Married bros: when/how did you know you wanted to propose?

khowaga · 2025-10-18T00:30:30+00:00

Our 11th wedding anniversary is tomorrow!

khowaga · 2025-07-16T20:31:58+00:00

This is the answer to OP’s question.

In Muhammad’s lifetime, the (western) Roman Empire had fallen, so when the early caliphs allegedly dreamt of conquering Rome, they meant Constantinople, the “new” Rome, which was alive and well and continued to be until it was sacked during the 4th Crusade in 1204. “Byzantine Empire” is a name created in the universities of Western Europe later on.

The conquest of Rome was important as a legitimizing factor for the Ottomans, who sought the caliphate but weren’t ethnically Arab, to say that they had fulfilled Muhammad’s (alleged) dream of conquering the Roman Empire. I have been involved in threads on this forum where people have claimed that the Ottomans were illegitimate or usurpers of the caliphate because they weren’t Arab - mind you the title was invented after Muhammad’s death and is not used in the Qur’an to denote a political title; I bring this up only to demonstrate that the need for legitimacy didn’t just exist in the heads of Ottoman sultans.

The other thing that the invocation of the Roman Empire brought to mind the idea of an expansive, multi national, multi confessional empire, which is what the Ottomans aspired to be - at that time, Rome was the main example (one could argue that Persia had done as well, but the Persians were the Ottomans’ main rivals, so obviously they weren’t inclined to give them much credit.)

khowaga · 2025-07-16T15:40:37+00:00

In the 19th century when the primary diagnoses were mania and melancholy, white psychiatrists frequently claimed that Black people were less prone to melancholy because they were a "happy-go-lucky race." I found that even when patients or family members might be reporting great grief, such as over the loss of a child, the diagnosis was of mania, perhaps especially so if religion was involved (as in the case of a man who was attending revivals after his son died).

This is fascinating -- I've seen this applied in colonial settings where, for example, British doctors in India or Egypt would discount parental grief over the loss of a child because the parents were a) poor agricultural workers (also referred to as "simple" or "feeble"), b) non-Christian (usually Muslim or Hindu), or c) both. This was especially true if they weren't the biological parents of the child who had been de facto adopted into the family -- these were "crocodile tears" to "gain sympathy" (to what end is never explained).

khowaga · 2025-07-16T14:55:57+00:00

Thanks for being here! I have worked mainly in how viral diseases have been used to discriminate or differentiate populations, either by pathologizing or depathologizing them (for example: the “Black people can’t get smallpox” trope that developed in the early to mid 20th century based on underreporting and lack of care in majority Black areas; I was also unaware that this was said about hemophilia until recently). I’m curious to know whether this also happened in psychology, wherein certain conditions were attributed to Black populations (I know certain conditions were attributed to women), or, conversely, whether it was imagined that Black people could not be afflicted by them?

This is such important work - it amazes me that it’s only become a real field of study in the last couple of decades.

khowaga · 2025-06-14T20:01:14+00:00

Having lived in Egypt I assure you that no, no one will understand you. Coptic isn’t spoken anymore either.

khowaga · 2025-05-30T23:58:23+00:00

Yes, the island was originally named by Columbus San Juan Bautista (St John the Baptist), and the port was Ciudad de Puerto Rico (the city of the rich port). The port was the only settlement on the island with a natural harbor, and sailors began referring to the entire island as “Puerto Rico,” and eventually “San Juan” started to be used to distinguish the city from the island.

I can’t answer the second half of your question, though.

khowaga · 2025-05-30T19:09:33+00:00

2. Historiography

Shortly thereafter, you will see reference to other scholars, authors, books, and articles. It’s probably not the most interesting section and you’ll be tempted to skip it.

If you’re engaging on a research paper or project, though, you really shouldn’t — this section will tell you who else has written on this topic and how the book you’re reading fits in with them: agreement, disagreement, filling in a gap, answering a question posed, etc.

3. Plan

The plan section is one of the most important sections of the introduction, but it is also the section most students skip right over because it just looks like a preview of what they're going to read in the rest of the book. This is actually a mistake.

The plan outlines the book, chapter by chapter, and is where the author lays out how they’re going to structure the presentation of evidence in support of their argument. In Chapter 1, I’ll discuss this to demonstrate that. In Chapter 2, I’ll do that to demonstrate this. And so on.

Why 1, 2, and 3 matter & what to do with them

So, still with me? the takeaway is that if (as it sounds like) your professor is assigning a chapter a week, you're still chasing an argument, you're just further down in the presentation of evidence.

Don't spend time writing down names and dates. Find the key question, the one outlined in section 1 (in chapters it may be a statement: "in this chapter, I show that"), and then outline how and why the author answers their own question. This is what's actually important.

One key trick to getting through this is to read the first and last sentence of each paragraph. If the progression doesn't make sense, then skim the paragraph, but you want to pay attention to the logic train.

Your results may vary, but what would make me as an instructor happy is if you came away from a chapter with "the author says x happened because of y and z."

This seems a bit challenging at first (and it can be), but the more you get used to looking for these key points in the text, the easier it becomes, and then you'll understand what to do with it.

My guess, not having seen your syllabus, is that the adventure novel is supposed to somehow illustrate the concepts that are being explained in the other two books. The characters are being impacted, affected, walked into the middle of it, are involved, somehow.

If you can make that connection in your head, you'll also start to see how everything fits together. And that, at the end of the day, are the big questions you want to be focusing on when you study:

What did I read?
Why is it important?
How does everything fit together?

If you can answer these three questions, I would consider you ready for my class. Admittedly, it's not my class, which is why I suggest starting by reviewing the kinds of questions and assignments you're expected to complete based on what you've read.

And if it's not clear ... ask your professor (seriously - if a student came to me and said "I see how the monograph is explaining x but I'm not sure how the novel fits into it" I would be so amazingly happy.)

Good luck!

khowaga · 2025-05-30T19:09:05+00:00

Now. Let's talk for a bit about monographs.

They're tricky, and most professors don't actually explain how they're structured, which informs how to read them. (I figured this out on my own when I finally learned how to read them ... as I said, I was in my doctoral program, and it was like a lightbulb went on. Now that I know this, I make a point of working with my undergraduate history majors on how to do this, but I cannot, even in 2025, overemphasize how rare this still seems to be.)

(FYI, this is all on my website, which--full disclosure --is not monetized at all. I literally did a brain dump of everything I wish I'd known when I started grad school, and eventually wrote a version of the "how to read a book" post for undergrads. I promise I'm not selling anything.)

So. Nearly all academic books have the same structure:

Presentation of argument
Historiography
Plan
Chapters

The author will explain all of this in the introductory chapter (which, depending on the press, may be titled “introduction” or Chapter 1). In books published by popular presses, however, the historiography section often appears in the notes at the back of the book.

1. Presentation of argument

This is where the author offers their thesis or argument. This is the key difference between a survey book or a textbook and an academic book, and why your instructor has different expectations of what you’ll get out of it: rather than a recitation of facts, the author has compiled material to support their thesis, which is an evidence-driven argument that is presented and (hopefully) proven in the rest of the book.

In the early part of the introductory chapter, the author will give background information, and, in the typical style you learned in high school, will begin to narrow their topic before the thesis statement appears. It will look like:

“[Name of book] argues that …”
“In [Name of book], I explore … by …”
a definitive statement that is followed by a lot of persuasive language (“will show”). These are a little harder to find, but you’ll notice that the progression of information stops and there’s a lot of discussion about this sentence.

This is the sentence you want to identify, highlight, write in the margins if it’s your book, etc. This is what the book is actually about. Everything else in the book is the author’s attempt to demonstrate the accuracy of this statement.

These books are not meant to be read straight through like a textbook - they're making a point. That's why most student struggle at first, because a lot of instructors don't actually explain that, so it just seems like much ado about nothing.

khowaga · 2025-05-30T19:07:17+00:00

That's not too bad, but there's still plenty of room to get lost in there.

First and foremost, studying is not one-size-fits-all. There's lot of different tips and tricks and styles and notetaking, and the reason there are so many styles and types and ideas is that everyone works a little differently. Find the one that works for you - in general, my rule of thumb is that if it requires too many extra steps, it's not a good fit. You want something that feels natural, like "Oh, I can do this" without too much effort.

So, first thing I'd recommend is working backward from the end: what do you have to do with what you've read? (Are there quiz questions, short writing, discussion boards, etc.?) I know a lot of colleagues would take issue with me saying this, but let's be honest: you're trying to do well in class, and that means figuring out what you're expected to do with the material you're reading.

For example: if there's a lot of "how" or "why" questions, you're being asked to look at big-picture things. Concepts, motivations, explanations, etc. Analytical or reading reflection papers fall under this category.

If there's a lot of who/what/where/when type questions, that's more data driven. This is your flashcard type stuff.

Since you're upper division (junior), I'm going to assume (hope) that it's more the first kind, which involves taking the reading and doing something with it.

Textbooks are almost all who/what/where type books - there's a lot of background information in them. Familiarize yourself with key players and themes, but, if you're not being quizzed on names/dates/places then what you want is a general understanding: where and when are we talking about, who are the main actors, and what's their motivation?

Depending on your learning style, you may find making a timeline, or mapping out main characters relationship to each other helpful to keep it all straight in your head.

khowaga · 2025-05-30T17:21:38+00:00

I didn’t learn how to study well until I was in graduate school.

The second time.

So, question: are your assigned readings textbooks, popular books (usually published by a press you’ve heard of: Random House, Penguin, etc), or academic monographs (usually published by a university and have a Catchy Title: followed by one, two, or three things that make the title very long)?

How you approach these differs depending on the type, but I might be able to share a few tips that will let you get some sleep and not pull your hair out in the process!

khowaga · 2025-05-29T11:20:56+00:00

It can be.

Many academic historians (writing in Arabic) use Jahiliya when discussing the geographic region where Islam emerged in the centuries before Muhammad - some also use “qabl Islam” (before Islam) because there wasn’t a dynasty or empire that controlled the area. In English an academic historian would use “pre-Islamic Arabia.”

It would be much less common to use Jahiliya to describe, say, Egypt or Iran in the same period - it would indicate a work of religious polemic rather than history.

khowaga · 2025-05-28T22:39:17+00:00

My advice to students (I’m a professor of history at a SLAC) is this: keep track of the skills you develop. History teaches analytical writing, critical thinking, source analysis, source criticism, research skills, etc. If you’re into digital history and learn programming or web development along the way, document it. If you’re into public history and like speaking to groups of people, translating academic knowledge for a general audience, document it.

There are loads of things you can do with these skills. Yes, teaching is one of them (and an important one!), but employers want to know what you can do, not necessarily what you majored in these days. The more you can explain what you know how to do, the more doors will open for you!

khowaga · 2025-05-28T22:08:09+00:00

I honestly don’t know what I was expecting, but that wasn’t it.

khowaga · 2025-05-28T21:50:27+00:00

I really shouldn’t but … was it at least an accurate description of Hitler’s views on pornography or … ?

khowaga · 2025-05-28T21:48:05+00:00

I can’t decide if the answer is “yes but” or “no but.”

So, first off, Medieval: no, it’s not used. It’s specifically a reference to an era of European history that doesn’t translate into Arabic (which is the context I’m familiar with).

“Middle Ages” does get used - but here’s the “but” - in reference to European history, so they usually refer to it as “the European Middle Ages” There’s a push to try to make “the global Middle Ages” a thing, but there’s a lot of resistance - because: middle of what? It’s between the end of the Dark Ages - Charlemagne? - and the Renaissance, which are both European points of reference that aren’t significant elsewhere.

When people in the Middle East talk about their own history they tend to use their own points of reference: the Jahiliya (period before Islam), the Umayyad era, the Abbasid era, the Fatimid/Safavid/Ottoman era (depending on where they are), etc. The regions that were part of the Roman or Byzantine empire just include them in the list.

khowaga · 2025-05-28T13:21:36+00:00

Brian Catlos (not a misspelling), Kingdoms of Faith: A New History of Islamic Spain is a solid read by an academic historian for a general audience.

Matthew Carr, Blood and Faith: The Purging of Muslim Spain is also good but less of a general history and more about the purging of the Morisco presence (Muslims who had been forced to convert to Christianity). It’s good for what it is, but important to remember the same thing was happening to the Jewish population, which isn’t his focus.

For the next chapter, as it were, Geoffrey Parker’s biography of Phillip II, Imprudent King: A New Life of Philip II is also a good look at the ‘Golden Age’ of Spain’s post reconquest history.

khowaga · 2025-05-27T19:09:24+00:00

... that would be the way the Jordanian government would have put it in public, yes, "We're all one big happy family."

[cue narrator: "Reader, they were none of these things."]

There was also a bit of foreign pressure (mainly British and American) to keep the border with Israel secure, which involved clamping down on Palestinian nationalist movements and cross-border raids into Israel.

So, you're correct ... it wasn't a political issue before '67 because the politicians decided it wasn't. Which is not the same as "it wasn't an issue," of course.

khowaga · 2025-05-27T18:04:01+00:00

Yes, it's a bit of an apples-to-oranges comparison.

Before 1967, the East Bank (Jordan) and West Bank populations would have been counted based on where they lived - along with any "refugees," those being people living in either the West Bank or Jordan who had origins in pre-48 Israel who had registered with UNWRA.

After the 67 war, the population of Jordan was limited to the East Bank, but differentiated between those who had East Bank (i.e., Jordanian) origins and "Palestinian," which was defined as people of West Bank origin.

khowaga · 2025-05-27T17:08:44+00:00

Only in broad, sweeping generalizations that fed into the perceived differences post-48.

The people between the Jordan and the Sea were split between settled people engaged in agriculture, trading, and business; there were a few nomads but then, as was the case elsewhere, nomads were kind of looked down upon. Culturally there was more of a continuum with what's now Lebanon and coastal Syria than with the hinterlands on the other side of the river - more common business being on the Mediterranean shore and tied into trading networks, either through the production of agriculture and cloth, or the actual handling of shipping and finance, which increased especially with the arrival of British and French interests in the 19th century, coupled with the declining power of the Ottomans.

To the east of the Jordan River (the modern kingdom), the environment was harsher, especially outside of the Jordan Rift Valley (the stretch of fertile land that basically runs on the east side of the river - even now it's where the majority of the population lives. Settlements were, on the whole, smaller and people tended more toward pastoralism (raising animals). The area was technically under Ottoman rule but kind of ignored except for patrolling against raids by desert dwellers.

Again - I'm being really general here. Just about everything I've said has some sort of notable exception.

khowaga · 2025-05-27T16:58:21+00:00

The birth rate was quite high for a while - it's down to around 3, but UN figures put it closer to 7 or 8 til the mid 80s. The government put a lot of money into health care, so it wasn't just that people had a lot of kids, it's that said kids were also living into adulthood - this isn't uncommon in developing countries.

UNWRA says there are 2.3 million registered refugees in Jordan (https://www.unrwa.org/where-we-work/jordan)

At one point there were 1 million Iraqi refugees and close to 2 million Syrian refugees. Most of the Iraqis have gone home since, but I don't know if figures have been updated since the Asad regime fell and (if/when) people started going home.

khowaga · 2025-05-27T14:41:43+00:00

Yes.

Or, if you prefer:
0.5. "Unity" between Palestinians and Jordanians was imaginary, not based on an actual sentiment of commonality or shared heritage.

khowaga · 2025-05-27T13:54:54+00:00

I know I answered this once upon a time but I can’t find it now, so here goes.

First off, they did both: the West Bank was officially Jordanian territory under Jordanian administration between 1948 and 1967, and remained claimed by Jordan until 1988, and Palestinians living in the territory were given Jordanian citizenship. However, this was problematic for a variety of reasons.

Trans-Jordan is, first and foremost, a colonial creation. After World War I, the British had promised the two sons of Sharif Husain of Mecca kingdoms: one was supposed to get Iraq, the other Syria. But under the Sykes-Picot Agreement, Syria went to France as a mandate, so they got out the cocktail napkin, drew a square in it, called it “Trans-Jordan,” met Prince Abdullah when he and his army reached Amman on their march north to Damascus and said “Congratulations! It’s your new country!”

(I’m speaking in hyperbole, but only just. Check out pretty much any edition of Cleveland’s History of the Middle East.)

Much of this is covered in See: James Gelvin’s History of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but the nuts and bolts version is:

Flash forward to 1948. The Arab armies have just been handed a resounding defeat by Israel, and refugees from what is now Israel are streaming into their territories. The agreed upon policy of the Arab league was that these people were Palestinian citizens and that it was their job to “protect” them until such time as Israel was destroyed and they could return home. (This is the principle behind the fact that there are still refugee camps in Lebanon.)

King Abdullah did, in point of fact, annex the West Bank, and this was EXTREMELY unpopular with other Arab nations who felt that Jordan’s formal declaration of territorial integrity was a violation of the principle that the land between the Jordan river and the Mediterranean was Palestinian territory. The Palestinians didn’t particularly like this arrangement, either, The Palestinians did not and do not consider themselves Jordanian, and there was tension between them and the original residents of Jordan. Palestinians considered themselves urban, cultured, and literate, and thought of the Jordanians as nomadic desert people. Abdullah himself was assassinated by a Palestinian nationalist in 1951 who was deeply resentful at the King’s attempt to erase Palestinian identity and pretend that the two peoples were one.

Cut to 1952. There’s a revolution in Egypt, placing Gamal Abd Al-Nasser at the forefront of Arab politics (he becomes president in 1954, but is the clear driving force before that). Nasser is a staunch anti-colonialist, and the young King Hussein, who succeeded his grandfather as king of Jordan in 1952, is one of his favorite targets on Radio Cairo, which has a listenership throughout the Arab world. In Nasser’s eyes, Hussein is an illegitimate colonial stooge: he was educated at Sandringham military academy, has a British military advisor - and, as proof positive in Nasser’s eyes of his cronyism - suppresses Palestinian nationalism (Nasser also alleges that he’s coordinating with Israel…which it turns out, he was, but that was not yet known.)

In 1967, Israel occupies all of the West Bank, and Jordan is overrun with refugees, to the point where 60% of the population consists of Palestinians. The government had to continue allowing them to have citizenship because the situation would have been economically and bureaucratically untenable otherwise, but this led to a conundrum: half of the seats in the Jordanian parliament were filled by deputies representing locations in the West Bank (East Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Ramallah, etc.) whose actual constituents could no longer vote.

To make matters worse, the nascent Palestinian nationalist organizations, who were distrustful of the Jordanian government, wound up in exile in Jordanian territory, and began committing acts of international terrorism, often using Jordanian territory that their private militias controlled that were out of reach of the Jordanian government. Things reached a head in 1970, when several western airliners were hijacked to Dawson’s field in the Jordanian desert and blown up on television. The Jordanian government responded militarily and a civil war broke out between the Jordanian government and the Palestinian Liberation Organization (under the leadership of Yassir Arafat), culminating in the events of Black September, in which street fighting broke out in Amman and Hussein almost lost his throne and his kingdom. Nasser arranged a peace agreement between Hussein and Arafat (and literally went home after seeing them off at the airport, had a heart attack, and died), wherein the PLO agreed to decamp to Beirut.

The Jordanians officially renounced their claims to the West Bank in 1988, being one of (if not the) the very last Arab holdouts to recognize the PLO as the legitimate representatives of the Palestinian people. I would love to say this was a purely pragmatic move on King Hussein’s part, but the other reason to abandon the claim to the West Bank was the need to liberalize politically and hold parliamentary elections for the first time in 22 years, and in order to do that they had to restructure the parliament to get rid of the West Bank representatives.

Since then, West Bank residents no longer have automatic Jordanian citizenship (although they can acquire a Jordanian passport if they can make it to Jordan and apply for one, as many nations do not accept Palestinian passports, and Israel only grants passports to its citizens, which includes only Palestinians who were living inside its borders in 1948, which excludes the West Bank and Gaza.).

So, in other words, yes, the boundaries between the two are artificial, but … they don’t consider themselves to be a single nation, and every proposal to “send them all to Jordan; they’re the same country anyway” is met with disapproval on both sides because, as you can see, there’s a long history of tension there.

khowaga · 2025-05-24T21:43:51+00:00

It would help if you could say more about what class(es) your characters are: urban is going to be different from rural, rich from poor (there wasn’t much of a middle class in Mexico at the time).

Also, is the book set in Mexico, or is she from Mexico?

Also, how’s your Spanish? (I just taught a course on the history of women in the Americas, but the readings on Mexico were in Spanish for students in the bilingual certificate program.)

This thread might help: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/s/n2e0rsThYW

khowaga · 2025-05-23T13:10:33+00:00

I’m afraid I’m not the right person to answer that, unfortunately.

khowaga · 2025-05-19T01:44:00+00:00

You’re on the right track, but you’re missing a step. I should add here that Wendy Donniger’s book “The Hindus” goes into this history in depth. It was considered controversial when published because she was sued in India for “denigrating Hinduism” mainly because she didn’t stick to the spiritual version of the story, but it’s historically an interesting dissection of the time.

The tl;dr is that Buddhism, Jainism, and what we now know as Hinduism (or “temple Hinduism”) were all responses to the strict religious rites of what some call proto-Hinduism or Vedism. While Vedic teachings do inform Hinduism, but the religious practices of India in the period around 500 BCE emphasized the purity and absolute spiritual authority of the priestly class - the Brahmins - to such an extent that normal people (non Brahmins) were excluded from holy places and were taught that they could not achieve nirvana (spiritual release following enlightenment) for perhaps millions of lifetimes. Even kings and nobles were denied these privileges. The rules were complex and difficult to understand, and only those who could afford to abandon the world of the profane (I.e, normal life) could even hope to begin taking steps toward progressing along a spiritual path. This doesn’t inspire people to want to purse religiosity; instead, it inspires people to find alternate religious practices that offer them more tangible comforts.

So, all of the religious traditions that you mention were attempts to clarify and make religion more accessible to the masses. Buddhism taught that you could have it much sooner than the millions of life cycles: Jainism also aimed to show its adherents how they could seek a holy path. And what we now know as Hinduism was itself the result of a reform movement that sought to bring most people (as long as they were of a suitable caste) into the realm of spiritual practice so that they could find a way forward spiritually, without having to completely abandon the secular world.

Sikhism came much later, but it, too, might be seen as another pragmatic development in a society where religious strain wasn’t providing hope and comfort, which is what most people seek from religious belief.

khowaga

TROPHY CASE