#Lebanon "for the 1st time can control its borders"? @MlongdenUK must have landed in Lebanon very fresh w/o doing him homework. Lebanon needs medicine & electricity not 100 armed vehicles to a 50.000 @LebarmyOfficial who spend wild of the country's

THREAD.

In analysing the Afghan political spectrum something becomes obvious: Kabul's base is far more diverse than the Taliban's. For simplicity's sake, I'll count stronger opposition toward the Taliban than Kabul as 'pro Kabul'.

Let's assess these generally. Exceptions apply.

A diverse base isn't necessarily, however, a good thing. Appealing to everyone ensures you appeal to no one, or that your support base is so fractured that it actually becomes a liability. Think of Clinton losing the Democrat majority in Congress being a blessing in disguise.

Some pro-Kabul groupings:

1) ethnonationalists of all ethnicities. Whilst the non-Pashtuns amongst them aren't pro-Ghani, they're pro-Kabul as an institution; they see it as far more representative and amenable to their interests than the Taliban.

Some Pashtun nationalists do support the Taliban (majority Pashtun) but these are a minority. The biggest blemishes on the Taliban's Pashtun credentials:

a) The Taliban/Pakistan relationship
b) their overt Islam, which many Pashtun nationalists are hostile toward.

2) The enlightened 'roshan-fikr' demographic

Liberals/seculars. Not much intro needed: progress, freedom, spectacular gains of the last 19 years, women's rights et cetera. You generally notice quite an anti-Islam, wholesale adoption of War on Terror rhetoric in their rationale.

1 So, today we turn to early Islamic Beirut. what do we know of the earliest times of #Beirut under early Islamic rule, starting with the #conquest. How and when did Beirut enter the emerging Muslim empire? -rm

2 Let’s start with traditional sources for the early Islamic period. Of those, only al-Balādhurī (d. ca. 892), the Abbasid scholar, is informative. Other Muslim and non-Muslim sources including al-Ṭabarī's Tārīkh are silent on the matter.-rm

3 In his small tome, Futūḥ al-Buldān, al-Balādhurī tells his readers: “After the conquest of Damascus, Yazīd came to Sidon, ʿArqa, Byblos, and Beirut which lie on the sea coast with his brother Muʿāwiya leading the van of the army.”-rm

4 Hence, the men who conquered Beirut were Yazīd b. Abī Sufyān (d. 639) and his half-brother and future caliph Mu‘āwiya (r. 661-680). The date of the conquest of the coast falls between 636 and 639 at the latest, the date of the death of Yazīd in the plague of Emmaus. -rm

5 Yazīd and the Muslim army likely took the coastal road to Beirut, a path taken by numerous armies before. They would have either swung from Damascus to Baalbek through the Hims gap to ‘Arqa, then Byblos, crossed the Dog River, and arrived at the eastern side of Beirut.

[Thread]What makes a hadith authentic? The basics of #HadithLiteracy

Five criteria must be met for a hadith to be classed as authentic.
1. Morally upright narrators
2. Precision in transmission
3. Connected chain
4. Free from inconsistencies with other reports
5. Solitary reports must be free from reasons for suspicion

The first three of these deal with internal defects. The remaining two deal with external (or ‘hidden’) defects. The objective of these criteria is to ensure there be no chance of forgeries and to mitigate against the likelihood of errors in reports.

1) All narrators must be morally upright and known for their honesty. This is to eliminate all chances of deliberate lies in the name of the Prophet ﷺ. A morally upright Muslim would never lie about Allah and His Messenger ﷺ.

2) Precision in transmission is likewise necessary to mitigate against unintended mistakes. An upright narrator with weak memory, for instance, might not consciously lie but is nonetheless prone to erring when conveying a report.