The Turning of Days
Every Old Society Had a Release Valve
Mesopotamia cancelled debts periodically, and not out of kindness. It was maintenance. We kept the mechanism and removed the valve.
Abu Haider
British-Pakistani information security professional and independent researcher in Islamic civilisational analysis.
The Turning of Days
Kemal Had a Century and a State
The most thorough attempt in Islamic history to replace a religious identity with a national one had total state power and a hundred years. It did not take.
The Turning of Days
Five Weeks to Draw a Border
Cyril Radcliffe had never been to India. He was given five weeks and out-of-date maps. A fifth of humanity still lives with the line, and two nuclear states defend it.
The Turning of Days
One Grows Exponentially, the Other Does Not
An argument against interest that needs no theology. Debt compounds. The real economy does not. Run the two curves long enough and only one outcome exists.
The Turning of Days
A Death Toll Large Enough to Cool the Planet
So many farmers died in the Americas that the forest grew back, and the regrowth pulled enough carbon from the air to change the climate. You can measure it in ice cores.
The Turning of Days
Analysing Yourself in Someone Else's Language
A society can be emptied of its own ideas while keeping all its things. Then it borrows the coloniser's, and cannot understand why they do not work here.
The Turning of Days
The First Rich Country to Stop Living Longer
American life expectancy fell three years running, in peacetime, with no plague. The last developed country to manage that was the Soviet Union, on its way down.
The Turning of Days
Each Winter Has Been Worse Than the Last
Three crises, three resolutions, each at a higher price than the one before. That is not a cycle. A cycle returns you to where you started.
The Turning of Days
The Same 250 Years, Whatever the Weapons
Assyria ran on bronze and lasted 247 years. Britain ran on steam and telegraph and got about 250. Whatever imposes the limit does not care what you have invented.
The Turning of Days
You Cannot Inherit Hardship
Most theories of decline blame something, which quietly promises it could be avoided. Ibn Khaldun's says the thing that destroys a civilisation is its own success, working exactly as intended.
The Turning of Days
Every Catastrophe Was Just a Setback
A doctrine that can absorb the Holocaust as a rounding error is not being tested by evidence. It is being protected from it.
The Turning of Days
Even Pharaoh Built Temples
Pharaoh built temples. So did Caesar, and the Mongol khans. Every tyrant in history operated inside a frame where something outranked him. We are the first who do not.