New in PJ Media:
What are your tuition dollars buying these days? Well, let’s see. At the University of South Carolina, you can learn all about how “Islamic Magic” can be used both as a weapon against the evil Western world and a remedy for the damage it has done. Yes, this is the kind of thinking that gets formerly ordinary kids joining Antifa and living in pup-tents for Hamas.
Matthew Melvin-Koushki is “Associate Professor of Islamic History at the University of South Carolina.” He “specializes in early modern Islamicate intellectual and imperial history, with a focus on the theory and practice of the occult sciences in Timurid-Safavid Iran and the wider Persianate world to the nineteenth century.” He has a couple of books in the works about Islam and the occult, and he is “also cofounder of the international working group Islamic Occult Studies on the Rise (IOSOTR).”
A busy academic, Melvin-Koushki is also a canny self-promoter, saying in his bio that his work “constitutes a new analytical framework for the study of early modern Persianate societies specifically and Western early modernities generally—one that retrieves Islamic Magic as ultimate stumblingblock and hence weapon and pharmakon against the violently colonialist yet still endemic story of the Rise of the West.”
Got that? “Islamic Magic” is a “weapon” against the evil colonialist “story of the Rise of the West,” which is “still endemic.” Apparently Matthew Melvin-Koushki means by this that the West, where he makes a comfortable living as a professor, is still “violently colonialist,” and that “Islamic Magic” can still be used as a weapon against this violent colonialism. If he has any plans to move to place where a practitioner of “Islamic Magic” might be more comfortable, he has not disclosed them. Apparently, he intends to continue living right in the belly of the beast.
His bio goes on to explain how the Islamic world was far superior to the “much smaller and rabidly insular Latin Christian Far West” by the sixteenth century, but that “radically disproportionate, eurocentric, orientalist and occultophobic historiography of early modern science” maintains the hegemony of the inferior West.
Spanning fully two-thirds of the human race by the sixteenth century, and from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific, the Islamic world was committed to Western, Neoplatonic-Neopythagorean cosmology as philosophical-imperial technology to a degree unparalleled by the much smaller and rabidly insular Latin Christian Far West, as Melvin-Koushki has shown. Yet the latter remains hegemonic in the radically disproportionate, eurocentric, orientalist and occultophobic historiography of early modern science, teleological touchstone for all other human (and nonhuman) ways of knowing and doing in the world. To break this colonialist curse, he has found several counterspells to be especially effective: Magic and the Weird, Persian Pythagoreanism and the Occult-Scientific Revolution, Occult Humanism and Islam-as-the-Greater-West, Cosmic Philology and the Superhumanities….
There is more. Read the rest here.
FYI says
“The hour drew near and the moon was split in Iwo”
the koran surah 54.1[}he MOON{
Yes it must be Magic…
…because it is NOT Science and never happened.It’s not Astronomy as we know it
But who can argue with allah’s holey book of absolutely incredible scientific facts?
What has..?
ONE foot
TWO right hands
THREE godess daughters?
allah
Ayatollah khomeni:There are no jokes in islam.That is haram
The Infidel..who said it was a Joke?your own koran and islamic sources say that
Tim gallagher says
What are your tuition dollars getting, well complete bullshit from the insane nonsense this Muslim is teaching. You would think that anybody with even half a brain would be ashamed come out with such laughable nonsense.
࿗Infidel࿘ says
The sad aspect is that even schools in pretty Red states are as badly infected by this sort of ideology
St Croix says
“Spanning fully two-thirds of the human race by the sixteenth century, and from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific, the Islamic world …”
Yes. That hyper-colonial power, the likes of which the world has never seen. Were they “insular”? By jingo, they were not! They didn’t stay in their little Pen-Insula, they spread out fast from the deserts of the Arabian Peninsula, in every direction, at amazing speed. Empires fell before them. Yet they had much to discover, more slaves to gather, more booty to capture, more infidels to fell, more nations to conquer! More jizya to collect! 1400 years of it, as it turns out.
Poor old Erdogan, the worst thing that ever happened, 101 years ago, the Ottoman Empire was retired. But! There’s always hope, he is in the process of reviving it as we speak. Aren’t we waiting with baited breath?
Will Melvin-Koushki have a cushy job teaching a new generation of mages in the revived colonialist Ottoman Empire? You never know.
Westman says
I’m gonna stick to my magic science of Tibetan prayer wheels and add an electric motor. I’ll be able to exceed the Muslim Magic empire with my own grander, automatic, creation. What kind of title should I give myself? King? Caliph? Grand Inquisitor? Ain’t science great!
tgusa says
‘Islam is Magic; Magic is Science; Science is Empire’
Is he out of his mind? I thought by now that everyone knew that wireless game controllers were the real magical science.
tgusa says
Wouldn’t it be magic to live in a place where all the women wear the same black shrouds and the same 7th century dark cloud hangs over everyone? Wow, that sounds great./s
Oh-ho-ho, it’s magic, you know
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZCZ1pl37Ag
tgusa says
I would guess that not many women in the islamic world play the song Magic. It would be a stretch to believe that many women in the islamic world would rather play the song Dream Weaver.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LgCWgfwlk0M
You dont need science to know that all women in the islamic world are afraid to speak up about anything because within the islamic world (and many non-islamic places) one never knows what be deemed un-islamic and will set someone, some group,some authority, some angry crowd…..off. If I were a woman in the islamic world I would probably keep my mouth shut too. It is a sad state of affairs, everywhere.
tgusa says
Typo above. It “wouldn’t” be a stretch to believe.
No Fear says
The study of the esoteric is OK as long as it draws on reliable sources and reliable correct history. There are some very good academic works on the esoteric. e.g. by people such as Prof Goodrick-Clarke etc etc
Nera says
Yup that’s the level of their scholarship. Gibberish. Matched only by their actual contribution and achievements in technology being sometimes short term convincing one culture that something they stole from another culture was invented by them.
Siddi Nasrani says
So true, according to them ( Muslims ) 1001 Inventions and the Library of Secrets.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxJ2OC7iXo0&t=2s
Years ago there was a travelling museum exhibition.
I saw this in Manchester in the UK.
sporticus says
You be rightly correct mesdames et monsieurs to bee-leeve it get a bit waarrm down here in Seth Caro- leenya an’ maybe that why we do our thinking somewhat unusually and don’t take the same route as up yours. You may complain that some rabid eetalian by the name of Galeelayoh discovered something called eenertia in the 16th Century which was taken up by that rabid Englishman Nooton and put as part of his of his Three Laws but now you should know that we all Woke Up these last few years an’ ree-ah-lize that these rabid white guys just wholesale stole their laws an’ all from the Asiatic Magicians Plato and Pie-thag-ur-ass…an’ We For The Peepol intend to take it all back by way of The Non Citizens Reparations Council For Magical Science. It sure does get magically warrmm down here an’ that’s how we like it.
Hank says
You don’t need Magic to destroy non-Muslim nations. You just need to vote for the elites like Biden, Trudeau, Albanese, Merkel, etc., and they will do the work for you and set it up during their time in office. They will make sure the coming generations will have no Bible foundation as reference, no Christian worldview, no moral compass, sexual confusion, no borders, no common sense and finally the grand-finale – given-up and abandoned by the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob (Romans 1:18-32)
As for Islam practicing magic, which is an occultic practice, again shows that it is an antichrist and occultic religion which is of the Devil. But hey, it was afterall willingly imported by the woke, progressive-liberal crowd.
“There shall not be found among you anyone who burns his son or his daughter as an offering, anyone who practices divination or tells fortunes or interprets omens, or a sorcerer ” Deuteronomy 18:10-12, Isaiah 8:19, Leviticus 19:31
izun tavka says
read http://www.faithfreedom.org and spread the word to others. know the truth.
࿗Infidel࿘ says
That site was pretty active in the ’10s, but has been dormant for a while. Also, nothing has been heard of Ali Sina: he seems to have disappeared completely
James Lincoln says
According to the feature article:
“Islam is magic”
More like “black magic”…
Kevin Kraemer says
Islam is well know to be a religion of conquest. Anyone who opposes it must be killed according to their book of beliefs. It is absolute rubbish.