For HIST 3805 students -- the Middle East and US policy at New Year 2011

Two informed summaries.

From the Economist, America and the Middle East:

Several reasons lie behind America’s loss of potency. Some reflect changes within the Middle East. Allies such as Israel and Turkey long followed American wishes reflexively because they felt imperilled and dependent on American largesse. They have now grown too strong for that. With its thriving economy, Israel feels able to take a more independent line. Turkey has also become an economic power and its government, unlike the dictatorships elsewhere in the Middle East, is now democratic. And although the region’s two strongest states still pursue policies that dovetail with America’s, they have grown unhelpfully estranged from each other.

Other allies that once augmented American power by proxy have grown too weak to help. Oil-rich Saudi Arabia packs financial clout, but its ruling princes are ageing and absorbed by a struggle for succession. Egypt, the most populous and diplomatically agile Arab country, is also run by old men. Once they could rally Arabs behind American objectives, but the Egyptians have struggled lately even to get the two main Palestinian factions, Hamas and Fatah, to talk to each other. The Mubaraks and the Al Sauds have little impact any more on the Arab Street: “resistance” and defiance carry more appeal. “The sense of how weak we are is a factor of how weak our partners are,” says Scott Carpenter, a Bush-administration official now with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

 Fingers burned

America’s own mistakes, tactical and strategic, have speeded its decline. The failure to find banned weapons in Saddam’s Iraq and the torture at Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib have tainted America’s moral authority. The application of American firepower has, ironically, also raised the bar for defying America’s will. Iran and its allies, including Syria, Hamas and Hizbullah, the Lebanese Shia party-cum-militia, feel they can call America’s bluff because they think that, having burned its fingers in Iraq and Afghanistan, it will no longer back harsh words with invasions.

You can see how they might reach that judgment. Aside from nearly 6,000 American fatalities in Iraq and Afghanistan, the expenditure, so far, of more than $1.1 trillion on military operations in those theatres has sapped the will for more campaigns. The cost of keeping a single soldier on the ground now exceeds $500,000 a year—a strong reason for a poorer America to reduce its presence in the region.

The incoming, Tea-Party-infused Congress is likely to make things harder. Whereas rivalry between Democrats and Republicans used to end at the water’s edge, it now extends into foreign policy. Despite the ratification of the New START treaty at the end of 2010, Congress is beset by partisanship, even in petty matters. Solely because of partisan obstruction, Mr Obama has yet to secure approval for his choice of two career diplomats as ambassadors to Turkey and Syria.

America’s pro-Israel lobby shows no sign of losing strength. Jonathan Broder, foreign-affairs editor of the Congressional Quarterly, discerns an effort by Republicans to woo Jewish voters, long more supportive of Democrats, by outbidding the administration over Israel. Eric Cantor, the incoming House majority leader, has proposed moving the $3 billion annual military grant to Israel from the foreign-aid budget to the Pentagon, in effect shielding it from spending cuts. “Not only would this remove a lever for American pressure,” warns Mr Broder, “it would make us silent accomplices in the settlement process.”

However, other Washington observers lament that the lessons of failure in the Middle East have yet to be learned. “Obama said that we had not only to change the war in Iraq, but to change the mindset that led to the war, and this has not happened,” says Brian Katulis of the Centre for American Progress, a left-leaning Washington think-tank. Despite a view that soft power can be as potent as military muscle, he says, this has not translated into policy. Marc Lynch, of George Washington University, agrees: “The lesson we seem to have learned from Iraq is not, ‘Disaster, don’t do it again’, but rather, ‘Now we know how to do counterinsurgency.’”

Issander el-Amrani at the National (United Arab Emirates):

Yet, even so, there is no easy alternative to America's Middle Eastern dominion. As frustrated as they are with American policies, the WikiLeaks cables also show that the region's leaders ultimately depend on US leadership. No regional actor has the capacity to single-handedly shape the region, and despite a decline in its credibility and influence, Washington remains the indispensable actor. The question is now about its ability to deliver. The "new Middle East" that Barack Obama inherited from his predecessor has yet to take shape - its centre is congealed but not yet set - but increasingly appears to be directionless.

Washington's friends and enemies, therefore, look attentively for signals from an Obama administration midway through its first term, with enthusiasm about a less belligerent America having given way to worries about its dwindling influence. Major regional diplomatic powers that rely on their inclusion in American initiatives - Egypt's monopoly on talks with Hamas is the most flagrant example of this - worry that their own credibility will suffer from US setbacks. Gulf states that have effectively subcontracted their security to the US worry both about the risks of a regional confrontation with Iran and the weakened value of this external security guarantee. Iran, mired in domestic troubles, seeks regional prestige as Washington's challenger but its unnecessarily belligerent rhetoric reduces its margin of manoeuvre to honourably avoid a confrontation that could devastate it. Syria, disappointed by a lukewarm overture from the Obama administration as it tries to "flip" it away from Iran, plays hard to get, stretched in all directions by its multiple overlapping alliances.

 Not unlike longtime junkies, the region's actors have developed a habit - an expectation that someone else will do the dirty work of managing a fractured Middle East, so they won't have to. After the heroin hit of Bush's creative destruction, they must do with the methadone of Obama. But they are still addicted to America.

Rosie the Riveter and Geraldine Doyle

An excellent piece from the Washington Post on the facts behind the famous poster and the cello-player behind the image.

Mongol: The Rise of Genghis Khan (2007)

Every culture has its historical moments that matter a great deal to its members. The moments can be mythological: in the English-speaking world, millions care about the legend of Robin Hood and whether it reflects a historical reality.  It is hard to go broke making a movie about Robin Hood.

If the fall of the Tangut kingdom is your emotionally resonant moment in history, this is the movie for you.  A combination of Russians, Mongolians, Kazhaks,  and Germans have invested a lot of money and talent on the intuition that there are millions of moviegoers just like you.

Just in case you have never heard of the Tangut kingdom, this destruction, if you believe the movie, was the turning point in the early life of Genghis Khan. Its destruction begins and ends the movie; in between there is a rather curious account of the early years of the great conqueror, when he is repeatedly betrayed, defeated, robbed of all his meager wealth, and enslaved. The only positive elements in the story are his relationship with his wife, and his relationship with a blood brother who is not always on his side.  Oh, he is also faithful to the Mongol code, which other people give lip service to but ditch whenever it is convenient. Thus Temugin's (Genghis' ) rough early years. He plays by the rules, everybody else cheats. But don't worry, he will undoubtedly return in a later movie (if financing is available) to teach the Mongols law.  In the meantime, he looks soulful, and does not send away his wife, whom he chose when he was nine, even though there is a reasonable doubt about the paternity of her son. (She was kidnapped by his enemies and who knows what happened then.)

A whole bunch of cultural buttons are being pushed here, but if you're not a Central Asian it's not exactly clear what they are.

This may come across as a negative review, but actually it is a well made movie. It's just not Robin Hood.   For the non-Central Asians among us, the most remarkable feature of the film may be the vast landscapes which fill the screen for the entire two hours.

 Images:  top, Temugin, played by the big Japanese star Tadanobu Asano;  bottom, the Tangut kingdom (Western Xia), shown in green.

Actually cutting and pasting

Grad student Tanya Roth, no stranger to the tools of the computer age, sometimes takes out the scissors and starts hacking away:

My grad school colleagues know me as someone who uses a number of digital processes for the dissertation project. ...

Maybe that’s why my advisor seemed surprised when I told her about my other hacking process…the literal cut-and-paste process I use when I’m editing chapters. This is the part where I hack the printed pages into pieces... I fell into this practice as a college freshman when I took my school’s comp 101 class. Back then, it was just a 10-page paper, but it worked. I cut the draft into paragraphs, numbered each, and wrote notes on the sides of each paragraph – sometimes editing sentences, but other times just noting what the theme of the paragraph was so I could rearrange content more effectively.

I did the same for my undergrad thesis, and the whole process has reemerged periodically during the dissertation stages. For all my digital processes, I can’t deny that this cutting and pasting works for me: it gives me the ability to visualize the whole piece a little better because I can see more than just one or two pages on the screen. I can try out what it will look like/sound like to rearrange paragraphs.

There's more, in this post and in others.

I like the idea of seeing the whole chapter laid out:

I don't know if it would work for me, but it might be worth a try.

It's a Wonderful Life

A terrifying appreciation.

Excerpt from the Abstract: Outrance and Plaisance

Abstract: Outrance and Plaisance (an excerpt)

Will McLean “Outrance and Plaisance” in Journal of Medieval Military History 8 (2010): 155-170

Modern writers on medieval deeds of arms often use the term à outrance to describe combats fought “using the normal weapons of war” and à plaisance to describe combats using “specially modified weapons with sharp edges removed or blunted”.

However, during the 15th century, when the terms were most often used to describe contemporary deeds of arms, writers in Burgundy, France, Spain and England used the terms very differently. Sharp weapons of war and blunt weapons could be used in both sorts of combat. Instead, arms à outrance were distinguished by the willingness of the champions to fight until one side or the other was captured or killed, unless the judge or judges stopped the fight. This could happen either in the context of a judicial duel or a high stakes combat by mutual consent.

Arms à plaisance were less extreme, and would typically end as soon as an agreed number of blows were struck, or as soon as a combatant was carried to the ground.

The author quotes contemporary accounts of the extraordinary combats that 15th century writers described as à outrance. They show what happened in the rare cases when they were fought to the finish, as well as the less uncommon fights that were halted or proposed but not accepted. He also quotes 15th century accounts of a more limited combat à plaisance that was nonetheless fought with sharp weapons.

Combats à outrance were extraordinary events and their potential to end in legalized homicide presented the judges with a dilemma. Their response gives a measure of how extraordinary these combats were. In deciding whether and how far to allow deeds of arms to proceed under their control, rulers struck a delicate balance among competing goals: displaying their own power, fairness and authority, gratifying noble subjects, entertaining the populace and maintaining good order in their realm.

The complete abstract is here.

Image:  some are still at it.

Christmas in Egypt (not exactly "Christmas in Killarney")

  Juan Cole has the story:

Some 500,000 Christmas trees were sold this year in Egypt, an extremely mysterious statistic. The country’s Orthodox Coptic Church celebrates Christmas on January 7, considers the day distinctly less important than Easter, and does not have a tradition of Christmas trees or Santa Claus. The roughly 8 million Copts are the largest national community of Christians in the Middle East. Admittedly, there are 200,000 uniate Catholics who follow the Pope in Rome but retain their Coptic liturgy (Coptic is a late, Christian-influenced form of the old Pharaonic language of Egypt). But 200,000 is only some 40,000 families or so.

So who is buying the other 460,000 Christmas trees? Well, some are going into the country’s malls (there are now lots of malls, some of them just enormous. I was in the 5-block-long City Stars Mall in Nasr City, Cairo last May, and I swear I got lost. The modern malls put up banners saying Merry Christmas and Happy New Year for their mostly Muslim clientele! And there are a lot of resident Western expatriates in the country working for NGOs, who would buy Christmas trees (last I knew there were 17,000 contractors for US AID). And there are Christian refugees from southern Sudan (about 1 million Sudanese refugees altogether, though the Christians must be a small proportion of them).

Perhaps middle class Copts are going in for the trees in greater numbers. But the Egyptian Muslim middle and upper classes have begun celebrating Christmas, which must account for most of the rest of the Christmas trees. Mohammad El Meshed writes that Osama Abdelshafy told him, ‘ “I have been invited to at least four Christmas parties this year, and three of them are being held by Muslims. This is the first time I’ve felt such a huge emphasis on Christmas.” The Egyptian Muslim middle classes are having Christmas parties and giving gifts.

One of the things Westerners who have only swiftly gone through Egypt as tourists will not appreciate is that Egyptians have the best sense of humor in the Middle East and they love throwing parties.

True, the conservative Muslim clerics advise against commemorating Christmas, and it sends the radicals ballistic for Muslims to do so, but while many Egyptians are pious, they don’t seem to let the puritans get in the way of a good time. And, the radicals were largely repressed and defeated in the Nile Valley by the secular Egyptian state.

More here!

This blog's top 5 posts, according to Blogger stats

The legend of Saladin
Not quite Christmas, but wolves anyway
More from Kyrgyzstan
Memories of Catal Huyuk
Blue sunset?

They are all there not for my deathless prose, but for the pictures, none of which originate with me. (The wolves, alas, are no longer accessible, except by searching for the image via Google.)

Iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit's (coming) BACK!

"Christ's endangered language," Aramaic. (It may be more accurate to say it's fighting a rearguard action at Oxford.)

It is the language that Christ spoke, but is regarded as "endangered" with ever fewer scattered groups of native speakers.

But in Oxford, Aramaic has been flourishing again, with a course in the ancient language drawing people from as far afield as Liverpool and London. There are now 56 people learning Aramaic at the university, including three classics professors, solemnly completing their weekly homework tasks and regularly attending the free lunchtime lessons, more than the numbers studying Greek.

Their first lesson might have surprised the writers of the books of David and Ezra in the Bible, and of the Talmud, both originally written in Aramaic: the scholars pored over a transcription of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.

David Taylor has previously taught the language to groups of two or three people in his study, and was astounded by the turnout for his first public lesson. Though a few fell by the wayside, more than 40 stayed the course until the classes ended in time for Christmas.

More at the Guardian.

In a more Christmas-y vein

From Rebecca Solnit, at TomDispatch.com, unusual insight:

Capitalism is only kept going by this army of anti-capitalists, who constantly exert their powers to clean up after it, and at least partially compensate for its destructiveness. Behind the system we all know, in other words, is a shadow system of kindness, the other invisible hand. Much of its work now lies in simply undoing the depredations of the official system. Its achievements are often hard to see or grasp.  How can you add up the foreclosures and evictions that don’t happen, the forests that aren’t leveled, the species that don’t go extinct, the discriminations that don’t occur?

The official economic arrangements and the laws that enforce them ensure that hungry and homeless people will be plentiful amid plenty.  The shadow system provides soup kitchens, food pantries, and giveaways, takes in the unemployed, evicted, and foreclosed upon, defends the indigent, tutors the poorly schooled, comforts the neglected, provides loans, gifts, donations, and a thousand other forms of practical solidarity, as well as emotional support. In the meantime, others seek to reform or transform the system from the inside and out, and in this way, inch by inch, inroads have been made on many fronts over the past half century.

The terrible things done, often in our name and thanks in part to the complicity o our silence or ignorance, matter. They are what wells up daily in the news and atftracts our attention.  In estimating the true make-up of the world, however, gauging the depth and breadth of this other force is no less important. What actually sustains life is far closer to home and more essential, even if deeper in the shadows, than market forces and much more interesting than selfishness.

Most of the real work on this planet is not done for profit: it’s done at home, for each other, for affection, out of idealism, and it starts with the heroic effort to sustain each helpless human being for all those years before fending for yourself becomes feasible...

We not only have a largely capitalist economy but an ideological system that justifies this as inevitable. “There is no alternative,” as former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher used to like to say. Many still argue that this is simply the best human nature, nasty to the core, can possibly hope to manage.

Fortunately, it’s not true.  Not only is there an alternative, but it’s here and always has been. Recently, I had dinner with Renato Redentor Constantino, a climate and social justice activist from the Philippines, and he mentioned that he never cared for the slogan, “Another world is possible.” That other world is not just possible, he pointed out, it’s always been here.
We tend to think revolution has to mean a big in-the-streets, winner-take-all battle that culminates with regime change, but in the past half century it has far more often involved a trillion tiny acts of resistance that sometimes cumulatively change a society so much that the laws have no choice but to follow after. Certainly, American society has changed profoundly over the past half century for those among us who are not male, or straight, or white, or Christian, becoming far less discriminatory and exclusionary.

Radicals often speak as though we live in a bleak landscape in which the good has yet to be born, the revolution yet to begin. As Constantino points out, both of them are here, right now, and they always have been.  They are represented in countless acts of solidarity and resistance, and sometimes they even triumph.  When they don’t -- and that’s often enough -- they still do a great deal to counterbalance the official organization of our country and economy. That organization ensures oil spills, while the revolutionaries, if you want to call them that, head for the birds and the beaches, and maybe, while they’re at it, change the official order a little, too.

Read it all.

Nuts

From the New York Times, earlier this week:

U.S. Military Seeks to Expand Raids in Pakistan

History -- and everything academic -- is useless

So says Charlie Brooker in the Guardian, talking about British tuition increases. He's staking out the "tough love" position. An excerpt:

Take history. There's already far too much of it. In fact, mankind is generating a "past mountain", which grows 24 hours in size every single day. No one can be expected to keep all of that in their head. There simply isn't room. Even award-winning historians will be lost for words if you unexpectedly leap out in front of them and demand they list everything that happened on, say, 6 July 1919, before the special quiz music ends, especially if they thought they were alone in the house.

So instead of studying the whole of human history, why not focus on a concentrated period, such as the most exciting five minutes of the second world war? That way you just get the fun bits with the machine guns and everything, and there's none of that boring exploration of the "consequences" or the "causes" or "how we can stop it happening again"....

Rather than providing frivolous courses in artsy-fartsy-thinky-winky subjects with no obvious revenue stream, our educational institutions could save a lot of time and unnecessary expense by only providing courses that train students for jobs we're definitely going to need in the brilliant future we're steadily carving for ourselves. What's the point in learning botany? We all know there won't be plantlife. Apart from maybe the odd triffid, or whatever sort of moss can withstand a dirty bomb. So why bother learning about it? There's no money to be made.
Instead, let's focus on giving young people the skills society will be crying out for in the years or months to come. Practical vocations such as water-cannon operator, wasteland scavenger, penguin coffin logger, Thunderdome umpire, dissident strangler, henchperson and pie ingredient.
Come to think of it, even those courses are going to be costly, and the eventual wages so insultingly low it'll take them three lifetimes to repay the loans.

Thanks to Guy Halsall for the link.

Word

On speaking Klingon, or for that matter redoing A Christmas Carol in that language:

"Outsiders think it's weird," says Lawrence Schoen, founder and director of the K[lingon] L[anguage] I[nstitute]. "But it's no different than walking into a sports bar where everyone knows the score of the third game of the 1982 World Series."

Something worth celebrating

Thanks to xkcd.com.

Will McLean, "Outrance and Plaisance"

Will McLean has written an important article on "Outrance and Plaisance," two terms often misused to describe late medieval deeds of arms as "to the death" or "not."   It appears in this year's volume of the Journal of Medieval Military History which is, alas, a bit pricey if you have to buy it yourself.   Maybe Will will provide a short abstract at some point?

It's drama

Julian Assange, rightly or wrongly accused of sexual crimes against Swedish women, appears after being bailed out of a British jail flanked by a stunning blonde.  Just a coincidence, I am sure.

Dr. Beachcombing classifies historical mysteries

The inestimable Dr. Beachcombing, while mulling on the (un)reality of Atlantis, comes up with a happy classification scheme:

Now with some historical mysteries we have an established reality and luscious legends sprouting up like nettles all around. For example, Princess Diana (to get all British), Charlemagne or, thinking of yesterday’s post, ‘tulipomania’. Beachcombing will call these type A mysteries. The challenge with these is to separate history and myth.

Then there are type B legends where we have a mass of legends and there may (or may not) be, behind them, the glimmering of something historical. Robin Hood, Madog, El Cid and a dozen other names trip off the tongue. Here the challenge is to establish if there is any history to separate from myth.

What Beachcombing finds fascinating about Atlantis is that it does not fit into either category A or B. In fact, he will have to usher on a third category type C to do justice to the great continent.

Type C mysteries are mysteries that may include ’real’ legends (meaning beliefs established among a given people) and these legends, if they exist, may contain real historical events. Here the challenge is to establish if there are any legends. In other words we are, with type C, at two removes from the truth. This is not like Merry King Cole, say, (a type B mystery) where we are wondering whether there is history in the legend. This is Atlantis where we do not even know if there is a genuine myth behind Plato’s ramblings or whether Plato invented the whole thing himself. As to history, that is a long way down the menu…

More on Atlantis here.

Democracy Denied by Charles Kurzman: my review appears

I just recently received my contributor's copy of the Journal of World History, vol. 21, no. 3 (September, 2010).  It is a special issue of the journal devoted to articles on cosmopolitanism. 

My contribution is a review of an excellent 2008 book by Charles Kurzman, Democracy Denied, 1905-15:  Intellectuals and the Fate of Democracy.   Here's an excerpt.

Kurzman contends that the six revolutions he examines can be seen as part of a global movement with local variations, rather than phenomena strictly tied to local conditions and problems.

The revolutions in question (in Russia, Iran, the Ottoman Empire, Portugal, Mexico, and China) all began  between 1905 and 1911; all were consciously democratic in their aspirations, at least insofar as democracy was understood at the time; all succeeded in obtaining effective parliamentary elections; and all the revolutionary regimes, except Portugal's, had failed before World War I broke out. Yet, as Kurzman says, even though more than a quarter of the world’s population was affected by this wave of democratic revolution, it has seldom been treated as an international event.

You can read the review in the Journal, or just go straight to the book.

Crepuscular rays over the Spiral Jetty, Great Salt Lake

Astronomy Picture of the Day, natch.

The rich get richer

One observer's explanation of how it has worked.

Sunday morning, and Explorator comes to my mailbox...

...full of archaeological goodies.  Thanks, David Meadows!

One of the nice things about this e-mail news compilation is that it supplies me with links to the little stories.

For instance, I don't get excited about the power, wealth and claims to divinity of Greco-Egyptian queens, but who would not want to see this amazing coin/medallion on Sunday morning?

And I find it pleasant to have nonsense about "Roman Chinese" systematically dealt with.

I'm grateful both to David and the originating sources.

Napoleon's Egypt -- a significant quote

For students in history 3805, wrestling with the paper on Juan Cole's Napoleon's Egypt, And how to relate Egyptian attitudes to French ones, here's a quotation from pages 174-5:

The French employed public celebrations and spectacle both to commemorate Republican values and to instill a sense of unity with regard to revolutionary victories. Such "festivals reminded participants that they were the heroes of their own revolutionary epic." The universal wearing of the cockade, the flying of the tricolor, the intricate symbology of columns and banners, the impressive military parades and cannonades, all were intended to invoke fervor for the Revolution and the remaking of society as republic. That some of the French appear seriously to have expected the conquered Egyptians to join them in the festivities demonstrates how little they could conceive of their own enterprise on the Nile as a colonial venture. The greatest use of Republican ideology appears to have been precisely to hide that fact from themselves.

Depending on the exact point of view you are taking in your paper, this insight might be very useful. There are lots of examples in the book to back it up.

Update:  Page 204:

[During a revolt one French leader heard Bonaparte say,] "Shall we be the plaything of some hordes of vagabonds, of these Arabs whom one barely counts among the civilized peoples, and of the populace of Cairo, the most brutish and savage rogues who exist in the world?"

Charny on retreating and surrendering -- my attempt to understand him

An excerpt from work in progress:

Scenarios involving retreating or surrendering or both appear in a conservative estimate in eleven of Charny's questions on war. It is clear from several of them that anything resembling running away might be interpreted as blameworthy. Question W30 says :

There is a battle …in which many men-at-arms of the defeated party depart and go away. Some consider that these have gone on their honor without being defeated; and many others consider that those who have gone are defeated. How can this be?

Judgments vary, but elsewhere we see that if the judgment was adverse, if one was thought to have been "fleeing" to one's "dishonor," it was so serious that some might think it would wipe out a lifetime of renown (W39). What distinguished dishonorable flight from the "safe and honorable withdrawal" which Charny thought all good men-at-arms needed to learn to execute? Of course we have no correct answer to this, just indications about how serious the dilemma was. For instance, in W31 we have a story that shows what problems arise when good military practice and the perception that one is fleeing conflict:

A captain of men-at-arms rides out in the field and orders some of his scouts to see the situation of his enemies who are in the field; and there are a sufficient number of these scouts. And at the approach of their enemies one party of their enemies pursues them faster than they can go; and the scouts retreat from their enemies and are able to retreat without loss. So there are some of the scouts who turn back and meet their enemies, and perform arms like good people should; and others retreat to their captain and make their report. Which of these are to be more valued and praised: those who went back to their lord or those who are captured?

The scouts who turn back and fight are doing something good and praiseworthy; yet Charny thought that the scouts who returned were also doing something valuable, and were obedient to their captain to boot. Perhaps Charny anticipated a reflexive endorsement of warriors who "perform arms like good people should." This is consistent with scenarios discussed in W7 and W8, where what might seem sensible course of action is contrasted with conventional belligerent courage. In the first we see a captain, the principal leader of one side in a hypothetical war, who

 is defeated but remains on the field so long that he sees and understands that he is unable to recover his fortunes or the day; and the battle has been very well fought. Which is the better thing for him to do: remain and take his chances, or leave so that he can recoup? And if he leaves, should he thereby lose his honor?

We may think that it hardly makes sense that the captain should sacrifice his rights and his person after one serious defeat; and we've seen that Charny did not reject the possibility of honorable retreat. Then we remember that King John refused to leave the field at Poitiers in 1356, even though he understood that the day was lost. This gives the scenario in question W7 a real piquancy. Question W7 also prepares us for the dilemma of the bodyguards in the next question who seriously contemplate abandoning their lord to return to fight in a lost battle. There are good reasons for them to remain with the captain, yet they hesitate:

Which is the better thing to do: lead their master to safety, and in that case, either go with him, or send him outside of the melee alone, and tell him to save himself if he is able? There is a great risk that he will not be able to save himself; and by returning into the battle they take the risk of death or capture. Since they have agreed to be men in his retinue, will they be blamed if they go with him? Which is better, to go or to stay?

Neither avoiding the presumed shame of abandoning their employer, their "master," nor the danger of returning to a hopeless situation are unquestionably preferable to the criticism they might attract for leaving the field. Even if we guess that Charny might have a clear preference himself, he expected debate. This is confirmed by other scenarios, which show that there was an entire terminology of warfare, which was meant among other things to clarify what was honorable behavior. One of the questions I would most like answered, were that possible, is W37:

Since I have heard it said that one is able to leave and retreat (retraire) from a battle from the defeated side (la part desconfite), if he has acted in seven ways without being killed or taken, without being reproached. How can this be and what are the seven ways?

It would certainly be very illuminating to have Charny's list of seven mitigating circumstances, and his comments on them, given that he was twice captured and must have twice surrendered himself, even though he did not consider this something that could be done lightly (W79). Unless Charny is disingenuously preparing to present a list of his own as something he heard from others, the list of seven implies serious discussion, perhaps long debate, that unfortunately never found the pen to write it down.

Links I used for today's lecture in HIST 3805, "Scholars and Sufis"

Some of the recent material I used.  In the case of YouTube pages, the comments are often very instructive.


Scholars and legalism

The Order for Hijab in the Holy Qur'an  -- a modern guide.

Road to Hijab themuslimwoman.com urges readers to love hijab.

Blog entry on wearing hijab in Cairo, 2008 -- a visitor observes recent practices and attitudes in Egypt's capital.

Sufis and mysticism

Healing Power of Sufi Meditation -- Chanting that evokes the Prophet.

Sufi Dancing in Istanbul

Sufi Whirling – OSHO in India -- sufi practice borrowed by non-Muslims.

Sufi Trance Project – Infinity-- a modern face?

Sufi Dancing in Saskatoon  -- it cuts across many boundaries.

A Sufi poetry collection -- love poems to God?

From NASA and the Big Picture -- LL Pegasi

Click the pic!

A whole calendar's worth here.