you mentioned on your toreador post that you were taking requests and also you mentioned the malkavians, so I’m curious how you’d interpret them. how would they fit into the ashirra? would their tendency towards prophecy and mysticism lead them to Sufism like the toreadors or do they have something else going on?
I think fundamentally, Ashirra Malkavians aren't that much different from others. West Asia wasn't backwards when it came to mental health at all, scientists of Islamic Golden Age wrote very extensively on the topic. Ibn Sina and Al-Razi described what we would call mania, depression and psychosis today, and distinguished between melancholia and madness. The oldest manuscript on bipolar disorder, "Treatise on Melancholy", was written in 10th century by Ibn Imran. If anything, Golden Age Ashirra should be better than Camarilla, not worse. The stygmatizing, institutional model we know today comes from Western colonial powers.
The first archetype that comes to my mind when thinking of Ashirra Malks is a dervish who appears to be mad, yeah. The Malamatiyya are a perfect fit, they cultivated blame ("malama") as a spiritual discipline and broke conventions to humble their ego and root out hypocrisy. But that can't be all ofc.
I think a good angle for an Ashirra chronicle is the question whether vampirism, and therefore Malkavian affliction, is a physical sickness or a test from God. The region has strong arguments for both positions, since it's deeply religious and has a history of scientific discoveries that were centuries ahead of Europe. Islam as a whole is less hostile to the supernatural, the Quran and Hadith very explicitly recognize the Jinn as sentient creatures who are capable of both good and evil, so it is not a stretch to think of vampires who don't want to part with their Muslim identity. Yet, even those of Muslim identity understand the importance of scientific method. A potential story hook is a Golden Age scientist trying to study the supernatural and cure a Malkavian of their affliction. Characters don't know that they're characters in a ttrpg and that the affliction isn't gonna go away. I'm always against giving characters too much info about the world, there is no worldwide understanding of vampiric condition, clans and the patriarchs in my headcanons. Everything is regional and viewed from the lenses that sound the most normal to the time of somebody's embrace. There's another post about Ashirra as a whole if you're interested.
There's a very interesting but often ignored religious concept of predestination, and I speak about Malkavians as much as about vampires as a whole bc they are linked in this. Keep in mind that this is a Sunni belief. Think of God like someone watching a movie for the second time, He already knows exactly what will happen on screen, but the characters are still making their choices for the first time. Nothing about this belief is evil, it still assumes that individuals have free choice. But in certain people, this belief sometimes becomes very ugly. A vampire might attribute everything bad that happened to them to God, that He already knows that the vampire in question is irredeemably evil and is punishing them accordingly. It must hit Malkavians harder bc they have been punished twice, with vampirism and mental illness. This is not a mainstream Sunni belief, this is actually a major sin (despairing of God's mercy), but it might be a belief some characters genuinely hold. It is also possible for an individual Malkavian to seek purification and even martyrdom, if they believe their condition to be a spiritual test.
Modern nights should be especially bad for Malks bc they often treat religious and scientific as incompatible. OCD-like compulsion could create a lot of inner conflict because of the concept of waswasa, the whispers of doubt. They really could think Shaitan is talking to them. Or other characters who know about their compulsion might think this way. Though once again, this is not the opinion of the majority. I just think it's a great theme to explore.
VtM doesn't understand how history works, my biggest gripe is with Kindred having a unified opinion on themselves, their clans and progenitors, when realistically, people shouldn't know shit about Malkav. A Kindred from 8th century Baghdad might believe that Malkav was a man of black bile and extreme humours disbalance, and a Kindred from a 13th century Persian Sufi order might believe Malkav was a saint who cloaked himself in madness to protect his station from worldly fame. And a Salafi Kindred might believe that Malkav is Dajjal, the false messiah who will be slain by Prophet Isa at the end of times. The pragmatic view from any rural area of any time and place might be that Malkav is a powerful Jinn who was bound by a sorcerer or a saint, and his madness is simply his nature bleeding into his host. I think WoD's lore about the Jinn is cringe and irl Jinn are more interesting and do more justice to the region. A modern secularist Kindred might think Malkav was a man with a severe neurological condition mythologized by pre-scientific age, and that vampirism itself is a virus. Any esoteric Kindred might think that Malkav witnessed the cosmic truth of the world and had his mind shattered. This type of Kindread will certainly treat ravings as coded revelations.
The best Ashirra companions for a Malkavian character, imo, are Banu Haqim, Toreadors and Lasombra. BH can be both compassionate scientists and extremists wanting to destroy them, Toreadors are more likely to treat them as humans and not a walking proof of any philosophical concept, since their main concern is beauty, and Lasombra have great potential for an esoteric approach. Zahir/Batin dichotomy (outer and hidden meaning) works very well with Lasombra's theme of darkness, also black is a Shia color, and the color of Abbasid court.
Canon and fanon love to depict friendship between Malks and Nosferatu, and I would strongly advise against that. Nosferatu being an Ashirra leader is honestly laughable in itself. Inner virtue compensating for outer deformity is a Protestant trope, it has little place in Ashirra. In Islam, especially so in Persianate world, beauty isn't a mask for virtue, it's virtue made visible. The Sufi tradition held that divine beauty manifests in the physical world, and ugliness, by contrast, was seen as a sign of spiritual ugliness and a distance from God.
Nosferatu look like shit, it would make more sense for them to be called najis, ritual impurity, than respected for inner virtue. If a Nosferatu has permanent wounds festering with pus, they're perpetually unclean and exiled from religious community. Their prayer doesn't count bc they can't perform wudu, ritual ablution, this is much darker and existential than western "woe is me, I'm ugly". A Malamati-like Malkavian might be friends with a Nosferatu, but that would be a minority stance. I think most would rather not make their social position worse. Btw Nosferatu are better to be associated with the ghoul, the actual middle eastern "vampires". They're the Jinn that haunt deserts and graveyards, feed on corpses and turn into hyenas or young and attractive men and women to lure people to their deaths. Works well with their animalism and mask of a thousand faces.
If you want darker stuff, check the monastery of St Anthony of Qozhaya in Lebanon and its cave of the mad (people were chained in a cave in expectation that the saint will come and cure them). Also you can check mad caliph Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah for inspiration, he's called the Fatimid Nero for his insane decrees. You can even make him a vampire or related to supernaturals in any other way since he disappeared under mysterious circumstances. For a time he forced Cairo to sleep during the day and work during the night. Holy fools are called majdhub, they were very common in Syria and Egypt between 16th and 18th century, a holy fool Malkavian might be an advisor who is allowed to call out the local leader on their bullshit and survive that only because of their holy fool status. But perhaps the most interesting idea is to divorce Malkavians from the western idea of mental illness altogether, and to make them truly Islamic by basing their affliction on stories like the one about the love between Majnun and Layla. Majnun literally means "madman" and "Jinn-possessed". He is a man consumed by emotion so vast and overwhelming that it breaks the frame of ordinary human existence, his madness is a state of transient divine ecstasy he can't contain. So a Malkavian can be Majnun, whether in love with his Layla, God, an idea or a place, and the love unmakes them in a way that looks like madness to others. There are several degrees of love in Sufi tradition, ishq is the one that overwhelms all reason.
There could be lots of interesting conflicts on the topic whether Malkavian ravings are false gospel, glimpses of ghayb, the unseen world, or bad brain chemistry, and since I don't want Ashirra to be Camarilla but with turbans and set in Cairo, that's what I would focus on. The most Islamic concept of a Malkavian character to me is an Umayyad era official who fell in love with a Christian nun from Jerusalem, walked into the desert bc of his obsession and got embraced there. An ancient, half-mythical figure who appears in Ashirra cities to deliver cryptic prophecies of doom sounds cool as fuck to me.
gracieabrams
