A firsthand account from British Assyriologist Archibald Sayce. Did 19th-century Western archaeologists "steal" artifacts from Ottoman lands? Did anyone regard it as stealing or try to stop them?

What's notable is what's not said as much as what is said: There are no references to interference by local authorities, demands for permits, or paperwork for exporting artifacts. Antiquarian surveys were not an area of human activity regulated by the Ottomans.

On a not quite related note, I've sometimes heard it said that Indians "didn't have history" and didn't know anything about their own ancient history until the British studied it—with regard to the proper use of the word "history", this is certainly untrue— —from the development of writing in India, Indian rulers certainly *did* record their deeds and accomplishments in inscriptions and monuments and so on—this is "history". The actual claim they seem to be making is that Indians didn't have *historiography*—writing *about* history.

Wrt "British Museum" discourse, it cannot be emphasized enough that, with few exceptions, the ancient civilizations of the Near East played no role at all in the culture or identity of the Arab and/or Islamic peoples of the region before European archaeologists rediscovered them It is not even that Muslims, in principle, often regarded pre-Islamic cultures with contempt—in fact, neither they nor anyone else had any knowledge or memory of ancient Near Eastern cultures beyond that preserved in Greek tradition until the work of 19thC European archaeologists

White people converting to Islam is almost always a form of transracialism.

It is often also a way for men to claim masculinity (see Andrew Tate). If there was a religion that allowed you to transracially convert into being an Eastern European thug, it would majorly cut into Islam's monopoly on conversions of lost and insecure young men. (I don't think Eastern Orthodoxy is really on top of that yet.)

If you do a deep dive on this, you find out that Arabs pushing their African maids/slaves out of upper-story windows is actually "a thing", though it hasn't received a ton of media coverage.

https://twitter.com/RonEng1ish/status/1748933993905476059

E.g. this 2011 BBC report on Malagasy maids in Lebanon, which mentions that, among many other abuses, they were sometimes deliberately crippled by being pushed out of windows.