endless forms most beautiful

call me aya 🖤 20's 🖤 shaam born, gulf raised 🖤 any pronouns 🖤 ancestor worship & animism 🖤 ex-muslim pagan 🖤 terfs, anti-theists, and zionists are not welcome here

[wathanism]

hello hello ❤ your local arab pagan here. my name's aya. this blog has kinda gone through a few changes, but mainly i'm here to be very arab and very pagan in everyone's faces, and that means a lot of politics. i also semi-often talk about science, specifically my field of biology and how scientific language is misused to further reactionary political agendas (see my #scientific racism tag).

what to expect on here:

wathanist practice ⁠— i.e. the pagan religion of the pre-islamic arabs. i'm still new to this practice and will figure out step by step what that looks like for me! currently i'm interested in animism, ancestor work, sun/nature worship, tarot, & djinncraft.

swana politics & anti-colonialism ⁠— i follow the old gods as a proud arab and as a way to decolonize my mind. while that is of course spiritual, it's also largely political. advocating for the rights and freedoms of all swana people (arabs and non-arabs alike) is inseparable from my religion. this also means advocating for reparations and accountability; i'm not denying the very real harm that has been caused by arabs and i believe it's our spiritual and moral duty to give reparations for that harm.

arabic literature, history, & culture ⁠— like i said, this blog is an expression of love for my people and all the beautiful things we bring to this world. my arabic is rusty, but i'm getting back into it!

what not to expect:

don't expect even the slightest tolerance for right-wing, centrist, zionist, or radfem ideology. just to get it out of the way: black & indigenous lives matter, trans rights are human rights, love is love, no human is illegal, forced birth is femicide, free palestine, prisons are obsolete, capitalist greed is the root of climate change, science is real, get fucking vaccinated. not one of these things is negotiable. only commies beyond this point, xoxo.

don't expect any tolerance for islamophobia. i'm an ex-muslim, and while i do have boatloads of religious trauma, i think the vitriol you'll see in ex-muslim communities online only opens people up to reactionary and right wing politics. i want my blog to be a place for muslims, and i also want it to be a space for ex-muslims to feel supported and validated without being pushed into harmful ideologies.

don't expect any tolerance of antisemitism. i'm a firm anti-zionist and i'm well aware that false claims of antisemitism are being weaponized right now, but it's on us to make sure we don't fall into "the jews control the world" conspiracies. i'm for a multicultural one-state solution.

just bc i don't fuck with islamism does NOT mean i support anti-theism. i am a deeply religious & spiritual person, so don't expect me to be on your side if you think all religion is evil. and definitely don't expect me to be on your side if you think islam, christianity, or judaism are uniquely evil religions.

[cbturkan]

Antique bookshop from Cukurcuma, Istanbul

Instagram

[edwordsmyth]

Yahya Sinwar

[hyperions-fate]

Shatt al-Arab Gardens, Basrah, Iraq (1957).

[ouroborosmoons]

Iranian lights his cigarette on a burning Israel flag. Seen in Tehran last night. (x)

[afroobeans]

Kashan, Iran – 1989: Women weaving Persian carpets by hand, preserving centuries of tradition. source

[shadeslayer]

art by Tima Lotah Link (Chumash) for the Native Voices 16th Annual Short Play Festival

"merciless indian savages" is a direct quote from the US declaration of independence, and this is referencing the art of "manifest destiny" as a white woman standing over the us countryside

[recuperationdisliker]

really what it comes down to with "third world countries are so homophobic and transphobic" is like:

this is not categorically true (see: cuba)

the imperial core isn't all that great either, quite frankly (see: usa)

sometimes a big part of the reason these values exist in a given country outside the imperial core is because of colonialism and imperialism having exported a specific view of gender relations (see: uganda)

you did not arrive at this conclusion neutrally. you have been trained to distrust racialised people in order to divide the working class.

[wathanism]

5. we were making substantial social progress completely on par with (or even exceeding) western nations, before the empire funded extremist groups and regime changes leading to the sort of political instability that stifles social progress and gives rise to fascism (see: the entire SWANA region)

[teaboot]

Not pertinent to anything in particular but I do think it's kinda weird that we keep depicting cavemen in media crawling around on all fours covered in dirt with tangled, matted hair, speaking in broken, cobbled-together toddler language when like.

They were us.

Like literally genetically they were US, just like. A while ago.

Like

Would you trust a TV caveman with a baby? Probably not

A real life caveman though??? I think they'd be at least okay at it

[sheilikhal]

This is actually really important and comes up in Anthropology classes all. The. Time.

As long as homo sapiens have existed, we have had the same emotional and mental capacity as you and I do today. You nailed it. They were US. Even Neaderthals existed alongside and had offspring with Homo Sapiens for many thousands of years.

There's much evidence that cavemen would have had complex spoken language, culture (learned information passed down), symbolic interpretation, and I think they most certainly would have been able to handle holding a baby. In fact I have my suspicisions that an ancient homo sapiens mother may be a more present, attentive, and knowledgable mom than I could be today.

Do not let media trick you into believing we are the pinnacle of humanity. Unilinial evolution theory (google it quick I beg) is BUNK, GARBAGE, and the root of so much evil.

We've been human for a long, long time, and we are not inherently better than all those who came before.

[fresne999]

One the most profound experiences of my life was visiting Font de Gaume, which has 12 thousand year old paintings. They use a technique where the horses appeared to run across the wall when seen in flickering firelight. There was a bison the wall staring at us with such attitude, I could practically hear him. I had the most profound feeling of those ancient artists reaching forward to lay their hands on my shoulders. To say, "This was my world." It was a profoundly moving experience.

Some years later, I went to the Orkney islands where we visited a tiny family run museum of artifacts from the chambered tomb at the other end of the farm. They handed me a pestle once held by some neolithci human.They'd worn groves where the thumb and forefinger would be for better grip.

[cymbie8]

One time, in a French history class, my teacher randomly at the end of the class had all of us draw a sketch of a horse. And we were all like ??? Okay???

At the beginning of the next class, my teacher showed us a cave painting of a horse. And then he showed all of our horses, which he had scanned and put into the presentation.

He then pointed out all the ways that our horses looked similar to the prehistoric horse. Same features, drawn from the same angle, etc.

And then he asked us, "Isn't it cool that you draw horses the same way as someone who lived 20,000 years ago?"

Yeah. That stuck with me for a while.

[catgirlthecrazy]

In Spain, there's a cave full of ancient, ice age era drawings of bison and reindeer and other animals of that period... And one small section of chaotic scribbles just a little away from everything else. These scribblesv were so incomprehensible, they were originally just called the 'Panel of Enigmatic Signs'... Until it occurred to someone that drawings only three feet off the ground probably weren't made by adults.

Scientists are now pretty sure the scribbles were made by kids ages 3-6, more or less on their own. The adult cave artists were probably doing what any modern parent might do when they want to keep small children out of their hair for awhile: they gave the kids some drawing tools of their own and a small section of wall to work on, out of the way but still close enough to keep an eye on them, and let them have at it.

What's most charming about the whole thing is the way the cave scribbles look exactly like what you'd find on the wall of a preschool today. Artistic styles vary widely across different times and cultures, but child development is as near to a universal human experience as it gets.

[mikkeneko]

Wisher made detailed 3D scans of the drawings, which helped her understand the uneven pressure applied to the charcoal and the direction the lines were drawn. The team then compared the panel’s composition with age-appropriate artistic efforts by modern children. Kids across cultures go through the same developmental stages, which influence their physical ability to draw, until about the age of 6, Amir notes.

The team compared the ancient art with the developmental stages exhibited by modern children: the furiously scribbled circles and push-pull lines typical of 3-year-olds just learning to control their bodies, for example, or the wobbly, right-angled figures of slightly older kids beginning to master fine motor skills.

Both are apparent in the cave, superimposed on each other as though two or more kids were drawing at once. That’s a clue the Las Monedas marks were likely made by “siblings or a mixed-age play group within the sphere of safety around adults, but also within their own space,” says co-author Felix Riede, an Aarhus archaeologist.

...

Adults at Las Monedas would have been aware of what the kids were doing and presumably had lit fires or torches; without ample firelight the cave is pitch black.

[lilkakow]

“Your government won’t last that long” - smiling Võ Thi Thang says to US-backed regime judge in response to 20 year prison sentence

[kaalbela]

Shopkeepers of Lebanon, a series by Elie Yobeid.

[themaniacisinthemailbox]

[gaysie]

headline from the nature briefing today / Map of the World, seperis

[faantasizee]

Lovebirds

[mskingbeann]

every time a country is invaded by the US under the excuse of “rescuing” its people, what’s left behind is either a cemetery or an open air asylum.

there isn’t a single case in history where the US actually saved a country from anything, what they did leave behind, consistently, were stolen resources, exploited land, and futures permanently scarred by military dictatorships.

what the US does in the middle east is widely known, what many people still don’t fully grasp is what they’ve done and continue to do in latin america.

they funded, trained, and supported military dictatorships across most of the region, and they infiltrated our cultures in a calculated, orchestrated way that still shapes us today.

to my LATAM stay strong cuz we’re going to need it in the years ahead.

[redstonedust]

you'll spend so long in deep discussions of gender online and then go talk to someone in your real life family and find out they still havent gotten past "women can be good at things" and its like oh okay jesus christ i forgot some people are still on the baby steps huh

[thererisesaredstar]

U.S. Imperialism Get Out

Emory Douglas (1960s)