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Hamza Khan's avatar

Beautifully written! A truly unfortunate state that Muslims find themselves in today is one which has almost intentionally decapitated itself from its historical lineage. Perhaps as a result of the colonization of both our cities and minds, we’ve relegated our entire positive history to the Umayyad and Abbasaid empires and ascribed everything following it up to the 19th century as a regressive stain, serving as the principle cause of our intellectual and military stagnation which therefore needs be forgotten of. In a form of collective apathy, we’ve become foreign to our own selves.

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hibis's avatar

Very interesting. I like that this is continuing the theme from the first article on 19th-20th century Muslim society of challenging common historical conceptions. I admit I didn't know a lot of the positive contributions the Mongols made. So apparently the very negative characterisation of them came from both contemporary Muslim historians who had apocalyptic paranoia, which made them tell exaggerated horror stories, and from Orientalists who as usual had biasd and innaccurate understandings of Muslim history. I wonder if modern Arab nationalists also had a hand in spreading this, cause they commonly say that only the Arab empires had any good and the foreign ones are to blame for ruining things.

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