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How do you explain the Trinity in Chinese? If you're a Christian in Tang China, there's a few ways!

I'm @ChenHuailun, back for my last #Twittistorian thread, this time on translating the names of God in Chinese Christian documents. ~ahc #jingjiao 1/

 There are two main writers/translators credited in the extant documents of the Christian (called 'Jingjiao' 景教 in Chinese) corpus of Tang China: Aluoben and Jingjing. ~ahc #jingjiao /2
Aluoben (阿蘿本) was said to have been the Persian missionary responsible for bringing Christianity to China, arriving in Chang'an in 635 and building a church there with 21 monks. ~ahc #jingjiao /3
'Observing the azure clouds, he [Aluoben] bore the true sacred books; beholding the direction of the winds, he braved difficulties and dangers.' - Xi'an stele ~ahc #jingjiao /4
Let's pause on this name, Aluoben (阿蘿本). Some translate it as 'Olopen.' Is it a Syriac name, perhaps a rendering of Yahballaha or Abraham? Or perhaps a Middle Persian name Anōš-ruwān (meaning immortal soul)? ~ahc #jingjiao /5
In Tang Chinese, these characters would be pronounced [a-la-pun]. I am inclined to believe the explanation of Kahar Barat, who suggests that it is simply a colloquial rendering of the Syriac title 'Rabban,' (ܪܒܢ) meaning 'our great one, or monk.' ~ahc #jingjiao /6
The other writer is Jingjing (景净), who is the author of the Xi'an stele erected in 781, more than 100 years after Aluoben brought Christianity to China. His Syriac name in the stele in Adam. ~ahc #jingjiao /7
Now that we have our two writers established, we divide the Jingjiao corpus between the two. Aluoben is credited in the Book of Hearing the Messiah (序聽迷詩所經) and the Discourse on One God (一神論). ~ahc #jingjiao /8
Jingjing is credited in the Book of Attaining Mysterious Rest and Joy (志玄安樂經), the Book of Proclamation of the Highest Origin of Origins (大秦景教宣元本經), the Hymn in Adoration of the Three Persons (景教三威蒙度贊), and the Book of Honour (尊經). ~ahc #jingjiao /9
They have markedly different ways of translating the names of God into Chinese. ~ahc #jingjiao /10
The first way is transliteration, as used by Jingjing in the Hymn in Adoration and Book of Honour.

For those who may be familiar with Syriac or even other Semitic languages, try to look at these Middle Chinese pronunciations and guess their meanings. ~ahc #jingjiao /11
阿羅訶 [Mandarin: a-luo-he; Middle Chn: ʔa-la-xa]
彌施訶 [Mandarin: mi-shi-he; Middle Chn: mji-ʂi-xa]
盧訶寧俱沙 [Mandarin: lu-he-ning-ju-sha; Middle Chn: lu-xa-niajn-ky-ʂa]
~ahc #jingjiao /12
These correspond to the three persons of the Trinity, namely God (Alaha ܐܠܗܐ), Christ (Mšiḥa ܡܔܝܚܐ), and the Holy Spirit (Ruḥa d-Qudša ܪܘܚܐ ܕܩܘܕܫܐ) ~ahc #jingjiao /13
The second way is using indigenous terms, as in Aluoben's Book of Hearing the Messiah. God is Tian-zun (天尊). Tian (天) means something like heaven or sky, but etymology dates back to the 9th cent BCE. Zun (尊) is a title of the Buddha as well as a deity in Daoism. ~ahc /14
Jesus Christ is Shi-zun (世尊), as used in the Discourse on One God. This is one of the ten epithets of the Buddha. However, there is no indigenous term for the Holy Spirit. ~ahc #jingjiao /15
The 3rd way of translating Christian terms into Chinese is neologism. We can see this in the use of the term One God (一神). God (神) refers to a kind of supernatural being, a god or a spirit, and is usually used in the plural sense. It also can refer to the souls of humans. /16
However the term 'One God' would imply a strong monotheistic emphasis of the Christian ‘god' (神). ~ahc #jingjiao /17
There are many titles/names for Christ, including Holy/Virtuous Son (聖子), Son of Light (明子), King of Eternal Life (常活命王), Universally-Honoured One (普尊), Merciful Joyous Lamb (慈喜羔), Great Master (大師). ~ahc #jingjiao /18
The titles with the epithet 'son' are notably similar to the emperor's title, 'the Son of Heaven' (天子). ~ahc #jingjiao /19
The word 'wind' (feng 風), attempts to incorporate the multiple meanings of the Syriac Ruḥa (ܪܘܚܐ), which not only means 'wind,' but also 'breath' and 'spirit.' It may also be influenced by Manichaean translations of Spirit in Chinese as 'wind' as well. ~ahc #jingjiao /20
Different ways of translating may imply different theological understandings or emphases between writers. For instance, the Cool Wind in Aluoben's docs have a sensory emphasis, while the Pure and Parisuddha Wind in Jingjing's docs have an emphasis on purity. ~ahc #jingjiao /21
Translation is never easy, especially between religious traditions that have few premises in common. Christians writing in Chinese had to be creative, and their translations may even give us insight into the theology of the church in China at the time. ~ahc #jingjiao /22
Overall, the Jingjiao corpus is small, but it is rich, and it can reveal to us a crucial part of the religious world of China and the medieval east.

Thanks for reading, and I will follow up with a round-up of all my threads this week! ~ahc #jingjiao /23

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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
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I want to talk about the key textual elements you might find in an Islamic manuscript. I'll focus on this manuscript, roughly 18th century, of an Arabic history of the rulers of Egypt called Nuzhat al-nāẓirīn, by Marʻī al-Karmī (d. 1623/4).
Budeiry Library (Jerusalem) MS 593 -jm


These texts have many elements designed to help the reader understand what they're saying, and choices by the scribe who copied the manuscript often help as well. Let's see what's here. -jm

First, almost every Islamic text begins with the invocation "in the name of God, the compassionate, the merciful." The wording is never changed, and it's always in Arabic, no matter what language the text is, although you might add phrases like "and we ask God for help." -jm


Christians were able to do more experimentation with their invocations, as you can see from the examples here. https://t.co/wEPWRitCWA -jm


After the invocation (basmalah), you might have what this text has, which is an introduction of the author in the form "the poor slave of God [so-and-so] said..." often followed by a quick prayer for the author. -jm
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@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/
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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.
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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)
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We were pulled over by Nigerian police the last time I was in Naija and this man saw a weapon certification in my wallet and was shocked. The weapon certification had a list of weapons I was qualified to shoot. He yelled "you fit shoot this thing?" I said "yes nau".. he-

Yelled "so if I give you this my gun, you fit shoot am well". I said "boya you should give me and let us see? 🤷🏾‍♂️" He said "who qualify you?". I said "This thing clearly says "Missouri State. Na yankee nah! I mean USA". He yelled "Sergeant Ojo! Sergeant blah blah come o!"

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"MLs" do support the proletariat of Xinjiang & have the whole time. People like @Tursunali_7 & @GulnarNorthwest (and many others) who show the world the real Xinjiang via their everyday videos.

Shopkeepers like in this video below say

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Or everyday working people like Zaynura Namatqari, who speak out against vicious & disgusting US lies and accusations about


.@qiaocollective have a brilliant thread of everyday proletarian Uyghurs speaking out against the harassment they face from the US and their paid


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