Recent content by My Daichingtala

@Skallagrim, thank you. Anyhow, from the late imperial Chinese perspective there is a valid reason for banning Islam even if Muslims do nothing wrong. To quote Waley-Cohen's Culture of War in China: Empire and the Military under the Qing Dynasty: Qing emperors saw no clear delineation between...

In 1724, the magistrate Chen Shiguan submitted the following memorial to Beijing: [Islam] is a perverse doctrine that deceives the people and should be banned by law. Those who enter it do not respect Heaven and Earth and do not worship the gods, instead setting up their own cultic deity [...]...

In 1532, Said Khan, ruler of a sizable Muslim sultanate in Central Asia, decided to launch a holy war for Tibet. The khan was under the misconception that Lhasa was some sort of Mecca for Buddhism - and, after all, what could be greater than destroying the Mecca of idolatry? For some strange...

I'm at @Ngabdulkamit's follower now - contact me there.

(Emphasis mine) This is a common but misleading claim spread by Jared Diamond and other largely non-specialist writers. 71.8% of diseases of modern emerging infectious diseases that originate from animal sources (which is 60.3% of total EIDs) come from wild sources. This appears to have been...

@ Revachah, it should be noted that Pearce's hypothesis is not the most widely accepted explanation of Oceanian settlement. In particular, I'm interested how you would justify the statement that Spice trading was probably an early driving factor [in overseas settlement]. We have suggested that...

I'll add more to this post when I have a computer, but the form of Sunni Islam as practiced in Java was very syncretic. For example, the first sultan of Yogyakarta, who reigned in the later 18th century - three or four centuries after the common populace of Java nearly all became Muslim - is...

Hello there, I was wondering if you have heard of Abdul Samad al-Palimbani, a half-Indonesian scholar who lived in 18th-century Mecca? Is he a somewhat known figure in Middle Eastern scholarship? Edit: It appears that he is commonly called "Sayyid 'Abd-al Samad ibn 'Abd-al Rahman al-Jawi" in...

In Java, 1815, the British made their preparations to return the island (a Napoleonic-era conquest) to the Dutch. But the British Indian troops of the Light Infantry Battalion were quite frustrated - and quite worried. They were frustrated because they had been on duty in a foreign land...

I was dissatisfied with my abortive Maluku TL, so here's another try. Dunno where I'm going with this. This will probably be a short timeline, focusing solely on eastern Indonesia for maybe a generation. I'm not planning very far ahead, but I'll try to update every week or two (no definitive...

Just so you are aware, Mu'awiya's siege of Constantinople is generally dated to around 667-670 in modern scholarship, rather than 674-678. See Marek Jankowiak's "The First Arab Siege of Constantinople."

If Hinduism is widespread enough, would 'Hinduism' even be a meaningful category? In many ways, especially in premodern and pre-Islamic times, Hinduism is less a single, unitary religion like Islam or Christianity and more a collective term for related faiths practiced in the Indicized world...

And a century or two later, the population will rise again because their population density allows for the endemicity of most deadly diseases. Therefore, once the first century or two is survived, the natives of the Inca empire will no longer be (severely, at least; some people argue for native...

And it's not, at least not as relevant you're making it sound like. The 20 million (besides being a rather generous estimate - the Caddos, spread across an expansive area of farmland which really isn't that bad, probably numbered less than 200,000. Remember that much of North America is desert...

It is a fact that smallpox takes 100,000-200,000 people to become endemic, per Frank Fenner, "Smallpox in Southeast Asia," or Conquest and Pestilence in the Early Spanish Philippines. Sure, both are about Southeast Asia because that's where my interest lies, but both are reputable academic...