Yared

She's nice. She's older than you, too! My poor, little yared taken advantage of by a mature woman! Horrible! :shame:

why?
Anyway, is she your "mother" in facebook? Magdalena?

OK... why are you keeping it secret?

done!

Hi

Whatever you want to tell me... I'm not looking for any specific information, I just want to keep in touch with you, I want you to be my friend and so on
Hm... what's your name?

Bye, Squonk

Stalker! Just re-shaved it, very punk that the moment!

Thankyou, she is lush.. shame she is a zillion miles away on the wrong side of the planet (or more that case, I am!)


NZ is well, okish. My job is pretty lame.. so i'm often wondering WTH im doing this for.. it makes me unenthusiastic about travelling.. which is silly. I hope it proves a lot more fun than i currently worry it will be.

Where is the world are you?

Hi

Tell me sth about your gf, then

Bye

I demand you have a conversation with me since you seem to have so many with other people!

Also, join my new game on CFC, it will be a blast!

Oh, gosh. Sorry, that question is more personal than I care to answer. Let's just say that I'm old-fashioned and believe that some things are best left for married people, 'k?

Any romance in my life is purely a figment of my mother's imagination. Honestly, there was a time when I was getting serious about a guy, but we finally had a talk and decided that we valued our friendship too much to risk it due to a romance not working out. That was back in the '90s, and there hasn't been anyone since - for me, anyway.

Nobody in particular right now. I don't tend to think of my friends in terms of male or female - they're just friends. The only time I have to be careful is if the friend is male and married - some women get irritated if their husbands don't pay 100% of their waking attention to them, so even a casual conversation is sometimes hard to have.

Hi

It's sad you didn't find anyone to relate to in your primary school. I'm sure it will be different in the secondary school.It's good that you have self-confidence and aspire for something. I hope you won't be disappointed - when it comes to chosen school and people in it.
I also hope you have good friends outside the school circle, if even those better ones are "hardly close" ones.
Don't you think you've got bad social skills. Having bad social skills often consists mostly of thinking one's got bad social skills.

Bye

How is your school? Do you have many friends? Will you miss them in your secondary school? Do you have to pass exams to your secondary school? do you chose it, or are you assigned to one automatically?

So you do go to school and not only sit at home

Why would you think I'm an Armenian?

Abbasids were originally supported by shiites, but turned against them. X-XI century is shiite hayday, as only Spain, Central Asia and muslim India were ruled clearly by sunnites. It's fairly interesting: shiite Buwayhides actually captured Baghdad and had the (sunni) caliph in their power, but they've decided it would be more useful for them to keep him then to replace him with a sunni one - especially since the last, 12th, imam, disappeared earlier, so there was no clear answer to who would be the caliph. So they didn't really use their power to make the population shia, and I believe people were more "confesionalised", they were already more aware of their denomination than they were in earlier centuries.

I'm a Pole, but my grand-grandmother was Armenian, and my grandfather used to pray in the armenian-catholic church.

OK, but you didn't answer my question: why don't you attend a secondary school?

Bye

Hi

It's hard to tell if majority was sunni or shia. The divide was political rather than religious at the beginning anyway. But I guess shiites were minority if not from the beginning, definitely since XI century onwards. Their problem was that the official power was in the hands of sunnis, so majority of people turned that way.

And some of the ismailites created Fatimid caliphate, ruled by people claiming to be descendants of Isma'il, thus of Muhammad, his daughter Fatima (hence the name), and Ali, her husband. Their country was created in what nowdays is Tunisia, but at some point they controled entire Northern Africa, Sicily, Palestine, Jordan, Hijaz, Lebanon, Syria. When they conquered Egypt, they moved their capital to a city they founded there: Cairo. They also established there the fameous Al-Azhar university.

Fatimid theology, like ismaili theology in general, became a bit "heretical" from sunni point of view. In result, they were quite tolerant to all religions and denominations. It was changed for some time under the said Al-Hakim, who persecuted sunnis, even more so non-muslims, and out of them christians in particular. The general view is that Al-Hakim was crazy, but my thesis aimed at finding the reasons why he persecuted christians, and why he stopped persecuting them shortly before his death.

Hi

I don't get it. You're too young to go to studies, you can't have possibly finished all the schools necessary to start university studies. So how come you can just stay at home?

Well, mr Al-Hakim was a member of the Fatimid dinasty. It's all a bit complicated. Muslims are divided into sunnites, shiites and kharigites, in general. Kharigites are very scarce nowdays, shiites are 1/5 of muslims or so. Shiites believe that Ali, Muhammad's cousin and husband of his daughter, should have been the caliph, and his descendants after him. But sometimes there were quarrels between the shiites who is the legitimate successor of Ali, the shia imam. Anyway, one of the group is 7-imamites, because they acknowledge 7 imams (while most shiites today acknownedge 12 imams), the last one being, according to them, Isma'il.

My thesis on arabic studies was more interesting, it was about persecution of christians by caliph Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah. The one that destroyed the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
Still, most people don't know who was he, you probably don't as well, so it's not anything people would flock to listen about

You are in school? I don't know anything about swedish educational system, and anyway, you're probably too young to think about studies yet. But what are you doing? what are your hobbies?

Bye

Hi

Well, I've finished arabic studies, and am doctoral student there.
But I've also finished (apart from my thesis) historical studies.
My thesis at history should be about byzantine-arab border in X century (well, exactly under Macedonian dinasty, sort of). For example, one of my ideas was the impact of climatic border on shaping the frontier. It's pretty evident when you see the map, but I also managed to find some little passages in chronicles that support my theory. But that's not enough. I had a briliant idea about the forms of the border, that it was a natural border on Taurus mountains, and condominium in Cyprus and Armenia, then it switched to a moving frontier based on forts, and then to a buffor states. Unfortunatelly, I discovered that several years ago someone else written something very similar... And it's still not enough. Nevermind.