kenning poster

elaborate border decorations

from a richly illuminated book of hours originally belonging to a bavarian princess. produced in flanders, c. 1520/30

An African Abbot in Anglo-Saxon England

To commemorate Black History Month in the United Kingdom, today we remember one of the first Africans to live in Anglo-Saxon England. The man in question was Hadrian (d. 709), the abbot of St Peter’s and St Paul’s at Canterbury, who played a pivotal role in the development of the early Anglo-Saxon Church.

Accessorising the new cotehardie a little, as a treat. I don’t know why all these turned out so serious 😂

well see the thing is. mohammad was almost certainly a real guy, who was some sort of leader of a group of people. POSSIBLY he never lead a large group, and the large group didnt form until afterwards. but it seems like he led at least a large-ish group. he probably had some sort of religious teaching, altho its unclear if he had any original doctrine or was just a passionate judeo-christian monotheist. oh and yknow, he lived and did stuff around arabia (well. some people say syria. probably not syria).

and that's...sort of all we can say for sure about the real muhammad! there's all sorts of other stuff that MIGHT be true about muhammad, especially after they got to medina. but his early life is a blank to us, the same way jesus' life before his ministry is a blank to us. who knows! but people who confidently tell you "mohammad lived in a city of pagans and converted them all" are exceedingly credulous. we have no good evidence that happened

one interesting thing the shwepisode talks about: so, obviously the islamic conquests "happened". in the sense that there wasn't a state there, and then there started being a large state there. but we dont see them archeologically! which is not crazy, they allowed people to surrender. they didnt just raze everything to the ground. but it's unfortunate, it would be nice if we could use archeology to say stuff about early islam. in part, we cant use archeology re: early islam because a huge number of artifacts were destroyed, there's a weirdly small amount of surviving stuff that could tell us about early islam. but it's not clear! posssibly even the *stories* about uthman destroying a whole bunch of alternate qurans aren't true!

There's a number of opaque Syriacisms in the Qur'an that likely weren't obvious to readers or Syriacs themselves, and a number of stylistic consistencies (like in the details of broken rhymes) suggestive of a single author from the Hijaz who knew some esoterica, with the variations being largely insignificant (like ambiguous readings that don't really mean much differently) and consistent with going through reciters with slightly different imalah (like where i and a are both read e).

Idk I get the urge to downplay the religious aspects but the trutherism stuff is kind of just a step removed from ancient aliens type patronization. Obviously Muslims wouldn't have the most sober account of their prophet but that doesn't mean they're liars or bad at recording history.

And people have good faith religious experiences all the time that honestly convince them of things - just look at born again experiences in christianity or the kind of analogous things in hinduism or so on. You don't have to accept anything of Islam to posit that Muhammad had some kind of analogue to a born again experience that made him believe he encountered Gabriel.