewish archives, synagogues, and neighbourhoods. Yet no one argues that Kraków or Vienna inherited Jewish civilisation. Custodianship follows people, not buildings.

Indian Muslims today do not form a cultural elite in India. Their centres, Hyderabad, Lucknow, Old Delhi, survive as enclaves, not as national reference points. In Pakistan, those same sensibilities became the national reference point, even for leaders who were not ancestrally culturally Muslim (Iqbal the Kashmiri Pandit; Jinnah the Lohana Gujarati). That fact alone tilts the axis of inheritance.

4. Urdu: Divergence, Decline, and Absorption

Urdu in India now bends towards Hindi through Bollywood and the northern demographic weight. The tradition survives, but as an aesthetic rather than a cultural system. Urdu in Pakistan survives as a living, adaptive language. It absorbs Sindhi, Punjabi, Pashto, and English. It mutates without losing its core. This ability to absorb and redirect is the Islamicate habit at work.

5. Dignity and Subordination

Cultural arguments are also dignity arguments. Many commentators insist that Indian Muslims are “better off because they stayed.” But subordination has an unseen cost. A culture loses its self-respect long before it loses its monuments. Pakistan, with all its failures, still protects a sense of centrality that Indian Muslims no longer enjoy. This is one of the reasons Pakistan remains coherent despite its crises. A poor country can survive if its identity remains intact. A rich country can break apart if its identity dissolves.

6. Why Pakistan Has Not Collapsed

The usual explanations, army discipline, foreign aid, geography, are incomplete. The deeper reason is cultural:

Pakistan anchors an identity that refuses humiliation.

It may lack functioning institutions, but it does not lack a civilisational self-image. That alone keeps the centre from falling away.

Final Thought

The Indo-Muslim legacy will never map neatly onto India or Pakistan. It survives in gestures, accents, family rituals, food, poetry, and inherited tastes. It survives wherever people still feel at home in that world. Ownership is not awarded by territory. Ownership is awarded by continuity.

And continuity today lies more firmly in the places, Karachi, Lahore, the diaspora, where the old Lucknow–Delhi sensibility still sees itself as central rather than marginal. The heirs of Lucknow may sit in Defence and Clifton rather than in Awadh, but the lineage they carry has not dimmed. It has simply moved.

First: I genuinely did not know that Khan was originally pronounced with a silent n, nor that paan had such a deep Islamicate turn in its social history. Much like music, I had long assumed paan to be a largely Hindu-coded practice. The article forces a re-examination of how intertwined everything actually was. The same goes for Hindustani music: I once thought of it as essentially a Hindu, temple-rooted tradition. Then you realise how much of the courtly synthesis, Persian, Hindavi, Turko-Central Asian, was shaped by Muslims, even if the Vedic lattice underneath remained foundational.

This is partly why I found Bombay Badshah’s objection (“Pakistan cannot claim any of this”) an odd line to draw. One can, of course, make the territorial argument; but it collapses immediately once you observe what India itself is doing: aggressively appropriating the Indo-Muslim aesthetic while deracinating its historical context. If Bollywood, tourism, cuisine, and the Indian cultural machine can freely claim Delhi, Lucknow, Agra, and Hyderabad as national inheritances, then Pakistanis whose families actually come from those cities are hardly crossing an intellectual red line by acknowledging lineage, memory, or loss.

And we have to be consistent. Indians lament the loss of Lahore; quite understandably. Nobody tells them, “Lahore was never part of the Republic of India founded on 15 August 1947.” Because everyone grasps the point: cultural grief predates and supersedes the modern nation-state.

Second: there is a broader dialectic underway. In Pakistan, writers, often for the first time, are producing a serious discourse about Indo-Muslim civilisational memory, unlinked from 20th-century nationalism. Simultaneously, India is engaged in an equally deliberate Hindification of formerly Muslim cultural zones. You can see it in cuisine, music, clothing, architecture, historiography; everything. Andalusia is a useful analogue here. As Fernández-Morera notes, modern Western academia mythologised Islamic Spain to advance a progressive narrative; Hindu nationalists today perform the inverse manoeuvre: they flatten the Indo-Muslim centuries into caricature so that modern majoritarianism appears as a “restoration.”

But both moves share the same flaw: they refuse to look at the subcontinent as it actually existed; messy, syncretic, violent, generative, hybrid, and impossible to reduce to one parentage.

Finally, and this is perhaps the quiet truth beneath all this chatter, most of us in this conversation are no longer fighting for these identities. I’ve moved fully into a civilisationally Hindu orientation; others into hyper-Islamic, secular, or diasporic ones. None of these debates are “hills to die on.” They become interesting only when the commentariat starts to polarise, or when a genuinely new insight surfaces, such as the Afghan provenance of so much North Indian Muslim elite culture, or the fact that classical paan, like classical music, flourished within an Islamicate context as much as a Hindu one.

The real point is simple: if India is free to selectively exalt pieces of this shared inheritance while discarding their historical custodians, then Pakistanis with genealogical and cultural ties to those cities are more than entitled to remember, and to claim, what their families carried into exile.

To deny one while permitting the other is not history.

This is not new. It has happened before in the Balkans, Spain, North Africa, and now South Asia. When Muslim political power retreats but its aesthetic legacy endures, successor communities begin absorbing, domesticating, and rebranding the cultural capital that Muslim rule left behind.

Hindustani music is a prime example. The foundational grammar, khayal, thumri, tarana, bandish, raga–riyaz discipline, gharana boundaries, was shaped by Persian, Turkic, and Indo-Muslim lineages. Yet today, the most visible custodians of this tradition are overwhelmingly Hindu: Bengali virtuosos, Maharashtrian stalwarts, the great Dharwad families, plus a handful of Muslim houses that continue against the grain. A few dozen performers make a strong living; a select few have global reputations. But the overall demographic shift is unmistakable.

Bollywood shows the same motion. Where Muslim lyricists, composers, and singers once defined the industry’s emotional vocabulary, there is now a steady rise of Hindu, especially Bengali, writers and musicians filling that space. The idiom remains “Urdu” on the surface, but the institutional carriers have changed.

Cuisine will follow. Biryani, Korma, Tandoori; these will persist, but the cultural ownership will shift as Hindu chefs, influencers, and restaurateurs become the primary transmitters. The pattern is not erasure; it is succession.

Historically, Muslim civilisation excelled at hybridisation. It absorbed Byzantine, Indo-Persian, Central & East Asian, African, and European elements and fused them into coherent forms; architecture, music, cuisine, calligraphy, court etiquette. The apex of Indo-Islamic refinement is the Taj Mahal, still the global shorthand for beauty. No cathedral, palace, or fortress in Europe, or elsewhere, commands the same universal awe. The Muslim aesthetic eye created something that continues to eclipse everything around it.

But civilisations are not static. They pass on their achievements to whoever is willing to maintain them. In India, that inheritor is now the Hindu middle class. As Muslim influence contracts in public institutions, Hindu society steps in—not by replacing the art forms, but by naturalising them.

A decade ago, before my own dramatic turn toward a Dharmic civilizational lens, I would have heard Ustad Naseeruddin Saami with a kind of melancholy reverence; one of the last great masters of a tradition that Pakistan cannot sustain on its own. Today, listening with a different sensibility, I recognise something else: continuity without custodianship is an illusion. If a community cannot carry its own inheritance, others will.

The Hindification of Muslim culture is not an ideological project. It is a demographic and institutional process. Traditions survive by passing into the hands of those who invest in them. India, in this moment, is reassigning stewardship.

The art will endure. The question is who will claim it, cultivate it, and give it a future.

An outstanding book. Michael Cook is wiser than he lets on (ie he does not explicitly make big sweeping statements about the lessons of history, but his presentation of the facts is nonetheless based on very sophisticated and wise analysis, which may remain implicit, or he may just hint at the issue and expect that the reader will know why he brought it up exactly like this) and always worth reading.
This is a survey of all of Muslim history from the time of the prophet to the early 20th century. He covers every region and pretty much every dynasty or group that ever ruled from Morocco to Malaysia, but it is not just a recitation of facts; at every point he has interesting things to say and he has a remarkable ability to convey a lot of information in a very short passage. Still, a lot of the details can be skipped if it is not an area you are interested in.
For example, I am very interested in Indian history and I found the short (just 60 pages) section on India to be one of the most balanced and accurate summaries of the 800 years of Islamicate colonization of India and its consequences. So the book passes the Gell-Mann test with flying colors.

A must read.

Another Browncast is up. You can listen on Libsyn, Apple, Spotify, and Stitcher (and a variety of other platforms). Probably the easiest way to keep up the podcast since we don’t have a regular schedule is to subscribe to one of the links above!

The history podcast returns to North India. Gaurav, Omar and Jay are in conversation with Maneesh about the changes in the North Indian landscape as the Islamicate invasions of India begin, first with the Arab colonization of Sindh, then heating up with the Turkic plunder raids of Mahmud of Ghazna and the gradual colonization of the Northwest by Turkic and Afghan raiders.