This critique is great (and obviously necessary), but there's a broader perspective that may be relevant to understanding what's going on.

https://twitter.com/shahanSean/status/1314372114946895873

Firstly, the timing of @shahanSean's thread is uncanny! There was a great paper at MESA yesterday by Tyler Nighswander (a dual-PhD student in NELC & Bioanthropology) on the Great Chain of Being in medieval Islamic philosophy and its modern Muslim appropriations.

Church-to-mosque-to-church: Agios Titos, the Church of St. Titus in Heraklion, Crete (photos from 2 years ago). Its modesty belies a bewildering story! Previously a Venetian Catholic church, the present edifice of 1869 was an Ottoman mosque designed by a Greek Orthodox architect. It's a complex history. This city was the new Muslim capital established by Andalusī Arabs who conquered the island from Byzantines in the early 9th century CE. It was called Khandaq, after their battle "trench" (Image: Saracens sailing to Crete, from the Madrid Skylitzes MS)

So here's the new Saudi translation of the Qurʾān into Hebrew, published in 2018 by the King Fahd Complex for the Printing of the Holy Qur'an in Medina. I came across it last summer shortly after it was made available online, but didn't look into it much as my knowledge of Hebrew is unfortunately still nearly non-existent. But little did I know that I was sitting on a controversy waiting to happen!

This is a really interesting paper. Some notes below from my reading:

https://twitter.com/mikati_rana/status/1179457122662322176

The argument links the question of women's participation in warfare at the origins of Islam to the nature of "military organization at the time." It also has great insights on social and cultural history (for someone like me who isn't that interested in military history!)

Thomas Cook began leading tour groups to Egypt and the Holy Land 150 years ago in 1869. He was even present at the opening ceremoy of the Suez Canal in November that year. So began the history of modern Western organized tourism in the Middle East. Cook's company would soon establish "tourist offices in Cairo (1872), Jaffa (1874) and Jerusalem (1881)...followed by the opening of Cook agencies in Constantinople (1883), Algiers (1887), Tunis (1901), and Khartum (1901)." Ref. Hunter 2003

Yup, it's as bad as it looks. Don't ask why, but it's on my desk this week as a colleague thought I should see it for myself.

https://twitter.com/tamhussein/status/1168857525380374529

It seems the chapter on Islam was added to a newer edition of the book, in the last part on "What Went Wrong" (But this ends up contradicting what he suggests in the previous chapter on Christians & Barbarians, in which he puts the blame for the fall of Rome on...guess who!)

So, on the question of 🧞‍♂️ sex with jinn! I swear, NOT a topic I particularly care for or know much about, but here's a few quick references from memory since it has come up: As noted here in this tweet today, believe it or not, this was indeed a matter of some concern and even learned debate in medieval thought:

https://twitter.com/GabrielSaidR/status/1163142343261917184

In fact, this was one of the first printed Persian newspapers IN THE WORLD, not just India! And actually, it was NOT the very first, there were others 🗞️ Important to point out because the role of Calcutta is often lost in some accounts of the history of modern news in Persian...

https://twitter.com/tuhfatulhind/status/1050301837474222080

As it happens, just two weeks before the release of Rammohan Roy's Mirʾāt al-Akhbār, another Bengali Hindu named Hurryhar (Harihar) Dutta began editing the Jām-e Jahān Namā, first issued on March 28, 1822. Here's from S.C. Sanial's "First Persian Newspapers in India" (1934):