#norman-arab

[retroactivepixels]

Palermo, 2023: an amazing 12th century church with Arab influences architecture. Mosaic details from inside. - The Church of San Cataldo

[rotzaprachim]

I love people learning how language works

[twilightishot]

Moodboard of Tia.

[charlesreeza]

Climbing to the roof of the Cathedral of Palermo, Sicily

Photo by Charles Reeza

[thejoyofseax]

Fáilte!

Welcome to The Joy of Seax! I'm Máistir Aodh Ó Siadhail, OP, from the Shire of Dun in Mara, in Insulae Draconis, in Drachenwald. This is a sideblog for my SCA (Society for Creative Anachronism) stuff. I expect it to be mostly food and cookery things, but might verge over into other topics as the mood takes me. I follow back from my main, @arcanehobo, and mostly reblog on @drift-hobo.

I cook, do research, and write wording for scrolls and charters, in English and Irish. My cooking usually falls within pre-Norman Irish (for which there are no written recipes) or 10th-13th century Arabic (specifically al-Warraq and the Kanz, both in the Nasrallah translations). Occasionally I do Tudor English cookery as well. While I do standard modern-kitchen feast cookery in plenty, my absolute preference is for outdoor cookery or period-style cookery, with open fire and iron pots.

In persona terms, Aodh was born in the year 1000 in Dublin, of mixed Irish/Norse ancestry, and it's now 1045 for him. He fought in the Battle of Clontarf, and when that didn't go so well for his side, left with Norse friends. He travelled through Scandinavia and Rus' territory to Baghdad, where he learned to cook, and then back up through Rus' again and eventually home. He's now a briugiu, a sort of royally mandated innkeeper, in the kingdom of the Southern Ui Neill.

I am happy to answer pretty much any questions you have in the SCA context!

[younes-ben-amara]

عيدُ ميلادٍ سعيد أستاذ محمود عبدربه أدامك المولى ذخرًا للمحتوى العربيّ 🎂🎈

ما هذه المجموعة من المختارات تسألني؟ إنّها عددٌ من أعداد نشرة “صيد الشابكة” اِعرف أكثر عن النشرة هنا: ما هي نشرة “صيد الشابكة” ما مصادرها، وما غرضها؛ وما معنى الشابكة أصلًا؟! 🎣🌐 🎣🌐 صيد الشابكة العدد #55 🎣🌐 صيد الشابكة العدد #55🍰 عيد ميلاد سعيد محمود عبدربه🧠💪 ذَاكِر لغتك العربية بقراءة هذه المقالات 🔌🧠 نقتطف من صحيفة المثقف ما يثري الثقافة 👎🏻 ما يمضي ضدّ الجِبلّة نهايته الفشل والاختفاء🤔❓ ما هي…

[astronicht]

Am I F1 posting am I LOTR posting I can multitask. Look I’m barely into Two Towers but I’m on another themed field trip and we’re going to look at 11th century “oliphant” hunting horns now. Was Boromir’s horn material and design ever specified? I don’t recall! probably it was a large boar tusk! Maybe it was a really really big bull! This is all more likely than elephant ivory, tho as seen here elephant (and rhinoceros) ivory WAS absolutely in use, especially in early medieval Muslim Europe (Spain, Sicily, and parts of Southern Italy) and was definitely known much further north (too far north tho and you start getting walrus ivory instead). But you’ve gotta see some of the coolest early medieval hunting horns anyway.

From the museum placard:

“The term oliphant refers to an ivory horn such as the one used by the legendary hero Roland, one of Charlemagne’s paladins, to sound the call for battle. Many such horns have been preserved. Usually decorated with hunting and animal motifs, they were made in Islamic-Arab countries as well as Norman Sicily and in Lower Italy. Many of them served as containers for relics in the church treasuries of the West.”

These two are (and I’m just getting this info off more museum placards) from Italy (Salerno or Amalfi, maybe) and from Arab Sicily. The latter, with the very Muslim-style animals in a web of vines, is my absolute fav. Sicily was conquered by the Byzantines, Fatimids, and ex-Viking Normans in succession and the style got neat as hell. Did Tolkien care about this mate I have no idea, I just think it’s the coolest thing. Also these are huge.

*and of course, ivory today is real fucking sad and part of an ecological catastrophe. But it’s worth saying that the 11th century was Not the century that fucked that one up.

[mariacallous]

If there was a pro-Palestinian movement that wanted to capitalise on the disgust at the destruction of Gaza, it would be moving now to demand a compromise peace.

Western and Arab governments should use every sanction to enforce the removal of Jewish settlements in the occupied territories, it would say. They are designed to so change the demography of the West Bank that a Palestinian state becomes an impossibility.

 Since Netanyahu came back to power in a coalition with the far right,  mobs have wrecked Huwara and other Palestinian villages.  It is not too fanciful to imagine a future when ethnic cleansers will run riot.

Western governments have already made tentative and, from the point of view of any robust and principled supporter of Palestine, wholly inadequate gestures. They have issued sanctions on groups that fund extremism, and left it there.

But instead of the global left demanding that the world begins to lay the groundwork for compromise, it insists on war, and a war to the death at that.

I could moralise about left ignorance. I could say its position that Israel is a settler colonial state is at best a half-truth which fails to acknowledge that its population is made up of the descendants of refugees from Arab nationalism and European fascism.

Let me for once avoid preachiness, however, and say that from the practical point of view, the global left has adopted a disastrous position.

It’s worse than a crime, it’s a blunder.

In any war to the death, Israel will win. It has nuclear weapons and a population under arms

Those who urge the abolition of Israel by chanting “from the river to the sea/ Palestine will be free” or by demanding that the descendants of Palestinians refugees have a right to return to swamp the Jewish state may think they are being principled. But they are playing into the hands of the Israeli right.

Netanyahu tells the West that he has no partners for peace. By supporting the programme of Hamas and Iran, the global left is proving him right.

When Iran attacks, the Israeli right can say completely accurately that its enemies want to wipe Israel from the map. And look what happens then. Not just Western countries but Arab states like Jordan defend Israel.

Two can play at the game of demanding total victory, and one side has all the advantages.

As the charter of the hard-line rightist Likud party put it, in  language which sounds familiar: “Between the Sea and the River Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.”

If I were Palestinian, I could imagine myself wanting Israel gone. But the hope of total victory has been a disaster. In 1948, 1967 and 1973 the Arab states tried to wipe Israel off the map and succeeded only in strengthening it.

There is still a great deal of argument about what Hamas thought would happen when its terrorists attacked Israel in October. One theory holds that Hamas was possessed with the same delusion that misled the Bolsheviks in 1917, and hoped to ignite a general uprising.

The Arab masses failed to rise up on Hamas’s behalf and Iran made it clear it was not prepared to engage in more than token warfare with Israel.

Once again, an attempt to wipe out Israel has brought harm to Palestinian civilians.

If you doubt me on the dangers of going for a purist, maximal strategy and demanding total victory, listen to a true leftist, Norman Finkelstein.

There was a time when I admired his attacks on the “Holocaust Industry” and Jews who exploited Nazism to help Israel.

But after my own experiences of left antisemitism, I became suspicious of an argument which, when taken to extreme, was used to maintain the pretence that anti-Jewish racism did not exist, or barely existed, and that accusations of antisemitism were log rolling by cunning Jews seeking to exploit the compassion of naïve gentiles.

The parallels with anti-black racists who claim their opponents are merely “playing the race card” were too obvious to labour.

No such qualms held Finkelstein back. He helped build the anti-Israel movement in the US, and you might have thought his comrades would have listened to him.

He gave a speech at the student sit-in at Columbia university saying they should not chant for the abolition of Israel and for a Palestine “from the river to the sea”.

If you leave “wriggle room for misinterpretation,” he said, your enemies will exploit it.

The speech was a faintly embarrassing performance. Finkelstein is an old man now, and he rambled down many rhetorical cul-de-sac​s. At the end the students just laughed at him and began chanting “from the river to the sea/ Palestine will be free”.

A part of the explanation for their disastrous flight to the extremes lies in the appeal of ​Manichaeism.

People want to feel wholly virtuous and by necessity want to believe their enemies are wholly evil. In these circumstances, only the co​mplete destruction of evil from the river to the sea will suffice. It’s simply not enough to say that Israel must merely withdraw from the occupied territories. Satan and all his works must be renounced.

You might object that some protestors say they want to replace Israel with a sweet, multicultural liberal democracy. But this is progressive thinking at its woozy wishful-thinking worst: an argument made in clear bad faith.

If they were serious, they would damn Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad and Iran who want to create an Islamic state. But it is not just that they do not criticise radical Islam, they barely acknowledge its existence. If you listen to the speeches at the rallies and sit-ins, Hamas and its ultra-reactionary blood-stained ideology are simply not mentioned.

The effort is self-defeating. By going to the extremes, a protest movement has a Manichean appeal but it plays into the hands of its enemies.

The “evaporation theory of protest” explains the phenomenon. When the Gaza war ends, and let us hope that it ends soon, most of the protestors will drift away and get on with their lives.

As they evaporate, all that is left will be a residue composed of the most committed and the most extreme.

They will carry on campaigning when the cause is all but forgotten. When Palestine and Israel are no longer in the news, they will still be there.

And when the next war begins in Israel/Palestine – and I am afraid that there will be a next one – they will organise the protests, write the extreme slogans and set the maximalist demands.

This is why the far left dictates the terms of left-wing protests, and why those protests fail.

Or to put it another way, this is why Jeremy Corbyn became leader of the Labour party and then lost every election he fought

I could be wrong. Perhaps the global wave of protest will bring change for the better. I hope it does. But I fear that, as so often, Palestinian people will be worse off than they were before.​

[rhinozzryan]

can u do etymology of the word kitten? i cant believe ive never asked this of u yet

TL;DR: kitten is a borrowing from French, a diminutive of chat, from the same Latin root as English cat, probably ultimately borrowed from a Near Eastern language like Arabic.

English n. kitten 'the young of the cat; a young cat, a cat that is not full-grown; the young of another mammal' (form attested from the early 17th century), earlier as Middle English n. kitoun, ketoun, kyt(t)on 'id.', a borrowing from Anglo-Norman n. *kitoun, *ketoun, *kiton, *keton 'id.' (not attested, but required as an intermediary; the regular change of word-initial /t͡ʃ/- to /k/- is implied by an erroneous ca. 1190 usage of Old Picard n. caston 'id.', with the form construed with the northern dialectical form of Old Picard n. caston, caton 'collet, bezel'), dialectical form of Old French n. chaton 'id.' (attested ca. 1230), diminutive of Old French n. chat, chas 'the domesticated cat, Felis catus' (attested 2nd half of the 12th century), a passing from Proto-Romance n. *katʊ 'id.' (secondarily attested in the borrowing into Basque n. katu 'id.'; also reconstructable via the passing into forms like Old Galician–Portuguese n. gato 'id.' and Sardinian n. gattu 'id.'), reflecting Late Latin n. cattus, catus 'id.' (a term widely borrowed, including, ultimately, into English n. cat 'id.'), probably (based on genomic and archaeological evidence in Egypt and the Near East) borrowed from Arabic n. قط 'id.' or a cognate, of uncertain further origin.

[gobcorend]

"(...) it must be shown to American Jews that the choice between Israel’s survival and Palestinian rights is a false one; that it is in fact Israel’s denial of Palestinian rights and reflexive resort to criminal force that are pushing it toward destruction; that it is possible to resolve the Israel-Palestine conflict so that everyone, Israeli Jew and Palestinian Arab, can preserve their full human dignity; and that such a settlement has been within reach for decades, but that Israel—with critical U.S. backing, largely because of the Israel lobby—has blocked it."

--- Norman G. Finkelstein in the book 'Knowing Too Much'

[odinsblog]

Many years ago, the Jewish U.S. scholar Norman Finkelstein wrote a best seller that caused uproar among a group he exposed as the “Holocaust Industry”: people who invariably had not been direct victims of the Holocaust, but nonetheless chose to exploit and profit from Jewish suffering.

Though treated as leaders of the Jewish community, they were not primarily interested in helping survivors of the Holocaust, or in stopping another Holocaust – the two things one might have assumed would be the highest priorities for anyone making the Holocaust central to their life. In fact, hardly any of the many millions the Holocaust Industry demanded from countries like Germany in reparations ever made it to Holocaust survivors, as Finkelstein documented in his book.

Instead, this small group instrumentalised the Holocaust for their own benefit: to gain money and influence by embedding themselves in an industry they had created. They became untouchables, beyond criticism because they were associated with an industry that they had made as sacred as the Holocaust itself.

A follow-up book called the Antisemitism Industry, an investigation into much the same group of people, is now overdue. These ghouls don’t care about antisemitism – in fact, they rub shoulders with the West’s most prominent antisemites, from Donald Trump to Viktor Orban.

Rather, they care about Israel – and the weaponisation of antisemitism to protect their emotional and financial investment. They profit from Israel’s central place in US political, diplomatic and military life:

• as a giant real-estate laundering exercise, based on the theft of native Palestinian land;

• as a laboratory for the production of new weapons and surveillance systems tested on Palestinians;

• as a heavily militarised colonial state, a spearpoint for the West, useful in destabilising and disrupting any threat of a unifying Arab nationalism in the oil-rich Middle East;

• and as the frontier state for eroding legal and ethical principles developed after the Second World War to stop a repeat of those atrocities.

Anyone who challenges the Antisemitism Industry’s – and therefore Israel’s – stranglehold on Jewish representation in public life is hounded as an antisemite or self-hating Jew, as is currently happening most prominently to Jewish film-maker Jonathan Glazer. He is the Oscar-winning director of The Zone of Interest, about the family of a Nazi commandant of Auschwitz who lived blind to the horrors unfolding just out of view, beyond their walled garden.

I wrote an earlier piece about the manufactured furore provoked by Glazer’s comments at the Oscars. In his acceptance speech, he denounced the hijacking of Jewishness and the Holocaust that has sustained Israel’s occupation over many decades and generated constant new victims, including the latest: those who suffered at the hands of Hamas when it attacked on October 7, and the many, many tens of thousand of Palestinians killed, maimed and orphaned by Israel over the past five months.

—Jonathan Cook, the antisemitism industry doesn’t speak for Jews, it speaks for western elites

[wandering-italy]

The Duomo of Syracuse started its long life as the Temple of Athena in the 5th century BCE. The conversion to Christian church seemed to have happened in the 7th century CE. The Doric columns of the original Greek temple were incorporated in place into the "new" church. This church was then converted into a mosque in 878 during the Arab conquests and then a church again in 1058. The roof of the nave and the mosaics were placed during the Norman years. Much of the exterior of the church was rebuilt after the Great Sicilian Earthquake of 1693

Syracuse, Sicily

Dec. 2019

[takami-takami]

Today is Nakba day, the anniversary of the Nakba (translated from Arabic: The Catastrophe) in which hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were ethnically displaced by Israel.

Here are some free pdf books on the history of Palestine should you want to educate yourself! I've included The Hundred Years' War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi which is a great introductory read, as well as Norman Finkelstein's book Gaza: An Inquest into Its Martyrdom.

And here is a vetted list of Palestinian families Gofundmes you can donate to should you have the means.

[eris-and-lokis-love-child]

People who know nothing about the levant, it's history, and just claim Palestinians to be invading Arabs from the Arabian should kill themselves. If they can claim Palestinians as arab invaders, then Israelis are european invaders- both have Canaanite dna, but apparently having some filthy goy dna only matters if it's the Muslim half.

What, you think invaders never interbred with locals? It happens all the time. Saxons, Danes, and Normans all invaded England and they all share a significant amount of DNA with neolithic locals.

If you don't understand the difference between genetics and ethnicity, that basically means you believe in Nazi race 'science'.

And if you cannot understand why that is a problem, you're the one whose death would improve the world. But I don't want you to kill yourself. I want you to become a better person. The one demanding people die for being who they are is you.

[alatismeni-theitsa]

https://x.com/greece_heritage/status/1794733345127194752?mx=2

“(Greece is one of) The most invaded countries in history”

Just saying

======================================

My reply:

Anyone who knows basic Greek history won’t be surprised in the least. A few of the invaders: “Illyrians, Persians, Celts, Romans, Goths, Heruli, Slavs, Avars, Arabs, Bulgars, Normans, Crusaders, Latins (Catalans, French, Italians etc), Serbs, Albanians, Venice, Genoa, Ottomans, Bulgarians, Italians, Germans”.

But still for some reason westerners see us as some powerful force that has immense influence and we are responsible for not having the same “glory” as our dead ancestors they admire, when in reality we have been genocided, executed, enslaved and beaten down like a dead horse for centuries now. Those same nations who accuse us today of not being good enough were happy to plunder our ancient texts and anything precious we had before even the fall of Constantinople.

I think we should add the English (a little) and the USAmericans (much more) here because I don’t know what else to call them having military bases on Greek soil, using our soldiers for their purposes and us needed to take their permission to do literally anything. Your nation has been attacked and you want to attack back? Better phone Daddy US first. They “keep us free” after all. (Hell, this sounds so dystopian)