5-year old after weekly hair-washing: "Baba, now I'm going to wash your hai....polish your head." 🥲

Tenure application guidelines: your scholarship should constitute a coherent body of work. My scholarship:

Enjoyed the first episode of Night Manager but it blows my mind that these kinds of error still slip through the cracks… #arabicfail

Strange that this is not yet showing up in most US media...

Debunked Hindutva revisionism, now a Bollywood film. “What [the film] has done instead is rehash discredited claims that once were relegated to the fringes of the internet, giving prominence to efforts to inflame sectarian tensions” Gift link

Unique opportunity to study Classical Persian, Urdu, and Chaghatay in Yerevan ferdowsi.org/ferdowsi-sum...

I'm taking a mandated course on how to recognize student hazing. Hazing can include sleep deprivation, humiliating rituals and implied threats to gain acceptance to an exclusive group. Unrelatedly, I'm prepping a tenure file on 5-hrs sleep...and if I don't do it right I'll lose my job next year.

One of the best things about living in California is the way people leave out boxes of winter citrus fruit because the trees in their garden produce far more than any household could possibly consume.

Call for applications: The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Buddhism Public Scholars program at ACLS—eligible scholars are invited to apply for positions in the US, Canada, and UK by January 27.

Another book to look forward to in 2026!

And another Alam-Subrahamanyam is also arriving in Feburary...a feast for historians of the Mughal world! sunypress.edu/Books/M/Mirr...

Absolutely cannot wait to see this come out next month. The editors - Asad Ahmed and his students at Berkeley - are doing groundbreaking work on the intellectual history of the Timurid/Mughal period... resolve.cambridge.org/core/books/i...

Here, the authors present a pair of third-millennium BC copper cymbals, excavated at Dahwa, #Oman ... Not only do the cymbals add to...evidence interpreted in terms of Indus migrants in Early Bronze Age Oman, they also suggest shared musical and potentially ritual practices around the Arabian Gulf.

BOOKS, BINDINGS AND BIBLIOPHILIA IN THE ISLAMIC WORLD: This short course in the codicology of Arabic/Persian manuscripts is coming up at SOAS in February, with fantastic speakers, and I'll be giving the talk on (well, what else?) ink materials and pigments. www.soas.ac.uk/study/find-c...

If they’re not careful the FIFA Peace Prize is gonna mean nothing

On a personal level it’s been a whirlwind of year: had a child, became a US citizen, presented work in Uzbekistan and Marseille, had two articles published, submitted a translation of an Arabic treatise on dreaming, and taught 100+ students. Hoping 2026 will be slightly less eventful…

Lovely anecdote from Vikram Seth’s Two Lives where he discusses his German Jewish aunt crying after being served Marmite at the home of the famous Islamic studies scholar AJ Arberry where she worked after fleeing Berlin in 1939. #Marmite #Britishdelicacies

The whole family has been struck down with the flu except me so I‘m sitting down to a full roast dinner alone like some kind of millionaire recluse.

Quick check: you’ve told everyone to not vote for Rishi Kumar right?

JOB: TT Assistant Professor, History, Stanford Modern South Asia www.higheredjobs.com/faculty/deta...

“What should have been a single, final document dump is instead a steady trickle of releases, each being pored over as it comes out. The latest drop, of some 11,000 documents, came overnight. People will want evidence and the story just keeps getting fed, and becoming bigger.”

I spent a week trying to find a single 18th Persian manuscript in an archive missing a wall and in which every book shelved less than three feet from the ground was irreparably damaged by monsoon rain and subsequent mold. I never found the manuscript.

UNC following the inglorious footsteps of Indiana University, currently making big headlines in…football… while gutting world famous area studies and other programs.

A form of censorship more powerful than a mere book ban Center for European Studies, African Studies Center, Carolina Asia Center, Center for Middle East and Islamic Studies, Institute for the Study of the Americas and Center for Slavic, Eurasian and East European Studies are all slated to close.

Just in case you thought people learned the lesson from DOGE... I think they might have learned a different lesson:

“Sure, there’s a book that tells you how this is supposed to go and how you’re supposed to handle things. But you’ve never been a by-the-book kind of person. You’re driven purely by instinct and caffeine, and it’s always worked out fine.” www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/are...

Although the more I think about it, quite a few things in here seem to be “borrowed” from my diss…including the painting that illustrates the piece. Maybe that’s why I like it so much… 😬😬

Our services will be affected between 8 and 12 December due to planned strike action at our St Pancras site. This includes an extension to our current collection access suspension. To check what’s impacted, please visit our website. bit.ly/StrikeAction...

For anyone interested in the thought and legacy of Shah Wali Allah Dihlawi, this essay is an absolute masterpiece. traversingtradition.com/2025/11/10/h...

I’m looking for recent scholarship on the subject of the spread of Islamophobia through social media. Any recommendations would be most welcome.

The machine we all need... www.instagram.com/p/DRmPFQsDOJ...

Looking forward to traveling to Marseille for this conference next week. I am discussing my current research on the reception and use of Shadhili texts - especially Hizb al-Bahr - in Mughal India. crh.ehess.fr/index.php?10...

I made mini Bakewell tarts with the five year old this evening. Much harder to do the pastry than if anticipated but they are absolutely delicious.

and then this on how freelancing was already degraded prior to the influx of fake AI bullshit. www.everythingishorrible.net/p/journalist...

Scholars & historians of Islam, ICYMI

Assistant Prof of Religion, World Christianity, opening:

refuge from Nazism falls victim to Nazism

I’ve written a piece on the curious lack of media and political interest in the issues faced by our national @britishlibrary.bsky.social. This is strange given we live in a world where ideas, knowledge and research are a long-term source of innovation and insight www.cityam.com/the-british-...

Assistant Professor in Southeast Asian Studies- Trinity College Dublin, The University of Dublin - School of Linguistic, Speech and Communication Sciences #skystorians 🗃️www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DPK381/a...

PhD position for historians of media/radio. werkenbij.uva.nl/en/vacancies...

Two paid PhD positions under Alka Patel at Aix—Marseille. la3m.cnrs.fr/actualite/of...

Listening to American podcasts is such a wild ride. You’ll go from a segment explaining why whatever issue is being discussed is just a symptom of late-stage capitalism into seamless segue like “and because living under capitalism is such a stress, I’m delighted to be sponsored today by betterhelp”

The latest issue of the Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient (JESHO) is out now! More details here: brill.com/view/journal... @degruyterbrill.bsky.social

Vote Labour

Sadly, I’m not surprised. I don’t think any history course I took at school even mentioned slavery or indenture. I hoped things might have changed since 2005 but these survey results suggest not.

5 year old solemnly informed me that she had found “a whack“ in her ear. Took a while to work out what she meant but turns out she had been hearing “wax” as plural “whacks”… which makes total sense!

Reading a fascinating Urdu text describing a trip to Palestine in the 1920s. According to the Indian Muslim author, he had a conversation with a Jewish man urging Jewish-Muslim unity to break the Christian colonial "flood". Can any historians of mandate Palestine tell me how common these ideas were?

Remember reading this mind bending text in Jim Robinson’s class at Chicago… my first introduction to the study of the occult.

Mind-blowingly rare first editions of esoteric books that I got to hold yesterday (courtesy of Justin Sledge), #2 of 5: First Hebrew printing of Sefer Yetzirah (Mantua, Italy, 1562), the early Kabbalistic account of how G-d created the universe through the 22 letters of the alefbet & the 10 sefirot

These are the apartments coming up next to our campus. Definitely a very normal housing market here in Silicon Valley 🙄