The Toreador of the Ashirra: A Reconstruction of the Clan of Beauty in the Islamic World.
[Dark Ages-adjacent bc I love Islamic Middle Ages and Renaissance, and the entire history of the clan and the region won't fit into one post anyway]
In the canon of the Dark Ages, the Toreador are presented as a high clan — patrons of the arts, keepers of culture, the beautiful ones who rule from salons and galleries or even from Catholic Church. This is a fantasy born of Renaissance Florence and Victorian London, projected backward and outward onto times and places where it makes no sense.
The truth is simpler and harder at the same time: artists were never rich.
In my stories, the Toreador are a clan of beautiful captivity. Every artist who ever starved in a garret, every calligrapher who spent years perfecting a single letter, every concubine who learned to make her cage a garden, every tile-maker who built monuments for kings who would never know their names — these are the Toreador. They are the ones who make the world lovely, and the world pays them by owning them.
To be Toreador is to understand, in your blood, that beauty is never free. Someone always pays. And the one who pays owns the beauty, and the one who makes it is merely its temporary custodian. This is the natural order of things: the patron has power and the artist has vision, the patron buys the vision and makes it theirs. The artist moves on to the next patron, the next cage, the next beautiful thing that will never quite belong to them.
In life, this was true. In death, it is eternally true.
The wealth of an artist was always borrowed, contingent, revocable. A calligrapher who pleased the Sultan might receive a purse of gold, while a calligrapher who displeased him might lose his hands. A tile-maker whose work adorned a mosque was paid a wage, not granted a share of eternity, and a poet who satirized the vizier could find themselves floating face-down in the Bosphorus.
Among the Toreador of the Muslim world, one story matters above all others: the story of Zulaikha and Yusuf. It is told in the Quran, in the poetry of Rumi and Jami and Hafez, in a thousand variations across a thousand nights. But for the Toreador, it is not just a story. It is their story.
Zulaikha was a woman of power and privilege, the wife of an Egyptian court official. She saw Yusuf — a slave, a prophet, a being of impossible beauty — and she loved him. Not wisely, not moderately, but with a love that consumed her entirely. She pursued and trapped him, and she tore his garment when he fled. She was exposed, humiliated, and yet she did not stop loving.
In some tellings, she grew old and blind, waiting for him. In some, he returned to her, and they were united at last. In the most beautiful versions, her love was not sin but the highest form of worship — love for a mortal face that was really love for the divine beauty behind all faces.
The Toreador know this story in their bones. They know that Zulaikha was not free: she was a wife, a woman in a man's world, constrained by laws and customs that gave her no real power. Her love for Yusuf was the one thing she chose for herself, and it destroyed her, and it made her immortal in poetry.
Every Toreador is Zulaikha. They love what they cannot have (beauty, freedom, the approval of their patron), they are trapped in cages of others' making (the patron's demands, the Masquerade, the limits of their own obsession), they create, through their love, something that outlasts them (art, poetry, architecture, the memory of a perfect moment), they are remembered, if they are lucky, not for their power but for the beauty they served.
"Was she real?" the Toreador ask each other. "Does it matter? We are real. And we are her."
The Western Romantic image of the artist as a bohemian, a libertine, a rebel against convention, has no place in the Islamic world. The artists of the Ashirra are ascetics.
To make art is to forget yourself, to lose your ego in the rhythm of the brush, to become a vessel for beauty that flows through you from somewhere else. The Ashirra Toreador understand this better than any other clan. They have learned that the self is the enemy of beauty. Pride leads to bad calligraphy. Ambition leads to cracked tiles. Attachment leads to stagnation.
Of all the arts, calligraphy was the most honored. The word of God was revealed in Arabic script, and to write that script beautifully was a form of worship. Calligraphers were the aristocrats of the artistic world, the ones most likely to be invited to court, the ones whose names were most likely to be remembered.
But a calligrapher with a weak character would not be commissioned to write the Quran. The work required not just skill but spiritual purity as well, or at least the appearance of it. A Toreador calligrapher had to maintain the facade of piety, even as they fed on the blood of the courtiers around them.
This did not make them saints. The court was a snake pit, and the calligrapher was a snake like all the others. They wrote letters for powerful patrons, forged documents, concealed messages in the flourishes of their script. They were spies as well as artists, and their art gave them access to secrets that others could not reach. Their piety was real, or it was performance. Their character was strong, or it was a mask. The Toreador understand this contradiction.
"We are the ones who write the words of God," the calligrapher says. "And we are sinners. We drink wine in secret, we lust for what we cannot have, we lie and cheat and betray. And then we go back to our ink and our reed pen and we write Bismillah, in the name of God, and we mean it. Both things are true. Both things are us."
The Western Renaissance celebrated the individual genius — the painter, the sculptor, the architect whose name was attached to his work. The Islamic world had a different model: the workshop.
The kitabkhana (library-workshop) was a collaborative space where calligraphers, illuminators, bookbinders, and painters worked together under a master. No one signed their individual work, because the manuscript was a product of the entire workshop. The master's name might be remembered, but the apprentices were anonymous.
Was it exploitation? No, it was a different understanding of art. Beauty was the product of tradition, discipline, and collaboration, it had nothing to do with individual genius. The artist was a mere craftsman, and their goal was continuation of a tradition that stretched back centuries.
The Toreador of the Ashirra understand this. They do not seek fame, instead, they seek perfection of craft. A Toreador illuminator might spend her entire unlife perfecting the art of gilding the margins of a single manuscript. She will not sign her name, nor she will be remembered. But the manuscript will survive her, and in its beauty, something of her devotion will endure.
The rose is the Toreador's symbol, and in the Islamic world, it carries meanings that Western vampires do not fully understand. The Persian name for the Damask rose is gol-e Muhammadi — the flower of Muhammad. Legend says the flower was created from the sweat of the Prophet on the night of his ascension to heaven.
For Sufi Toreador, this is no coincidence. Beauty is a sign that points toward something beyond itself. When they create beauty, they are participating in the divine act of creation, reflecting the names of God through the medium of paint and tile and ink.
This is dangerous theology. The Banu Haqim watch the Toreador carefully, suspicious of any teaching that might blur the line between Creator and creation, but the Toreador persist. They find in Sufism a vocabulary for their longing, a justification for their obsession, a path toward salvation through beauty.
The Ashirra tolerates them because their work adorns mosques and madrasas, because their poetry praises the Sultan and the Shah and the Caliph, and because their music is beautiful. But the Toreador know the truth: their real work is hidden in the double meanings, the coded metaphors, the secret language that only other Toreador can read.
They wrote poetry that could be read two ways: as praise of a mortal patron or as praise of the divine. They used the metaphor of wine to describe the intoxication of divine love, and also to describe the intoxication of blood, of hunger, of the vampire's own cursed nature. They saw in the face of a beautiful mortal a reflection of God's beauty, and they worshipped that reflection even as they fed on the mortal who bore it.
The Sufi Toreador walks the knife's edge between devotion and blasphemy, between love and predation, between the longing for God and the hunger for blood. Some fall and some are saved. Most continue, forever in between.
"I saw the Beloved in the face of the boy," a Sufi Toreador might write. "I drank the wine of His presence from the boy's veins. I am damned, and I am saved, and I cannot tell the difference."
Some Sufi Toreador become majdhub — the God-intoxicated, those whose love for God has so consumed them that they appear mad. They wander the streets and speak in riddles, their art reduced to fragments and gestures. They are revered by mortals who think them saints. They are feared by vampires who know what they really are.
These are the Toreador who have given up on the cage entirely. They no longer serve patrons or create art for an audience. They exist only for the divine, and their art is their existence itself. They are beautiful and terrible, and they are the closest thing the clan has to saints.
Female poets existed in the Islamic world, though their names are less often recorded. Al-Khansa, a contemporary of the Prophet, was famous for her elegies. Wallada bint al-Mustakfi, an Andalusian princess, ran a literary salon in Cordoba and had love affairs with poets. The Toreador remember them.
Many female Toreador were concubines — women who were enslaved, educated, and trained in the arts to serve the pleasure of the powerful. A concubine might be a calligrapher, a musician, a dancer, a poet. She might perform for the Sultan alone, or she might be part of an ensemble that entertained the entire court.
Her life was a cage. She could not leave without permission, could not refuse her master's advances. She could be sold, given away, killed, with no recourse. But within that cage, she had power. The arts she mastered gave her influence and the secrets she learned gave her leverage. The beauty she created gave her a kind of immortality.
A female Toreador who was a concubine in life carries that memory in her blood. She knows that the cage is not an exception to the Toreador condition but its essence.
Women who were not concubines often worked in textiles — weaving, embroidery, carpet-making. These were respectable occupations, and the products of their labor were valued throughout the Islamic world. A silk carpet from a woman's workshop could be worth a fortune.
For Toreador women, textile work had special advantages, as it was done in private, in the women's quarters, away from the eyes of men. A woman could spend centuries perfecting a single design, a single stitch, without anyone outside her household knowing. Her art was intimate, personal, and hidden.
This is a different kind of Toreador: not the court poet who lives on the edge of the sultan's favor, but the hidden maker who works in silence, whose art is known only to those who enter her private space. She is no less a Toreador. She is perhaps more so, because her art is not compromised by the need to please a patron. She makes for the sake of making, for the love of beauty, for herself alone.
Female dancers were important in Islamic court culture, both within the harem and outside it. They performed at celebrations, at festivals, at private gatherings. They were trained from childhood in complex movements, in the handling of veils and scarves, in the expression of emotion through the body.
For a Toreador dancer, the body is the medium. She shapes it, trains it, uses it to create beauty that exists only in the moment and then vanishes. This is a kind of asceticism — the art that cannot be preserved, cannot be collected, cannot be owned by any patron. It exists only in performance, only in memory, only in the hearts of those who see it.
A dancer Toreador is perhaps the freest of all, because her art leaves no trace. She can perform for a patron one night and be gone the next, her beauty existing only in the memory of those who saw her. She cannot be imprisoned by her own work, because her work is herself, and she can always leave.
If their patrons provide the resources for their art, their inspiration often comes from elsewhere — from the other low clans, the outcasts, the ones who see the world differently. Malkavians show them the beauty in madness, the patterns in chaos, the truth in ravings. A Toreador might spend decades painting a Malkavian's visions, trying to capture something that cannot be captured. Nosferatu show them the beauty in ugliness, the dignity in deformity, the grace in the gutter. A Toreador might fall in love with a Nosferatu's face, seeing in its ruin something more beautiful than any perfection. Ravnos show them the beauty in illusion, the art in deception, the poetry in a lie. A Toreador might learn from a Ravnos how to make art that is never the same twice, that shifts and changes like light on water.
These relationships are often secret. A Toreador's patron might not approve of them spending time with madmen and monsters, but the Toreador cannot help it, as the art demands it. The beauty they seek is everywhere, especially in the places the powerful would rather not look.
The Toreador remember certain eras as golden ages, though every golden age was also an age of danger:
The Abbasid Golden Age (8th-13th centuries), when Baghdad was the center of the Islamic world and art was generously patronized.
The Timurid Renaissance (15th century), when Timur's descendants sponsored the arts in Samarqand and Herat.
The Safavid Golden Age (16th-17th centuries), when Shah Abbas moved the capital to Isfahan and filled it with beautiful buildings.
The Ottoman Classical Age (16th century), when Suleiman the Magnificent patronized Mimar Sinan, the greatest architect of the age.
Each of these eras ended in violence. The Toreador remember the endings as clearly as the golden ages themselves.
The Toreador have no internal conflicts. They do not fight over territory, because territory belongs to their patrons. They do not fight over status, because their status is defined by their patrons. They do not fight over ideology, because they have no ideology except the love of beauty.
This is not because they are peaceful or enlightened, it is because they have nothing to fight over. A Toreador in Istanbul serves the Ottoman Sultan, a Toreador in Isfahan serves the Safavid Shah. They have no reason to kill each other just as much they have no reason to unite. They simply exist, each in their own cage, each serving their own master, each creating their own beauty.
In the Ashirra, the Toreador might call themselves Bani al-Ward — the Children of the Rose, or al-Muhibbun — the Lovers (muhibb is lover as both "beloved" and "a seeker of God"), or Ahl al-Qalam, the People of the Pen, to emphasize calligraphy as the highest art. Or simply Zulaikha's Children, for those who prefer to emphasize their connection to the story.
The name does not matter as much as what it represents: the beauty that is also a wound, the love that is also a cage, the art that is also a prayer.
In the kitabkhanas of Istanbul, in the mosques of Isfahan, in the tombs of Delhi, the Toreador work. They grind pigments and mix inks and cut quills. They write the name of God, and their own name is forgotten. They build tombs for emperors, and their own remains are dust.
When a Toreador sees another Toreador's work, across centuries, across continents, across every division of faith and culture and politics, they recognize something. They see the longing, and the cage, and the beauty that was made despite everything.
"She was here," they whisper. "Another Zulaikha. Another one who loved what she could not have. Another one who made something beautiful anyway."
That is the Toreador truth.
"We are Zulaikha. All of us. We love what we cannot have. We serve what we cannot own. We create what will never be ours. And we do it anyway, because that is what love does."
Fixing the Ashirra: A Historically Conscious Reimagining
Or: Why the Canon Version Makes No Sense and What to Do About It
The World of Darkness is a product of its time and place — America in the 1990s, written by people whose understanding of the Islamic world rarely extended beyond Orientalist tropes and headlines about Gulf War oil. The Ashirra, as presented in canon, is a monolithic, ahistorical, theological mess that exists primarily to be "the Camarilla but with turbans", and I would like to fix that.
But before we can fix the Ashirra, we need to understand when and why the Camarilla and Sabbat (as global phenomena) would actually emerge, because the writers are either illiterate when it comes to history or prefer to ignore it for the sake of the rule of cool.
The canon claims the Camarilla formed in the aftermath of the Anarch Revolt, in the 15th century. This is anachronistic nonsense.
In the 15th century, there was no concept of "Europe" as a political or cultural unit, travel between regions was slow, dangerous, and rare, communication across the continent took months and the idea of a continental vampire government would have been literally unimaginable. Not a single one of these points can get negated with the help of vampire powers.
The Camarilla cannot be a medieval or Renaissance institution. It is clearly a modern one, born of the same forces that produced the League of Nations, the United Nations, and the European Union. Think of what it requires: it needs reliable long-distance communication like telegraph or telephone, standardized travel like railroads and steamships, a shared political vocabulary (nationalism, international law, human rights), a common enemy to unite against (the Sabbat, mortal governments, the Inquisition).
These conditions did not exist until the 19th century. The 19th century was the age of:
Nationalism: The idea that people sharing a language and culture should have their own state.
Revolution: Liberal, nationalist, and socialist uprisings across Europe and the Americas.
Ideology: The birth of systematic political worldviews (liberalism, conservatism, socialism, anarchism).
Colonialism: The formal division of most of the world into European spheres of influence.
Communication: The telegraph, the railroad, the steamship, the mass-circulation newspaper.
This is the world that could produce something like the Camarilla: a bureaucratic, hierarchical, international institution designed to protect the interests of established powers against revolutionary threats. Camarilla's values include stability over justice, hierarchy over merit, secrecy over accountability, gradual reform over revolution. This is just 19th century conservatism dressed in gothic drag.
The Sabbat cannot be an ancient cult of Caine-worshippers, because it looks like a product of the age of revolution, born from the same ferment that produced:
Marxism: The idea that the existing order is irredeemably corrupt and must be destroyed.
Anarchism: The rejection of all hierarchical authority.
Nationalism: The belief that your people have been wronged and must reclaim their destiny.
Fascism: The cult of violence, the beloved leader, and the glorious mythical past.
The Sabbat should be a salad of extremist ideologies, not a unified sect. So, a Sabbat cell in St. Petersburg might be Marxist-Leninists who believe that vampire politics are class warfare, a Sabbat cell in the Caucasus might be Armenian ultranationalists who want to purge all Turkic vampires (or the other way around), a Sabbat cell in the American South might be a death cult that worships Caine as the first revolutionary.
If the Camarilla is a 19th-century product, the Ashirra is older — not because vampires are more traditional in the East, but because the Islamic world developed concepts of international law and transregional governance centuries before Europe.
Let me be clear about why the canon "Camarilla but with turbans" Ashirra doesn't work:
The Islamic world has never been politically unified. For most of its history, it has been divided into competing empires, dynasties, and caliphates. The Umayyads fought the Abbasids, the Abbasids fought the Fatimids, the Ottomans fought the Safavids, the Mughals did their own thing. Each claimed to be the true inheritor of the Prophet's authority and each despised the others. The idea that vampires from Morocco to Indonesia would share the same political structure, the same legal traditions, the same loyalties, is absurd.
A vampire sect that pretends to unify all of these is an American fantasy. There could be, like, at least three Ashirras at the same time: Ottoman (Sunni, Hanafi), Safavid (Shia, Ja'fari), and Mughal (Sunni, Hanafi but with heavy local syncretism). They would hate each other, compete for influence and issue fatwas declaring each other's leaders heretics. And this is only one specific historical period I mentioned (16th-18th centuries), there would be even MORE Ashirras throughout history.
West Asia is not and has never been exclusively Muslim. Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, and others have lived in the region for centuries. They should have their own vampire traditions, their own legal frameworks and alliances. They would not create a separate sect for themselves, instead, they would exist within the same political structures as Muslim vampires, as dhimmis (protected peoples) with limited rights. A historically conscious Ashirra should have a millet system, different religious communities governed by their own laws, under the overall authority of the Muslim majority.
The "assassin from the sands" Banu Haqim stereotype is so obvious and so tiresome, but the deeper problem is the conflation of judicial authority with executive violence. A qadi does not execute his own judgments. He does not hunt the guilty or sneak through shadows with a poisoned dagger. He sits in a court, hears testimony, and issues a ruling. Then somebody else enforces it.
The Banu Haqim should not be assassins. They should be jurists, scholars, and judges— the spiritual heart of the Ashirra, the ones who write the fatwas, who interpret the law, who struggle with the question of what justice and faith mean in a cursed existence.
Some of them can be vigilantes who take the law into their own hands when the system fails. Some of them can be corrupt and issue fatwas for money or favor. Some of them can be mystics who see the law as a veil over a deeper truth. But the core of the clan, imo, should be judicial, not martial. Islam is a religion of civil order, it has lawmen instead of priests, and the lesser jihad is only a small part of it, not the core.
The diablerie question is also more interesting than canon allows, and I think the reputation of serial diablerists can get attached to Banu Haqim without any curses involved. In Islamic law, a murderer's family has three options: retribution (qisas), blood money (diyya), or forgiveness ('afw). For vampires, this should apply to diablerie as well as murder.
Qisas: The victim's lineage may diablerize a member of the killer's lineage in return.
Diyya: The killer pays a massive blood price — territory, services, childer.
'Afw: The victim's lineage forgives the killer, considered the highest spiritual act.
The evidentiary standard for hadd crimes (including murder) is impossibly high — four adult male Muslim witnesses of impeccable character. Diablerie happens in private, there are almost never four witnesses.
The result is that most diablerists walk free in the eyes of formal law. But the victim's family can still seek a fatwa permitting private retribution. This creates a system of legalized blood feuds, managed by the Banu Haqim but not controlled by them. The qadi issues the fatwa; then the feud proceeds according to understood rules. It may last centuries. I think this framework makes more sense than the clan of judges being the most notorious criminals.
I don't like the canon plot about the Camarilla-Ashirra alliance and in my personal headcanon it simply doesn't exist. It's such a lazy move that ignores the history of the region and shies away from the uncomfortable topic of colonialism in order not to hurt white player's feelings. The Ashirra should despise the Camarilla with a burning passion.
The Camarilla is a European institution, it emerged and solidified during the period of European colonialism. It would have extended its influence into the Muslim world through the same mechanisms as mortal colonialism — trade, military conquest, economic pressure.
The Ashirra would have fought back, and would have lost. Not completely, and not everywhere, but enough to be permanently scarred. The relationship between the two should be defined by resentment, collaboration, and ongoing struggle. Older vampires remember Sykes-Pico agreement, and they should dream about tearing British and French Ventrue in half, because the said agreement drew idiotic border lines across their domains.
I think that many Ashirra vampires would despise the Camarilla for what it did to their homelands — the invasions, the occupations, the extraction of wealth, the imposition of foreign laws. But at the same time, many would collaborate by selling out their own people for personal gain, adopt European titles and manners, become clients of Ventrue merchant families. Many would be ambivalent, they would recognize the Camarilla's power, hate it, but see no alternative to it.
This creates conflict within the Ashirra about how to respond to the West. Should it modernize, adopt Camarilla methods, try to compete? Should it return to its roots, reject foreign influence, purify itself? Should it find a third path, neither Western nor traditional? There is no consensus. There are only factions, constantly fighting.
The fact that Ashirra exists at all in modern nights is simple Western ignorance. The Ottoman Empire fell a century ago, the political structures that supported the Ashirra — the caliphates, the sultanates, the imperial bureaucracies — they are all gone. What remains? Nostalgic elders who remember the old days, fragmented local powers who control individual cities or regions, a few surviving institutions that have no connection to each other. The Ashirra as a unified sect is dead, it has been dead for a century. The only people who pretend otherwise are those who remember when it was alive.
The Banu Haqim qadis no longer hold the power they used to. The world has changed, because now economic power matters more than scripture. A Ventrue-backed corporation can do what a Banu Haqim judge could not. The clan has more conflicts with itself than with outsiders —qadis from different madhahib issuing contradictory rulings, elders trying to preserve traditions that the young see as obsolete, families feuding over inheritances that have lost their meaning.
There are still vampires who call themselves "Ashirra" and there are still those who follow Sharia of the Night. There are still courts where a qadi's word carries weight, but they are local, fragmented and nostalgic. The Ashirra is a memory — beautiful, sad and lost to time. There is no "Ashirra policy" on anything, only what this qadi decides, what that sheikh wants, what this elder remembers. The end.
The way all of this is written (or more like not written, lmao) in canon is stupid. I remember one of the rulebooks saying that modern Ashirra strongholds are Saudi Arabia, Iran and Afghanistan. Fucking what? These countries hate each other, they are political and spiritual enemies that have nothing in common, and Afghanistan is in no condition to be a stronghold of anything.
The canon Ashirra is a fantasy, it is a product of writers who did not understand Islamic history, and were content to reproduce stereotypes.
I want to make Ashirra messy, fractured, and contradictory, like the history it emerges from. I want it to have competing empires, legal traditions, and religious communities where religion actually matters. I want to talk about how it has been shaped by colonialism and is still dealing with the trauma. The Ashirra is dying, and the Kindred who remember its glory days are bitter, nostalgic, and dangerous, and this kind of character can make a very compelling hero or villain.
There's the last issue I would like to mention: blood sorcery. For the love of God, do not use the word "sihr" for this like Whitewolf did. Sorcery is a very serious sin because it is considered disbelief (you seek powers not from God = you do not believe in God), no Muslim vampire would do "sihr". That doesn't mean they can't throw fireballs though, you just need a better name for the fireballs.
In my chronicle, Banu Haqim call their magic "Ayat" — meaning signs, verses, evidence. It is the term for the verses of the Quran, chosen because it frames vampiric powers as given by God. To Banu Haqim "sorcerers", who aren't in fact sorcerers, but scholars, the word ayat means miracles, wonders and marvels of the physical universe that point to the Creator. The birds can fly because God wills so, and a Banu Haqim can fry your ass with a fireball because God wills so as well. The word "sihr" should be instead applied to infernalism, and instead of a "sorcerer" you can simply say "mystic". An Islamic mystic is somebody who looks for intimate knowledge of God, and in this framework, the Ayat, whether a discipline or a custom path of thaumaturgy, is exactly that, a tool for understanding.
Would you like to read more? I have other stuff on Ashirra, Banu Haqim and VtM lore in general, bc other clans and factions have a lot of bullshit too, and I can suggest actual ideas on what narratives to craft instead, not just moan and bitch that the canon is bad.
Not fandom related at all but the news about Marjane Satrapi made me really angry and I really need to vent about it
I fucking hate Marjane Satrapi and I fucking hate Persepolis. Imagine writing a graphic novel "to combat Western stereotypes" about your homeland and then putting nothing but Western stereotypes in there. That thing about giving plastic "keys to heaven" to young soldiers to encourage martyrdom is insane level of bullshit. What else? Did they also fly to Iraq on a fucking carpet? Literally never happened, you will never find anything about it written in Farsi, it's all Israeli and diaspora bullshit. The concept of keys to heaven itself isn't even Islamic, for fuck's sake, it's Christian, how stupid do you need to be to fall for this? The fact that allegedly Satrapi learned it from her parents' SERVANT should already make you side eye her. Do you have a servant? I do not. The keys bullshit was disproved even by a guy who worked for BBC, and BBC isn't known for its great nuanced perspectives on the Middle East.
The claim of her being a native informant and therefore reliable is so laughable. She was an upper middle class Tehrani from a leftist secular family with access to Western culture and the funds to send her to Vienna. She went to an elite French school. Is this supposed to be a universal Iranian everygirl? Before the revolution, only, like, 3% of the population had college degrees. She's representative of less than 3% of the population bc not even other rich kids of that era universally love her. Would you consider a woman with Mar-a-lago face a universal American everywoman? Why not?
She called Shi'a rituals fake and insincere but never criticized US/Israel as an existential threat to her homeland, how US sanctions devastate ordinary Iranians, US military interventions and what Israel is doing both in Gaza and Lebanon. But do you know WHAT she criticized? French visa policy, because poor, poor children of Tehrani rich shits can't immigrate to Western Europe so easily.
Her book is such a typical post 9/11 jerkoff material for people with white savior fantasy, I just can't. Off course, everybody religious in Iran is grim and depressing and rude, the veil is oppressive and the Western culture and attire are so, so liberating. Everything about Islamic government is terror, misery and stagnation. She's like "Please, US, bomb my country, but do so in a cool, progressive and feminist way". Btw did you know that Iran now has more women with STEM degrees than US or any European country?
Satrapi's political position is pure delulu. She said she rejects East-West binary and thinks that the only conflict is the conflict between fanatics and everyone else. Did fanatics steal Iranian oil? Did fanatics hang signs "Entry of dogs and Iranians prohibited"? Did fanatics bring both Pahlavis to power with a coup?
Persepolis is nothing but flimsy ideological justification for US military intervention and agressive foreign policies in the Middle East. Even other Iranians living abroad think that it's bullshit, please consult Hamid Dabashi and Roksana Bahramitash. The ones not living abroad will be even less kind with their criticism.
I'm genuinely scared for people from Tumblr who think that Persepolis is in any way enlightening... The social justice anti-racism website falls for the stupidest neo-orientalist propaganda, haha classic. Western feminists don't give a shit about second and third world women and just want to play saviors, because most of them believe that it's brown men who are evil and at fault for everything wrong with their countries, and totally not the West that has been fucking with the said countries for more than a century and continues to do that even now. I am disgusted, genuinely disgusted.
wait who is this pro Isr@el person who the WH40k fandom interacts with? I’m not really into twt dramas or stupid stuff like that but I’m genuinely curious? Like I never seen any pro Isr@el person in my timeline or maybe I’m just too woke and optimistic for life
Robot-roadtrip-rants from this website. They left an uncalled for commentary against Iranian government in the tags of their reblog of my Ahri the man meta some time ago, I went to check their blog and lost my shit. I don't remember whether they explicitly called themselves zionist or no, but I don't want my content to be available to anybody who thinks Isr@el has a right to exist, that it wants to annex South Lebanon because of a "security threat" from Hezbollah and not because zionists decided they're just gonna do that already in 1919, and who spends more time shilling for it and crying about western "antisemitism" than crying about the multiple genocides Isntreal perpetuates.
I never wrote a single callout before and I'm also not into drama, but this shit pissed me off. Like dude (gender neutral), go be an Israeli shill on somebody else's lawn, the farther from me the better. I wouldn't even know anything if it wasn't for their commentary on my post
after checking there blog, uhhhhhhh holy white Jew complex “I’m just as oppressed as a black person” I can’t trust the mf who thinks that there such a thing as “left wing anti-semitism” problem
but genuinely I want to know about the callout post maybe I didn’t see it and I didn’t really scroll through there account and didn’t come to the most unhinged stuff
You get me, I felt like my IQ points were slowly dropping the more I scrolled their blog😭
And by the callout post I meant the previous reply saying their name and opinions, I didn't actually confront them. That wasn't an actual callout but tumblr would argue this is worse than callout, that this was antisemitism, straight up hitlerism and also a hate crime, because how could I say anything bad about the most oppressed minority in the world, the secular Ashkenazi jews living in US?
I blocked them without going too far into post history bc reading their reblogs on Lebanon and Hezbollah felt like torturing myself for no reason.
Not fandom related at all but the news about Marjane Satrapi made me really angry and I really need to vent about it
I fucking hate Marjane Satrapi and I fucking hate Persepolis. Imagine writing a graphic novel "to combat Western stereotypes" about your homeland and then putting nothing but Western stereotypes in there. That thing about giving plastic "keys to heaven" to young soldiers to encourage martyrdom is insane level of bullshit. What else? Did they also fly to Iraq on a fucking carpet? Literally never happened, you will never find anything about it written in Farsi, it's all Israeli and diaspora bullshit. The concept of keys to heaven itself isn't even Islamic, for fuck's sake, it's Christian, how stupid do you need to be to fall for this? The fact that allegedly Satrapi learned it from her parents' SERVANT should already make you side eye her. Do you have a servant? I do not. The keys bullshit was disproved even by a guy who worked for BBC, and BBC isn't known for its great nuanced perspectives on the Middle East.
The claim of her being a native informant and therefore reliable is so laughable. She was an upper middle class Tehrani from a leftist secular family with access to Western culture and the funds to send her to Vienna. She went to an elite French school. Is this supposed to be a universal Iranian everygirl? Before the revolution, only, like, 3% of the population had college degrees. She's representative of less than 3% of the population bc not even other rich kids of that era universally love her. Would you consider a woman with Mar-a-lago face a universal American everywoman? Why not?
She called Shi'a rituals fake and insincere but never criticized US/Israel as an existential threat to her homeland, how US sanctions devastate ordinary Iranians, US military interventions and what Israel is doing both in Gaza and Lebanon. But do you know WHAT she criticized? French visa policy, because poor, poor children of Tehrani rich shits can't immigrate to Western Europe so easily.
Her book is such a typical post 9/11 jerkoff material for people with white savior fantasy, I just can't. Off course, everybody religious in Iran is grim and depressing and rude, the veil is oppressive and the Western culture and attire are so, so liberating. Everything about Islamic government is terror, misery and stagnation. She's like "Please, US, bomb my country, but do so in a cool, progressive and feminist way". Btw did you know that Iran now has more women with STEM degrees than US or any European country?
Satrapi's political position is pure delulu. She said she rejects East-West binary and thinks that the only conflict is the conflict between fanatics and everyone else. Did fanatics steal Iranian oil? Did fanatics hang signs "Entry of dogs and Iranians prohibited"? Did fanatics bring both Pahlavis to power with a coup?
Persepolis is nothing but flimsy ideological justification for US military intervention and agressive foreign policies in the Middle East. Even other Iranians living abroad think that it's bullshit, please consult Hamid Dabashi and Roksana Bahramitash. The ones not living abroad will be even less kind with their criticism.
I'm genuinely scared for people from Tumblr who think that Persepolis is in any way enlightening... The social justice anti-racism website falls for the stupidest neo-orientalist propaganda, haha classic. Western feminists don't give a shit about second and third world women and just want to play saviors, because most of them believe that it's brown men who are evil and at fault for everything wrong with their countries, and totally not the West that has been fucking with the said countries for more than a century and continues to do that even now. I am disgusted, genuinely disgusted.
wait who is this pro Isr@el person who the WH40k fandom interacts with? I’m not really into twt dramas or stupid stuff like that but I’m genuinely curious? Like I never seen any pro Isr@el person in my timeline or maybe I’m just too woke and optimistic for life
Robot-roadtrip-rants from this website. They left an uncalled for commentary against Iranian government in the tags of their reblog of my Ahri the man meta some time ago, I went to check their blog and lost my shit. I don't remember whether they explicitly called themselves zionist or no, but I don't want my content to be available to anybody who thinks Isr@el has a right to exist, that it wants to annex South Lebanon because of a "security threat" from Hezbollah and not because zionists decided they're just gonna do that already in 1919, and who spends more time shilling for it and crying about western "antisemitism" than crying about the multiple genocides Isntreal perpetuates.
I never wrote a single callout before and I'm also not into drama, but this shit pissed me off. Like dude (gender neutral), go be an Israeli shill on somebody else's lawn, the farther from me the better. I wouldn't even know anything if it wasn't for their commentary on my post
Not fandom related at all but the news about Marjane Satrapi made me really angry and I really need to vent about it
I fucking hate Marjane Satrapi and I fucking hate Persepolis. Imagine writing a graphic novel "to combat Western stereotypes" about your homeland and then putting nothing but Western stereotypes in there. That thing about giving plastic "keys to heaven" to young soldiers to encourage martyrdom is insane level of bullshit. What else? Did they also fly to Iraq on a fucking carpet? Literally never happened, you will never find anything about it written in Farsi, it's all Israeli and diaspora bullshit. The concept of keys to heaven itself isn't even Islamic, for fuck's sake, it's Christian, how stupid do you need to be to fall for this? The fact that allegedly Satrapi learned it from her parents' SERVANT should already make you side eye her. Do you have a servant? I do not. The keys bullshit was disproved even by a guy who worked for BBC, and BBC isn't known for its great nuanced perspectives on the Middle East.
The claim of her being a native informant and therefore reliable is so laughable. She was an upper middle class Tehrani from a leftist secular family with access to Western culture and the funds to send her to Vienna. She went to an elite French school. Is this supposed to be a universal Iranian everygirl? Before the revolution, only, like, 3% of the population had college degrees. She's representative of less than 3% of the population bc not even other rich kids of that era universally love her. Would you consider a woman with Mar-a-lago face a universal American everywoman? Why not?
She called Shi'a rituals fake and insincere but never criticized US/Israel as an existential threat to her homeland, how US sanctions devastate ordinary Iranians, US military interventions and what Israel is doing both in Gaza and Lebanon. But do you know WHAT she criticized? French visa policy, because poor, poor children of Tehrani rich shits can't immigrate to Western Europe so easily.
Her book is such a typical post 9/11 jerkoff material for people with white savior fantasy, I just can't. Off course, everybody religious in Iran is grim and depressing and rude, the veil is oppressive and the Western culture and attire are so, so liberating. Everything about Islamic government is terror, misery and stagnation. She's like "Please, US, bomb my country, but do so in a cool, progressive and feminist way". Btw did you know that Iran now has more women with STEM degrees than US or any European country?
Satrapi's political position is pure delulu. She said she rejects East-West binary and thinks that the only conflict is the conflict between fanatics and everyone else. Did fanatics steal Iranian oil? Did fanatics hang signs "Entry of dogs and Iranians prohibited"? Did fanatics bring both Pahlavis to power with a coup?
Persepolis is nothing but flimsy ideological justification for US military intervention and agressive foreign policies in the Middle East. Even other Iranians living abroad think that it's bullshit, please consult Hamid Dabashi and Roksana Bahramitash. The ones not living abroad will be even less kind with their criticism.
I'm genuinely scared for people from Tumblr who think that Persepolis is in any way enlightening... The social justice anti-racism website falls for the stupidest neo-orientalist propaganda, haha classic. Western feminists don't give a shit about second and third world women and just want to play saviors, because most of them believe that it's brown men who are evil and at fault for everything wrong with their countries, and totally not the West that has been fucking with the said countries for more than a century and continues to do that even now. I am disgusted, genuinely disgusted.
Why is this book so unhinged... Ahriman absorbs the shard of Magnus that has been larping as King Kadmus (Mr McNeill how many historical references do you want in your book? McNeill: YES) and then he starts seeing everything exactly as Magnus sees it and he recoils from his brothers' voices and his own because he realizes they're all ugly as fuck. They're described as abrasive, grunting and bovine. Oh my God Magnus why did you give gender dysphoria to Ahriman. Is this why he's even more fem-coded in the omnibus than before??? Magnus why do your sons' voices sound like the lowing of cattle to you??? Please explain.
This was probably about the material world in general being too limiting and hideous as opposed to the warp's infinite imagination and primarch's perfection (?) but duh. That was still a very weird thing to say. Something you'll only see in McNeill's books. I'm still not over eunuchs and ancient androgyne god-kings statues at Magnus' place. Da fuck they were even supposed to mean??? Did he mean Gyptus or Prospero had androgyne gods in its mythology??? Irl Ancient Egyptian kings were certainly considered divine but where did the androgyne thing even come from...
I'm surprised there are no Sanguinius fan arts based on Lawrence of Arabia movie.
They are both charismatic yet fatalistic blond white men who get stranded in the desert and end up uniting tribal people, the said tribal people hope that something good will come out of their angelic white savior but ultimately they only get fucked over (Baal stayed a shithole until Spoiler and Arabs had their borders drawn by 2 drunk European men and their reward for participating in the war was infighting and oil theft).
The analogy doesn't work beyond that off course bc at least Lawrence felt bad about it and Sang just said nah, suffering builds character and radiation gives +1 buff to your space marine stats
watching Lawrence as a northern Saudi who is related to the Bedouins who fought the ottoman was like a Native American watching dances with the wolves
most of it was pausing and going “these costumes look hideous” and “a Bedouin will never fucking do that” and “that is so obviously a fake thing how the fuck niggas fell for this” then I found out that the movie didn’t get translated until years later after its release because inherently it was clearly written for a western audience and Arabs weren’t really the target audience for it, now it became literally one of the only if not the only works of pop culture that depicted northern Saudis and it’s also the worst not only that it made an entire generation of westerns think that the default Saudi culture is northerns when in reality we are like the odds one out because we are a product of levantine cultures not Arabic, we are more closer ethnically and culturally to Syria then Yemen
oh and yes there is fanart of sangy straight up based on Lawrence of Arabia I couldn’t find it but I remember it was made by a very popular artist on twitter and it is also on twitter but I think there also on tumblr
I mean do you think the fandom won’t make any art like that, babe that’s sangy top tier one of the most orientalised Primarchs after Magnus Of course they gotta bring the og god of orientalism, Lawrence
Ofc the movie isn't accurate but you see when I said what I said some people I know were like Lawrence who?😭The bar is so low that an orientalist movie is too woke and niche somehow. Sent this shit to an Irish friend, they said smth about Sangy and Lawrence both flying and I was like what, you're making a slightly dark joke about the latter dying in a motorcycle accident? But no they mistook him for Saint Exupery.
And bruh by taking inspiration I've meant using the sharp shading style of the movie poster or redrawing one of the scenes with the desert landscapes, not drawing Sangy with a camel oh my god what is this😭😭😭 The only Arab Sanguinius I've seen is that meme post about depression from you, the orientalist depictions seem to be either an unidentifiable desert people mesh or Amazigh? Sorry for triggering your ptsd from the movie but thanks to Sanguinius with a camel we're even I think. Please say you're exaggerating for comedic effect and there was no camel🙏
I'm surprised there are no Sanguinius fan arts based on Lawrence of Arabia movie.
They are both charismatic yet fatalistic blond white men who get stranded in the desert and end up uniting tribal people, the said tribal people hope that something good will come out of their angelic white savior but ultimately they only get fucked over (Baal stayed a shithole until Spoiler and Arabs had their borders drawn by 2 drunk European men and their reward for participating in the war was infighting and oil theft).
The analogy doesn't work beyond that off course bc at least Lawrence felt bad about it and Sang just said nah, suffering builds character and radiation gives +1 buff to your space marine stats
I headcanon that Maggy's cloak is made of ostrich feathers or at least looks that way because what we have in canon is not Egyptian enough for me and since Magnus' story is actually a nod to the Osiris myth, it deserves all the good references I can think of. Explanation under the cut.
In Ancient Egyptian mythology, the god Osiris was a king betrayed by his brother Seth. He was murdered, dismembered, and his body scattered across the land. His wife Isis gathered the pieces and restored him, but he could not return to the world of the living. Instead, he became a god of an underworld kingdom.
And Osiris wore a crown with ostrich feathers, yeah. But it's not just that!!! They are a symbol of his kingship, but they are also connected to the feather of Maat. In the Hall of Judgement, the heart of the diseased was weighted against the feather of Maat. If the heart is lighter, the soul passes into the afterlife, and if it isn't, the person is to be devoured by the soul-eater Ammit.
Maat means cosmic order, truth, justice, the balance to be maintained by the king. All those cool pyramids were built by the Ancient Egyptians to maintain Maat.
I think it would be very ironic for Magnus to wear ostrich feathers. His heart is certainly not lighter than a feather, but he was and still is even in 40k a sort of messianic figure. The concept of Maat is connected with the Egyptian civilization itself, that Egypt was The side of order and truth and balance, and everybody else was a barbarian and a child of chaos (lol). Dressing yourself in the symbol of your own future damnation while thinking it's the symbol of your efforts toward humanity's unification sounds perfect for Magnus.
I wish that more people knew at least something about Iranian culture bc Ahriman being Persian is an untapped potential for infinite comedy.
His Primarch's name is Magnus. Magnus is literally just "Magus" with an N. And majus (مجوس) is literally an Arabic anti-Persian slur. It comes from the Persian majūs, a Zoroastrian priest. Means "fire-worshipper" and implies that a person is not a real Muslim. Still used against Shi'a Muslims and Iranians in general as an ethnic slur today.
Imagine you're a space marine with an American cowboy aesthetic. You finally get reunited with your Primarch and his fucking name is Mikey Mouse McYankee. This is so bad that this is actually very funny.
I promised that I would draw anything for anybody who writes Ahriman/Astraeos so here's Khayon because @bloodmech loves Khayon (btw my offer still stands).
I have a very niche poetic association with Khayon. He reminds me of an anecdote about a dervish, from Haft Awrang, or Seven Thrones by the Persian poet Jami (1414–1492). The story and explanation of why the hell would I even compare Khayon to a dervish is under the cut. This is sort of meta post, bc I talk about symbolism in both Khayon's story and my art.
In that anecdote, an old Sufi dervish attempts to court a beautiful young man inside a hammam. As the young man has his head shaved, the dervish collects every strand of the hair, which falls to the floor. Following this and other courting efforts attempted by the dervish, the youth eventually says: ‘Die before me, so that I may notice you’. The dervish accordingly drops dead, but later appears to the young man in a dream to rebuke him for not noticing him even after death. Shaken by the apparition, the young man casts off his fine clothes and, to amend for his sin, goes on the hajj, or pilgrimage, every year and rubs his face on the grave of the dead dervish.
Khayon is that dervish to me, and the beautiful youth who doesn't care is Abaddon off course. I don't think he would go on a hajj for Khayon, but you get what I mean. Khayon doing whatever he's doing under Inquisition's custody is him dropping dead on the spot for beloved's attention. So, that's why Khayon is holding a red strand of hair in my pic. It's Abaddon's, and it references this story.
Why a dervish? Well, because a dervish is a mystic who renounced the world. A sorcerer is also a mystic, and Khayon did renounce his previous allegiances. A dervish often carries an axe, the tabarzin, and Khayon also carries an axe in canon. A dervish belongs to an order, often a militant one, bound by oaths of loyalty that supersede blood. Khayon's order is the Black Legion, and his oath is to the Warmaster. And a dervish, especially in the Malamatiyya tradition, sometimes does insane and self-destructive things as a form of spiritual practice — acts that look like sin or madness to outsiders, but which are, to the dervish, a stripping-away of ego. Khayon's ego is a strange thing, it is vast and it is absent. He is theatrical and annoying. He is powerful enough to bind daemons and destroy worlds, and he has given all of that power to a man who will never say thank you. He is telling his story from an Inquisition dungeon, and still he speaks of Abaddon with something that sounds like affection.
My choice of clothing for him is off course symbolic. The outer robe is black, inlaid with Arabic calligraphy in gold, those are the colors of the Black Legion, and the official colors of the Abbasid court where a poet survives by pleasing the caliph (you all owe me because I didn't put some sort of a pun with "Abbasid" and "Abaddon" in here lmao). But inside the robe, the fabric is blue, like that of the Legion he left but cannot forget. And beneath that, against his skin, is a shirt of red, the original color of the Thousand Sons before the Heresy, the color they wore when they were still loyal, innocent, whole. Khayon has layered his identities in reverse chronological order: present on the outside, past closest to the heart.
It's very interesting that Khayon's name is Iskandar. It is Alexander, a conqueror's name, but also a name that belongs to many cultures: Greek, Arabic, Persian, Turkic and countless more. It is not an ancient Egyptian name like many of the other Prosperine Thousand Sons. It is cosmopolitan, more modern, unmoored from a single origin. Khayon is not stuck in the past, he has left the 15th. He joined the Black Legion, the most diverse and heterogeneous of the Traitor Legions. He is a man who builds new connections because the old ones are ash, and the name says so before he opens his mouth.
Some of the Egyptian motifs in the piece are drawn from Muslim Egypt, not only the Pharaonic past, and this was a deliberate choice. There is the Egypt of pyramids and gods, and there is the Egypt of mosques and courts, of Sufi orders and caliphal intrigue, of Arabic poetry and Mamluk warriors. And in my humble opinion, Khayon belongs more to the latter. He is a creature of the court, not the temple.
In Islamic tradition, Khayon's familiar, the wolf, carries a double meaning: it is a symbol of tribal loyalty and solidarity, but also a symbol of lies and deception. Gyre is both of these things at once — a companion whose loyalty is absolute, and a creature whose existence is a kind of untruth, because it is a daemon bound into a shape that does not belong to it. Khayon himself is the same: fiercely loyal, yet fundamentally deceptive.
So, yeah, if you pile up all those things together, it makes a lot of sense for him to be both Arabic and Pharaonic. Also, I gave him a darker skintone because I think he has more vitality than other TS and he isn't a loser who sits in the library all day, Khayon may be a theater kid, but he's still a jock. Didn't want to make him look too well dressed either because duh, have you ever seen a jock who's too well dressed? He looks garish on purpose because that's just how Khayon behaves.
Now somebody please tell me I'm not the only person insane enough to think about mad dervishes and Abbasid court when looking at Khayon.
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