1 So, today we turn to early Islamic Beirut. what do we know of the earliest times of #Beirut under early Islamic rule, starting with the #conquest. How and when did Beirut enter the emerging Muslim empire? -rm

@ChenHuailun here. I'm adding a supplementary thread before today's scheduled one to expand on the origins and early history of the Church of the East (aka the Nestorian Church) ~ahc #jingjiao 1/

The Church of the East traces its origins to the christological position of the School of Antioch, which held that the human and divine and human essences (ουσία) of Christ were united in a single prosopon (πρόσωπον). ~ahc #jingjiao 2/

This ran against the position of the School of Alexandria, which held that the two essences of Christ were united in a single hypostasis (ὑπόστασις). In general terms, hypostasis is more inherent than prosopon. ~ahc #jingjiao 3/

One implication of the Antiochene rejection of the hypostatic union is that Mary could not accurately be called the Theotokos, or God-bearer. Instead, she is the Christotokos, the Christ-bearer. ~ahc #jingjiao 4/

These Christological debates were further complicated by Syriac terms such as 'kyana' (ܟܝܢܐ), associated with 'ousia' but later translated to 'hypostasis' by Syrian Orthodox; and 'qnoma ' (ܩܢܘܡܐ), sometimes contentiously translated as 'hypostasis' or 'person.' ~ahc #jingjiao 5/

Happy Friday! I'm @khowaga, and I'm talking about the social history of medicine and disease in #Egypt. Today's topic is the cholera of 1883. (1/19)

#tweetistorian #twitterstorians #histmed #epitwitter

It goes like this.

According to popular legend, Patient Zero of the 1883 cholera epidemic was a mason in his mid-forties named Ḥassan Nūr-al-Dīn, who lived in the port city of Damietta (34,000 people). (2/19)

Nūr-al-Dīn rarely traveled outside of Damietta, but on the morning of Thursday, June 21, he took the local train to the next major town upriver, Manṣūra (30,000 people) for a weekend trip. The next day, Friday, he began to feel unwell. (3/19)

After a fitful night, he went to the station to return home on Saturday. His condition deteriorated rapidly: on boarding the train he exhibited no symptoms, but by reaching the hamlet of Rās al-Khalīg, about an hour later, he had become violently ill. (4/19)

By the time the train arrived in Damietta, he was so weak that he had to be carried home from the station. He arrived at his house before sunset, died shortly before midnight and was buried promptly the next day, Sunday, June 24. (5/19)

One key element of the Islamic intellectual tradition is the commentary. Commentaries on the Qurʼan (tafsīr) began early in Islamic history, but from about the 12th or 13th century, well into the 19th, commentaries on other scholarly texts became extremely common. -jm

Usually a commentary is called a sharḥ, and a supercommentary (i.e. a commentary on a commentary) is called a ḥāshiyah. Sometimes you get all the way up to a fourth- or fifth-level supercommentary. -jm

Sometimes it's hard to even tell what the "core text" is, because even a very famous text that's the core of many commentaries might present itself as an abridgement or comment on something even earlier. -jm

Commentaries might serve multiple purposes: to explain obscure grammar or vocabulary, to dig into particular legal cases, etc. Even to show why the core text is wrong. Eventually you get some Ottoman Turkish commentaries that translate Persian poems and then comment on them. -jm

Authors of commentaries often mark quotes from the core text by key words like "qawluhu" ("what he said") and manuscripts often emphasize this by writing these words in red or putting a line over the quoted text, so you can figure out who is talking. -jm

1/25 Today, I will continue looking at the lives of Palestinian poets in the context of the intellectual battle over modernizing Arabic poetry after 1948. A marginalized and maligned figure in Arab intellectual history in the Cold War is Tawfiq Sayigh (1923-71) ~AA.

2/25 I am tagging Tawfiq's nephew @SayighYezid, a brilliant political economist and political scientist of the modern and contemporary Middle East. He is the son of Palestinian economist Yusuf Sayigh and Rosemary Sayigh, the British anthropologist ~AA.

3/25 Though elsewhere in my work I closely study Jabra I. Jabra (1920-94) -- Sayigh's lifetime colleague and confidant -- I will cover Jabra, here, in relation to Sayigh for the purposes of brevity and since Jabra has received a fair amount of attention in the historiography ~AA.

4/25 The prose-poem was a form that Sayigh masterfully used to express his feelings of misery and pain. Sayigh led a tortured life that took him from one exile to another until his lonely death in Berkeley in 1971. Mounah Khouri, Arabic professor @NESUCB laid him to rest ~AA.

5/25 During the Nakba, the Sayigh family fled from Tiberias and settled in Ras Beirut, where Sayigh received them and cared for them from his income as a librarian at Beirut’s American Cultural Center and as an anonymous editor of the women's magazine "Ṣawt al-Mar’ah" ~AA.

Why I am disgusted by the human species.

Speciesism Part 2: Marine Life

It is estimated that up to 3 trillion fish are caught from the wild & killed globally every year: This doesn’t include the billions of fish that are farmed. Fish account for 40% of animal products consumed

Fish farming is forecast to overtake wild-caught fish production in 2021: For context, farmed fish accounts for 70% of all farmed animals worldwide. This presents a host of problems. For example, shrimp farming has led to the destruction of three million acres of coastal wetlands

Like all captivity of sentient life fish farming is creating disease. This ends up in the wider ecosystem damaging and polluting wildlife.

Worldwide demand for seafood is expected to double in the next two decades A recent global survey in has estimated that we could see sea life vanish altogether by 2048. Due to the relentless fishing and relentless pollution. The corals are dying.

Whales:

Despite a moratorium on commercial whaling and a ban on international trade of whale products, three countries-Iceland, Japan, and Norway—continue their commercial whale hunts.
16,000 whales have been murdered every year for 83 consecutive years.

Let me talk to those who are planning to buy cars these year; Buying a car is good. Very essential for making life easier. However, a car isn’t cheap, the cheapest car is around 450USD in Kenya. Today owning a car may seem very easy as compared to the 70s, THREAD 1/3

Today you can buy a car either in cash 💰, by bank finance, hire purchase and through trade in. But my interest on this post is on bank financing and Hire purchase. Bank finance is where the bank buys for you a car and you pay the bank for a period of time.

Hire purchase terms of purchase is where by you identify a car in a dealership, negotiate for its final price, pay an agreed deposit upfront then clear balance in defined period of time I.e in 6/12/18/20/24 months. So HP =Deposit + total Monthly Installments.

Whenever a bank offers to buy you a car, there is always a 99.9% chance that they will retain the logbook[A substitute for a collateral in lending] A logbook is the only instrument of ownership for any car in Kenya. So the bank will issue you with your logbook once you finish,

Finish paying for the car. The only problem I have with bank financing is the possibility of the buyer losing the car and servicing the loan. It has happened and it does happen. The bank repossesses the car and they auction it. You shall have lost two important things; the money

Could Turkish drones be the silver bullet in Nigeria's decade long war against insurgency. Turkey has in recent years become a major player when it comes to the world of drones. Weve seen what Turkish drones did in Syria.

In Libya, in what can be described as the largest drone war in the world we saw how the LNA's goal of seizing the capital Tripoli abruptly ended after Turkeys intervention with its Bayraktar drones. There is no doubt these drones will be of immense value to the Nigerian military

The relatively flat featureless terrain of the northeast means that ground units are easily spotted, with few natural barriers to hide. The Alpha jets and L-30ZA are valuable yet limited by numbers. Besides they antiquated platforms.

While manned fighter aircraft have been used for most part of the war the NAF needs to start considering the employment of unmanned aerial vehicles on a strategic level. UAVs are useful for several reasons. Not only do they provide valuable information about the enemy

..that can be spotted from standoff distances, they are able to attack targets immediately with a far higher rate of success. In the event a drone is shot down...BIG DEAL !..the pilot is safe, back at base and able to pilot the next drone that takes off.

A lot has been written about what Mario Draghi's arrival in Italy means for Italy. But little has been said about what he could mean for Europe. I think Draghi could be a game changer for EU; he could even turn its toxic North-South dynamic on its head. Thread 1/

Why? The @EU_Commission is currently reviewing (quietly) member states reform plans. These are basis upon which EU capitals hope to begin receiving their allocation, in transfers & loans, from the €750 billion Recovery Fund, starting later this year 2/

Remember the numbers are unprecedented. Italy is eligible for ~€188bn (roughly €65.5bn in grants; €123bn in loans). Spain a €144bn, roughly €59bn in grants & €85bn in loans etc etc. The amounts for all member states are unprecedented 3/

Yet despite this, & fact Fr & Ger pushed hard for this deal, officials in Bxl are scathing about proposals advanced by.. Paris & Berlin. I oversimplify: but basically, Macron is distracted by Covid; Merkel, elections in Sept. Sweeping reforms are the last thing on their minds 4/

This puts Commission in its usual bind. If Bxl doesn’t raise the reform bar with Chancellery & @Elysee, it will have no credibility to push southern Europe to do same. But it also can’t impose reforms on countries that aren’t willing to do them, especially not the big 2 5/