"A hand-written and illustrated translation by an American artist". To make this multiply bizarre, the visual style resembles nothing so much as a medieval Book of Hours, only with scenes of contemporary American life. It seems really strange, though the pictures attached to the article aren't much on which to evaluate it.

" His book, Rectifying God’s Name, on the great Chinese Muslim scholar Liu Zhi was recently published by the University of Hawaii Press."

"...how China tackled the technological differences between itself and the West in the process of acquiring steam technology. It begins in the First Opium war (1839-1842), when the Chinese people witnessed British paddle-wheel steam warships. Having misunderstood the steam mechanism, they worked instead with the technology available to them in order to combat British naval forces. In the 1860s, they experimented with steam-powered ship technology again, but in a different environment in which foreign machine tools and knowledge of the steam mechanism were available. Through trial and error they realized the importance both of machine tools in turning the principle of steam power into a workable engine and of technical drawings in diffusing technical knowledge. Thereafter the Chinese government established arsenals and shipyards that used steam as their source of motive power. Along with foreign machine shops, they marked the beginning of radical changes..."

Just how hard was it for 19th century China to "get up to steam"?

My father's mother, and much of that side of my family, would be among those Indians raised speaking English instead of more-remotely-ancestral languages (in her case, Tamil).

I thought everyone knew this? (Hopefully the "utter stupidity" tag will be completely obscure very soon.)

The broader site looks interesting, too.

"traces the history of the upper Rio Grande's modern Spanish heritage, showing how Anglos and Hispanos sought to redefine the region's social character by glorifying its Spanish colonial past. ... northern New Mexico's twentieth-century Spanish heritage owes as much to the coming of the Santa Fe Railroad in 1880 as to the ... colonial campaign of 1598. As the railroad brought capital and migrants into the region, Anglos posed an unprecedented challenge to Hispano wealth and political power. Yet unlike their counterparts in California and Texas, the Anglo newcomers could not wholly displace their Spanish-speaking rivals. ... Instead, prominent Anglos and Hispanos found common cause in transcending the region's Mexican character. Turning to colonial symbols of the conquistador, the Franciscan missionary, and the humble Spanish settler, they recast northern New Mexico and its people."

"In the years after World War II, Westerners and Japanese alike elevated Zen to the quintessence of spirituality in Japan. Pursuing the sources of Zen as a Japanese ideal, Shoji Yamada uncovers the surprising role of two cultural touchstones: Eugen Herrigel’s Zen in the Art of Archery and the Ryoanji dry-landscape rock garden. ... Herrigel’s book popularized ideas of Zen both in the West and in Japan. Yamada traces the prewar history of Japanese archery, reveals how Herrigel mistakenly came to understand it as a traditional practice, and explains why the Japanese themselves embraced his interpretation ... Turning to Ryoanji ... this epitome of Zen in fact bears little relation to Buddhism and is best understood in relation to Chinese myth. For much of its modern history, Ryoanji was a weedy, neglected plot; only after its allegorical role in a 1949 Ozu film was it popularly linked to Zen."

"draws on neuroscience and psychology to understand the way we both perceive and conceive of art, including its resistance to verbal exposition. Through examples of work by Indian, Chinese, European, African, and Australian artists, Art Without Borders probes the distinction between accepting a tradition and defying it through innovation, which leads to a consideration of the notion of artistic genius. Continuing in this comparative vein, Scharfstein examines the mutual influence of European and non-European artists. Then, through a comprehensive evaluation of the world’s major art cultures, he shows how all of these individual traditions are gradually, but haltingly, conjoining into a single current of universal art"

"entanglements of medieval elites in the regions that today comprise Afghanistan, Pakistan, and north India ... ranges in time from the early eighth to the early thirteenth centuries ... considers the role of material culture ... coins, dress, monuments, paintings, and sculptures ... The book explores modes of circulation--among them looting, gifting, and trade--through which artisans and artifacts traveled .... It analyzes the relationship between mobility and practices of cultural translation, and the role of both in the emergence of complex transcultural identities. Among the subjects discussed are the rendering of Arabic sacred texts in Sanskrit on Indian coins, the adoption of Turko-Persian dress by Buddhist rulers, the work of Indian stone masons in Afghanistan, and the incorporation of carvings from Hindu and Jain temples in early Indian mosques."

"Unani" == "Ionian", i.e., "Greek".

"Liu Zhi (ca. 1670–1724) was one of the most important scholars of Islam in traditional China. His Tianfang xingli (Nature and Principle in Islam), the Chinese-language text translated here, focuses on the roots or principles of Islam. It was heavily influenced by several classic texts in the Sufi tradition. Liu’s approach, however, is distinguished from that of other Muslim scholars in that he addressed the basic articles of Islamic thought with Neo-Confucian terminology and categories. Besides its innate metaphysical and philosophical value, the text is invaluable for understanding how the masters of Chinese Islam straddled religious and civilizational frontiers and created harmony between two different intellectual worlds."

Sino-Islamic calligraphy that must be seen to be believed.

John Emerson has a review of this somewhere, I think...

Mmmm, cardamom coffee.

_Confucian China and Its Modern Fate_ is one of the best works of history I have ever read.

"That something so preeminently Italian as mozzarella should be rooted in India and midwifed by Central Asian nomads is an extraordinarily satisfying addition to my eccentric encyclopedia of globalization."

Or: X-files in the outback.

"During the nineteenth century, Lemuria was imagined as a land that once bridged India and Africa but disappeared into the ocean millennia ago, much like Atlantis. A sustained meditation on a lost place from a lost time, this elegantly written book is the

Using Khalilzad to illustrate Americans _learning_ the word/concept "inshallah" is crazy: he grew up in Afghanistan and Afghans use it all the time. But that he could use it and expect to be understood is different...