David Shariatmadari in The Guardian (Photograph: Richard Saker):

His 2011 book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, a primer on a career’s worth of psychological inquiry, won the US National Academy of Sciences book award, and the enthusiastic approval of his peers. It tells the story of “two systems” of thought, one automatic and intuitive, the realm of systematic biases, the other conscious and deliberative. It is a challenging work, clearly written but stuffed even so with difficult problems and counter-intuitive explanations. Despite that, it has sold millions of copies around the world. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, professor of risk engineering and author of The Black Swan, places it “in the same league asThe Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith and The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud”.

What’s fascinating is that Kahneman’s work explicitly swims against the current of human thought. Not even he believes that the various flaws that bedevil decision-making can be successfully corrected. The most damaging of these is overconfidence: the kind of optimism that leads governments to believe that wars are quickly winnable and capital projects will come in on budget despite statistics predicting exactly the opposite. It is the bias he says he would most like to eliminate if he had a magic wand. But it “is built so deeply into the structure of the mind that you couldn’t change it without changing many other things”.

The same applies to our habit of predicting stereotypical outcomes at the expense of what’s known about the world. When told of a student, Tom, who has a preference for neat and tidy systems and a penchant for sci-fi, most of us guess that he’s studying computer sciences and not a humanities subject. This is despite the fact that the group studying the latter is far larger. “Think of it this way. A form of stereotyping is involved in understanding the world. So I have a stereotype of a table, I have a stereotype of chairs. Now when you start having stereotypes of social groups, it’s the human mind at work. It’s not a different mind. It’s what you need to get around in the world.” You can slow down and become aware of this, Kahneman believes, but the underlying mechanism isn’t going to change.

More here.

Rosecrans Baldwin in The Morning News:

Sarah Hepola is the personal essays editor at Salon and a contributor to The Morning News since 2002, one of our very first writers. She’s also a close friend, in part because her pieces have always been exactly what we want to publish at TMN: investigative essays that are personal, funny, and very smart. Her new book, Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget is an addiction memoir, and it’s also all of those things, but much more. As the Times critic Dwight Garner wrote recently, with a little more flamboyance than we expect in his reviews, “Simply extraordinary…. Ms. Hepola’s electric prose marks her as a flamingo among this genre’s geese.” Blackout tells the story of the author’s problems with “the gasoline of all adventure,” as she puts it, from a very specific and misunderstood angle: the phenomenon of blackouts, or those moments when a drinker’s long-term memory shuts down while drinking. In Hepola’s experience, blacking out was part of some of her worst moments as an alcoholic, and the book finds her investigating what the phenomenon is exactly, and what really happened when her memory turned off. After we read the book, we were surprised to realize how little we knew about blacking out, too, so we reached out to Sarah to find out more.

Blacking out isn’t the same as passing out, not the same as “browning out,” as they say in It’s Always Sunny. What is it?

A blackout is when you drink so much that your long-term memory shuts down. You can still talk and make jokes and flirt with random guys, but the recorder in the brain isn’t working, so, afterward, you won’t remember a thing. It’s an alcohol-imposed amnesia. Not everyone will have blackouts, which makes it confusing for those who don’t, and for those of us who do, it’s unforgettable. You wake up, and pieces of your night are missing.

More here.

Peter Brown in Lapham's Quarterly:

When Christians of late antiquity thought of religious giving, they went back to what for them was the beginning—to the words of Jesus. The words of Jesus to the Rich Young Man described a transfer of “treasure” from earth to heaven: “Jesus said to him, ‘If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven.’ ” Jesus repeated this challenge to his disciples: “Sell your possessions and give alms; provide yourselves with purses that do not grow old, with a treasure in the heavens that does not fail, where no thief approaches and no moth destroys.” The transfer of treasure from earth to heaven was also current in Jewish circles. In the Jerusalem Talmud of the late fourth century, there is a story about King Monobazos, the Jewish king of Adiabene on the Euphrates. He was said to have spent his fortune providing food for the poor in Jerusalem. His infuriated relatives accused him of living up to his name, which was derived from the word bazaz—“to plunder.” Monobazos was plundering his earthly inheritance. He answered them: “My fathers laid up treasure for below, but I have laid up treasures for above. They laid up treasures in a place over which the hand of man may prevail: I in a place over which no hand can prevail.”

The words of Jesus and the story of King Monobazos urged or described heroic acts of renunciation and generosity. By the third century, however, in both Judaism and Christianity, the gesture of giving had become miniaturized, as it were. One did not have to perform feats of heroic self-sacrifice or charity to place treasure in heaven. Small gifts would do. For instance, Cyprian, who became the bishop of Carthage around 249, treated the steady, low-profile flow of alms to the poor on the same footing as the renunciation of all wealth that Jesus had urged on the Rich Young Man. Heaven was thus not only a place of great treasure houses, it included prime real estate in a state of continuous construction due to almsgiving performed on earth by means of common, coarse money.

When one turns to present-day scholarship on this theme, we find that the idea of a transfer of treasure to heaven is surrounded by a loud silence.

More here.

Anonymous in the NY Review of Books:

Ahmad Fadhil was eighteen when his father died in 1984. Photographs suggest that he was relatively short, chubby, and wore large glasses. He wasn’t a particularly poor student—he received a B grade in junior high—but he decided to leave school. There was work in the garment and leather factories in his home city of Zarqa, Jordan, but he chose instead to work in a video store, and earned enough money to pay for some tattoos. He also drank alcohol, took drugs, and got into trouble with the police. So his mother sent him to an Islamic self-help class. This sobered him up and put him on a different path. By the time Ahmad Fadhil died in 2006 he had laid the foundations of an independent Islamic state of eight million people that controlled a territory larger than Jordan itself.

The rise of Ahmad Fadhil—or as he was later known in the jihad, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi—and ISIS, the movement of which he was the founder, remains almost inexplicable. The year 2003, in which he began his operations in Iraq, seemed to many part of a mundane and unheroic age of Internet start-ups and a slowly expanding system of global trade. Despite the US-led invasion of Iraq that year, the borders of Syria and Iraq were stable. Secular Arab nationalism appeared to have triumphed over the older forces of tribe and religion. Different religious communities—Yezidis, Shabaks, Christians, Kaka’is, Shias, and Sunnis—continued to live alongside one another, as they had for a millennium or more. Iraqis and Syrians had better incomes, education, health systems, and infrastructure, and an apparently more positive future, than most citizens of the developing world. Who then could have imagined that a movement founded by a man from a video store in provincial Jordan would tear off a third of the territory of Syria and Iraq, shatter all these historical institutions, and—defeating the combined militaries of a dozen of the wealthiest countries on earth—create a mini empire?

The story is relatively easy to narrate, but much more difficult to understand. It begins in 1989, when Zarqawi, inspired by his Islamic self-help class, traveled from Jordan to “do jihad” in Afghanistan. Over the next decade he fought in the Afghan civil war, organized terrorist attacks in Jordan, spent years in a Jordanian jail, and returned—with al-Qaeda help—to set up a training camp in Herat in western Afghanistan. He was driven out of Afghanistan by the US-led invasion of 2001, but helped back onto his feet by the Iranian government. Then, in 2003—with the assistance of Saddam loyalists—he set up an insurgency network in Iraq. By targeting Shias and their most holy sites, he was able to turn an insurgency against US troops into a Shia–Sunni civil war.

More here.

Mishi Saran in The LA Review of Books:

THE WORD “FASCISM” has been doing the rounds in India and China.

The first time I heard it, I was at a small, polite dinner in Shanghai a few years ago. At least I thought it was polite; I should have known that behind closed doors, Chinese intellectuals let opinions buzz, as fast as flies over summer watermelon. China’s President Xi Jinping was newly in power.

“I’m reading Mein Kampf,” said a frail woman with tidy, grey hair sitting opposite me.

I sat a little straighter; I’d never actually heard anyone say that.

“I’m recognizing that the Chinese Communist party uses the same tactics. They unite people with hate; love is not a uniting factor. They give the people slogans.”

Her declaration seemed to loosen lips in the room, and others chimed in, with reports of how anyone writing a thesis now had to submit an abstract to the Party chief stationed at whatever institution.

“I never really like Wen Jiabao, but at least we could speak then,” a man said. “Now, under Xi, this kind of tightening, I don’t know …”

The next time I encountered the word — or more accurately the allusion — was in relation to my homeland, when Indian Prime Minister Modi stormed to a landslide victory in the country’s elections in May 2014, and a magazine called Open put Modi on the cover with the title, “Triumph of the Will,” a nod to a 1935 Nazi propaganda film. I wasn’t paying attention at the time, busy packing up house, saying goodbye to Shanghai after eight years of living there. I had to find a place to live in our new home, Hong Kong, and settle our little girl into a new school routine.

A year later, when Modi was due to visit China in May 2015, I accepted an invitation to come to Shanghai to hear him speak. The Indian Association based in Shanghai, loosely affiliated with the Indian Consulate, had contacted Indians living in cities across China and in Hong Kong too.

More here.

Perry Anderson in Jacobin:

Five years of mass unemployment and welfare cuts later, Greek debt had merely soared still higher. Syriza won office because it promised, with much fiery rhetoric, to put an end to the submission of Greece to the rule of the troika. It would “renegotiate” the terms of the country’s wardship in Europe. How did it hope to do so? Simply by pleading for kinder treatment, and cursing when it was not forthcoming — pleas and curses alike appealing to the loftier values of Europe, to which the European Council could surely not remain deaf.

Incompatible with these outpourings, mingling supplication and imprecation, was, all too plainly from the start, any thought of desisting from the euro. There were two reasons for that. Provincial in outlook, the Syriza leadership found it difficult to make any mental distinction between membership of the EU and of the eurozone, treating exit from the one as if it were virtual expulsion from the other: the ultimate nightmare for any good European, as they held themselves to be.

They were also conscious of the fact that Greek standards of living — lubricated by low interest rates brought on by the convergence of spreads across Europe; topped up with Structural Funds — had indeed increased in the Potemkin years of Simitis, leaving warm popular memories of the euro, which did not connect subsequent miseries with it. Syriza made no attempt to explain the connection. Tspiras and his colleagues assured all who could listen that, on the contrary, there could be no question of abandoning the euro.

With this, they gave up any serious hope of bargaining with the real — not their dreamland — Europe. By 2015, the threat of a Grexit was economically much weaker than it would have been in 2010, because by now the German and French banks had been paid off with the bailout nominally going to Greece. Despite residual alarmist talk elsewhere, the German finance ministry has for some time, and with good reason, dismissed any dramatic material consequences from a Greek default.

But for the European ideology, to which all eurozone governments subscribe, the symbolic blow to the single currency — indeed, in the typical language of the day, the “European project” itself — would be grievous, a setback it was felt critical to avoid.

More here.

Pankaj Mishra in The Guardian:

Violence has erupted across a broad swath of territory in recent months: wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, suicide bombings in Xinjiang, Nigeria and Turkey, insurgencies from Yemen to Thailand, massacres in Paris, Tunisia and the American south. Future historians may well see such uncoordinated mayhem as commencing the third – and the longest and the strangest – of world wars. Certainly, forces larger and more complex than in the previous two wars are at work; they outrun our capacity to apprehend them, let alone adjust their direction to our benefit. The early post cold war consensus – that bourgeois democracy has solved the riddle of history, and a global capitalist economy will usher in worldwide prosperity and peace – lies in tatters. But no plausible alternatives of political and economic organisation are in sight. A world organised for the play of individual self-interest looks more and more prone to manic tribalism.

In the lengthening spiral of mutinies from Charleston to central India, the insurgents of Iraq and Syria have monopolised our attention by their swift military victories; their exhibitionistic brutality, especially towards women and minorities; and, most significantly, their brisk seduction of young people from the cities of Europe and the US. Globalisation has everywhere rapidly weakened older forms of authority, in Europe’s social democracies as well as Arab despotisms, and thrown up an array of unpredictable new international actors, from Chinese irredentists and cyberhackers to Syriza and Boko Haram. But the sudden appearance of Islamic State (Isis) in Mosul last year, and the continuing failure to stem its expansion or check its appeal, is the clearest sign of a general perplexity, especially among political elites, who do not seem to know what they are doing and what they are bringing about.

More here.

Alison Abbott in Nature:

Neuroscientists have identified an area of the brain that might give the human mind its unique abilities, including language. The area lit up in human, but not monkey, brains when they were presented with different types of abstract information. The idea that integrating abstract information drives many of the human brain's unique abilities has been around for decades. But a paper published¹ in Current Biology, which directly compares activity in human and macaque monkey brains as they listen to simple auditory patterns, provides the first physical evidence that a specific area for such integration may exist in humans. Other studies that compare monkeys and humans have revealed differences in the brain’s anatomy, for example, but not differences that could explain where humans’ abstract abilities come from, say neuroscientists. “This gives us a powerful clue about what is special about our minds,” says psychologist Gary Marcus at New York University. “Nothing is more important than understanding how we got to be how we are.”

Simple sequence

A team of researchers headed by Stanislas Dehaene at the INSERM Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit at Gif-sur-Yvette near Paris, looked at changing patterns of activation in the brain as untrained monkeys and human adults listened to a simple sequence of tones, for example three identical tones followed by a different tone (like the famous four-note opening of Beethoven’s fifth symphony: da-da-da-DAH). The researchers played several different sequences with this structure — known as AAAB — and other sequences to the subjects while they lay in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner. The fMRI technique picks up changes in blood flow in the brain that correlate with regional brain activity. The team wanted to know whether the subjects of both species could recognize two different features of the sequences: the total number of tones, indicating an ability to count, and the way the tones repeat, indicating an ability to recognize this type of algebraic pattern.

More here.

Julian Barnes in the London Review of Books:

Just as there are writers’ writers, so there are painters’ painters: necessary exemplars, moral guides, embodiers of the art. Often they are quiet artists, who lack a shouty biography, who go about their work with modest pertinacity, believing the art greater than the artist. Noisier painters sometimes unwisely patronise them. In France, the 18th century gave us Chardin, the 19th Corot, and the 20th Braque: all true north on the artistic compass. Their relationship with their descendants is sometimes one of influence, more usually one of semi-private conversation across the centuries (Lucian Freud doing versions of Chardin, Hodgkin painting ‘After Corot’). But it also goes beyond that – beyond admiration, beyond style, homage, imitation. Van Gogh, even as he was violently wrenching himself towards a form of painting which still startles us today, was filling his letters and his mind with thoughts of Corot (he also greatly valued Chardin). It was a tribute by the living artist to his predecessor’s clarity of seeing, an acknowledgment that this is what painting is. Just as the young John Richardson, visiting Braque’s studio for the first time, felt that he had arrived ‘at the very heart of painting’.

But these apparently quiet artists often turn out to have been more far-sighted and more radical than we assume. Corot, for example, once dreamed the whole of Impressionism. As Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo in May 1888,

When good père Corot said a few days before he died: last night I saw in my dreams landscapes with entirely pink skies, well, didn’t they come, those pink skies, and yellow and green into the bargain, in Impressionist landscapes? All this is to say that there are things one senses in the future and that really come about.

By the time of Van Gogh’s letter, the century-long struggle in French art between colour and line had been settled in favour of colour. (Settled for the time being, that is – until a few years later Cubism restored the primacy of line.) Corot pink developed into a leading, raging, shocking colour: the pink loitering surreptitiously in shadows, the overt pink of Monet’s haystacks and Van Gogh’s Pink Peach Tree, and still active in the pink of Bonnard’s last painting, Almond Tree in Blossom. But yellow and green were there too, as Van Gogh noted, and orange and red; oh, and blue and black. The tops were taken off all the tubes, and colour seemed to get its freedom and intensity back: richnesses that had been suppressed – either by self-censorship or academic dictate – since the days of Delacroix.

More here.

Gwynn Guilford in Quartz:

Sneakily but steadily, the Chinese government is pumping torrents of money into its banks. And many trillions of yuan have been flowing into stocks via the interbank lending markets.

Just as interesting, though, is where the cash isn’t flowing. Despite the flood from the central bank, the money geysering forth isn’t making its way into ordinary people’s pockets, their checking accounts, or growth-boosting infrastructure projects. That’s a disquieting hint that China’s $30 trillion in debt is terrorizing its economy far more than the country’s robust 7% GDP growth rate implies.

The first thing to note is the scale of the sums gushing out of the People’s Bank of China. Sources of this largesse include interbank lending, lowering of bank capital requirements—which freed up an estimated 1.5 trillion yuan ($240 billion)—and “innovative liquidity tools” (meaning, backdoor lending to banks).

This money should spur growth. However, Wei Yao, economist at Société Générale, has spotted a curious divergence that suggests it’s not.

More here.

Tosin Thompson in The New Statesman:

Every year, we travel through time.

In autumn, we travel forward in time by one hour, and in the spring, we travel back in time by one hour. Every four years we gain 24 hours in February, and every three years an extra second is added to a minute.

Time appears, and then – *poof* – disappears again. But, wait a minute (whatever a minute is). Time cannot spring in and out of existence, can it? Time loans the universe a second, an hour, or possibly a day until the deadline whereby the universe must pay time back, right? But where has time been all this time?

Time is hard to define. We measure time in years (the time it takes Earth to orbit the sun), days (one rotation of the Earth) and lunar months (the time it takes the moon to wax and wane). Time – hours, minutes, seconds, milliseconds, nanoseconds – are all man-made constructs. We made them up.

And time is a concept that doesn’t necessarily apply to the universe.

Time has always been inextricably linked with the sun. The ancient Egyptians and Babylonians used sundials that roughly divided daylight into 12 equal segments. 60-minute hours and 60-second minutes are the product of the ancient Mesopotamian sexigesimal (base 60) numbering system. The French attempted to use the decimal system (base 10 rather than 12) for time-keeping, but that never caught on. The Greeks improved the sundial by marking gradations on sundials to indicate the divisions of time during the day.

And then the Scientific Revolution (1550-1700) came along. According to Vincenzo Viviani, Galileo's first biographer, 20-year-old Galileo got bored during prayers at the Cathedral of Pisa in 1583. As he daydreamed, something caught his eye: a swinging altar lamp. Curiosity got the better of him and he swung the lamp to find out how long it took to swing back and forth. He used his pulse to time large and small swings.

Galileo discovered something remarkable that nobody else had: the period of each swing was exactly the same. Then, the pendulum clock was born – the most accurate way of timekeeping at the time.

More here.

Ed Yong in Not Exactly Rocket Science:

We all know people who act very differently depending on the company they find themselves in. They can be delightful in some circles, and obnoxious in others. The same principles apply to the microbes in our bodies—our microbiome. They have important roles in digestion, immunity, and health, but none of them is inherently good. They can be helpful in one part of the body and harmful in another, beneficial when paired with certain partners and detrimental when teamed up with others.

This means that, as I’ve written before, there’s no such thing as a “healthy microbiome”. Context matters. And contrary to what some companies might tell you, we’re still not very good at looking predicting what any particular community of microbes means for our health. One common approach is to compare microbiomes in people with or without a disease, single out species that distinguish the two groups, and use their presence or absence to make predictions. But those same bugs might have the opposite effect, or none at all, in another setting.

Alyxandria Schubert from the University of Michigan used a less reductionist approach—one that embraces the complexity of the microbiome rather than shoving it aside.

More here.

Eric Homberger in The Guardian:

Anointed “our pre-eminent lefty” among contemporary American novelists, EL Doctorow, who has died aged 84, was praised as the “epic poet” of the forgotten American left. It was praise that he did not welcome. He proved elusive when dealing with the pigeonholes crafted by reviewers, and not a few readers. In a career spanning five decades, Doctorow feared that tidy labels were a distraction. He lived contentedly within the paradoxes of his career.

He did not want to be called a political novelist. “My premise is that the language of politics can’t accommodate the complexity of fiction, which as a mode of thought is intuitive, metaphysical, mythic.” Although he wrote lovingly of the lost world of the Jewish Bronx in the 1930s, where he grew up, he rejected the idea that he was an autobiographical writer. “Every book is an act of composition,” he remarked in 1989, “and if you happen to use memories or materials from your own mind, they are like any other resource; they have to be composed. And the act of composition has no regard where the material comes from. So when it’s all done it’s all autobiographical and none of it is.”

Doctorow wrote a handful of the most influential historical novels of the past half-century, but was determined not to be known simply as a historical novelist. Praised for having “done his homework” on the American Civil war for The March(2005), he claimed that he did little research, freely inventing when the historical record seemed somehow incomplete. There is a moving letter in The March sent by the Union generalissimo William Tecumseh Sherman to a Confederate general whose son was killed in battle. But no such letter was ever written.

More here.

Andrew Rice in The Guardian:

After the coup failed, the raids began. On New Year’s Day this year, FBI agents descended on a blue split-level house in a suburb of Minneapolis, Minnesota. In the dead of night, near Austin, Texas, they searched a million-dollar lakeside villa. Agents interrogated an activist at his house in the working-class town of Jonesboro, Georgia. At a rundown townhouse development in Lexington, Kentucky, they found the wife of a US soldier, with a refrigerator full of her husband’s favourite Gambian delicacies – dishes prepared for a triumphant homecoming and repurposed for mourning.

When the employees of Songhai Development, an Austin building firm, arrived at work on Monday 5 January, they discovered the FBI had visited their offices over the weekend and seized all the company’s computers. The company’s owner, Cherno Njie, was spending the holidays in west Africa. But Doug Hayes, who managed construction for Njie, expected his boss back at any moment – they had an apartment project that was about to face an important zoning commission hearing.

“I guess he really had a two-track mind,” Hayes said in May, with a rueful laugh, over lunch at his favourite Texas barbecue joint. “He had that going, and he also wanted to be president of the Gambia.”

By the end of that Monday, Njie’s name was all over the international news. He had been arrested as he got off a plane at Dulles international airport near Washington DC, and charged with organising a failed attempt to overthrow Yahya Jammeh, the military ruler of the Gambia, a slender riverine nation of fewer than 2 million people. One alleged co-conspirator, a Gambian who had served with the US army, had already confessed to US investigators, telling them he was one of a small group of men from the diaspora who had taken part in a botched nighttime attack in December on Jammeh’s residence.

More here. [Thanks to Margit Oberrauch.]

From More Intelligent Life:

IN JAMES WHALE'S 1931 film of “Frankenstein”, the monster is brought to life as his creator imagined God’s first creatures to have been: by lightning. “Behold!” Victor cries, as the storm lashes his laboratory and its metal armatures begin to glow. “The great ray that first brought life into the world.” A couple of decades later, in a ground-breaking foray into the science of life’s origins, the biochemist Stanley Miller used high-voltage sparks to produce some amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. His Chicago laboratory was less dramatic than Victor’s, but the idea was the same: a flask of gases represented the atmosphere of the early Earth; the sparks, its lightning.

There is lightning, too, in a wonderful new book by Nick Lane, a biochemist at University College London, and, I should add, a friend of mine. “The Vital Question”, rated “masterful”, “epic” and “scintillating” by the critics, contains as convincing an account of the origins of life as any now on offer. And it also contains lightning—but as a comparator, not an instigator. The strength of the electric field across the membranes that allow living things to capture the energy they need is a startling 30m volts per metre: the same sort of strength seen in the fields that tear open thunderclouds. Lane belongs to a small and persuasive cabal that is using studies of the way cells access energy to gain insight into all sorts of questions, from why there are different sexes to why creatures grow old (and—a personal favourite—why birds age much more slowly than other creatures of their size). The cabal takes Theodosius Dobzhansky’s well-worn dictum, “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution”, and adds that nothing in evolution makes sense except in the light of energetics.

More here.

Dan Bilefsky in The New York Times:

LONDON — The ancient manuscript, written on sheep or goat skin, sat for nearly a century at a university library, with scholars unaware of its significance. That is, until Alba Fedeli, a researcher at the University of Birmingham studying for her doctorate, became captivated by its calligraphy and noticed that two of its pages appeared misbound alongside pages of a similar Quranic manuscript from a later date. The scripts did not match. Prodded by her observations, the university sent the pages out for radiocarbon testing. On Wednesday, researchers at the University of Birmingham revealed the startling finding that the fragments appeared to be part of what could be the world’s oldest copy of the Quran, and researchers say it may have been transcribed by a contemporary of the Prophet Muhammad. “We were bowled over, startled indeed,” said David Thomas, a professor of Christianity and Islam at the University of Birmingham, after he and other researchers learned recently of the manuscript’s provenance.

The ancient pieces of manuscript, estimated to be at least 1,370 years old, offered a moment of unity, and insight, for the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims. Professor Thomas said it provided tantalizing clues to help settle a scholarly dispute about whether the holy text was actually written down at the time of the prophet, or compiled years later after being passed down by word of mouth. The discovery also offered a joyful moment for a faith that has struggled with internal divisions and external pressures. Muslims believe Muhammad received the revelations that form the Quran, the scripture of Islam, between 610 and 632, the year of his death. Professor Thomas said tests by the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit indicated with a probability of more than 94 percent that the parchment dated from 568 to 645.

More here.

Nayanjot Lahiri in Caravan:

THERE IS NOTHING ESPECIALLY STRIKING about the cluster of rocks which crowns the edge of a low hilly ridge near the village of Erragudi in the Andhra region. From a distance, the cluster appears unremarkable, while the ridge on which it sits is somewhat bare, rising out of a patchwork of cultivated fields and sparsely dotted with vegetation. The rocks on it stand a mere 30 metres or so above the plains.

Cascading down the rocks is a dramatic waterfall of words. More than a hundred lines in the ancient Brahmi script are imprinted across several of the boulders. Large portions of this scrawl are exceedingly clear, the characters boldly etched across the rock face. Some segments have deteriorated, while a few of the lines have been defaced by modern graffiti. Yet not even the English and Telugu scribbles of contemporary visitors can diminish the overwhelming impression of messages from antiquity created by the profusion of these ancient words. This copious transcription is part of a royal enunciation. The words and phrases that comprise it were composed by and inscribed at the instructions of Ashoka, the sorrowless one, the third emperor of the dynasty of the Mauryas, and ruler of a terrain that stretched, at one point, from Taxila in the north-west to Kalinga in the east.

Some 2,200 years ago, Ashoka made himself visible through the words that he caused to be inscribed at Erragudi, as well as at scores of other places across India and beyond. They represented an extraordinary democratic innovation—no ruler before him appears to have thought it necessary, or found the technology, to speak directly to his or her subjects. In keeping with Ashoka’s territorial ambitions, the scale of this project was truly imperial. The edicts were inscribed and installed across his lands, often in more than one language. A large and adept provincial administration helped carry his voice out to his subjects. They may even have reached those on the borders of the empire, an important consideration for a monarch who had undergone a religious conversion—one of the most famous in world history—and wished to reassure all people that the path of his dhamma was open to anyone who wished to follow its precepts with the right morals and true zeal. He transformed the way in which the state communicated with its people; in doing so, he hoped to transform the state itself.

More here.

Hugh Roberts in The LRB:

Damascus was the seat of the Umayyad dynasty, established by a clan of the Prophet’s tribe to rule the first Islamic empire. Syria is where, in 1516, the absorption of the Arab world into the Ottoman Empire began, with the Ottoman victory in the battle of Marj Dabiq; where the nahda, the cultural renaissance of the Arab world, blossomed in the 19th century; where the unified Arab kingdom that the British promised the Hashemites, who led the 1916-18 Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire, was to have its capital. It is where, in the aftermath of the Second World War, the most politically developed and socially radical version of the dream of Arab unity was conceived by the founders of the Arab Socialist Baath (‘resurrection’) Party. Syria is also the terminus of the Arab Spring.

More here.