quod vide

A friend of mine used to wander through history by following each q.v. in an enyclopaedia or historical dictionary. Each q.v. would lead to another entry, which would lead to another, and so on. Of course, these days q.v. has been largely replaced by the hyperlink. (Interestingly, while Wikipedia has a disambiguation page for QV, from which one can go to Cross-reference, that entry covers cross-referencing in hypertext.)

Last night I was struggling to get to sleep, and I decided (once again) to pick up a dry and difficult book. My choice was History of the Arabs by Philip K Hitti. However, the page I randomly opened it at (towards the end of the chapter on Abbasid society) was not dry at all. The paragraph I read was incredibly interesting, and nearly every line contained references that made me want to learn more. So today, just to satisfy my curiosity, I decided to add all the links I wanted when reading it in the book:

One of the most remarkable features of Christianity under the caliphs was its possession of enough vitality to make it an aggressive church, sending its missionaries as far as India and China. Al-Nadim reports an interesting interview which he himself held with one such missionary returned from China, whom he met in the Christian quarter of Baghdad. The famous stela at Sian Fu, China, erected in 781 to commemorate the names and labours of sixty-seven Nestorian missionaries, together with the affiliation of the Christian church in India, that of the “Christians of St Thomas” in Malabar on the south-west coast, with the patriarchate in Baghdad, bear witness to the evangelistic zeal of the East Syrian Church under the Moslems. It is also recognized that the existing characters of Mongol and Manchu are lineal descendants of the original Uighurian forms, which were certainly derives from the Syriac alphabet as used by the Nestorians.

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On the subject of how one acquires information and ideas, The Economist has an interesting new site called Thinking Space that is worth a look:

The Economist Thinking Space asks people…where do you get your ideas? We invite you into the lives of some of our European Economist readers – it opens the door to their ‘thinking space’. Our diverse range of influential personalities share their thoughts, ideas, parts of their lives and the role The Economist plays in it. Users are also able to upload and tag images of their own spaces, to allow the site to become more inclusive and to grow, breaking away from the brand’s historical exclusivity.