Marriage and Slavery in Early Islam
The jurists employ overlapping linguistic, conceptual, and legal parallels between marriage, slavery, and ownership. The contracting and dissolving of a marriage gave rise to the clearest parallels between matrimony and slavery or purchase. The centrality of milk (ownership, control, dominion) emerges as the tie joining the two parties is established or dissolved. These parallels “between the condition of servility and the condition of marriage in Islam” centre on the sexual claims established by the marriage contract. In the words of John Ralph Willis, “A comparison is drawn between the dominion imposed by the husband through which his wife is caused to surrender her sexual self, and the sovereignty established by the master whereby the slave is compelled to alienate his right to dispose.” Willis notes that marriage is “likened to a sale”: “it is said that in the market the master buys his slave, whereas in marriage, the husband purchases his wife’s productive part.” Yet the fact that the wife does not lose her “right to dispose”— that is, her control over property— distinguishes the transactions even as it highlights the sexual character of the own ership conveyed through marriage. More obvious even than parallels between marriage and purchase of a slave are jurists’ frequent analogies between unilateral divorce (talaq) and manumission. Marriage, Willis says, enslaves a “woman’s sexual self”94 through the dower, as a slave comes to be owned through purchase; repudiation frees her just as manumission frees the slave. [p. 50-51]



Gog and Magog in Early Syriac and Islamic Sources
A fascinating examination of the role of the mythical peoples Gog and Magog and of Alexander the “two horned one” in Islamic theology, mysticism and mythology. Alexander is described as two horned because, at least according to at-Tabbari, he went from one end of the world, in the west, to the other end, in the east. The word karn means horn, and the extremities of the world are called ''horns" [p. 57n3].
Islamic eschatology knows ten signs which portend the Last Day, the so-called 'signs of the Hour'. They are:
the coming out of the descendants of Asfar
the coming of the Mahdi [Sunni & Shia differ on his identity/role]
the coming of the dajjal [a figure in Islamic theology homologous with Christianity’s Antichrist]
the descent of 'Isa b. Maryam [Jesus]
the rising of the sun in the West
the coming forth of Gog and Magog
the beast coming out of the earth
the assumption of the Koran into heaven
the smoke
the burning of fire from Yemen, or, the subsiding of the earth. [p.78]


In Arabic sources the name Turk is often said to derive from turika "to be left behind", the passive form of taraka. Originally, it is said, Gog and Magog were 24 or 22 peoples, or, according to Wahb b. Munabbih and Muqatil b. Sulayman 21 peoples. When 'the two-horned one' locked them up behind the barrier, one people were lift behind (turika) because they were absent on a raid, or, according to a less anti-turkish approach, they were left out because they believed in God. On the authority of al-Suddi, Ibn Mardawayh reports that the Turks are a contingent of Gog and Magog who broke out alternately. They had gone out on a raid andthus remained 'on this (i.e. the Arab) side' of the barrier. [p. 83-4]


Mirkhwand and Khwandamir apparently also reckon Gog and Magog among the human beings. They both remark that one of their abominable customs is to devour the body of someone who dies among them. On the other hand, they also write that Gog and Magog cannot be considered as human beings for they have neither law nor religion, do know neither God nor man, and live like animals. For Ibn Khaldun, Gog and Magog are not only human beings, they are also “white”:

The inhabitants of the North are not called by their colour, because the people who established the conventional meanings of words [to them] were themselves white. Therefore the inhabitants of the North, the Turks, the Slavs, the Toghuzghuz, the Khazars, the Alans, most of the Western Christians, Gog and Magog, are found to be separate
nations and numerous races called by a variety of names. [p. 108]

Weapon Systems and Political Stability: A History
Written in the neo/functionalist style of American sociology of the 70s and 80s (I often got the impression that I was reading something written by Pitrim Sorokin or Talcott Parsons) the book offers a number of fascinating affinities/suggestions into the relationship between modes of warfare and political institutions/regime types. Personally, I don’t find the approach wholly convincing. The Weberian breadth of historical exposition often clouds whatever point is being made or pursued. The generational or cyclical approach to politics and warfare is as flawed as the 4GW spiel. The belief, the evidence I’m afraid just doesn’t hold up for it to be anything more, that large numbers of infantry / infantry warfare coincides with democracy and democratic polities too often for the relationship to not be causal still begs the question of what, if any, relationship there is. The Spartan regime was authoritarian/monarchical and its armed forces were based on infantry contrary to Quigley’s assertions. All armies in the First World War were dominated by infantry but not all regimes were democratic thereby. Quigley sketches out the argument that military specialists cause/result from oligarchic/managerial regimes but, due to his unfortunate death, he never explains this more fully. Indeed, my comments may be unduly harsh as the work was never a completed manuscript but published from the authors notes posthumously. However, it does contain some very interesting observations that got me thinking about other things differently. In fact the recent enthusiasm for drones and other remotely piloted death-dealers can be seen as a managerial policy designed to remove one of the Clausewitzian tripods (the “People”) from the decision-making process (by removing the threat of the death of soldiers (drawn from the People) thus enabling a managerial bureaucratic style of war making that favours a technocratic elite.




Early Riders: The beginnings of mounted warfare in Asia and Europe
Although debate continues about the beginnings of pastoral nomadism in the Eurasian steppe, since M.P.Gryaznov first argued the case most steppe archaeologists and prehistorians have been persuaded that it was some time after 1000 BC that a fully nomadic way of life began on the steppe, and that by the end of the eighth century permanent villages had all but disappeared. Because nomadic societies in later periods depended heavily on horseback riding, it is a reasonable assumption that the early nomads too were riders. Why the steppe dwellers abandoned their villages and became nomads is of course disputed. Anatoly Khazanov proposed that a climate shift ca. 1000 BC was responsible: as rainfall declined the steppe dwellers were forced to move their animals through an annual circuit, many hundreds of miles long, of seasonal pasturages. Another possibility (and I think a more likely one) is that a sudden improvement in horsemanship—and the consequent ability to handle a weapon while on horseback—was itself the main motivation for nomadic life. Good riding may have made it relatively easy for “poachers” or “rustlers” to drive off the cattle and sheep that lone herdsmen from the settlements had traditionally taken into the steppe. In that case, to protect their herds the settlement communities may perforce have turned to full nomadism.[p. 63]