Plus anyone who has ever driven in Oman knows mountains arenโt really a transport issue for their civil engineers. Just wait til the bros start talking about the Trans-Hijazi railroad as a lodestar
This split screen looks like something from Adam Curtis as part of a โPower of Nightmaresโ trilogy.
Support to faculty in Middle East studies, Islamic studies, PoliSci, Intl. Studies, Anthro., who are speaking with students from the region, U.S. veterans, active duty personnel, reservists, national guardsman about this war in your offices. Those are real conversations you're having. They matter.
Can't help but think this DOGE staffer has a substack out there that's 1,500 words long and talks about how A.I. will disrupt the humanities.
Make sure you watch to his dicsussion of the Holocaust.
Best watched with the "Curb Your Enthusiasm" soundtrack.
Some will argue that this *isn't a fatwa* because it did not come from Ali al-Sistani himself.
Al-Sistani issued a statement on 14 Ramadan 1447 / 4 March 2026. In it, he calls for a peaceful diplomatic resolution to a war that is in violation of international law.
www.sistani.org/arabic/state...
This is advice offered by a regional office to a questioner in Iran. It's directed to Iranians seeking to understand how to support the Islamic Republic.
A fatwa is a Q&A genre of Islamic law representing a jurist's best advice. While generally non-binding, some treat it as such.
It's from a regional office in Mashhad (Iran) not Najaf (Iraq). It calls protest and demonstration a collective responsibility (taklif) (meaning not all must do it). It does not call for violent mobilization. It tells the questioner to seek parental permission or consideration before doing so.
A document in Farsi from the office of ayatullah Ali Sistani in Iraq
This document is making the rounds on that other website with people proclaiming it a "fatwa" from Ayatullah Ali al-Sistani and arguing that it calls for jihad, self-defense, and the mobilization of the Shi'a. Nope.
On a superficial read, it appears to be authentic. This is not a "jihad fatwa."
Reading this piece, you understand why Elsevier moved so aggressively toward value capture. Buying their way into US News Rankings is an attempt shore up a commercial publishing investment that is threatened fundamentally by the arguments about commercial publishing in the piece.
I'm posting this twice. It's these "financial managers" who are driving the restructuring of U.S. higher ed. Their data & analysis leads to closures of Middle East, Jewish, Islamic, and religious studies programs and departments.
And, now they're bemoaning "geopolitics."
bsky.app/profile/yeom...
Even more fitting? The decisions to shudder those programs are being led by the field of study (finance) that gave rise to the "data-driven" hedge fund managers who never thought to look at a map and are now "exposed to geopolitics" ... in Dubai.
bsky.app/profile/yeom...
So too, bravo to all the courageous universities that are defunding, โmergingโ, or cutting altogether Middle East and other Area Studies programs, along with languages, Religious Studies, History, etc. Very strategic.
Protests in Pakistan have resulted in a call by the Pakistani gov't for a curfew. Participants in those protests include Pakistani Shi'i communities responding in protest to Khamenei's killing in Iran.
www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/...
Now, I'm just a professor trained in religious and Islamic studies, but if my (checks notes) funds manager at a large global hedge fund w/ a presence in Dubai demonstrated this egregious a capacity for evaluating risk, I'd move my money elsewhere.
But, I'm a scholar in the late humanities era.
In case you're wondering how some sectors of the Christian right are seeing Trump's war in Iran, I've just read several articles seeing a prophetic meaning in a coincidence of Trump's strikes, the assassination of Khameni, and a blood moon occurring on Purim (tomorrow).
And even the claim to the title was contested by many Qom, IIRC
There is so much AI-driven slop on that โother websiteโ right now. Armchair experts posting long-form drivel on weapons systems, ideologies, and politics that they donโt understand. Glad to see a lot of smart folks on here noting that thereโs not much to know. Epistemic humility is a virtue.
Lots of speculation about the status of Ali Khamenei, Supreme Leader of Iran. Many analysts are missing that if Khamenei is killed, there isnโt just an effect on Iranian politics. Khamenei is held by some Shiโa across the world as a โmarja-e taqlid,โ a source of religious authority and emulation.
Absolutely true. Officer candidates, veterans, reservists, and active duty personnel have always commanded the respect and appreciation of their professors at my institution, regardless of the professorโs political stances.
Ironic that one of the legacies of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is a presidency that can initiate wars on whim, without even the pretense of building a case to the American people first.
Oman's FM Badr Albusaidi, who has been mediating the recent rounds of indirect talks between the US and Iran, has reacted to today's attacks by the US and Israel on Iran.
๐ด LIVE updates: aje.news/x068qe
I haven't seen a single major news outlet observe that the US and Israeli-led war against Iran is occurring during the month of Ramadan.
On Tuesday, I had on the syllabus to lecture on 1979 in my course on Jihadi-Salafism โ the Iranian Revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
I think Iโll be adding the 2026 US-Israeli-Iranian war.
Reminds of the time I tried to help Caitlin Flanagan of the Atlantic understand that Khomeini and Khamenei were two separate supreme leaders and she absolutely refused to accept it and then blocked me
The heartening thing of signing onto Bluesky today, having been a faculty member tasked with closing a department and ending a major, is to see just how widespread the logic, metrics, and instruments of closure are across the academy.
Why? It's good to see the commonality of a shared absurdity.
Max Weber rises from the grave, screaming, "Science as a Vocation!"
In Ohio, we are receiving direct legislative mandates to the curriculum, removal of โcontroversial subjects,โ AND all of the veneer of neoliberal rationality as we face metrics at the divisional, departmental, and professional level.
The heart of it all!
Iโm increasingly convinced that the Venn diagram of people who hated writing papers in college and โA.I. visionariesโ is just a single circle.
Iโve flown on enough planes, driven across enough bridges, and witnessed the practice of medicine enough to know that โmemorizing things to perform a task wellโ is actually a fairly important part of life-saving and life-affirming labor.
