Dropping The Mask

Arab Dark Academia✨️

Arabic dark academia

Having tea first thing in the morning, the afternoon, evening, night and whenever you have nothing to do and whenever you have everything to do

Practicing calligraphy, hoarding calligraphy pens and quills like a dragon hoards its jewels

Youre now a calligragon btw

Pretentious hand written letters

Fragments of poetry and prose on the wall

In Egypt you can buy a vintage gramophone (as far as I remember)

Wrinkling your nose at orientalists who have clearly never been anywhere near the culture they're trying to portray.

Appreciating the orientalists who have in fact been there and paint like it. (Sorry to disappoint but there were never sexy slave babes roaming the streets)

Mourning for the scholars of Al Andaluas and times when Arabic was the language of science

Arguing over e'arab (the value of a word with regard to others in the sentence) and balagha (it translates to "eloquence" but is more like a complex version of figures of speech) of words

Arabic being such a complex language you get carried away sometimes

Passing the allotted wordcount so you start going over your paper and compressing a whole sentence, consisting of a conjunction, a subject, a verb and two objects into a word in desperation

Words like فأسقيناكموه (faa'skainakumooh) meaning "and so we have let you drink it" being an example.

Tea over burning coal. Over logs (hatab) tea over bokhour/oud hits different and you know it.

Brewing coffee over low heat and humming to Layali Al Ouns

"No offense but I like real coffee" when someone mentions starbucks

Um Kulthoum and Asmahan are superior you cant change my mind.

NO I DID NOT FORGET ABDUL HALIM HAFEZ I WANTED HIM A BULLET OF HIS OWN.

Fareed al atrash concerts at 3 am.

Nothing you ever cook will be under seasoned.

Reciting poetry to yourself in the mirror

Big chunks of jewelry (usually gold) engraved or woven through with intricate patterns and swirls. Wearing four bracelets in one hand is absolutely fine and under dressing is a myth

Owning swords is not out of fashion (ancient arabs were well known for their swordsmanship) but using them is, unfortunately <3

Wondering how they won wars with these swords. I couldn't even lift it enough to stab myself if I wanted

Extra names. People called شهد honey (shahd), جمال beauty (jamal), زهرة flower (zahra), ليلى night (laila), سماء sky (samaa), مهند/سيف sword (mohanad/saif) and صفاء purity (safaa) like it's the most normal thing in the world (which it should be, along with names of ancient gods)

Poetry from the abbasid era describing palaces and fountains and music so eloquently your heart skips several beats and you wonder how it is still beating at all and if, after all, you have been born in the wrong era.

Classic poetry from the school of Apollo brimming with romance and yearning you have never seen matched.

Poems that tear at your heart and stitch it whole with every bayt (verse? The equivalent for it) and you keep coming back for more.

Stories so well told that you swear you can see the princes and charmers and musicians and dancers all flicker to life in the flames before you

Historical masjids and churches.

Going to the palaces and shrines and towers from the ancient days of yore

Not exclusively (as neither is anything on this list) arabic but BRAIDS and braid jewellery that clinks when you shake your head

The unwavering belief that poetry is meant to be sung.

Singing poetry because it is meant to be sung

Thick eyebrows

Lining already lash lined eyes with kohl.

Beautiful brown eyes. Honey eyes. Chocolate eyes. Freshly turned earth eyes. Eyes that hold all the ethereal beauty of the world.

Hair styled in dark, thick curls or braids

Savouring the way the words move around from your throat to your chest to the tip of your tongue, like liquid gold,

The sweet music from the strings of a qitharah (string instrument)

Scented candles are cute, but have you ever heard of oud (perfume infused wood)? Anyhow one of my Sudanese friends make it AND IT IS BEAUTIFUL.

Wanting to study with the scholars of baghdad and azhar so bad

Recognizing that for all your culture, some of it is inspired by others and that's okay.

Please add what you can to this list. It is far from complete.

In India’s Thar Desert, nomads rely so much on camels for survival that the animals are revered. Livestock owners take great pride in their camels, carving intricate patterns in their fur.

The King said if Hae Soo leaves either Damiwon or the Palace, he’ll make an announcement that she poisoned the previous King. It wont be hard to catch her.

❤✨️✨️

There’s this fic on AO3 that, according to my history page, I have visited 176 times.  Which means I alone am responsible for 176 hits on that fic.  I commented on some of the chapters, but only a few, because I feel like a stalker when I comment every week.  I gave it kudos, but I can only give it one, even though it’s one of my favorites.

So just remember, when you’re looking at that hit count and wondering why you don’t have that same number of kudos (divided by the number of chapters, because each one of those also counts as a hit), it might be because some people out there love your fic.  They read it when they’re feeling down.  They open it in the waiting room at the doctors office, or in the lonesome dark of night.  They turn to it in celebration when they did something right.  They open it over and over so they can send the link to their friends, or just to revisit the characters that they love.  They checked it ten times in one day, hoping that you had updated.

A disparity between hits and kudos does not mean that your readers didn’t like your fic, or that they were too lazy to hit the kudos button.  It means that some of them came back, and there’s nothing that makes me happier about my writing than that.

some of my favorite tiny love stories

Honestly that's so fuckinggg annoyinggg ughhh

whenever i click the cc button on a youtube video that clearly has a high budget and is made by a fucking studio and i see “english - auto generated” i spit daggers from my eyes and mouth at whoever decided to not pay someone to make actual captions

Jude Duarte, The Wicked King (2019) ♛ ♜ ♗ ♞

“‘For a moment,’ he says, 

‘I wondered if it wasn’t you shooting bolts at me…’

‘And what made you decide it wasn’t?’ He grins up at me.

 ‘They missed.’”

pictures like these always make me want to cry

#I wanna live here 😭😭

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