Iskandar Ding

I'll be teaching Chaghatay literature at this upcoming summer school, designed to offer an opportunity for students of Persian, Turkic, and Urdu literatures to be acquainted with the shared Persianate literary tradition interlingually and intertextually. ferdowsi.org/ferdowsi-summe…

Imagine a 14th-century "universal" prayer The 1348 Stele of Sulaiman from #Dunhuang features the Buddhist mantra "Om Mani Padme Hum" in 6 scripts: Sanskrit, Tibetan, Old Uyghur, 'Phags-pa, Tangut, & Chinese A stunning relic of Yuan Dynasty multiculturalism!

📢 Deadline Extension Good news for prospective students! The deadline for the Shapoorji Pallonji Scholarships at SOAS has been extended ⏳—giving you more time to apply for this exciting opportunity. 💡 Explore eligibility and apply here: 👉 soas.ac.uk/study/student-…

Lettre envoyé en 1393 par le souverain mongol musulman Toqtamish Khan rappelant au souverain de Lituanie-Pologne d’honorer les obligations fiscales à la Horde et de laisser les marchands circuler librement dans son territoire La lettre est écrite en turc avec l’alphabet ouighour

I am pleased to share that the Editorial for the special issue ‘A Sociolinguistics of Islam: Exploring Multilingualism & Meaning in Faith’ is now online:

Still time to sign up! If you have lower intermediate Persian, we will teach you how to read and understand Urdu and Chaghatay within a week. For my Chaghatay part, I will also initiate you to modern Uyghur and Uzbek at the end of the course.

@DBiverd Aha, interesting.

@iskdin If you mean "denying any personal thinking to the author", OK. But your first message takes pretext of a speculative text and then your argument goes on to incorporate anything related to religion. Culture, popular practice, speculative thinking cannot be compared so easily.

Great work, but I wait for the day when scholars of Islam stop seeing the Hui through the Orientalistic lens of 'Islam mixed with Confucianism/Taoism'. Liu Zhi is great, but enough of Liu Zhi. Do something beyond the 'Hui Confucianism' cliché. It's interesting how the Hui are never seen as Muslims proper by these scholars. Instead, we're treated as a perennial anomaly that needs its local influences highlighted in every single abstract. The research community never seem quite as eager to perform this clinical dissection on other communities - can you imagine a mainstream discourse on South Asian Islam, for example, that constantly reminds us how it's hybridised with Hinduism? It seems that only the Hui are constantly reminded of a 'composite identity' by Western/Westernised academia which seeks to justify with such a reminder an endless cycle of Orientalist fascination.

In fairness, quite the opposite. The Chinese government never simply understands the Hui as 'just Han Chinese' and Chinese academic research and popular discourse on the Hui always points out the Hui's non-Han origins. What the Ch. gov. promotes is the Hui's roots in 華夏 and not Han culture. Unfortunately, both 'huaxia' and 'Han' get translated indiscriminately as 'Chinese' in Western and West Asian languages.

@iskdin In fairness the Chinese government is more than willing to promote this narrative.

@hostisromae Voilà. Exactly. Islam in China wasn't always 'syncretised' with 'Chinese culture'. Looking at Hui Islam only through a 'Chinese culture' lens creates gaps in knowledge about it.

@iskdin South asian Islam wasn't formally outright syncretized with Hinduism, and attempts at that always failed. It was more just superstitions being handed down informally in popular society. Do you think it's different for hui people? Genuine question.

@DBiverd The issue comes when a phenomenon is defined by said compositeness and presented only as a composite.

@iskdin I don't get your point. Saying a social phenomenon is "composite" is just a descriptive (and often lazy) way to say it has different components. Nothing specially "orientalist" there. Saying it is authentic is often just using an opposite ill-formed concept.

The best video anyone has made about the Sinophone Muslims (Hui/Dungans). It's short, but richer in information than the mainstream Western academic output on Islam in China. youtube.com/watch?v=cHEvX7…

New open-access book: The Zoroastrian World. Download the PDF direct from the publisher: taylorfrancis.com/books/oa-edit/…

New Approaches to Ilkhanid History ed. Timothy May et al. BRill 2020 archive.org/details/nati_2… PDF 🎯 archive.org/download/nati_…

If you’re in London next Monday (13 April), you’re welcome to join us at this event and hear how photographer Peter Sanders travelled across Islamic China to take the exquisite pictures in his book.

@muqtatafat_net Hopefully we'll do more!

@iskdin I wish this was offered as an online course. Good luck anyway

A reminder that this unique opportunity to explore Persian, Chaghatay, and Urdu literatures together this summer (6-31 Jul) in Yerevan is still open for applications. If you have lower intermediate Persian and want to transfer your skills to reading Chaghatay and Urdu, this course is for you. As for my part, I'll guide you through ʿAlī Šēr Navāʾī's prose and poetry and Baburnāma, amongst others, and initiate you to modern Uzbek and Uyghur.

@SasanianShah @avzaagzonunaada Ustad jan you're always welcome

@iskdin @avzaagzonunaada I might show up midway. Is that ok?

@Dr_Barzouya Next time, if this one runs well!

@iskdin I wish I could Akajan but summer plans are already settled. I have always wanted to get a bit more knowledge of Chaghtai, the ancestral tongue of maternal lineage.

@davidchaffetz @Saatvata I would love to go to Portugal!

@iskdin @Saatvata I would love to do this, but can't spend this summer in Yerevan. Maybe another year, or you come to Portugal!

Please spread the word! The Manchu Studies Group is pleased to once again offer online Manchu courses at the beginning and intermediate levels in summer 2026. Application deadline is MAY 11th for both courses. manchustudiesgroup.org/2026/03/23/sum…