1/ I’m not surprised at seeing this pro-Khaleej, anti-Iranian propaganda masquerading as history from the Saudi state “news” organization. What I am surprised at is trying to market this towards Western audiences in the hope that they’ll actually buy this. Not because Western... https://twitter.com/sasanianshah/status/1308896963522367493

2/...readers are more critical thinkers than denizens of Saudi Arabia or the countries in its spheres of influence, but because if you want someone to believe total bullshit, you’ll have to appeal to their biases. This piece is clearly an attempt to do exactly that, by aligning..

3/...Arabian and Arab values with “Judeo-Christian civilization that is the modern West” against the East, especially Iran. This leads to some generalizations ranging from crude, such as casting the debate between Al-Ghazali and Ibn Rushd as Persian dogma vs. Arabian...

4/...freethought (making one wonder where the Persian Ibn Sina and the Arab Muhammad Ibn Abdul-Wahhab fall into this dichotomy) to outright bullshit, like “In the Muslim East, Arabs gave way to others to rule: ‘Abbasids, Seljuks, Mamlukes, Mughals, Ottomans.” Yes, you read that..

5/...right, ABBASIDS ARE APPARENTLY NOT ARABS! What’s weird is that the author, Ed Husain, once wrote an op-Ed in the NYTimes criticizing Saudi Arabia for its human rights abuses and exporting terrorism. However, it looks like he’s become a full-time MBS cheerleader. Anyway,...

6/...people who aren’t familiar with historiography in dictatorships now have a glimpse as to what state-sponsored history looks like. This isn’t to say that Saudi Arabia and other countries run by dictatorships don’t have real historians. They obviously do. But the version of...

7/...history that the government tries to feed its citizens are often completely divorced from the actual history that scholars do. We may be seeing something very similar to this soon in the US with Trump’s new propagandistic curriculum.

8/ To my historian/humanities friends, I’m sorry to do this to you, but I feel the need to bring this to your attention. @shahanSean @iandavidmorris @sasanianshah @RachelSchine @MayShaddel @protosemite @SWANA_Heat @PhDniX @azforeman

9/ Thanks to @protosemite for bringing this excellent thread by @bdaiwi_historia refuting many of the author’s absurd claims. There are still more left to be refuted, so I might do my own thread on the remaining historical errors and their political implications, if someone... https://twitter.com/bdaiwi_historia/status/1308907662021713920

10/...else hasn’t already.