Anonymous
7/23/2025, 7:56:33 AM No.17865104
I am extremely interested in Pre-Islamic Arabia, Islamic Arabia (Mohammed), and Post-Mohammed Arabia/Islam and want to specifically read everything and study everything under the sun specific to this topic.
I like all of history but I can only afford to be functionally literate (history wise) in non-Islamic history topics (WW2, US history, other World History) and other stuff but to be extremely, expert-level nuanced in Islamic history and the nuances of every event that occurred/is linked to Islam, whether from Pre-Islamic Arabia, Islamic Arabia and beyond.
I speak Arabic as a first language, but expository works and old books are written in an archaic language form that uses an old form of Arabic that's still intelligible to the lay person but without properly studying it you'll run into misconceptions, run into pronunciation blunders, and won't be taken seriously if you don't fill that "language mastery" prerequisite.
I.e., you cannot claim you are worth your weight in Islamic history if you don't have an elite grasp of Classical Arabic.
Problem is, I'll never use that language IRL and it won't help me IRL and the sole purpose of studying it is to feed my curiosity of studying a specific part of history. I might eventually even have to learn some Syriac and Hebrew/adjacent Middle Eastern languages if there is interconnected relevance in these topics.
However, again, I am not going to end up as a historian or make YT videos or anything because it's such as a controversial topic so I am only doing this to be self-informed and self-educated.
So my question is, is this effort worth it? Or should I just read what someone who has done what I have done has said and take their word/make my conclusions from their work, instead of reinventing the wheel myself, so-to-speak?
I like all of history but I can only afford to be functionally literate (history wise) in non-Islamic history topics (WW2, US history, other World History) and other stuff but to be extremely, expert-level nuanced in Islamic history and the nuances of every event that occurred/is linked to Islam, whether from Pre-Islamic Arabia, Islamic Arabia and beyond.
I speak Arabic as a first language, but expository works and old books are written in an archaic language form that uses an old form of Arabic that's still intelligible to the lay person but without properly studying it you'll run into misconceptions, run into pronunciation blunders, and won't be taken seriously if you don't fill that "language mastery" prerequisite.
I.e., you cannot claim you are worth your weight in Islamic history if you don't have an elite grasp of Classical Arabic.
Problem is, I'll never use that language IRL and it won't help me IRL and the sole purpose of studying it is to feed my curiosity of studying a specific part of history. I might eventually even have to learn some Syriac and Hebrew/adjacent Middle Eastern languages if there is interconnected relevance in these topics.
However, again, I am not going to end up as a historian or make YT videos or anything because it's such as a controversial topic so I am only doing this to be self-informed and self-educated.
So my question is, is this effort worth it? Or should I just read what someone who has done what I have done has said and take their word/make my conclusions from their work, instead of reinventing the wheel myself, so-to-speak?
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