re: King defends controversial tweet: 'I meant exactly what I said'

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Almost. Such a concern is racist, but calling someone a racist is something I'm not in a position to do, certainly in this context.

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Interesting stance. Are you equivocating or would you care to expound on it?

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I never read past this on this board. I saw it the first time, and it wasn't important enough to me to respond. Repeating yourself won't change that.

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Then perhaps you shouldn't keep doing the same wrong things.

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What do you mean by this? That "they" could speak Greek or that they administered their empire in Greek? They certainly kept a lot of the Byzantine administrative mechanisms in place, with many of their bureaucrats using Greek (and other languages), but they eventually became an Arabic speaking empire.

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Damascus was heavily Hellenized at the time of the Ummayyad caliphate, as was much of the Levant. Arabic was not heavily codified by the end of the Rashidun caliphate. We see in early Arabic fragments Greek translations along side them (see PERF 558). The Arabic system was finally finalized in 743, with Ummayyads being replaced by the Persian speaking Abbasid's in 750. This also explains the early Islamic tradition of memorizing the Qu'ran because Arabic script was still in its infancy. Effectively scholars have placed Arabic as the lingua franca of Islamic empires around the end of the Ummayyads reign in the ME.

To understand why these people were familiar with Greek has to do with what was occurring in the Mesopatamian basin in the early years of Islam, namely the Sasanian-Byzantine wars, which ended around 630, around the time of Muhammed's hejira to Medina. Greek and Persian were widely spoken, especially for Arab trader clans that formed the backbone of the earlier Rashidun caliphate. It's more correct to say that the Ummayyads were multi-lingual, as a function of the early Islamic conquests relied on interaction and agreement with non-Muslim groups and non-Arab Muslims, with the hierarchy established that ensured an Ummayyad Arab was on top, and slaves were on the bottom.

It was a decentralized system, a pattern of governance which continued from the Ummayyads to the Abbasids, and later into the Turkic empires as well as the greater Persian empires. It was so decentralized that attempts at modern centralization have lead to many assorted problems, as there is no real history of that sort of polity in Central and West Asia.

So I don't know if I answered your question.

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Interesting stance. Are you equivocating or would you care to expound on it?

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Gladly. Any need for the presence or absence of a race is racial prejudice, which fits the description of

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3
: racial prejudice or discrimination

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The idea that our political system should in any way be based on this is

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2
a : a doctrine or political program based on the assumption of racism and designed to execute its principles
b : a political or social system founded on racism

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Of course, none of this would be possible without

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1
: a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race

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The yearn to preserve a race such as whitey within the confines of a political division such as the United States fits all three definitions of racism given by Merriam-Webster. LINK

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The yearn to preserve a race such as whitey within the confines of a political division such as the United States fits all three definitions of racism given by Merriam-Webster.

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So then gerrymandering districts to create black voting districts is racist?

Assyrian nationalist claims Assyrians invented everything

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Didn't the Arabs discover the concept of zero?

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The Arabs created our concept of numbers... 1,2,3
That's why we use 'Arabic Numerals'.
But Romans and Greeks had symbols for numbers before them.

You're all wrong.

It was lizard aliens. They also built the pyramids.

Theyre currently the head of what you normies call the "deep state".

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So then gerrymandering districts to create black voting districts is racist?

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To make it more micro than macro: voting for someone (or refraining from doing so) because he or she is black is racist.

Gerrymandering because you think that a black voting district is needed is racist.

Gerrymandering because you think that a Democratic district is needed and you are aware that blacks vote 97% Democrat is not racist.

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" This is a very important issue you raise, and it goes to the heart of the matter of what Arab/Islamic civilization represents. I reviewed a book titled How Greek Science Passed to the Arabs, in which the author lists the significant translators and interpreters of Greek science. Of the 22 scholars listed, 20 were Assyrians, 1 was Persian and 1 an Arab. I state at the end of my review: "The salient conclusion which can be drawn from O'Leary's book is that Assyrians played a significant role in the shaping of the Islamic world via the Greek corpus of knowledge. If this is so, one must then ask the question, what happened to the Christian communities which made them lose this great intellectual enterprise which they had established. One can ask this same question of the Arabs. Sadly, O'Leary's book does not answer this question, and we must look elsewhere for the answer." I did not answer this question I posed in the review because it was not the place to answer it, but the answer is very clear, the Christian Assyrian community was drained of its population through forced conversion to Islam (by the Jizzya), and once the community had dwindled below a critical threshold, it ceased producing the scholars that were the intellectual driving force of the Islamic civilization, and that is when the so called "Golden Age of Islam" came to an end (about 850 A.D.).

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I dispute this passage in particular. The Islamic Golden Age did not come to an end at 850 A.D., (coincidentally the date of the dath of al-Khwarizmi).

For example, Averroes produced work past that date, as did Avicenna, among numerous other scholars who I could name if you wish me to. My favorite book from this era, Alhazen's Book of Optics, was written after this date.

The use of Greek speaking people to translate to Arabic is undeniable. It also relied on Sasanian scholars as well as a host of Byzantines scholars. But the Islamic golden age of science lasted long after the Islamification of formerly Hellenized areas.