Suheil Bushrui is an eminent scholar and humanist. Listen to him! I had the pleasure of knowing Dr. Bushrui when I worked at the University of Maryland in the 90s.

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I find it classically Greek that a temple to Poseidon would be lost due to an earthquake.

> During the colonial period, European powers invading and occupying countries in Africa, Asia, and the Americas was a common occurrence, and these actions were often met with little or no condemnation from other countries or international organizations. This was due in large part to the prevailing belief at the time that European nations were culturally and technologically superior to the peoples they colonized, and that it was therefore justifiable to bring these "uncivilized" peoples under European control.

Just to add to that, Chinese and Japanese colonialism followed the exact same dynamic, right down to justification based on the idea of their own superiority.

Muslim colonialism was a massively long-term enterprise, but obviously relied on the belief in the absolute truth of Islaam for its justification. That said, I'm not aware of any questioning from within of the Muslim expansion. None. Because thwt would likely be seen as blasphemy.

It's hard to determine how Inca colonialism was justified. It started in southern Peru and eventually conquered lands from southern Colombia to south-central Chile. It often made use of Stalinesque mass population transfers to prevent rebellions and insurgencies. But as to justifications, there wasn't necessarily one at all. Expansion and conquest seem to be the default human group behavior, and thus require no more justification than eating, except for civilizations with an extraordinarily highly developed sense of ethics, as these are the only ones que question such obviously beneficial actions as conquering more lands and peoples.

map often gives a false sense of smallness

There's a few factors at play.

One is, like you mention, how long people have lived there. So for a thing like a temple, you usually get it to last a bit longer as most people will venerate it and typically will want to make sure it lasts, especially those who worship or recognise that deity (though people like Herostratus have existed). But as time passes, and that religion is replaced, or new people move in that don't respect or recognise that god they might not care for the temple at all, or might deliberately destroy it, or simply start to use the stones and other such things to build their own things. Or they might decide it's a great place to store gunpowder and the Venetians might decide to fire upon your gunpowder supplies to keep you from firing back at them, you know, hypothetically.

But also you need to look at the geography and geology of Greece. There's a lot of hills and mountains, this has a lot of benefits for living there, but it also means there's a lot of stuff constantly going down from higher points of elevation to the lower parts where you might find more settlements. This can be just basic runoff, to landslides, to complete shifts in the land itself from earthquakes and just general plate tectonics. Look for example at how much the area around Thermopylae has changed https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cf/Thermopylae_shoreline_changes_map.png

You also get even more violent events like volcanoes. Which is why places like Pompeii got covered completely. Of course the people living there knew it was there, and their descendants would hear about it and learn it was there, but overtime that direct knowledge was lost and while we had texts they weren't maps, and still only a small population would have been reading and familiar with these stories. The volcano still would keep up its attack and burry it further and further and further down overtime, as well as just that general passage of time.

And that comes back to the first point, how many people have continued living there. New homes, new buildings, new structures, etc. are built over places eventually too. And while there certainly have been times where it's been decided "well, we need to tear down your home and excavate this area" it's generally not a method that's utilised a lot.

And of course this isn't even describing every way things get lost over time: there's a lot more to it, but hopefully it gives you a sense of it all. And this means that there's a lot of cool stuff out there to be discovered. Some most of it probably never will be found. We still have mentions of entire towns and cities that we just don't know where they are. It could be a simple thing as "well, this source calls this town that we already know about by this weird name that was rarely used, it's not lost" some others are "yeah this place is just missing entirely." and it could be under a bunch of houses right now.

agreed, especially the oversimplification of "Christian" vs "Muslim" trope

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Even Rome is continuously discovering stuff every time a spade digs into the ground. There's a lot of history down there.

All hail Poseidon, may his blessing wash upon us.

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It's wild to me that there is anything at all left to discover in a land as small and anciently populated as Greece.

Reddit is amazing thanks to people like you.

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The answer lies in the methodology of how Sharia is compiled and interpreted. Islamic law is extremely path dependent, so that theoretical inferences are drawn from what is clearly referenced from the Prophet's life and applied to new situations, which leads to new institutions, like. slave-soldier recruitment. Inferences drawn from these are applied to newer situations and so on.

This is how it went: The earliest Holy Wars were fought by people organized as clearly segmented tribes under the leadership of their chiefs. Alongside them fought believing slaves from places such as Ethiopia and Persia. There was a requirement for every able believer to fight. This much is recorded in the Sunnah.

Now, from this it can be inferred that there are 3 legitimate ways of recruitment: slaves brought along by their masters, allied tribes recruited as a whole and those who are bound as Muslims to a religious duty.

Apply this to the practical situation existing in the 9th century and you get the answer. Out of these 3 options, tribes were difficult to manage and you didn't want to empower the common folk Fellahin too much. So slave-soldiers directly owned by the Sultan became most convenient.

Yes, there are sects. The Shia-Sunni split is the result of a fracture among the very earliest companions right after his death. But within the Sunnis (who are and always were the vast majority) doctrine is pretty much the same. Only minute details of ritual vary, not enough to profoundly affect political structure. Even Iran wasn't Shia majority until very late and Egypt remained Sunni through decades of Shia rule.

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You say "not quite as observant of the Prophetic example" yet that implies that the "Prophetic example" was understood in a monolithic manner. This is not the case, for even within a single "sect" you find a huge variety of understandings of both the example in question and what it meant for believers. While it is true that there was consensus on a few things (few would deny for example that the Prophet existed) outside of that there was a lot of diversity in interpretation and practice.

The most obvious example is that those we would now think of as "Sunni" and "Shia" sects began as trends in the conceptualisation of legitimate authority. That such a fundamental difference could exist is a pretty clear refutation of what you're saying here.

What in the Sunnah makes it necessary for tribesmen to be recruited that way? When in the life of the Prophet did he use enslaved soldiers from the steppes?

I know you're not a professional historian (and this isn't relevant to the truth or otherwise of my claims but I'm saying it anyway), but I am.

And your approach to this is not informed.

I also recently finished A World Undone. I thought it was a great single-volume history of WWI and I really appreciated the background chapters to give greater context to the whole conflict.

As someone who's very interested in poetry, 1200s-1800s is what i like to call the dark age of Arabic poetry.

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The US was actively engaged in its own imperialism in North America during Monroe’s presidency, and “the Monroe Doctrine” didn’t even get that name until after the phrase “manifest destiny” had been coined.

The doctrine was intended to keep European powers from reestablishing themselves in the Americas, because that would be a threat to the US. It was not, in any way, an indication that the US believed the non-white inhabitants were better equipped to govern themselves.

It would also depend on how the colonization was made, the scale of atrocities and who the victims were. And obviously who the aggressor was and their current reputation.

As an example, Leopold's "Kongo Free State" was condemned internationally in the 1890s when conditions of forced labor, torture and executions become known in Europe in open letters such as this:

George Washington Williams, an African-American journalist, pastor, historian, lawyer, and Civil War veteran, after visiting the Congo in the spring of 1890. Hoping to witness firsthand Leopold’s alleged philanthropic works, Williams instead left Africa outraged and disillusioned. He wrote Leopold shortly after, “in plain and respectful language,” protesting how Congolese were swindled of their lands and brutalized by agents of the Congo Free State, including Henry Morton Stanley. He lashed out at Leopold for allowing kidnappings, coerced labour, torture, and wanton murder.

More well known critics came in the form of Joseph Conrad, writer of The Heart of Darkness, and later Mark Twain. Both these authors contributed in telling the (white) world how bad things really were in the Congo. The Casement report later verified the atrocities and were taken quite seriously, resulting in the dissolving Leopold's property and creating the Belgian Colony.

Note that many of the detractors and condemners did not disagree with colonialism, but reacted because Leopold's reign went too far and caused too much suffering that even your staunchest "white man's burden" racist imperialist could stomach it.

Still, even after this debacle most Europeans believed in Imperialism as a way to spread culture, decency, trade, and prosperity to regions and peoples they believed to not have it.

I love it when these questions pop up because I'd never know to ask them. Fascinating

A little spot healing brush should suffice 😂

Reality is messy and complicated. It is true that individual Muslims, especially in the modern world are not quite as observant of the prophetic example because of practical reasons and social change. And you'll find variations where people in the heartland of the Muslim World (Arabia, Persia, Pakistan) tend to be more observant than those in the peripheries (Indonesia, Turkestan).

However, all I implied was that the ideological framework of Sharia law greatly affected the actual political, military and social structure of the Caliphates and Sultanates. How could it not be? In practice, it's true that it was impossible to follow rulings to the dot, and rulers had leeway, but to deny that there weren't any commonalities in how kingdoms of this specific period in this specific area operated is missing the forest for the trees. The commonalities I pointed out were quite universal in the Middle East from the late Abbasid period until the 18th century. Even the far away Moroccans were using Slave-Soldiers from the Sahel. There was always at least a nominal Caliph present until WW1, so there's that. Battle strategy could be different but recruitment strategy could not, free tribesmen HAD to be recruited as whole tribes, while slave-soldiers could be better organized. Peasant conscription was rare, as elsewhere in medieval times.

I'm no professional historian. I don't know precise dates and the names of many dynasties. But you can't deny these common strands of history.