Asian Review of Books

“What does the Geniza provide? It provides something of you from the bottom up, I would say, so we get more glimpses of everyday life. The cache of materials are really dense. So we have an interconnected cast of characters, and we're able to tell different kinds of histories from the ground up that we don't necessarily have the same opportunity to tell on the basis of sources that people have focused on more so over the last century and a half of scholarship.”

“One of the most conspicuous ones are gifts of enslaved people between different sovereign rulers or between vassals and sovereign rulers. And so we find in, for example, Chronicles, that when this Caliphate had just founded the new city of Cairo as their imperial capital... this was a way that diplomacy was done. And in turn, the Fatimid Caliphs will send their own gifts of enslaved people and eunuchs even to the Emperor of Byzantium.”

“The slave trader in the period that I study, it mainly appears as a diffuse capillary network in which small numbers of enslaved people are parts of mixed cargoes, and they're sent with handlers through a series of ports until they reach their final destination. This capillary network could stretch all the way to India if you're a merchant in Cairo. And so we have Jewish merchants, for example, who were traveling to Indian Ocean, and they write home and they say, look, I purchased a six-year-old girl for the lady of the house.”

“In Islamic law, there's an extra benefit that enslaved women have in particular that doesn't exist in Jewish law. And it's because of patrilineal dissent in Islam. So a Muslim man can legally use an enslaved woman for sex and her child is a freeborn Muslim. So the child is born free and the mother, the slave mother, she gains limited protection. And in most schools of Islamic law, she can't then be sold or separated from her child.”

“In Jewish law, the moment a Jewish slave owner purchases a person, that enslaved person enters a liminal category in which they're neither fully Jewish, but neither are they non-Jewish. Take a second to digest that. It is confusing. They're a kind of Jew, but not fully. This, I think, imparts dynamics in the Jewish community where enslaved people... there was a sense that they were part of the Jewish community in a provisional, tentative sense.”

“The important thing I want to underscore is that both in Islam, both in Jewish culture and religion, like slave owners tell themselves stories of good and bad slave owners. And so they really, and this is important because they never arrive, I don't think, at a critique of slavery as an institution, because they are focused on like the problem is what slavery has done badly. And that unscrupulous men don't follow the laws of slavery like they should.”

“Maimonides says, look, it's better that he free her and marry her. In other words, it's better to take the lesser of these two evils. So this shows you that, like, there's not sort of one single mind about slavery, even in through the writings of one individual. And so the way slavery was thought of, like, it's really dependent on context. It is both moral sort of challenge, perhaps moral evil. It is also seen as something that's prestigious.”

“Everyone in the Mediterranean, including Jews, Christians, and Muslims, understood that depending on the place they're in, they are vulnerable to enslavement, whether if it's through capture and war or through piracy. We have evidence that Jewish leaders were trying to raise money to redeem Jewish captives, and that was seen as a sort of obligation that the community had. All people are vulnerable to slavery, but also it's very common that those same groups are people who own slaves.”

“In Pāṇini's case, his goal was not to describe language or to produce a conventional grammar either. When we say Pāṇini wrote a grammar of Sanskrit, which is an ancient Indo-European language, what he was doing is he was trying to build a linguistic machine. It seeks to represent linguistic information or language itself in mechanical terms, in mechanistic terms.”

“Then in 2022, Rishi Rajpopat, a PhD student at Cambridge, said he’d figured out how to unravel Panini’s work to create a cohesive set of rules—and potentially wiped away centuries of commentary. The announcement made headlines and led to some grumbling among other Sanskrit professors.”

“In the event of a conflict, apply the rule that comes later, going from left to right, because we write Sanskrit from left to right. So, the rule that comes later, as in the operation that applies to the right hand side part, the right hand, the right most part basically, if there are more than two rules. And that, to my surprise, solved all these problems.”

“Whereas in the case of Sanskrit, a lot of that work happens within the peripheries. So there is an affix and often there is an infix and so on. A lot of the action, structurally speaking, happens within the bounds of a word. So you can imagine morphology and phonology do a lot of heavy lifting in an ancient Indo-European language like Sanskrit.”

“We have come to accept complexity and complication as a proxy for brilliance. But I think this is only one of many examples that we have access to as human beings of the fact that simplicity and elegance in presenting a complex web of information is what constitutes genius and not complexity.”

“The tradition interpreted later as the rule that comes later in the serial order of rules, and there are 4,000 of them arranged in a particular traditional order. That created many problems, and the first person to notice that was Kātyāyana. All the commentators that came after him did exactly that. You can imagine how unimaginably complex things got based on the mistake that the first commentator made.”

“However, this is an algorithm that Pāṇini has devised. What is an algorithm? It is a clear set of instructions, so that you might be able to always achieve the desirable outcome. In mechanics, the fact is Pāṇini had created what I call a perfect algorithm to tackle the problem of rule conflict, which was misunderstood right from the first commentator's time.”