Bernard Lewis — From Babel to Dragomans: Interpreting the Middle East

1192 published claims from this book.

• A 16th-century European ambassador saw Ottoman discipline mirrored in Western decadence
• A fatwa is a juristic ruling, not a death contract
• A large professional history establishment can coexist with public historical oblivion
• A major shift in US policy and attitudes toward the Middle East is underway
• A misplaced diacritical mark turns Arabic adornment into fornication
• A movement’s founding ideology can become a trap that ensures its defeat
• A Mughal prince lost Ottoman support through courtly discourtesy toward the Sultan.
• A partially victorious revolutionary movement must keep its radical missionaries active.
• A people without state or church institutions produced no historical writing.
• A Persian physician’s autobiography shaped later Islamic autobiographical fragments
• A popular nationalist demand can be dropped with almost no opposition once conditions change
• A positive romantic legend of the Turk coexisted with outright hostility in the West
• A prosperous commercial age coexisted with chronic state fiscal crisis
• A shared ancestral word split meaning along pastoral-agricultural lines
• A single definite article in Resolution 242 shaped withdrawal interpretation for decades.
• A single omitted definite article in a UN resolution decided a diplomatic outcome.
• A state can become a proxy battleground between rival great powers
• A victor’s draft language can be inferred from textual traces
• A widely-believed false story about Soviet power is itself a political fact
• Abandoning history would leave falsification uncontested while real processes continue
• Abd al-Malik’s new Arabic coinage provoked a Byzantine casus belli
• Abolishing slavery made concubinage illegal across the Muslim world
• Absence of Roman rule made Hellenistic influence shallow and transient in Iran
• Academic life offers neither real money nor real power
• Ad hominem ridicule and rhymed curses formed the core toolkit of medieval propaganda
• Advanced ancient societies could flourish while neglecting history entirely.
• Adversaries can each legitimately claim the same historical victory
• Algerian natural riches coexisted with debt and unemployment under mismanagement
• All governments apply multiple standards, not merely double ones
• Almost six years of wartime intelligence work forced a difficult academic re-entry.
• Ambassadorial wives leveraged marital status into unique harem access
• Ambiguity over ‘imam’ lets leaders exploit eschatological resonance
• America’s case for Middle East intervention rested on disputed oil arguments
• An 1861 peasant-class conflict metastasized into a sectarian massacre of 11,000 Christians
• An ancient Hittite king uniquely felt compelled to justify usurping his brother’s throne
• An ancient Hittite king wrote the first known moral self-justification for power
• An Arabic memoir gives the fullest Muslim view of Crusader-era life
• An Assyrian king recorded feeding 69,574 guests at a ten-day banquet.
• An Assyrian king’s banquet inscription hosted nearly seventy thousand guests
• An imperial mood combines greed, smugness, and a sense of mission
• An incomplete revolutionary victory prevents a clean break from doctrine
• An Iraqi priest wrote the first Arabic descriptions of the New World
• An Ottoman ambassador first recommended meritocracy over patronage in 1790
• An Ottoman architect in Akbar’s service influenced Agra and Delhi’s buildings
• An Ottoman architect trained under Sinan worked on Akbar’s buildings
• An Ottoman envoy proposed replacing patronage with Prussian-style meritocracy
• An Ottoman gentleman’s account of seventeenth-century Vienna survives and is remarkable
• An Ottoman official’s son learning French was a singular early accomplishment.
• Ancient Arab poetry was formally categorized into propaganda genres
• Angel derives from words meaning messenger in both Hebrew and Greek
• Anglo-Ottoman diplomatic correspondence contained systematic deliberate mistranslation
• Angry mobs attacked US targets over events with no US involvement
• Another advanced civilization could thrive while neglecting historical record-keeping
• Anti-American anger reflects real disruption caused by Western domination
• Anti-American contempt stems from perceived moral corruption, not imperial grievance
• Anti-American U.N. majorities during Moynihan’s tenure were smaller than the norm, not larger
• Anti-American UN votes did not rise under Moynihan’s confrontational style
• Anti-colonial sentiment refocused onto superpowers once domination ceased being European
• Anti-imperialist explanations fail since Russia escaped heavier Muslim criticism
• Anti-Semitism as a term was coined by anti-Semites to dignify Jew-hatred
• Anti-Semitism functions as an interchangeable, replaceable programmatic label under Fascism
• Anti-Semitism was coined by anti-Semites as pseudo-scientific cover for Jew-hatred.
• Anti-Western Islamic revolutionaries eagerly adopted Western media and communications technology
• Anti-Zionism can cloak anti-Semitism unacceptable in public discourse
• Anti-Zionism can serve as respectable cover for shameful prejudice.
• Anti-Zionism functions as dual-purpose domestic and foreign policy
• Anti-Zionism functions as socially respectable cover for anti-Semitism in Anglophone politics
• Anti-Zionism gives anti-Semites respectable cover in the English-speaking world
• Anti-Zionism is not identical with anti-Judaism.
• Anti-Zionism serves as a respectable cover for anti-Semitism where direct prejudice is discredited
• Apocalyptic predictions served as political protest propaganda for rebel pretenders.
• Apocalyptic prophecy served rebels by casting them as expected saviors
• Apostasy is treason because Islam is a polity, not only a faith
• Apostasy law’s death penalty blocked Christian missionary work in Muslim lands for centuries
• Apostasy laws deterred Christian missionary work in Islamic lands.
• Applying the term feudalism outside western Europe is at best a misleading analogy.
• Arab celebration of Soviet arms was anti-Western spite, not pro-Soviet sentiment
• Arab conquerors first encountered rice through a poisoned-food suspicion anecdote
• Arab governments may keep the Israel conflict unresolved as a safety valve
• Arab leaders backed the Axis despite knowing Germany would promise them nothing concrete
• Arab leaders grew candid about national goals while ideology lagged behind.
• Arab leftists hesitated to condemn Nazi crimes against Jews
• Arab polemic targets Jewish religion more severely than it targets Israel.
• Arab populations doubted Saddam acted for more than personal power
• Arab publics acclaimed the arms deal for humiliating the West, not for Soviet alignment
• Arab rulers follow rags-to-riches self-enrichment while bin Laden renounced wealth
• Arab rulers tolerated bin Laden because offending the U.S. cost nothing
• Arab separatism was negligible before the 1908 Young Turk revolution
• Arab states frame irredentist annexation claims as reviving pre-imperial unity
• Arab states lack legitimacy because imperial borders cut across ethnic and religious loyalties
• Arab states want Saddam removed but fear partial action that only invites his revenge.
• Arab students long came to England to study their own history.
• Arab-Muslim identities operate at three nested levels above and below the state
• Arabic repurposed the Greek word for history to mean fable
• Arabic-speaking peoples defined themselves by Islamic loyalty rather than ethnicity
• Arabic’s dominance made Islamic civilization structurally monolingual
• Arabist scholars judged Arab rulers by treatment of Arabs, not foreign alignment
• Arabs accepted Ottoman dominance as legitimate Islamic leadership before nationalism
• Arabs accepted Turkish primacy as natural within Islamic universalism
• Arabs understood the Palestine conflict as territorial, not ideological
• Artificial colonial states acquire real identity through self-interested ruling elites
• Artificially drawn Arab states acquired real solidity through entrenched elites
• Asia’s independence era could give way to a new Soviet imperial age
• Asian scholars initially accepted orientalist scholarship before later rejecting it
• Asianism and Africanism are Greek inventions alien to Middle Eastern thought
• Assassination fails against institutions with replaceable leaders
• Assassination targets dictators but modern terrorism targets democracies
• Assassination-based movements fail to overthrow a single regime
• Assassins saw themselves as levelers of royal power imbalance
• Assassins spared the Templars because killing their masters was unprofitable
• Assassins targeted Sunni elites, not Crusaders, despite popular belief.
• Assimilation can intensify rather than reduce group hatred as boundaries blur
• Assimilation into secular states constitutes a subtler coercion than exclusion
• Asymmetry in religious-protection demands follows from the infidel-rule doctrine
• Atlantic-built ships enabled small European powers to dominate Asian seas
• Atlantic-built ships outgunned Ottoman vessels because they were designed for ocean weather.
• Backing the wrong heir in an imperial succession fractured diplomatic relations long after
• Bedouin nomads traditionally regarded kingship as dishonorable servitude
• Belief in a timeless Muslim essence underwrote the East-West hierarchy of progress
• Bilateral treaties of equal validity in two languages can lack any agreed common version.
• Bilingual treaties with a shared master text spawned divergent national versions with serious discrepancies
• Bin Laden objected to who ruled the empire, not to empire itself
• Bin Laden’s appeal exceeds that of prior pan-Arab and pan-Islamic revolutionaries
• Bin Laden’s appeal reached far beyond extremists to broad Arab publics
• Bin Laden’s appeal rested on renouncing wealth Arab rulers crave
• Black and gray propaganda predate their modern names by centuries
• Bloch’s early social utopia subordinated the church to socialism while retaining it
• Both anti-Semitic and anti-Arab prejudice disguise themselves as support for the opposite side
• Britain initiated the Arab revolt negotiations to weaken the Ottomans.
• Britain reluctantly entered the Middle East after preserving Ottoman integrity
• Britain sponsored its own pan-Arabism to defuse Arab nationalism
• Britain’s 1941 backing helped legitimize Arab unity as a political project.
• British administrative unification, not Ottoman precedent, created Palestine as a single political unit
• British Mandate rule deserves comparative study against neighboring empires
• British Middle East interest derived entirely from its India paramountcy
• British rule created the political entity of Palestine and a Palestinian nationality.
• British support for Arab unity aimed at securing imperial interests, not Arab aims.
• British wartime policy, not Arab nationalism, launched the Arab revolt
• British-occupied Egypt hosted the Middle East’s first genuinely free press
• Bulgarian artillery destroyed the Edirne archive in 1912
• Buying technology does not make a society technologically advanced
• By the 1970s Arab states were politically diverging despite cultural affinity
• Byzantine-Sasanid rivalry on this soil was resolved by Islam, not by either power.
• Calligraphic inscription substitutes for sacred imagery in Muslim worship
• Calligraphic inscriptions replace icons as Muslim devotional art
• Calling an Ottoman elite a Turk was an insult meaning ignorant peasant
• Calling opponents racist equated them with Nazis in Soviet rhetoric
• Catahistorians who deny truth serve falsification rather than neutrality
• Chess and backgammon retain Persian-invented terminology.
• China began building a global Middle East policy in the late 1950s
• China’s global policy expansion preceded its Middle East engagement
• Choosing a starting point can bias history without any falsehood
• Christendom had one religious minority, Islam had many
• Christian and Muslim mutual denunciations paradoxically revealed their shared Jewish roots
• Christian and Muslim scholars persistently consulted Jewish sages despite denunciation
• Christian converts sold their language skills openly in Muslim lands
• Christian Europe’s multilingual plurality structurally required language learning
• Christian European states armed Muslim armies against fellow Christians
• Christian merchants traded arms with Islam even during crusades and Ottoman wars.
• Christian minorities under Muslim empires ran their own schools, courts, and tax levies
• Christian monasteries functioned as the de facto taverns of Islamic lands
• Christianity incorporated the Hebrew Bible while Islam supplanted both Jewish and Christian scripture
• Christianity required convincing Jews of its truth, Islam did not
• Christians inherit Jewish scripture, Muslims replaced rather than adopted it
• Christians sold weapons to Muslim enemies throughout the crusades
• Chronic invasion blocked completion of Islamic feudalization until Ottoman times
• Church-state separation historically preceded Jewish civic equality
• Cinema has replaced state education as the most effective historical falsifier
• Civilization wars mobilize outside aid along religious rather than ideological lines
• Civilization’s broadening of identity has contained but never eradicated group hatred
• Civilizations divide into sweet-milk, sour-milk, and no-milk zones
• Classical Arabic alone is nearly useless for everyday conversation in the Arab world.
• Classical Islam recognized one religious-political power rather than a church-state division
• Classical Islamic jurisprudence prohibited voluntary travel to non-Muslim lands.
• Classical Islamic jurisprudence punished blasphemy with flogging and imprisonment, not death
• Classical Islamic law mandates due process that the Rushdie fatwa bypassed
• Classical Muslim jurisprudence categorized Muslims under Christian rule into three involuntary cases
• Classical Muslim jurists never imagined voluntary Muslim emigration
• Classical Muslim jurists ruled Muslims must leave non-Muslim lands
• Closed archives create historical bias favoring the closed society
• Coercion remains the most effective means of falsifying history
• Coffee required a complex process unlikely to be discovered by accident
• Cognate food words reveal the differing livelihoods of pastoralist and agricultural peoples
• Collective memory and accurate record-keeping are as vital to groups as to individuals
• Colonial languages taught for administration carried revolutionary ideas that doomed empire
• Communal and religious loyalties regained ground after pan-Arabism waned.
• Communal land doctrine yielded in practice to aristocratic grants after conquest
• Communist Marxism functioned as a secular religion with Jewish roots
• Communist rule froze older historical attitudes that reemerged after collapse
• Communist states functioned as a secular religion with its own church
• Comparing one’s own country’s war history to the enemy’s version changes the historical understanding
• Comparing past and present through modern eyes merely compares two modern views
• Competing tribal and sectarian narratives have been history’s oldest partisan form
• Complex bureaucratic warfare can defeat a reformer without identifying a killer
• Conquest creates new language and compound identity in both England and Iran
• Constitutional declarations of political principles signal their impotence, not their power
• Constitutional enshrinement in this tradition signals decline, not enforcement, of principles.
• Contemporaries overestimated Ottoman strength even as the empire was declining
• Contempt is the default stance of the truth-holder toward the outsider.
• Cook-shop carvers tasted food before guests to prove it was not poisoned
• Cook-shop carvers tasted guests’ food to prove it unpoisoned
• Cooperative edited volumes fail when contributors write at unequal levels
• Costly weapon purchases do not buy Middle Eastern states self-defense
• Court ceremonial compliance decided whether Ottoman Sultans received foreign princes
• Court poetry functioned as pre-mass-media propaganda and image-making for rulers.
• Court poets functioned as pre-modern public relations officers
• Court poets functioned as royal propagandists before mass media.
• Critical re-examination of history requires both developed critical faculty and freedom
• Cross-diplomatic wit failures reveal perceived hierarchies of refinement
• Cross-epoch parallels often compare two modern views rather than two real historical sequences
• Crusade-era commerce and war created professional interpreters called tarjuman
• Current Western troubles stem from failing to see cultural differences
• Cyrus is called messiah and honored above nearly all Jewish rulers
• Deception and fabrication inhered in myth from its origin
• Deceptive ancient texts were common enough that even Herodotus was dubbed Father of Lies
• Decolonization produced many new independent Arab states between 1948 and 1967.
• Decolonization risked replacing Western with Soviet domination of the Middle East
• Deep US-Israel alignment followed, rather than caused, Soviet gains in Arab states
• Defeat by a familiar tolerated minority provoked violent regime change across the Middle East
• Deliberate propagandistic falsehood permeated ancient texts and drew explicit moral condemnation
• Demanding minorities shed their self-defining narratives masks majority state ownership.
• Democracies resist assassination because their leaders are readily replaceable
• Denying outside influence on Islam distorts historical scholarship
• Devalued rather than revalued values drive the region’s fragmentation into tyranny
• Dhimma tolerance is a revocable concession from a dominant to subordinate group.
• Dietary staples cannot fully explain where Islam expanded
• Diplomatic rupture between Mughals and Ottomans came from protocol offense, not policy
• Discontented minorities disproportionately join revolutionary movements seeking equality.
• Distinctively Persian personal names survived Islamization as markers of retained identity
• Distorted history tempts some to reject history altogether
• Distrust of interpreters drove Europe and the Porte to end dragoman systems
• Dragomans softened imperial language in both directions, inflating English courtesy into Ottoman submission
• Dragomans systematically mistranslated diplomatic correspondence to smooth over status hierarchies
• Dynastic propaganda contrasted vigorous new rulers against effete degenerate rivals.
• Each major revolution follows a different inherited ideological script
• Earlier anti-Western movements failed to win bin Laden’s level of popular support
• Earlier anti-Western revolutionary movements lacked bin Laden’s popular reach
• Early Anglo-Ottoman diplomacy relied on Italian as an intermediary language
• Early Arab political groups sought autonomy within the Ottoman state, not independence
• Early Arabist discourse praised Arabs as servants of Islam, pre-dating nationalist reversal
• Early Arabist thinkers praised Arabs as servants of Islam, not as a nation
• Early elective Islamic succession failed bloodily and became dynastic rule
• Early Islam’s architecture and coinage defined itself against Christian rivals
• Early Islamic history showed the Middle East outpacing the West
• Early Islamic identity was forged in rivalry with Christian Rome
• Early Islamic tradition sharply distinguished kingship from lawful caliphate
• Early Muslim historians pioneered source criticism far ahead of any contemporary method
• Early Muslim student missions to Europe transformed their home countries
• Early orientalists made extreme personal sacrifices incompatible with venal motives
• Early pan-Arabism was a Syrian-led movement organized through secret societies
• Eastern European Jewry met classic criteria of a national minority
• Eastern European Jewry was an ethnic nation lacking legal status, like its neighbors
• Eastern scholars initially respected or ignored orientalists and only later grew critical.
• Eastern travelers to Europe sought wonders just as Europeans did in the East
• Economic need, not ideology, drove women’s emancipation in Muslim societies
• Education today ought to place many cultures and their shared heritage at its center
• Egypt historically drew immigrants but now loses citizens to emigration.
• Egypt reversed from an immigrant-receiving to an emigrant-sending country
• Egypt’s centrality and preponderance made it the natural Arab leader.
• Egypt’s demographic and cultural weight made it the natural Arab leader
• Egypt’s early Arabist ventures rewarded participants despite their political failure
• Egypt’s name and ancient history were officially erased during the Nasserist Arabist period
• Egyptian anti-Israel passion was overstated by international press reports
• Egyptian anti-Semitic texts reproduced medieval blood-libel and Holocaust denial tropes
• Egyptian audiences rejected didactic Soviet cinema for Western films
• Egyptian elites were less unanimously pro-Soviet than official media suggested after Czechoslovakia
• Egyptian factional strife and famine drove the Fatimids to military dictatorship
• Egyptian intellectuals and merchants nostalgically preferred Western over Soviet ties
• Egyptian Jews at large were free but forbidden to emigrate
• Egyptian Muslim nationalism dispersed all minority communities, not just Jews
• Egyptian nationalism historically oscillated between Pharaonic and Arab self-identification
• Egyptian nationalism was territorial, not Arab, before the world wars
• Egyptian nationalists initially dismissed pan-Arabism as a British anti-Ottoman plot
• Egyptian political jokes target the nation itself rather than the regime
• Egyptian public opinion would not seriously obstruct a government cutting losses on Palestine
• Egyptian soldiers profited from commerce during the Yemen war
• Egyptians hold competing Arab, Egyptian, and Muslim political identities
• Egyptians perceived Soviet aid as a repeat of British colonial occupation
• Egyptians preferred Western culture over Soviet during the Soviet alliance era
• Egyptians simultaneously hold three competing identities—Arab, Egyptian, and Muslim—that drive rival political alignments.
• Egyptians use the city’s foundation anniversary to contest their 7,000-year heritage
• Election in Sunni caliphate meant choice by a small qualified college
• Elective caliphate failed catastrophically, leading to dynastic rule
• Elite-populace cultural convergence previously held Muslim societies together until Westernization split them
• Empires often granted subjects more individual freedom than successor nation-states did
• Ending empire grievances redirected Egyptian activism to broader Arab and African causes
• Enlightenment bred racism because wrongs now need ideological justification
• Ethnic and sectarian divides made the Iran-Iraq war multi-layered
• Ethnic nationalism reached the Islamic world as foreign import embraced first by Christians
• Ethnoreligious movements seriously challenge state hegemony throughout the Middle East.
• Europe’s advantage over the Ottomans grew from its internal divisions, not its strength.
• Europe’s vernaculars became codified written languages beginning with Castilian in 1492
• European anti-Semitic texts flooded the Arab world through translation
• European artistic patterns had fully displaced traditional Islamic arts by the nineteenth century
• European captivity narratives abounded while Muslim ones went unwritten and unread
• European conquerors of the Balkans were a civilized Muslim people, not steppe barbarians
• European conquest imposed European ways of classifying the world on Muslim observers.
• European framing of the Ottoman Empire as declining outlived the empire itself
• European imperial rule reinforced Muslim expectations of communal legal autonomy
• European language knowledge among Muslims shifted from despised to indispensable
• European languages lexicalized Turkish national identity as an insult
• European lazaretto quarantine originated as a response to Muslim-world contagion fears
• European loanwords in Ottoman Turkish were mostly Italian and maritime until 1800
• European military instructors reframed Westerners as knowledge sources in Muslim eyes
• European models reshaped but did not initiate Islamic memoir-writing
• European nationalism supplied the ideological template for Jewish statehood claims
• European orientalism directly solicited many Islamic-world autobiographies into existence
• European powers actively sponsored Arab nationalist movements for their own advantage
• European powers trained native language cadets to replace unreliable dragomans
• European scholars were translating Ottoman texts well before any Muslim interest in Europe arose
• European slaves were medieval Islam’s most important import from the West
• European thought supplied Muslim lands with revolutionary symbols and values
• European travel accounts of the Levant were written without ever seeing what they described.
• European travel writers fabricated accounts of places they never entered
• European Turcology scholars reconstructed the pre-Islamic Turkish past
• European-style order and discipline, not weapons, gave Europe battlefield superiority over the Ottomans.
• Europeans read Ottoman decline as a loss of strength and will, not mere power
• Even a pro-execution mufti required a formal trial before any sentence
• Even famous Muslim rulers rarely received full-length biographies
• Even Icelanders were seized by corsairs and reported on them
• Even Jewish theology adopted the systematic form of surrounding Christian culture
• Even radical Islamic fundamentalists have adopted Western institutions like constitutions and elected assemblies
• Even sympathetic Arabs doubted Saddam’s motives and redistribution promises
• Even the Nazis used religious background to determine who was Jewish
• Evenhanded foreign policy is regarded as self-defeating even by classical Arab moralists
• Evenhanded policy toward friends and enemies undermines both alliances and deterrence
• Evenhandedness toward friends and enemies is a self-defeating foreign policy
• Every confirmed postwar chemical weapons attack occurred in the Middle East.
• Every UN member state practices some form of group discrimination.
• Exclusion from citizenship drove Palestinians to abandon pan-Arabism for their own state
• Executions for apostasy ceased long ago in the Muslim world
• Explaining why events happened is history’s most intellectually rigorous task
• External world shifts left no room for a schismatic Muslim power
• Failed revolts forged Shia identity as perpetual minority
• Failure to defend free speech erodes Western freedoms irreversibly
• Falling oil demand would strip Middle East rulers of their coercive funding
• Falsehood and intimidation have become normalized in U.N. procedures
• Fascist paramilitary youth models shaped most Arab political movements including the left
• Fatimid Caliphate combined imperial sovereignty with revolutionary mission.
• Fatimid eastern strategy is only known through indirect evidence
• Fatimid expansion peaked when a Baghdad general proclaimed their caliph for a year
• Fatimid reach exceeded their military capacity to support distant gains
• Fatimid Red Sea strategy paired the Aydhab port with ideological penetration of Yemen
• Fatimid religious mission followed and exploited their trade routes into India
• Fatimids’ ideological isolation guaranteed their own eventual defeat.
• Fiction channels social criticism that censors fail to recognize as subversive
• For many Islamist radicals the internal enemy takes priority over foreign ones
• For two centuries after conquest Egypt remained a governed province of the eastern Caliphate.
• Forced conversion breeds suspicion that hardens into hatred when converts prosper
• Foreign-educated Muslim students became vectors of Western ideas in their home countries
• Forged attribution is a more potent lie than straightforward falsehood
• Forged propaganda comes in altered-text and wholly-invented forms
• Forged prophecies bank on a true postdated prediction to sell a false one
• Forged prophetic traditions were being invented for political purposes into the 1990s.
• Forged-ascription propaganda predates modern disinformation and the Soviet term for it
• Forging sayings of the Prophet for politics persists into modern times
• Freedom and independence are distinct and often mutually exclusive
• Friday sermons channeled official news from rulers to subjects in medieval Islam
• Frying was rare in the ancient Middle East because oil was costly
• Germany and Italy supplied the unification model for Middle East unity movements
• Global linguistic convergence has increased rather than reduced translation demand.
• Global response to the Kuwait invasion was uniquely unanimous
• Grant-holders profited by collecting full tax but paying only a tithe
• Great powers can be drawn into regional conflict even without deliberate intent.
• Great-power rivalry shaped the outlook of Mideast statesmen and Western specialists alike
• Greek writing about Persia was respectful despite centuries of conflict
• Group boundaries shift from blood to permeable culture, religion, and citizenship over time.
• Group hatred evolves through stages that begin with animal exclusion instincts
• Group hatred is transmitted primarily through intergenerational oral storytelling of grievances
• Group hatred targets what a person is, not what they do.
• Hadith collections functioned as legal casebooks for establishing rules of procedure
• Hajji Khalifa blamed Muslim intellectual negligence for Christian advance
• Hassidic Judaism was a necessary precursor to Zionism
• Hassidism was a necessary prerequisite for the Zionist movement
• Headgear, not weaponry, marked the deepest cultural boundary for Muslim armies
• Hereditary succession persisted even among nomadic Middle Eastern tribes
• Heritage erasure operates through distortion, silence, and omission rather than lies.
• Heroic Islamic history writing doubled as deliberate ruler-serving propaganda.
• High culture can flourish without a historical orientation
• Historians distrust their own materials because evidence is inherently fragmentary and unreliable
• Historians face social and material pressure to conform to favored schools of thought
• Historians of the Middle East traditionally trained in four to five dead languages
• Historians progress from establishing what happened to explaining why it happened
• Historians should strive for fairness despite the impossibility of full objectivity
• Historians should strive for fairness through explicit awareness of their own biases
• Historians’ self-censorship for political ends is a modern nationalist practice
• Historical espionage between Christian and Muslim worlds was extensive but poorly documented.
• Historical narratives can be lawfully ‘cooked’ like balance sheets
• Historical revisionism requires developed critical faculties plus freedom
• Historical writing can either correct or intensify group hatred
• Historically the standard response to unassimilated others was elimination via conversion, expulsion, or massacre.
• History did not professionalize until the nineteenth century
• History is distorted chiefly through invention backed by fabricated evidence
• History is falsified by coercion, intimidation, and pressure when direct force fails
• History shows Shia rulers who gained power either fell or governed like Sunnis
• History’s eclipse by social sciences weakened evidentiary standards in public discourse
• History’s potential misuse raises questions of who controls its telling
• Holocaust denial laws criminalize a claim states leave flat-earth beliefs free
• Holocaust guilt can drive either supporting or denouncing Israel as expiation
• Holy war doctrine demands emotional hatred that compassion-based theology forbids.
• Hostile anecdotes about dynastic founders are propaganda, not history.
• Hostile narratives shaped later portraits of controversial rulers, not historical deeds.
• Human-rights outrage at the UN applied stricter standards to right-wing Europe than black Africa.
• Humanities study serves understanding and enrichment beyond practical utility
• Husayn’s authentic manifestos stressed Islam, not Arabism
• Husayn’s revolt was dynastic-religious, not Arab nationalist
• Identical U.S. withdrawals are read as prudence by Americans and cowardice by Middle Easterners.
• Ideological racism emerged precisely because Enlightenment values demand rationalizations for evil
• Ideology alone cannot unify a region; a powerful state must drive it.
• Illicit contact with Christendom forced Islamic jurists into contested legal rationalizations.
• Immigrant groups lose usefulness once emigration stops and homegrown generations lack old-world skills
• Imperial frontiers ignore inhabitants’ rights, leaving rival claims nearly parallel
• Imperial partition of the Middle East created entities not accepted by their inhabitants
• Imperial political ideology directly shaped which history could be studied
• Imperial powers drew frontiers that maximize future regional conflict
• Imperial rule often granted subjects more individual freedom than successor nation-states did.
• Imported right-left labels mislead when applied to non-Western politics
• Imposing Western political categories distorts understanding of Middle Eastern loyalties
• Impossible ideals still demand disciplined effort toward them
• Impossible perfect objectivity does not justify abandoning scholarly standards.
• In medieval Islam bread was treated with quasi-religious sanctity
• In Soviet usage, the word racist meant Nazi-linked irredentism, not color prejudice.
• India and Pakistan hold unique geopolitical advantages over Western powers in the Middle East
• Individual hatred stems from perceived grievance while group hatred targets identity
• Insecurity drove small landowners to commend themselves to great ones
• Instrumentalizing history for present politics is worse than ignoring it
• Inter-confessional espionage was extensive but mostly undocumented by design
• Internal apostates are treated as more dangerous enemies than external infidels
• Internal jihad against apostate rulers is a medieval concept modernized.
• International consensus against Iraq’s invasion rivaled the anti-Nazi coalition
• Intra-Islamic propaganda outweighs anti-non-Muslim propaganda in frequency and intensity.
• Iran justified state-sponsored killings by invoking the Prophet’s example
• Iran was largely Sunni until the Safavid dynasty imposed Shi’ism
• Iran’s 1979 revolution was a classical mass revolution
• Iran’s Islamic revolution was the first electronically networked modern revolution
• Iran’s revolution inspired subversive plots even in communist-run Bosnia
• Iran’s revolution resonated most with Sunnis where Shi’ism was unknown
• Iran’s revolution structurally parallels pre-revolutionary France and Russia.
• Iran’s revolutionaries imitated Robespierre and Stalin, not Islamic models
• Iran’s revolutionary methods derived from European models, not Islamic precedent
• Iranian civilization dominated Islamic political and cultural power for centuries
• Iranian clerical rule breaks new ground in Islamic history
• Iranian defenders justified the assassination bounty by citing prophetic precedent
• Iranian revolution followed the pattern of prior great revolutions in needing political power change
• Iranian revolution’s methods borrowed from European Jacobin and Stalinist precedents
• Iraq and Iran sought WMD as a deterrent against American intervention
• Iraq was ruled by a Sunni minority despite a Shiite majority
• Iraq’s Shia majority endured Sunni ascendancy across a millennium of regimes
• Iraq’s Shia majority has been ruled by Sunnis since the Middle Ages.
• Iraq’s Shia majority remained subordinate to Sunni rulers for centuries
• Islam and modern European Christianity hold incompatible conceptions of what religion itself encompasses
• Islam conquered most of the Christian Roman Empire in its first century
• Islam has no clerical absolution; each believer absolves himself
• Islam has no sacraments and requires no ordained priesthood
• Islam holds God himself to be supreme head of state
• Islam is theocratic in principle since God alone is sovereign
• Islam lacks an ordained priesthood with sacramental function
• Islam never separated religion from the state as Christianity did
• Islam recognized Christendom as its only genuine rival civilization early on.
• Islam regarded Asia and Africa as teachable converts unlike rival Christendom
• Islam traditionally makes no compartmental separation between religion and other life domains
• Islam-West conflict is a civilizational clash beyond policy or issues
• Islam’s advance and retreat defined Europe’s eastern and western borders
• Islam’s ban on images made the Middle East less responsive to visual propaganda.
• Islam’s egalitarian message has been continuously contested by older river-valley social orders
• Islam’s everyday dignity can flip into explosive rage during upheaval.
• Islam’s fusion of religion with state makes holy war inherently political
• Islam’s moral law was beyond any single agency’s or branch’s control
• Islam’s pork ban may have halted expansion into pig-farming regions
• Islam’s relationship to Jewish sources differed structurally from Christianity’s
• Islam’s self-perception of triumph mirrored Christian imperial self-regard
• Islam’s spread clashed continuously with the ancient river-valley civilizations it conquered
• Islam’s traditional tolerance of other believers exceeded Christian practice before secularism.
• Islamic advance and retreat defined Europe’s boundaries and identity
• Islamic art substitutes calligraphic inscriptions for representational imagery in worship.
• Islamic autobiography is distinctive for its universal ancestry-opening
• Islamic autobiography serves oneself, others, and posterity.
• Islamic biography arose to verify hadith narrators’ reliability
• Islamic classical doctrine divides the world into house of Islam and house of war
• Islamic conquests introduced sugar to the Mediterranean and eventually the New World
• Islamic court writers merged biography of ruler with self-autobiography
• Islamic culture’s famed dignity can erupt into rage-driven violence in upheaval
• Islamic dynasties picked successors by suitability, not primogeniture
• Islamic fundamentalists condemn rule by infidels, not domination itself
• Islamic historiography sustained semi-epic heroic biography long past its early period.
• Islamic jurists categorically prohibited Muslims voluntarily entering non-Muslim countries
• Islamic land grants lacked feudalism’s immunities and sub-infeudation
• Islamic law classified abandoned and church lands as fay’ community booty
• Islamic militant literature centers Muslim governments as usurpers more than external enemies
• Islamic monotheism absorbed Iranian dualist notions of a cosmic clash.
• Islamic political theory fuses God and Caesar into one sovereign
• Islamic polities practiced broad tolerance while denying full religious equality
• Islamic qat’i’a grants lacked the immunities and sub-infeudation of European fiefs.
• Islamic revolution defined its enemies as the infidel abroad and apostate at home.
• Islamic revolutionaries retained Western constitutional and legal forms while rejecting Western laws
• Islamic revolutionaries selectively accept Western technology despite rejecting its ideology.
• Islamic revolutionary conflict is pragmatic versus ideologue, not moderate versus extreme
• Islamic revolutions are driven by a recurring conflict between ideologues and pragmatists.
• Islamic saga historiography served both morale-raising and propaganda ends
• Islamic source criticism predated comparable methods anywhere in the world
• Islamic states only authorized learning from Europe to better fight it.
• Islamic vocabulary is the most effective symbolic tool for political mobilization
• Islamic worldview divides humanity into the House of Islam and House of War
• Islamist movements define their program as undoing Westernization rather than rejecting modernity wholesale
• Islamist movements excused Soviet brutality because Western tolerance invited open criticism
• Islamist revivalism mistakes an imagined past for a re-creatable one
• Islamist revolutionaries rejected the West selectively, not wholesale
• Islamists attacked Western secularism because its pluralism posed a real challenge
• Islamists demonized the West because its consumerist temptation threatened tradition
• Islamophobia parallels anti-Semitism as hatred toward resident minorities in Christendom
• Isma ili missionaries entered India early by both land and sea routes
• Ismaili missionaries paired religious conversion with trade in medieval India
• Ismailis once dominated Shia Islam before declining to a minor sect.
• Israel’s 1967 victory triggered Soviet anti-Zionist demonization of the classical anti-Semitic type
• Israel’s 1967 victory triggered the Soviet campaign equating Israelis with Nazis
• Israel’s open society enables more news coverage than its closed neighbors
• Israeli democracy stems from traditions of Jewish communal autonomy.
• Israeli propaganda exposed Nasser’s grammatical errors to undermine his authority
• Israeli victory inverted the victim-oppressor moral frame in Western opinion
• Israelis read the racism charge through Holocaust memory, not color
• Italian was the only European language usable across the Ottoman lands until the 1800s
• Italy launched the first Arabic radio broadcasts from outside the Arab world in 1935
• Jew-hatred as systemic ideology is uniquely Euro-Christian, not Islamic
• Jewish communities deliberately rejected historiography for over a millennium
• Jewish historiography ceased after the Babylonian return despite biblical example
• Jewish history is inseparable from the wider languages of host civilizations
• Jewish institutional life assimilated to whichever dominant culture surrounded it
• Jewish marriage law absorbed surrounding Christian and Muslim norms
• Jewish marriage law absorbed the surrounding civilization’s marital norms.
• Jewish messianism emerged only after Babylonian exile under Persian influence
• Jewish presence in Russia grew only through eighteenth-century territorial expansion
• Jews deliberately rejected the writing of their own history
• Jews fared better in pluralist than in fully secular societies
• Jews flourished better under hierarchical pluralist empires than under secular states
• Jews rejected historiography for centuries as a conscious refusal, not incapacity
• Jews were seen as a race only in Nazi pseudoscience.
• Jihad and crusade differ in scriptural mandate and scope
• Jihad and crusade differed fundamentally in religious warrant and scope.
• Jihad originally meant striving to spread Islam, not primarily holy war
• Jihad originally obliged peaceful mission, with war only as last resort
• Jihadist anti-Americanism opposes who rules, not imperial domination itself
• Jihadists believed their Afghan war defeated the USSR and emboldened attacks on the US
• Judaism could only flourish, not merely survive, under Christian or Muslim rule
• Judaism flourished only under Christian or Muslim rule, not elsewhere
• Judaism permitted scripture translation while other scriptural religions resisted it
• July 1954 Anglo-Egyptian agreement on Suez marked Britain’s Middle Eastern decline
• Key Judaeo-Christian cosmological concepts originated in ancient Persian religion
• Khomeini exceeded Shari’a procedural norms by making rather than applying law
• Khomeini personally targeted the Shah, Carter, and Saddam
• Khomeini’s appeal transcended sectarian boundaries across the Sunni Muslim world
• Khomeini’s Rushdie fatwa made new law rather than applying existing law
• Kingship and caliphate differ by lawful rule, not succession method
• Knowing friend from enemy is the highest human prudence.
• Knowledge flow reversed from Islamic to Western centers by 1800.
• Language education sowed the ideals that ended the empires that spread it
• Language proximity cannot explain why Iran avoided Arabization
• Language relatedness alone cannot explain why Arabization succeeded in Egypt but failed in Iran
• Late-19th-century reformers blamed Islam’s decline on Ottoman tyranny, not on Islam itself
• League-of-Nations Arab states largely had fabricated identities unnamed for centuries.
• Lebanon’s civil war factions defied simple left-right and religious classification.
• Lebanon’s identity was rooted in mountaineer Christian and heterodox refuge before 1920.
• Lebanon’s mountain refuge sustained autonomous identity through centuries of Ottoman rule
• Legitimacy in dynastic monarchy derives from family membership
• Lewis defines America as a European enterprise contra American self-identity.
• Lewis frames fourteen centuries of Islam-West contact as a single binary struggle.
• Lewis frames Ottoman and Soviet decline as parallel paths needing a Kemalist savior
• Lewis trained in five dead languages before professing Middle Eastern history
• Long-established Muslim minorities can be culturally European yet still face violent conflict
• Losing two Gulf oil producers barely moved world oil prices.
• Loss of historical memory harms groups the way amnesia harms individuals
• Loss of Palestinian territories freed Arab states to stop denying a Palestine entity
• Making coffee required discovering a long elaborate process, unlike most foods and drinks
• Mandatory powers installed regimes mirroring their own institutions in Arab territories
• Many current world troubles stem from failing to understand culturally alien societies
• Marxism’s Jewish-founded structure spared Jews an adversarial role in its sacred history
• Mass conversion threatened state revenue, prompting a legal fiction taxing the land itself
• Mass conversion to Islam forced the treasury to tie tax to land, not religion.
• Mass executions in Iran reflect revolution, not Islam or Iranian culture
• Mass Western news coverage of the Middle East began with the Crimean War
• Media interest in the Arab-Israeli conflict stems from public curiosity about Jews specifically
• Medieval Arabic historical literature exceeds all of Christendom’s combined
• Medieval Arabic writers ranked Arabic above all other languages in an evolutionary hierarchy
• Medieval Arabs understood plague contagion but devised no preventive measure
• Medieval assassins were volunteers for whom survival was disgraceful
• Medieval Christian pilgrims faced suspicion as both Christians and pilgrims in the Middle East
• Medieval court panegyrics were recycled between patrons and still mislead historians today
• Medieval court poets still shape how historians read their patrons today
• Medieval European scholars studied at Arab Muslim universities in Spain and Sicily.
• Medieval in-kind tax lists are goldmines of food price and product data
• Medieval Islam’s worldview inverted onto its own periphery the Orientalist hierarchy
• Medieval Islamic historical writing outpaced all Christendom combined in bulk
• Medieval Islamic physicians recorded autobiographical memoirs as moral lessons.
• Medieval Islamic society had the highest voluntary travel mobility of any premodern society
• Medieval Islamic society had unmatched voluntary personal mobility
• Medieval Muslims dismissed Europe as historically and intellectually insignificant
• Medieval panegyric poems were recycled and resold across patrons
• Medieval propaganda techniques closely anticipated modern public-relations methods
• Mehmet II actively patronized Greek and Italian learning after conquering Constantinople
• Mentioning a ruler’s name in Friday sermons marked submission to his sovereignty
• Messianic hopes shifted from religious to secular redeemers after Shabbetai Sevi’s failure
• Messianism shifted from religious to secular redeemers after Sabbatai Zevi
• Middle East allies fear genuine democracy more than Saddam’s removal
• Middle East borders were drawn as straight lines by European colonial rulers
• Middle East dictatorships manufacture external conflict to justify internal oppression.
• Middle East discontents are a clash of civilizations, not of states
• Middle East frontiers were drawn by European statesmen with rulers on maps
• Middle East hostility to the West is civilizational, predating specific grievances.
• Middle East political conflict stems from clashing European and Islamic conceptions of sovereignty
• Middle Eastern aspiration for autonomy exceeds actual capacity
• Middle Eastern Christians led the first wave of Easterners studying in Europe
• Middle Eastern democratic forms mask the region’s real monarchical politics
• Middle Eastern dictatorships need conflict to justify domestic oppression
• Middle Eastern history scholarship suppresses the slave trade that shaped it
• Middle Eastern leaders misread the US as a reincarnated British Empire.
• Middle Eastern political forms should not be equated with Western originals
• Middle Eastern regimes benefit from keeping the Israeli conflict unresolved
• Middle Eastern regimes may keep the Israel conflict simmering as a safety valve
• Middle Eastern religion emphasizes practiced loyalty over doctrinal belief
• Middle Eastern traders visited the West long before Europeans traveled East
• Middle Eastern women’s travel writing began only around 1900
• Middle Easterners misread America as the restored British Empire
• Militant Islamist strategy rested on a belief that America cannot absorb casualties
• Military defeat historically triggers either radical adventure or sullen withdrawal
• Military headgear was the last bastion of Islamic clothing identity to fall
• Military uniforms carried symbolic weight that weapons did not
• Minorities are outsiders who choose to retain their otherness within a state.
• Minorities are outsiders within frontiers who refuse full assimilation.
• Minority religious elites absorb the institutional forms of the dominant culture around them
• Modern bureaucracy reimagined citizens as regulated particles in a machine
• Modern Hebrew functions structurally as revived Yiddish in new vocabulary
• Modern Middle Eastern nationalism was constructed by force and education in the twentieth century.
• Modern nationalism first prompted the idea of a Jewish state
• Modern racism and antisemitism are civilized rationales for primitive instincts
• Modern terrorism against democracies mirrors old assassination tactics against autocrats
• Modern translation technology has vastly widened literary reach beyond its original worlds
• Modern tyrannies are overwhelmingly republics rather than monarchies
• Modern Western perspectives can enrich understanding of medieval Middle East
• Modernity, not dynasty, forged Ottoman-Indian Muslim solidarity
• Monarchy was attacked from left, religious, and modernist quarters alike
• Mosque layout in breadth derives directly from prayer-row practice
• Mosque networks and armies are the only organizations tyrants cannot control
• Mosque networks give Islamist opposition an infrastructure no tyranny can fully suppress
• Most Arab states were artificial creations with invented names
• Most mid-century Arab youth movements modeled themselves on European Fascist parties
• Most Middle Eastern urban residents bought cooked food rather than cooking at home
• Most modern Arab state names and borders were European inventions
• Most modern Middle East states are recent colonial or Ottoman constructs
• Most modern Middle Eastern political murders are religiously motivated.
• Mughal India and the Ottomans both feared Nadir Shah’s expansionism
• Mughal-Ottoman relations collapsed over courtesies and forms of address.
• Muhammad’s migration transformed him from rebel to statesman
• Murad II paraded captured knights across the Middle East as propaganda
• Muslim and Western historians radically disagreed on which battle mattered
• Muslim captives of Christians wrote almost no captivity accounts, revealing one-sided cultural curiosity.
• Muslim extremists themselves, not Western polemicists, drove the negative image.
• Muslim fury stems from a centuries-old reversal of dominance over Christendom
• Muslim historiography produced no national histories, only universal and dynastic ones
• Muslim hostility to the West grew from humiliation and Western self-discrediting wars.
• Muslim perceptions of European ascendancy shifted from military to economic inferiority
• Muslim political authority derives legitimacy from Islam more than from nation or sovereignty
• Muslim student missions to Europe began only in the early 1800s, for military modernization
• Muslim travelers replaced contempt for Europe with respect born of perceived weakness
• Muslim-Western civilizational struggle reversed direction around 1683
• Muslims once admired America for wealth and success without moral suspicion
• Muslims recognized Byzantine Christians as fellow Romans and rivals
• Muslims recognized Byzantium as a rival universalist faith and empire
• Muslims remember an era when Islam ruled as the Earth’s greatest civilization.
• Muslims saw defeating Byzantium, not conquering Europe, as the real goal
• Mythology functions as primitive history legitimating authority and group identity
• Mythology functions as primitive science, religion, and history for the tribe.
• Naming a ruler in Friday sermons encoded submission or independence
• Nasser-era Arabism suppressed even the name of Egypt itself
• Nasser’s pan-Arabism was attacked as both Egyptian imperialism and national self-squandering
• Nasser’s regime coincided with rapid breakdown of Egyptian public sexual conservatism
• National school histories focus overwhelmingly on one side’s wars
• National state forms cannot explain Middle East popular movements.
• Nationalism arrived in the Middle East as a European import that local use transformed
• Nearly all Middle Eastern states retain legal polygamy and restrictive intermarriage rules.
• Nebrija’s 1492 grammar was the first to treat a vernacular seriously
• Neighboring states fear partial intervention against Saddam more than his reign
• Neighbors want Saddam removed but fear half-hearted intervention
• New land grants made the muqta a profit-taking tax intermediary
• New World bullion and colonial resources enriched Europe at Islam’s expense
• New World bullion and colonial resources reversed the wealth gap between Europe and Islam.
• New-world foods were named after distant places they did not come from
• Nineteenth-century Europeans racialized Shi’ism as Aryan resurgence against Semitic Islam
• No Islamic jurist anticipated voluntary Muslim emigration to non-Muslim lands
• Nomadic Bedouin culture prized refusal to submit to kings
• Non-intervention fails if rival powers still intervene in the region
• Non-state Arab actors organized transnationally for Palestine before their governments acted
• Non-Turkish Ottoman subjects served as carriers of Western-derived national ideas
• Non-Western militaries concluded they need nuclear weapons to deter the US
• Non-Western scholars initially welcomed Orientalist scholarship and used it readily
• Objectivity is unattainable yet historians must still pursue it rigorously
• Official historiography requires an institutional sponsor to exist
• Official history is engineered to blind public opinion for political ends
• Official Ottoman court chroniclers wrote candidly about major defeats
• Oil revenues freed autocratic states from pressures toward democratization
• Oil wealth unevenly distributed fractured Arab solidarity into separate state agendas.
• Oil-rich Middle East countries have done worse economically than oil-poor ones
• Old Muslim minorities in Europe were acculturated yet still persecuted
• Only Turkey, Tunisia, and Israel have formally outlawed polygamy in the Middle East
• Opening an autobiography with one’s pedigree was nearly unique in antiquity
• Oral performance carried poetry’s propaganda to mass audiences in pre-literate societies
• Ordinary Egyptians resented Russians more than their own authoritarian government
• Orient originally designated the Middle East and Islamic world, not Asia
• Orthodoxy means officially sponsored truth whose deviation carries penalties.
• Ottoman administrative knowledge of subject Christians never entered its literature
• Ottoman advisers warned sultans that European naval power threatened Istanbul’s prosperity
• Ottoman aid to Sumatra was diverted by a Yemen rebellion
• Ottoman ambassador selection reflected rank and Christian-social standing in Istanbul
• Ottoman ambassadors were sometimes chosen for wealth over competence.
• Ottoman archives are so rich they force rewriting most Ottoman historiography
• Ottoman archives could rewrite most existing Ottoman historiography.
• Ottoman archives guarded knowledge through layered linguistic and bureaucratic barriers
• Ottoman archives held millions of documents long closed to Western scholars
• Ottoman archives held over 50,000 registers spanning the entire empire.
• Ottoman archives offer more material than Western-trained scholars have used.
• Ottoman archives remain barely catalogued and could force a rewriting of the field
• Ottoman archives were guarded by deliberate obscurity as effectively as by policy
• Ottoman archives were historically guarded by layered linguistic obstacles
• Ottoman arrival in the Indian Ocean triggered naval rivalry with the Portuguese
• Ottoman attitudes toward Europe shifted from contempt to detailed curiosity by 1665.
• Ottoman chancery style could bury meaning in verbiage
• Ottoman consular records span over three centuries in a massive register series
• Ottoman consular registers systematically recorded foreign commercial activity from 1567.
• Ottoman court chose ambassadors by cost-saving rather than merit
• Ottoman court historians frankly chronicled their own defeats
• Ottoman cupola design solved cold climate and prayer-line needs
• Ottoman customs documents reached Venetian archives written in Hebrew letters.
• Ottoman decline eventually made Western charges against the Turks partly accurate
• Ottoman decline in the face of foreign threat produced genuine brutality toward subject peoples
• Ottoman decline is cited as the paradigm for the Soviet empire’s collapse.
• Ottoman decline stemmed from institutional resistance to Western science, not internal decay
• Ottoman decline stripped Turks of both imperial and religious authority to feel superior
• Ottoman diplomacy modernized from a household office into a ministry after 1836.
• Ottoman diplomatic modernization began only when foreign policy became crucial
• Ottoman diplomatic prose often degenerated into obscuring bombast
• Ottoman diplomatic protocol demoted foreign monarchs to mere provincial rulers
• Ottoman dragomans formed kinship networks that crossed embassy loyalties
• Ottoman economic weakness stemmed from too little central control, not too much
• Ottoman envoys produced systematic written travel accounts of Europe
• Ottoman envoys recorded their travels in standardized embassy books called Sefaret-name
• Ottoman expansion reached Vienna twice before its first defeat in 1683
• Ottoman fiefs held no seigneurial rights, leaving peasants freer on the land
• Ottoman finance records used a cipher-like script for speed and secrecy
• Ottoman historiography degenerated as Ottoman civilization declined
• Ottoman historiography located imperial origins in the Islamic caliphate, not ancient Turkish history
• Ottoman Imperial Archives excluded all Westerners before 1949
• Ottoman intellectual interest in Europe lagged far behind Europe’s interest in Islam
• Ottoman intelligence took a fantastic 1588 report of an Akbar-Portuguese plot seriously
• Ottoman interest in Europe only began once Europe seemed dangerous
• Ottoman Jewish customs receipts were written in Hebrew because both officials were Jewish
• Ottoman knowledge of Mughals began with refugee princes and rival embassies
• Ottoman leaders publicly conceded European naval superiority by the mid-1500s.
• Ottoman memoir tradition was so weak that major texts were unknown to its historiography
• Ottoman military dominance of Europe ended only in 1683 at Vienna
• Ottoman naval expeditions for Southeast Asian allies were repeatedly diverted by nearer crises
• Ottoman records are densest where its administration was most direct.
• Ottoman records on Balkan provinces exceed those on Asian territories
• Ottoman reformers proposed replacing patronage with Prussian-style meritocracy
• Ottoman rule tolerated minorities while Christian reconquests erased entire populations
• Ottoman rule was relatively non-persecuting compared with Christian reconquests
• Ottoman statecraft treated calibration of fear as governance technique
• Ottoman statesmen already saw European naval power as a mortal threat by the 1510s.
• Ottoman statesmen recognized European naval superiority as early as the sixteenth century
• Ottoman sultans hired historians to publicize victories to rival rulers
• Ottoman Sultans refused to sponsor Mughal pretenders out of realpolitik prudence
• Ottoman sultans ruled subject to Islamic Holy Law they could not alter
• Ottoman translations of European history focused on royal biography
• Ottoman treatment of subject peoples compared favorably with Christian reconquest practices
• Ottoman Turks possessed a sophisticated literary and artistic culture, not barbarism.
• Ottoman victory bulletins were commissioned historiography sent as political theater to rival rulers
• Ottoman writers proposed a Suez canal a century before it was built
• Ottoman writers recognized European discoveries as threats to Islamic trade by 1580
• Ottoman-Mughal ties faded by the late 16th century as Europeans rerouted trade
• Ottoman-Mughal ties shrank to commerce and then faded with Western sea dominance.
• Ottoman-Mughal ties were triggered only by the Shiite Iranian threat
• Ottomans refused European rulers imperial titles, addressing them as provincial kings
• Outsider scholarship on Islam reads better to Western lay readers than insider accounts
• Ownership claims over history were used to preempt Western study of Middle Eastern history
• Palestine as a name carried no continuous statehood or Jerusalem-capital tradition
• Palestinian elites abandoned pan-Arabism after experiencing exclusion from power.
• Palestinian guerrillas mattered far less to Egyptians than to Western observers
• Palestinian refugees fared better than countless other 20th-century refugee populations
• Palestinians were denied citizenship and work rights in most Arab states.
• Palestinians were treated as foreigners in nearly every Arab country
• Pan-Arab passion and anti-Western hatred have never translated into unified political action
• Pan-Arab political solidarity is a myth; shared culture produces no political force
• Pan-Arab unification required a Prussia-like leading state, not just ideology
• Pan-Arab union was explicitly defined against the Ottoman Caliphate model.
• Pan-Arabism survives as public orthodoxy long after leaders abandoned it
• Pan-Arabism’s adoption let Arab states hold Palestinian territories and keep refugees stateless.
• Pan-Arabism’s first great age drew directly on German and Italian nationalist models
• Pan-Arabism’s own logic undercut the moral force of Arab claims against Israel.
• Pan-Turkish nationalism was built by Russian-educated exile Tatars reacting against pan-Slavism
• Passports and security checks predate modern bureaucracy by centuries
• Patronized poets functioned as classical Islam’s public-relations apparatus for rulers.
• Permitting outspoken criticism can actually mask tighter political control
• Persian culture and Shi’ism held Iran’s ethnic periphery together after the Safavids
• Persian influence introduced messianism to the Hebrew Bible
• Persian rulers translated imperial edicts into each provincial language
• Persian, not Arabic, was the classical literary language of late-medieval Islam
• Phanariot Greeks remained loyal to the Ottoman state despite Greek independence
• Philhellenism perpetuated Western hostility to the Turk
• Physicians gained privileged access to Ottoman harems denied to other male travelers.
• Physicians gained unique Western access to harems and produced harem ethnography
• Poetic boasts served as battlefield morale weapons in early Arabia
• Poetry propaganda served rulers, rebels, and personal social announcements alike
• Poetry served as mass media in pre-print societies.
• Poets served as the public relations professionals of the pre-modern world
• Political factions in early Islam metamorphosed into religious sects
• Political freedom was greater under the Mandates than before or after
• Political grievances divert attention from deeper socioeconomic causes of anti-Western feeling
• Political Islam’s appeal rests on the failure of imported Western models.
• Political jokes under Arab regimes turned self-critical where other autocracies targeted leaders
• Political upheaval created receptivity to Isma’ili messianic ideology.
• Politically engaged literary theory applies a market model of eclectic consumption
• Polities cannot function without shared consensus, even autocratic ones
• Polyglot classical rulers could bypass interpreters and speak directly to subject peoples
• Polytheism’s open pantheon makes genuine religious tolerance structurally easy.
• Poorly paid interpreters leaked diplomatic secrets out of vanity and bribery
• Post-1918 Anglo-French control of the Middle East gave way to new contestants
• Post-1945 Middle East great-power succession changed players but not the script
• Post-1948 Arab intellectuals cited Hitler to validate antisemitic conspiracy theories.
• Post-1948 Egyptian anti-Israel literature imported European anti-Semitic texts wholesale
• Post-1967 defeat pushed many Egyptians toward Egyptian identity over Pan-Arab nationalism
• Post-1967 Egyptians debated Egyptian versus Arab national identity
• Post-1967 Nasser purged his inner circle of all potential opposition
• Post-Cold-War superpowers neither could nor would keep imperial rule in the Middle East
• Post-imperial Muslim migration to Europe followed former colonial ties
• Post-Ottoman mandatory powers shaped Arab states in their own institutional image
• Post-Ottoman nationalist states shaped Western views of the Turks through their own liberation narratives
• Post-republic Turkish scholars reframed Ottoman history as a national phase.
• Postwar hostility to Orientalism grew from political conflict, not scholarship defects
• Postwar Islamic anti-imperial anger transferred from Europe to the superpowers
• Postwar Middle Eastern republics often masked continued dynastic dominance
• Postwar university expansion created new positions in previously neglected fields like Oriental studies
• Pre-1800 European loanwords in Turkish were few and mostly Italian maritime terms.
• Pre-Islamic Arabian battles resembled ritualized sport more than war
• Pre-Islamic Arabian tribal battles resembled sport more than lethal warfare.
• Pre-Islamic Arabic kingship carried mostly positive associations
• Pre-Islamic Bedouins rejected kingship as a form of servitude
• Pre-Islamic civilizations preserved foreigners’ histories mainly through their own authors, and neglected them
• Pre-Islamic Mediterranean civilizations showed almost no interest in other peoples’ histories
• Pre-modern Muslim historical writing lacks the empathy for enemies found in Jonah and Aeschylus
• Pre-modern Muslim Middle Eastern loyalties ran to religion and kin, not nation or land
• Pre-modern Muslim scholars regarded Western history as lacking value and purpose
• Pre-modern sources show empathy for enemies except in Muslim historiography
• Pre-national Arab political loyalty ranked religion first, dynasty second, ethnicity last
• Pre-national Middle Eastern loyalty ran to religion, kin, and village, not nation.
• Primogeniture is a European concept absent from Muslim dynastic succession
• Primogeniture is a European idea that never took root in Muslim dynasties
• Pro-Western Arab leaders governed against prevailing popular sentiment
• Propaganda became a negative label that people apply only to opponents’ messages.
• Propaganda forgers embed accurate old predictions to sell false future ones.
• Propagandistic history-writing is a modern nationalist invention
• Rabbinical Jewry is defined maternally and by conversion, never racially.
• Reading Ottoman administrative records requires deep knowledge of the empire’s institutions
• Reading Ottoman records requires decoding an opaque administrative system
• Redemption narratives turned involuntary captives into travel writers
• Reference-style consumption of scholarship obscures its broader thematic value
• Refugees fleeing persecution supplied skilled translators to the Ottoman empire
• Refusing all compromise handed Moses’s enemies the opening to destroy him.
• Regime change inaction can carry greater dangers than intervention.
• Regimes can grant freer speech while tightening their grip on organized action.
• Regional autocracies would feel threatened by a democratic Iraq
• Rejected old values with unassimilated new ones produce tyranny and terror
• Relativist epistemology enables both discrediting good evidence and validating bad evidence
• Religion rather than nationality has been the primary basis of identity in Islam
• Religion-based identity in Islam predates Western secular nationhood.
• Religion, not nationality, anchored identity for Muslims and medieval Christians
• Religious condemnations can be timed for domestic political gain
• Religious identity, not nationality, structured medieval Muslim self-conception
• Religious jealousy over divine favor underpins the first recorded murder
• Religious murder for internal succession differs from killing foreign oppressors
• Religiously motivated murderers killed many modern Middle Eastern rulers and intellectuals
• Removing specific grievances does not relieve structural anti-Western sentiment
• Renewed Middle East instability derailed the US pivot to Asia
• Repeated failed Shia insurrections cast imams in a Christ-like sacrificial light.
• Repeated prior conquest eroded resistance in Arab-conquered provinces but not Iran
• Republican soldiers who attacked barracks under Mazzini were executed by the monarchy.
• Resolving Egypt’s Suez grievance worsened rather than improved Middle East stability
• Revolution freed Egypt from an embarrassing imperial claim it could not abandon otherwise
• Revolutionary dynasties toned down messianic titles once in power.
• Revolutionary Islam supplied both goals and a taxonomy of enemies for Iran’s revolution
• Revolutionary regimes cycle from ideological domination back to pragmatist rule once passion cools.
• Rice was unknown to seventh-century Arab conquerors in the marshes
• Rice was unknown to the Greco-Roman world
• Right-left labels mislead when applied outside their Western origin
• Rising Egyptian Muslim nationalism dissolved all foreign minorities, not just Jews.
• Rival bardic sagas and sectarian historiography persist into modern nations
• Rival state ambitions sabotaged Arab unity against Israel in 1948
• Romantic philhellenism distorted Western perception of the Ottoman Turks.
• Roughly 260 villages were emptied and half a million Palestinians became refugees in 1948
• Royal titles faced attack from liberals, Islamic fundamentalists, and modernizers alike
• Rural Muslim peasant women held more freedom than urban women
• Russia acquired its Jewish subjects by Polish partition conquest, not by invitation
• Russia and Turkey each followed divergent translations of the same 1774 treaty
• Saddam prioritized weapons of mass destruction over the welfare of Iraqis.
• Saddam prioritized WMD over both his people’s welfare and his army
• Saddam repositioned from Gulf order defender to Robin Hood figure
• Saddam’s legitimizing lineage drew on Iraq-native non-Arab conquerors
• Sati al-Husri’s pan-Arab ideology had to argue Egypt into the Arab nation
• Scattered evidence indicates the Fatimid Mission ran a central grand strategy.
• Scholarly representation of Islam was dominated by Western outsiders
• Scholarship on the Arab-Israeli conflict is a self-sustaining industry
• Scientific racism emerged to justify slavery once religious justifications failed
• Second-generation Ottoman Jews lost their European linguistic edge and were replaced by Greeks.
• Sectarian theology differently shaped Sunni and Shi’a historical narratives
• Sectarian theology shaped what Islamic historians chose to defend
• Secular and religious visions of this civilization remain locked in an open contest.
• Secular ideologies replicate religious salvation-history as a narrative form.
• Selective relevance can corrupt history more than outright neglect can.
• Self-critical history can be as arrogant as self-glorifying history
• Self-flagellating national history is as self-centered as triumphalist history
• Self-flagellatory national history is as arrogant as self-serving history.
• Self-perception of history is the most effective tool for shaping group hatred
• Sensitive subjects warrant scholarly attention precisely because sensitivity signals something is wrong.
• Sensitivity in a society signals sites of wrongness that demand attention
• Seventeenth-century Turkish statecraft taught calibrated fear and hope
• Shared Arab cultural identity does not translate into political bloc action
• Shared monotheistic traits make Islam and Christianity uniquely prone to conflict
• Shared religious premises make inter-Abrahamic conflicts more virulent than cross-civilizational ones
• Shared theological vocabulary made Christian-Muslim polemics intelligible and vicious.
• Shared words diverged in meaning because Arabs were pastoralists and Hebrews farmers
• Shari’a prescribed permanent war between Islam and Christendom, in theory only.
• Shi’a historiography held that history went wrong after Ali’s murder
• Shi’ism functioned to differentiate Iran from all its Sunni neighbors
• Shi’ism originated in Iran as an Arab import rather than an indigenous Persian faith
• Shi’ism served as Iran’s marker of difference from all bordering Sunni states
• Shi’ite identity served to differentiate Iran from its Sunni neighbors.
• Shia and Sunni diverge on whether history went right or wrong after the Prophet
• Shia obedience to authority is conditional and revocable, unlike Sunni
• Shia rebel method of propaganda then armed attack mirrors the Prophet’s own career
• Shia rebels modeled their strategy on Muhammad’s Mecca-to-Medina exile
• Shia rulers who seized power behaved like the Sunnis they replaced
• Shia schisms repeat because of contested political succession
• Sixteenth-century Ottoman lands had fewer mills per capita than eleventh-century England
• Small land grants created a middle class of Muslim freeholders
• Smoking tobacco was once a capital offense under some Islamic rulings
• Solving the Arab-Israeli conflict would not solve the region’s other fundamental problems
• Some Orientalists pursued their scholarship to the point of ruin
• Some scholars dispute outsiders’ right to study Middle Eastern history at all
• Sophisticated civilizations can thrive while deliberately ignoring history
• Soviet and Egyptian meanings of socialism diverged sharply
• Soviet anti-Zionist racism charges derived from earlier pan-Turkism and pan-Iranism attacks.
• Soviet atheism functioned as a religious orthodoxy of its own
• Soviet bloc expansion was expected to absorb client states permanently
• Soviet Central Asian borders were drawn to guarantee future ethnic conflicts
• Soviet client treaties were drafted in Moscow and concluded in days
• Soviet influence weakened pan-Arabism from both the left and the right
• Soviet law classified Jews as a nationality without territory, trapping them between identities
• Soviet policy actively discouraged pan-Arabism in favor of separate state relations
• Soviet wartime propaganda deliberately obscured Nazi persecution of Jews
• Specific Western grievances do not explain persisting anti-Western hostility.
• State-compelled national history teaching risks becoming ideological indoctrination rather than self-knowledge.
• Stopping eastward revenue drain and boosting commerce funded Egypt’s first independent Muslim state.
• Storytellers recited exemplary past deeds to move audiences to emulation
• Subject peoples’ nationalism provoked the Turkish imperial majority into its own nationalism
• Successful revolutionary movements must betray their millennial promises
• Successful revolutions must sacrifice their messianic radicalism to consolidate power.
• Successful revolutions require audiences who already know the script’s outcome
• Sufi wandering rather than organized missions spread Islam eastward
• Sultanic power was checked by Islamic Holy Law rather than popular consent
• Sunni and Shia historiographies diverge over whether history serves or has betrayed God’s purpose.
• Sunni and Shia names derive from Arabic for custom and party
• Sunni consensus doctrine sanctified the historical status quo as divine guidance
• Sunni dominance over Shia was not settled until the high Middle Ages
• Sunni Islam’s beliefs foster a developed historical self-consciousness
• Sunni revitalization through Seljuq power contained the Fatimid challenge
• Superpower involvement paradoxically contained the regional conflict’s danger
• Support for Nasser’s return split between staged-political theories and genuine accountability demands.
• Tenth-century Baghdad needed a chain of translators to read a Latin letter
• Territorial kingship titles were nearly absent in the Islamic world before 1900
• The ‘superior culture’ explanation for Iran’s survival fails on direction of borrowing
• The 16th-century Ottoman threat mirrors the Cold War confrontation
• The 1948 defeat’s humiliation drove violent overthrow of Arab regimes.
• The 1954 Anglo-Egyptian Suez evacuation marked Britain’s power decline in the region
• The 1967 crisis escalated from a boundary dispute into an existential confrontation
• The 1967 defeat freed Arab states to outsource the anti-Israel struggle to Palestinians
• The 1967 defeat freed Arab states to support Palestinian self-determination.
• The 1967 defeat rekindled Egyptian national identity apart from Arabism
• The 1967 defeat shifted Egyptian blame onto their Arab allies
• The 1991 Gulf War outcome motivated both Iraq and Iran to pursue WMD.
• The 1991 Gulf War was concluded without occupying Baghdad or toppling Saddam
• The academic field of Oriental studies formally renamed itself around 1973
• The alphabet democratized writing and widened the reach of written propaganda.
• The apple functioned as a generic label under which new foods entered languages
• The Arab democratic movement cannot yet be dismissed as a sham or failure
• The Arab Revolt functioned as a foundation myth for both sides.
• The Arab revolt was dynastic and religious, not nationalist.
• The Arab Revolt’s military value and popular support were exaggerated.
• The Arab states’ names and borders reveal their colonial, artificial origins
• The Arab-Israeli conflict is not the bloodiest Middle East conflict
• The Arab-Israeli conflict reduces to three fundamental questions
• The Arab-Israeli dispute provokes unique emotional passion in Western debate
• The Arabic title malik originated as a positive royal designation
• The Arabic word for history derives from moon-based dating
• The Arabic word for nationalism began as a Turkish term of abuse
• The Arabic word for nationalism was a Turkish coinage meaning factionalism
• The Assassins called themselves fidaiyun, a term their enemies renamed.
• The Assassins targeted Muslim leaders, not Crusaders, whom they served only as allies
• The Assassins targeted Sunni rulers, not Crusaders
• The battle of Tours was a footnote to Muslim historians, not a turning point.
• The Bible gives ancient Iran uniquely positive treatment
• The bin Laden as Robin Hood framing conflates distinct eras and moral categories
• The black Abbasid and red European flags both shifted from revolution to regime symbols
• The bound codex book form likely originated in Iran.
• The British civil-service concept transplanted a distinctively British model of authority into Palestine
• The British Mandate introduced crucial changes beyond visible material legacies
• The caliphate was founded to solve succession after Muhammad’s death
• The concept of revolution as legitimacy was alien to Islamic tradition
• The concept of revolution is a Western import to the Middle East
• The early Muslim conquests annexed lands then considered part of Europe
• The early Ottoman Empire ran on elaborate, conscientious bureaucracy, not incompetence.
• The enemies-of-God concept spans classical antiquity and all three Abrahamic scriptures
• The fall of Constantinople was a triumph of a civilization, not of barbarism
• The Fatimid Caliph doubled as revolutionary leader subverting the Abbasid order
• The Fatimid caliphate contested Abbasid legitimacy itself, not just their rule.
• The Fatimid chancery deliberately maintained two tiers of court poetry for different audiences
• The Fatimid revolution succeeded only partially where the Abbasid one had triumphed fully.
• The Fatimid schism was untenable amid Islam’s unified front against Christendom
• The Fatimid state institutionalized missionary training in Cairo colleges.
• The fatwa’s timing served Iran’s internal radical power politics, not religion.
• The first genuinely free press in the Middle East existed under British occupation
• The first Islamic civil war turned on the legitimacy of regicide
• The founding text of pan-Arabism was sponsored by the Khedive against the Sultan.
• The Friday sermon functioned as official state media in medieval Islam
• The Greek dragoman elite remained loyal to the Ottoman state
• The Greek word historia evolved into a word for tall story in Arabic
• The Hajj moved merchants, scholars, and slaves across the Islamic world annually
• The Hebrew Bible’s self-critical historiography influenced Christians but not later Jews
• The hidden twelfth imam vanished around 873 and Twelvers await his return.
• The institutional label orientalism was renamed by 1973 because of political pressure
• The Iran-Iraq war supports a multiplicity of partial explanations.
• The Iran-Iraq war was fought over the Shatt al-Arab waterway.
• The Iranian religion originated the dualistic cosmic struggle of good versus evil
• The Iranian revolution may be replaying French and Russian revolutionary phases
• The Iranian revolution reached far beyond Iran into the broader Islamic world
• The Iranian Revolution was a genuine revolution akin to the French and Russian ones.
• The Iranian revolution’s appeal crossed sectarian lines where Shi’ism was unknown
• The Islamic cosmic struggle is a divine test, not a battle humans can win.
• The Islamic Middle East historically stretched into Central Asia past the Soviet border
• The Ismailis were the leading Shia branch for centuries
• The Italian invasion of Ethiopia steered Egypt toward pan-Arab leadership
• The Jews who remained in Egypt were the poorest and most culturally Egyptian
• The Jews who stayed in Egypt are the most culturally Egyptian of all
• The Kata’ib’s initial model was Czech sport, not Nazi storm troopers
• The label ‘Assassin’ was imposed by enemies while the self-descriptor was fida’i
• The label propaganda is now applied only to what opponents disseminate, never to self-description.
• The madrasa originated as counterpropaganda against Ismaili and Fatimid influence.
• The madrasa system was created as an ideological counter-weapon against Isma’ili Shiism.
• The madrasa was created originally as Sunni counterpropaganda against Isma’ili Shi’ism.
• The medieval Assassins failed to overthrow any regime and ended as hired hitmen
• The medieval Assassins killed mostly Muslims, not Crusaders
• The Middle East as a civilization extends past the Soviet border into Central Asia
• The Middle East never developed acute race consciousness like Europe did
• The mosque network gives Islamists a communications infrastructure no other opposition can rival
• The Muslim pilgrimage was the earliest major driver of long-distance personal travel
• The Muslim religious-political unity framing is partly a modern colonial contrastive construct.
• The name Palestine was never attached to a state before the British Mandate.
• The nation-state’s power claim drives Islamism’s focus on the state.
• The Nazis themselves popularized the terms racist and racism
• The Nazis’ fall and the Holocaust revelations combined to weaken Arab positions on Palestine.
• The Ottoman and Mughal empires only cooperated against the Shi’ite Iranian threat
• The Ottoman conqueror of Constantinople collected Greek books and humanists.
• The Ottoman economy lagged not from state overreach but from weak central mobilization
• The Ottoman Empire had already peaked when Europe feared it most
• The Ottoman Imperial Archives had never been opened to Western scholars
• The Ottoman sack of Constantinople was less destructive than the Crusader sack of 1204.
• The Ottoman Turks were culturally closer to Byzantium than the Western Christians were
• The Ottomans considered a Suez canal but were outmatched by European naval power
• The Ottomans seriously considered a Suez canal in 1568 but later abandoned it
• The Palestine conflict broadened from a three-party affair to an inter-Arab cause from 1936
• The pork ban may have hemmed in Islamic expansion geographically
• The Prophet’s biography fused religious authority with pre-Islamic Arab heroic saga.
• The Qur’an’s chapters reflect Muhammad’s shift from rebel to ruler
• The Quran reserves malik for flawed or equivocal mortal rulers
• The real regional danger is American withdrawal, evidenced by Middle Eastern chemical weapons use
• The region called the Middle East was invented by imperial and Cold War interests
• The religion-politics separation framework is Christian-specific, not universal
• The Robin Hood framing of bin Laden is a delusion at both ends
• The same act of religious conversion reads as apostasy or enlightenment depending on perspective
• The same claim about the Prophet can serve opposite moral purposes
• The same historical victory can be legitimately claimed by opposing national narratives
• The same ideals drove Christian Ottoman rebels and Muslim anti-colonial rebels
• The same political term can carry radically divergent meanings across allies
• The self-ascribed term for Islamic warriors was fida’i, not assassin
• The Seljuq state valued military service over fiscal yield
• The separation of church and state was first made law in the United States
• The Shia are a scattered global minority concentrated around Iran.
• The State of Israel was a creation of East European nationalism
• The stirrup enabled Persian courier networks by making fast riding stable
• The stirrup let Persians build admired courier networks across the Middle East
• The studied peoples eventually objected to being the object of orientalist study
• The Sultan’s language of vassalage was rendered as friendly equality in translation to England
• The Sunni caliphate was conceived as elective by a narrow college
• The Sunni-Shia split is fundamentally about dynastic versus elective succession
• The Sunni-Shia split is political in origin, not theological.
• The superior-culture absorption argument fails because the direction of language learning differed from Rome-Greece
• The term Middle East denotes where the three religions meet, not a fixed region
• The term Orient originally meant the Islamic world immediately east of Europe
• The term orientalist was officially abolished at the 1973 Paris congress
• The term umma was semantically transformed to denote the Arab nation.
• The Twelver imam line ended with a concealed Mahdi in 873
• The U.N. functions as an organization for the conservation of conflict
• The U.S. faces a pressured binary choice between dominating or abandoning the Middle East.
• The UN normalized falsehood and intimidation as procedural norms by the 1970s
• The unification of Germany and Italy served as the model for Arab nationalist unification
• The United Nations conserves conflict rather than resolving it as a parliament
• The US drew anti-Western hostility without territorial colonialism
• The US-Israel strategic alliance resulted from Soviet gains in the Middle East
• The Western compartmentalization of religion is foreign to Islamic tradition.
• The word Levantine originated from the Italian word for sunrise
• The word revolution has been devalued to mean any trivial change or mere coup
• The Zoroastrian devil is an independent cosmic power, not a divine servant
• Theological anti-Jewish hostility is a Western Christian, not an Islamic, tradition.
• Theoretical ideological racism originated in Western Europe specifically
• Third World solidarity politics treated Western guilt-feeding deference as a diplomatic commodity
• Third Worldism recast the golden-age myth of Western innocence lost
• Tobacco smoking was once punishable by death under Islamic law
• Tolerance keeps the tolerated group in a subordinate, revocable position.
• Trading companies’ Middle Eastern ‘factories’ were trade centers leaving rich archival records
• Traditional Islam lacks any church or priesthood structure
• Traditional Islamic states divided governance between military and bureaucratic elites
• Translation can convey a foreign civilization’s self-view to outside readers.
• Travel is individual journeys of record, distinct from collective migration
• Treating history as sacred precedent drove early Muslim source criticism
• Treating Muslim identity as incidental underwrites the Enlightenment’s universalism claim
• Treaty negotiation timelines signal a country’s real independence from the Soviet Union
• Tulunid and Ikhshidid rulers sought local autonomy, not the Caliphate.
• Tulunid rulers aimed to rule Egypt without challenging the Abbasid Caliphate.
• Tulunid-era Egypt lacked the cultural renaissance that emerged in Iran.
• Turkey alone among 1918’s defeated powers rejected the imposed peace
• Turkey’s hat reform ended the last non-Western element of military dress
• Turkish scholars studied ancient but neglected modern Turks abroad as émigrés.
• Turkish scholars study ancient Central Asian Turks but neglect present-day outside-Turkey Turks
• Turkist scholars redefined Turkish history as national and ethnic rather than dynastic and religious
• Two rival Egyptian narratives blamed either world Jewry or American imperialism for Israel.
• UN members face asymmetric penalties that made anti-American voting nearly costless
• UN Resolution 242’s ambiguous wording on withdrawal hinged on a grammar-encoded article absence
• Unattainable ideals still dominate human conduct.
• Under the Fatimids, tribute flowed into Egypt rather than out of it
• Uneven oil wealth fractured inter-Arab relations after 1973
• Universities offer neither real money nor real power
• US oil policy pursued access rather than direct control
• US support for Israel grew from Soviet successes, not prior preference
• US-supported Middle East rulers breed the terror directed against America
• Victorious premodern rulers paraded captured war trophies across vast distances as visual propaganda
• Violent intimidation suppresses historical scholarship where state coercion cannot
• Voluntary civil society had little pre-colonial precedent in the region’s traditional associations
• War mobilization drove women’s emancipation in the Ottoman Empire
• Warring for God makes one’s opponents automatically God’s enemies.
• Wartime intelligence work gave Orientalists specialized modern regional knowledge
• Wartime state intelligence work drew directly on academic Orientalists
• Washington rejected toleration as condescension toward inherent rights
• Western and Middle Eastern interaction relied on Italian two-stage translation until the nineteenth century
• Western audiences misread religious-political murderers as targeting outsiders when Israelis were incidental
• Western colonies displaced Middle Eastern coffee and sugar exports entirely
• Western impact caused Middle East political formlessness and instability
• Western intervention discredits its own proposed solutions in the Middle East
• Western lay readers found outsider-written scholarship on Islam most satisfying
• Western literary forms permanently transformed Middle Eastern literary languages
• Western literary forms replaced indigenous genres down to the level of language itself
• Western literary genres displaced traditional Islamic forms across the whole region
• Western media attention to Palestinian guerrillas far exceeded Egyptian attention
• Western merchants controlled even basic Middle Eastern consumption goods by the late 1700s
• Western misinterpretation of the term rayah was later adopted by the Turks themselves
• Western power and ideas devastated the Islamic world from 1800 onward
• Western press labels of Lebanese Kata’ib as rightist are misplaced
• Western proposals are discredited by the very fact of being Western
• Western reports miscast the Assassins as anti-Crusader when most victims were Muslim rulers
• Western Romantic Arabism eventually shaped Arabs’ own self-image retrospectively
• Western scholars of Arabic long studied the classical language over living dialects
• Western scholarship on Turkish identity directly supplied mid-century Ottoman nationalists their categories
• Western self-criticism as moral exception vindicates the civilization that produced it
• Western study of Islamic history moved from credulity to critical method to total rejection
• Western-proposed solutions to Middle Eastern problems are discredited by the proposer
• Western-style institutions were judged by their failed local imitations, discrediting reform.
• Westerners explain away hostility by scapegoating rival colonial powers.
• Wheeled transport in the Middle East arrived only with imperial transit needs
• Wheeled vehicles came to the Middle East only with British imperial needs
• Wine prohibitions created legal friction between Muslim majorities and non-Muslim minorities.
• Women’s status in Christendom exceeded that in polygamous societies
• World attention to the Arab-Israeli conflict reflects fascination with Jews more than strategic importance.
• World cuisines divide into sweet-milk, sour-milk, and no-milk zones
• Zionism grew from Jewish religion, messianism, and persecution, not race.
• Zionism’s defining traits came from Eastern European Yiddish culture
• Zionist emigration to Palestine was minuscule next to mass Jewish migration westward
• Zionists pitched Jews as carriers of European culture against the Arabs
• Zoroastrian communities enabled European Orientalists to access ancient Iranian languages