A Shia Muslim king gave patronage to a Jewish artist who created a syncretic work based on Hindu themes (the celestial court of Indra) in a language derived from Hindustani and a script loaned from Farsi. It provides a glimpse at a past when cultures were collaborating with each other freely to create great art work, without animosity. I wonder how many more such unique works will be re-discovered and brought to light.
We ban accounts that use HN primarily for political and ideological battle, especially when they use drive-by snark to do it. Topics like this are divisive enough without Molotov cocktails, so would you please not do this?
I'm not sure we can/should assume a lack of animosity. In most cases, these things exist alongside animosity. Human culture is very complex and the story is usually multifaceted.
We all recently revolted against the last empires and quasi-empires in favour of nationalism. It's hard to say it was unjustified, and it often came with democracy and other aspects of liberty and liberalism. But empires have played complex roles in human history. They were oppressors and enslavers, but also collectors of culture and scholarship. Enablers of travel, commerce and cultural exchange. They brought disparate cultures together, voluntarily and involuntary.
Massive empire building in many cases left culturally rich legacies. The Mongolian empire opened east-west exchange of ideas and contact between scholarly, religious and artistic culture throughout all Eurasia. Some credit it with enabling cultural movements like the Italian Renaissance. This was alongside atrocities. Look up the conquest of Baghdad.
The Baghdadi Jews the article references have a long history with empires. The community started 2700 years ago, when the King of babylon conquered Judea and shipped Jerusalem's elite to the Bagdad area. The enormous Persian empire conquered Babylon and they were at the center of a cultural superpower. Then Alexander's Greeks Came, then Romans, Parthians, Caliphs, Khans, Seljuks, Ottomans... Many Emperors. Much blood. Much art.
Kindly enlighten me as to what "diverse" concepts, formulations, ideas, etc., are brought here together as a coherent form. (Poorly executed Hebrew "calligraphy"?)
This forum is likely an inappropriate venue to delve into the political and civilizational dimensions of the concerted efforts of the British academic institutions to attempt to diminish the Persian civilization and culture and its preeminence as the cultural foundation of the 'Iranian Peoples' [1], so we'll let that pass.
Delving into the misunderstandings willfully communicated by the British Library, we note the following:
1 - Sabz سبز [2][3] means Green in both Farsi and Urdu.
2 - Emeralds [4][5] have a name in both language.
3 - Nizami's Seven Beauties explicitly uses 'Color' symbolism. (And no, Green is not indicative of a mineral in that spiritual and mystic text.) [6]
4 - The curious case of degeneration of established civilizations -- High Western Civilization was the first victim -- that cynically puts forth entirely artless and amateurish "syncretic" craft [7] as equal or worthy continuation of sublime works of art. [7][8]
The book consists of paintings of events from Hebrew scripture, set in the scenery and customs of thirteenth-century France, depicted from a Christian perspective. Scenes are surrounded by text in three scripts and five languages: Latin, Persian, Arabic, Judeo-Persian, and Hebrew.
The animosity is mainly a product of western domination tactics. But I do agree on the fact that these discoveries are extremely important to build a better understanding of our past and the complexity of international relations back then.
Exactly! This is all western domination tactics!! In-fact I'm sure the lat terror act from ISIS was a direct order from Trump himself to prevent the Afghan robotic team from ever returning to the US
> The animosity is mainly a product of western domination tactics
Really? The West has only been a dominant force in world affairs for about 500 years and a lot of conflict, wars, massacres, and general unpleasantness happened long before then.
Animosity between cultures mainly happens because humans are groupish, and bigoted against out-groups. This is true of all human societies. It's nothing specifically to do with the West.
This is a very good response, which I hope the person that you responded to will take to heart. I'm always amazed by the historical ignorance of so many people who hold firm geopolitical views though, and sometimes wonder if it is willful.
I'd like to add to your post that anyone looking for interesting writing on this subject should have a look at Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind. (Based on the language of you post I think you might have read it?)
We See What We Want to See and hear what we want to hear [0]
Francis Bacon said in 1620 that "the human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion … draws all things else to support and agree with it. And though there be a greater number and weight of instances to be found on the other side, yet these it either neglects and despises, or else by some distinction sets aside and rejects; in order that by this great and pernicious predetermination the authority of its former conclusions may remain inviolate." [1]
Biased processing and confirmation bias are most likely to occur when people feel threatened in their beliefs[2]
Absolutely true, but you can't deny that the west has played a massive role in creating chaos in almost every part of the globle (South America, Central America, Central Africa, The Middle East, the Indian Subcontinent, the transatlantic slave trade (notice I didn't say "slavery") and so on and so forth ...) I'n not saying it was all sunshine and rainbows before, just that the west exacerbates/manipulates these animosities to create a situation of chaos they can benefit from. (By "the west" I really mean the US and before them the British Empire, again, I have nothing against the people of these countries but history is history )
Syria for example, even though It probably wasn't the best place on earth, as perfectly fine before the US and NATO decided to shower them with the blessing of democracy.
"As countries such as the United States and the United Kingdom debated their response to the attacks, they encountered significant popular and legislative resistance to military intervention"
People around the world hated each other long before the west, and they continue to do so long after the west left. Now all there is people from the west that consider other people as irresponsible children that cannot make their own choice
Considering the CIA's track record when it comes to interfering in internal armed conflicts throughout the Middle East and South America, I would be careful with the assumption of "if there's no official statement by the US saying they're involved, they're not involved" even if there's a thin line between that and outright conspiracy mongering.
There are a lot of conflicts in the world even without Western involvement but the US has a pretty solid track record of interfering in those conflicts to serve their own interests -- and I'm pretty sure the US is not the only one doing it (I'd say Russia but their interference in the Ukraine has been dramatized to the point where some people would assert there wouldn't be a conflict without Russian involvement in the first place).
So let me see if I can understand, the Syrian people started rally against the regime not because they are fully grown men and women capable of making their own decision, and they really wanted to have a better life. But because it was someone from Washington DC who wanted to ... (I don't know what exactly he wanted, but he surely wanted something)
There is a spectrum of possibilities between "the people of Syria are freedom fighters who rose against their dictator to create a democracy" and "the people of Syria love their glorious leader, only foreign puppets would wish to fight him" and not everyone who disagrees with you has to be at the completely ridiculous opposite extreme. (Edit: in particular, disagreeing with your reply to zabana doesn't mean that they support their original argument.)
With a conflict this large, I'd be surprised if any foreign powers of note didn't at least try to plant sources within all major factions, as well as picking their favorites and supporting them with financial aid and weapons. That doesn't mean that everything was completely orchestrated, just that foreign involvement was pretty much inevitable as soon as things got violent.
The discussion is about whatever people are fully capable to hate and murder each other without Western involvement or not. This is a simple yes and no question and in light of that I'll ridicule anything that even remotely suggest otherwise.
There used to be a separatist movement (aka terrorists / freedom fighters) in Spain and France called the Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (or ETA for short). Until surrendering their weapons in April this year, they've been involved in a number of attacks since 1968 that most people would consider acts of terrorism.
Their goal was to establish an independent Basque nation by forcing the French and Spanish governments to give up their respective territories.
Now, for a number of reasons, they haven't been particularly successful. Their attacks mostly involved bombings, robberies, kidnapping or plain old executions. They've used some military grade weapons like mortars but never had much resembling a full army, let alone tanks.
If things had been different and the US would have had an interest in having the CIA fund, train and equip the ETA to the point where the ETA would have been able to wage an actual war of secession against Spain and/or France, wouldn't you agree that this situation would have been drastically different from "merely" killing less than 1000 people over decades of activity?
Yet apparently by your standards because ETA still existed and killed people without the hypothetical CIA support the situation would have been no different in the grand scheme of things and the US's involvement would have been completely irrelevant.
There are plenty of terrorists or separatists or nationalists or rebels or freedom fighters in all kinds of countries and plenty of them have killed people. Yes, people kill people without covert (or overt) military support from the US and other powers but pretending that makes the level of support they receive irrelevant is absurd.
Without US involvement, the Syrian civil war would look quite different, just like the Ukrainian civil war would look very different without Russian involvement.
Syria is not a good example for you to pick. She borders Iraq, a place where the US absolutely and directly interfered with catastrophic consequences. The uprising described in the Wikipedia article was a part of the "Arab Spring", which was strongly encouraged by the US and certainly not discouraged by the West.
The west was involved in other ways as well. It was widely reported in Egypt at the time of the Egyptian uprising that Amnesty International were directly helping the Muslim Brotherhood rise to power in the country - something they succeeded in doing. I remember at the time the BBC describing them as moderate and misunderstood people. They must have been fed that line from somewhere because if they had cared to spend 10 minutes researching the MB for themselves, they would have quickly discovered that they were the radical and extremist cult Mubarak said they were; something they went on to prove for themselves with devastating effect after they rose to power. My guess is that the BBC reports were coming from AI.
Whilst I'm on the subject of Amnesty International, I did a quick search on https://www.amnesty.org for "Muslim Brotherhood" (to try and find articles to back up my claims) and found some very revealing articles they published about the MB's struggles in Egypt and I also found the following news article [1] accusing one of their directors of having direct ties to the organisation.
So... I guess what I'm saying is that this is all very complicated.
No, the West aren't to blame for everything that's gone wrong in the Middle East, but we don't need to run to the opposite end of the spectrum and pretend they have clean hands either.
The West has played a massive role in everything, so we brought both good and bad things. But you can't argue that a war is a Western invention, or that there were fewer wars in lands occupied by the West.
>Syria for example, even though It probably wasn't the best place on earth, as perfectly fine before the US and NATO decided to shower them with the blessing of democracy.
Perfectly fine? That's about as bad an example as you can think of. Look up all the crazy stuff Syria did to its own people in the last few decades. While it wasn't the war zone it is now, it was one of the more brutal regimes on the planet for decades. Plenty of disappeared people, to add to all that.
I understand, but what does it have to do with my comment? Were you replying to the wrong thread?
Person said Syria was "just fine" before recent US involvement. I was pointing out how it was far from just fine. Whatever the US did elsewhere in the world is irrelevant to this subthread.
> but you can't deny that the west has played a massive role in creating chaos in almost every part of the globe
Indeed that is the case, but as dvfjsdhgfv point out, "the West has played a massive role in everything".
> that the west exacerbates/manipulates these animosities to create a situation of chaos they can benefit from
I think it would be more accurate to say rulers everywhere have often pitted groups against each other. I don't think rulers generally want chaos -- order is more stable and profitable.
> Syria for example, even though It probably wasn't the best place on earth, as perfectly fine before the US and NATO decided to shower them with the blessing of democracy.
What happened in Syria is that encouraged by events elsewhere in the Arab world, many Syrians decided to overthrow their government. The West has only been involved on the periphery of that conflict.
31 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 81.3 ms ] threadA Shia Muslim king gave patronage to a Jewish artist who created a syncretic work based on Hindu themes (the celestial court of Indra) in a language derived from Hindustani and a script loaned from Farsi. It provides a glimpse at a past when cultures were collaborating with each other freely to create great art work, without animosity. I wonder how many more such unique works will be re-discovered and brought to light.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
We all recently revolted against the last empires and quasi-empires in favour of nationalism. It's hard to say it was unjustified, and it often came with democracy and other aspects of liberty and liberalism. But empires have played complex roles in human history. They were oppressors and enslavers, but also collectors of culture and scholarship. Enablers of travel, commerce and cultural exchange. They brought disparate cultures together, voluntarily and involuntary.
Massive empire building in many cases left culturally rich legacies. The Mongolian empire opened east-west exchange of ideas and contact between scholarly, religious and artistic culture throughout all Eurasia. Some credit it with enabling cultural movements like the Italian Renaissance. This was alongside atrocities. Look up the conquest of Baghdad.
The Baghdadi Jews the article references have a long history with empires. The community started 2700 years ago, when the King of babylon conquered Judea and shipped Jerusalem's elite to the Bagdad area. The enormous Persian empire conquered Babylon and they were at the center of a cultural superpower. Then Alexander's Greeks Came, then Romans, Parthians, Caliphs, Khans, Seljuks, Ottomans... Many Emperors. Much blood. Much art.
"We all" is an overstatement.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/synthesis
Kindly enlighten me as to what "diverse" concepts, formulations, ideas, etc., are brought here together as a coherent form. (Poorly executed Hebrew "calligraphy"?)
This forum is likely an inappropriate venue to delve into the political and civilizational dimensions of the concerted efforts of the British academic institutions to attempt to diminish the Persian civilization and culture and its preeminence as the cultural foundation of the 'Iranian Peoples' [1], so we'll let that pass.
Delving into the misunderstandings willfully communicated by the British Library, we note the following:
1 - Sabz سبز [2][3] means Green in both Farsi and Urdu.
2 - Emeralds [4][5] have a name in both language.
3 - Nizami's Seven Beauties explicitly uses 'Color' symbolism. (And no, Green is not indicative of a mineral in that spiritual and mystic text.) [6]
4 - The curious case of degeneration of established civilizations -- High Western Civilization was the first victim -- that cynically puts forth entirely artless and amateurish "syncretic" craft [7] as equal or worthy continuation of sublime works of art. [7][8]
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_peoples
[2]: https://translate.google.com/#fa/en/%D8%B3%D8%A8%D8%B2
[3]: https://translate.google.com/#ur/en/%D8%B3%D8%A8%D8%B2
[4]: https://translate.google.com/#en/fa/emerald
[5]: https://translate.google.com/#en/ur/emerald
[6]: https://theculturetrip.com/europe/azerbaijan/articles/the-se...
[7]: http://a6.typepad.com/6a017ee66ba427970d01b8d296ef8e970c-pi
[8]: https://mohafezekar.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/azaryun-yagh...
The book consists of paintings of events from Hebrew scripture, set in the scenery and customs of thirteenth-century France, depicted from a Christian perspective. Scenes are surrounded by text in three scripts and five languages: Latin, Persian, Arabic, Judeo-Persian, and Hebrew.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgan_Bible
http://www.themorgan.org/collection/Crusader-Bible/thumbs
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/08/father-robotics-team-m...
Really? The West has only been a dominant force in world affairs for about 500 years and a lot of conflict, wars, massacres, and general unpleasantness happened long before then.
Animosity between cultures mainly happens because humans are groupish, and bigoted against out-groups. This is true of all human societies. It's nothing specifically to do with the West.
I'd like to add to your post that anyone looking for interesting writing on this subject should have a look at Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind. (Based on the language of you post I think you might have read it?)
I think it is.
We See What We Want to See and hear what we want to hear [0]
Francis Bacon said in 1620 that "the human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion … draws all things else to support and agree with it. And though there be a greater number and weight of instances to be found on the other side, yet these it either neglects and despises, or else by some distinction sets aside and rejects; in order that by this great and pernicious predetermination the authority of its former conclusions may remain inviolate." [1]
Biased processing and confirmation bias are most likely to occur when people feel threatened in their beliefs[2]
[0] - https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/kidding-ourselves/20140...
https://blogs.worldbank.org/publicsphere/i-only-hear-what-i-...
[1] - www.constitution.org/bacon/nov_org.htm
[2] - http://psy2.ucsd.edu/~mckenzie/nickersonConfirmationBias.pdf
Thanks for the book suggestion though.
Syria for example, even though It probably wasn't the best place on earth, as perfectly fine before the US and NATO decided to shower them with the blessing of democracy.
Both NATO and the US had nothing to do with the situation there. In-fact Obama administration made considerable effort not to get involve:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_uprising_phase_of_the_Sy...
"As countries such as the United States and the United Kingdom debated their response to the attacks, they encountered significant popular and legislative resistance to military intervention"
People around the world hated each other long before the west, and they continue to do so long after the west left. Now all there is people from the west that consider other people as irresponsible children that cannot make their own choice
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/08/02/world/middleeast/cia-s...
Considering the CIA's track record when it comes to interfering in internal armed conflicts throughout the Middle East and South America, I would be careful with the assumption of "if there's no official statement by the US saying they're involved, they're not involved" even if there's a thin line between that and outright conspiracy mongering.
There are a lot of conflicts in the world even without Western involvement but the US has a pretty solid track record of interfering in those conflicts to serve their own interests -- and I'm pretty sure the US is not the only one doing it (I'd say Russia but their interference in the Ukraine has been dramatized to the point where some people would assert there wouldn't be a conflict without Russian involvement in the first place).
With a conflict this large, I'd be surprised if any foreign powers of note didn't at least try to plant sources within all major factions, as well as picking their favorites and supporting them with financial aid and weapons. That doesn't mean that everything was completely orchestrated, just that foreign involvement was pretty much inevitable as soon as things got violent.
Their goal was to establish an independent Basque nation by forcing the French and Spanish governments to give up their respective territories.
Now, for a number of reasons, they haven't been particularly successful. Their attacks mostly involved bombings, robberies, kidnapping or plain old executions. They've used some military grade weapons like mortars but never had much resembling a full army, let alone tanks.
If things had been different and the US would have had an interest in having the CIA fund, train and equip the ETA to the point where the ETA would have been able to wage an actual war of secession against Spain and/or France, wouldn't you agree that this situation would have been drastically different from "merely" killing less than 1000 people over decades of activity?
Yet apparently by your standards because ETA still existed and killed people without the hypothetical CIA support the situation would have been no different in the grand scheme of things and the US's involvement would have been completely irrelevant.
There are plenty of terrorists or separatists or nationalists or rebels or freedom fighters in all kinds of countries and plenty of them have killed people. Yes, people kill people without covert (or overt) military support from the US and other powers but pretending that makes the level of support they receive irrelevant is absurd.
Without US involvement, the Syrian civil war would look quite different, just like the Ukrainian civil war would look very different without Russian involvement.
The west was involved in other ways as well. It was widely reported in Egypt at the time of the Egyptian uprising that Amnesty International were directly helping the Muslim Brotherhood rise to power in the country - something they succeeded in doing. I remember at the time the BBC describing them as moderate and misunderstood people. They must have been fed that line from somewhere because if they had cared to spend 10 minutes researching the MB for themselves, they would have quickly discovered that they were the radical and extremist cult Mubarak said they were; something they went on to prove for themselves with devastating effect after they rose to power. My guess is that the BBC reports were coming from AI.
Whilst I'm on the subject of Amnesty International, I did a quick search on https://www.amnesty.org for "Muslim Brotherhood" (to try and find articles to back up my claims) and found some very revealing articles they published about the MB's struggles in Egypt and I also found the following news article [1] accusing one of their directors of having direct ties to the organisation.
So... I guess what I'm saying is that this is all very complicated. No, the West aren't to blame for everything that's gone wrong in the Middle East, but we don't need to run to the opposite end of the spectrum and pretend they have clean hands either.
[1] https://www.rt.com/uk/312630-amnesty-international-muslim-br...
Perfectly fine? That's about as bad an example as you can think of. Look up all the crazy stuff Syria did to its own people in the last few decades. While it wasn't the war zone it is now, it was one of the more brutal regimes on the planet for decades. Plenty of disappeared people, to add to all that.
"Plenty" ... compared to Pinochet? Jorge Videla? etc. etc., all massive beneficiaries of US aid and support.
Person said Syria was "just fine" before recent US involvement. I was pointing out how it was far from just fine. Whatever the US did elsewhere in the world is irrelevant to this subthread.
Indeed that is the case, but as dvfjsdhgfv point out, "the West has played a massive role in everything".
> that the west exacerbates/manipulates these animosities to create a situation of chaos they can benefit from
I think it would be more accurate to say rulers everywhere have often pitted groups against each other. I don't think rulers generally want chaos -- order is more stable and profitable.
> Syria for example, even though It probably wasn't the best place on earth, as perfectly fine before the US and NATO decided to shower them with the blessing of democracy.
What happened in Syria is that encouraged by events elsewhere in the Arab world, many Syrians decided to overthrow their government. The West has only been involved on the periphery of that conflict.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14918321 and marked it off-topic.