Man in the know?

Read this Aljazeera op-ed on The triviality of US Mideast policy, all the way to the end, and then note the author's nationality and professional background. No points for guessing he's an American. His old job, however...

Egypt as...

Egypt and the Arab Middle East as Eastern Europe, 1989?

Egypt as Iran, 1979?

Another good idea from Japan: Yukigassen

From the Weather Network:

When Canadians think about the ultimate winter sport, games like hockey come to mind. But in Japan, some people think of an organized snowball fight.

This is not your typical backyard snowball face-off. The snowballs aren't just perfect. There are 540 of them. They were made in a machine and are each 6.5 to 7 cm large.

It's part of a game called Yukigassen, which is Japanese for “snow battle.” The first tournament in North America was held in Saskatoon on Friday and Saturday.

Ready for battle

How is it played? Two teams of seven players compete. Each team has a flag, and half of the snowballs, to be used over three periods. There are two ways to win. Either eliminate all members of the opposing team by hitting them with snowballs and getting them “out” or capture the other team's flag.

Two introductions to the current situation in Egypt

There is a very clear and straightforward analysis of the Egyptian situation by Juan Cole over at his blog Informed Comment.  Note this excerpt:

Why has the Egyptian state lost its legitimacy? Max Weber distinguished between power and authority. Power flows from the barrel of a gun, and the Egyptian state still has plenty of those. But Weber defines authority as the likelihood that a command will be obeyed. Leaders who have authority do not have to shoot people. The Mubarak regime has had to shoot over 100 people in the past few days, and wound more. Literally hundreds of thousands of people have ignored Mubarak’s command that they observe night time curfews. He has lost his authority.

Authority is rooted in legitimacy. Leaders are acknowledged because the people agree that there is some legitimate basis for their authority and power. In democratic countries, that legitimacy comes from the ballot box. In Egypt, it derived 1952-1970 from the leading role of the Egyptian military and security forces in freeing Egypt from Western hegemony. That struggle included grappling with Britain to gain control over the Suez Canal (originally built by the Egyptian government and opened in 1869, but bought for a song by the British in 1875 when sharp Western banking practices brought the indebted Egyptian government to the brink of bankruptcy). It also involved fending off aggressive Israeli attempts to occupy the Sinai Peninsula and to assert Israeli interests in the Suez Canal. Revolutionary Arab nationalist leader Gamal Abdel Nasser (d. 1970) conducted extensive land reform, breaking up the huge Central America-style haciendas and creating a rural middle class....

The failure of the regime to connect with the rapidly growing new urban working and middle classes, and its inability to provide jobs to the masses of college graduates it was creating, set the stage for last week’s events. Educated, white collar people need a rule of law as the framework for their economic activities, and Mubarak’s arbitrary rule is seen as a drag here. While the economy has been growing 5 and 6 percent in the past decade, what government impetus there was to this development remained relatively hidden– unlike its role in the land reform of the 1950s and 1960s. Moreover, the income gained from increased trade largely went to a small class of investors. For instance, from 1991 the government sold 150 of 314 state factories it put on the block, but the benefit of the sales went to a narrow sliver of people.

The world economy’s [pdf] setback in 2008-2009 had a direct and horrible effect on Egyptians living on the edge. Many of the poor got hungrier. Then the downturn in petroleum prices and revenues caused many Egyptian guest workers to [pdf] lose their economic cushion. They either could no longer send their accustomed remittances, or they had to come back in humiliation.

The Nasserist state, for all its flaws, gained legitimacy because it was seen as a state for the mass of Egyptians, whether abroad or domestically. The present regime is widely seen in Egypt as a state for the others– for the US, Israel, France and the UK– and as a state for the few– the Neoliberal nouveau riche. Islam plays no role in this analysis because it is not an independent variable. Muslim movements have served to protest the withdrawal of the state from its responsibilities, and to provide services. But they are a symptom, not the cause. All this is why Mubarak’s appointment of military men as vice president and prime minister cannot in and of itself tamp down the crisis. They, as men of the System, do not have more legitimacy than does the president– and perhaps less.

 There is another analysis with a slightly different slant at American Footprints by Noor Khan:

Egypt has NEVER experienced a real democracy. Despite being technically independent since 1922, it was under British colonial control until the Free Officers “Revolution” in 1952. Since Nasser and the Free Officers were pretty popular, the time is often looked back on nostalgically, especially by the lower classes, but it was a military government. Since Nasser’s death in 1970, Egypt was ruled by Anwar Sadat until he was assassinated in 1981 and M. Hosni Mubarak since then. Upon coming to power, Mubarak instated an Emergency Law which suspends many constitutional protections and basically gives the state complete jurisdiction for anything falling under the category “security.” There is no guaranteed right to privacy, free speech, assembly, press, or even a trial. Although there are a number of members of the judiciary who have tried to maintain its independence from the state, they are regularly thwarted and often removed or worse.

Image: Egyptian fighter planes of the sort used to try -- unsuccessfully -- to frighten demonstrators. Desperation?

The Internet as a force for freedom?

Maybe not!

A knowledgeable and thought-provoking interview at RFE/RL.

A valet who didn't play by the rules

My research on deeds of arms and the law of arms has tended to emphasize that legitimate war was supposed to be the monopoly of "men at arms,"  i.e. gentlemen, squires, knights and lords of higher rank, the kind of people who had adequate horses and armor.  A scenario written by Geoffroi de Charny around 1350 certainly implies that a lesser man should not be able to capture a gentleman/man at arms for ransom.  But did these theoretical strictures really constrain battlefield behavior?

Here's a passage that Will McLean has taken from Froissart that suggests otherwise:

They fought hand to hand, and Ernauton de Sainte Colombe, an excellent man at arms, was on the point of being killed by a squire of the country called Guillonet de Salenges, who had pushed him so hard that he was quite out of breath, when I will tell you what happened: Ernauton de Sainte Colombe had a servant (un varlet) who was a spectator of the battle, neither attacking nor attacked by any one; but, seeing his master thus distressed, he ran to him, and, wresting the battle-axe from his hands, said, 'Ernauton, go and sit down: recover yourself: you cannot longer continue the battle.' With this battle-axe he advanced upon the squire, and gave him such a blow on the helmet as made him stagger and almost fall down. Guillonet, smarting from the blow, was very wroth, and made for the servant to strike him with his axe on the head; but the varlet avoided it, and grappling with the squire, who was much fatigued, turned him round, and flung him to the ground under him, when he said, 'I will put you to death, if you do not surrender yourself to my master.' 'And who is thy master?' 'Ernauton de Sainte Colombe, with whom you have been so long engaged.' The squire, finding he had not the advantage, being under the servant, who had his dagger ready to strike, surrendered on condition to deliver himself prisoner within fifteen days, at the castle of Lourde, whether rescued or not. Of such service was this servant to his master; and, I must say, sir John, that there was a superabundance of feats of arms that day performed, and many companions were sworn to surrender themselves at Tarbes and at Lourde.

I wonder if Guillonet showed up at Lourde?

Image:  part of the war band, but not men at arms.

Fourth Annual Coptic Studies Symposium: Ottawa, February 26, 2011

I don't know if anyone who reads this blog will be interested, but just in case here's a message from Prof Greatrex.  Note that this mostly about old-time Copts (late antiquity).

I would like to draw your attention to the Fourth Annual Coptic Studies Symposium: Coptic Heritage – Dynamics and Diversity, organized by the Canadian Society for Coptic Studies (CSCS), which will take place at the University of Ottawa on 26 February 2011. The programme is as follows:

9.00-9.45   registration

9.45-10.00  welcome

Ramez Boutros, President, Canadian Society for Coptic Studies

His Excellency Wael Aboulmagd, Ambassador, Arab Republic of Egypt

Antoni Lewkowicz, Dean, Faculty of Arts, University of Ottawa



10.00-10.45 Keynote lecture by Jacques van der Vliet (University of

Leiden/Radboud University Nijmegen), ‘Pesynthios of Koptos/Qift (569–632) and the Rise of the Egyptian Miaphysite Church’

10.45-11.00 discussion



11.00-11.30 Robert Edwards (University of Ottawa), ‘A Case for Martyrdom? Editorial Intention and the First Apocalypse of James (NHC V,3//AM 2)’

11.30-12.00 Timothy Pettipiece (Carleton University), ‘Towards a Manichaean Reading of the Nag Hammadi Codices’



12.00-1.30  lunch break



1.30-2.00   Anne Moore (University of Calgary), ‘Syncretism and Confrontation in Besa’s Life of Shenoute’

2.00-2.30   Theodore de Bruyn (University of Ottawa), ‘The Intercessory Function of Mary in Egyptian Amulets

and Anaphoras in Late Antiquity’



2.30-3.00   coffee break



3.00-3.30   Sabrina Higgins (University of Ottawa), ‘Divine Mothers: The Influence of Isis on the Virgin Mary in Egyptian Monastic Iconographic Programs’

3.30-4.00   Ramez Boutros (University of Toronto), ‘The Architectural Stone Carvings in the Christian Basilica of Dendara: Style and Workmanship’



4.00-4.30   stretch break



4.30-5.00   Helene Moussa (St. Mark’s Coptic Museum, Scarborough), ‘Museums as Cultural Institutions: The Experience of St. Mark’s Coptic Museum’

5.00-5.30   May Telmissany (University of Ottawa), ‘Coptic Films and Copts in Egyptian Films: Intersections and Discrepancies’

In case you would like to attend the event and for more information, please get in touch with the organizer, my colleague Jitse Dijkstra (jdijkstr@uottawa.ca).

Geoffrey Greatrex


Geoffrey Greatrex
Département d'études anciennes et de sciences des religions
Department of Classics and Religious Studies
Université d'Ottawa/University of Ottawa
70 av. Laurier est/Laurier Ave. East
Ottawa, ON, CANADA K1N 6N5
tél. (613)-562-5808
fax. (613)-562-5991

The reality of re-enactment --- jousting

The Independent reports on the official investigation of a modern jouster's death. 

These passages struck me:

A man died during a jousting re-enactment because of failures to ensure a correct helmet was worn and failures to ensure his shield was appropriately assembled, a coroner ruled today.

Paul Anthony Allen died after a splinter went through the eye hole of his helmet, penetrating his eye and then brain, as the event was being filmed for Channel 4's Time Team programme....

Mr Allen, who had never jousted before despite practising with a lance and shield, was hit by a splinter from a balsa wood tip designed to break on impact with the opponent's shield for safety, the inquest heard.It broke off, as it was supposed to, but a piece of wood flew up through the eye-slit of his helmet, hitting his eye socket.

The accident happened during a warm-up run for a sequence to have been used in a special edition of the archaeological programme, hosted by former Blackadder star Tony Robinson.

Mr Allen was airlifted to hospital with the splinter of balsa wood still in his eye and his eye hanging from its socket, the inquest heard.

He had an operation to remove the splinter, which penetrated 5in (13cm) into his head, but his condition did not improve and he died on September 20.The cause of death was given as cardio-respiratory failure and a severe penetrating brain injury, the inquest heard.

Today, Northamptonshire Coroner Anne Pember said failures led to Mr Allen's death.

She said: "There were failures a) to engage a rider with a proven track record of lance-breaking jousting, b) to ensure the correct helmet or helm for jousting was used and c) to ensure that the shield had been appropriately assembled for jousting purposes." She passed her condolences to Mr Allen's family but added: "I know Mr Allen was doing what he absolutely loved when he met his untimely death."

Her comments were echoed by Mr Allen's wife, Sharon McCann, who said after the inquest that her husband had died doing something he loved. "If he could have written his script this would have been his chosen end," she said."I believe that those involved were acting in good faith.

"With hindsight there may be lessons to be learned which, I hope, will prevent anything similar happening again."

 The inquest heard that both Miss McCann and Mr Allen had both been involved in historical re-enactment for around 14 years. About 10 years before the accident, Mr Allen had given up his job teaching English, drama and history to concentrate on re-enactment, Miss McCann said.

But she added that, as far as she knew, he had never done a performance joust before...

The inquest heard that Mr Allen was due to receive the blow with a lance wielded by fellow rider Adam Plant, from Old Ellerby in Hull, and was not due to strike a blow himself. 

But in a report read to the court, jousting expert Mike Loades said Mr Allen had an unsuitable helmet for jousting, and was holding his shield wrong. He said the helmet, called a Great Helm, was suitable only for carnival jousting, as its eye holes were too big and the top part of it, above the eyes, protruded more than the part below the eyes - when it should have been the other way round. His report also found that Mr Allen was holding his shield in the way it should have been held for infantry, rather than cavalry.

He said: "The key to jousting is the correct body equipment."If the armour is right, then any other mistakes will be relatively harmless. "Mr Loades said jousting had an extremely good safety record and that record should not be compromised by this incident. He said to describe it as "random or freak" would be wrong, adding: "This is not the case. "The circumstances and equipment deficiencies of this occasion are clearly explicable and avoidable."

Image:  Someone in that crowd is determined to give it a try...

Dr. Mark Crane on scholasticism vs. humanism; another colleague shows his stuff

I don't think I can send out copies, as with the link to the Murton podcast just below, but let it be known that Mark Crane has also been busy, producing this article:

Mark Crane, "A Scholastic Response to Biblical Humanism:  Noel Beda against Lefevre d'Etaples and Erasmus (1526),"  Humanistica Lovaniensia 59 (2010): 55-81.

Dr. James Murton speaks on Environmental History -- podcast

A colleague shows his stuff:

Canadian Environmental History Podcast Episode 19 Available


From: Sean Kheraj <skheraj@MTROYAL.CA>

In 1954, Canadian historian James Maurice Stockford Careless published an
influential article in the Canadian Historical Review, titled “Frontierism,
Metropolitanism, and Canadian History” which offered a new approach for
understanding the course of Canadian history and the development of the
Canadian nation-state. Instead of adopting the US model of a Frontier
Thesis, which saw the expansion and development of the United States
connected directly to the extension of a westward settlement frontier,
Careless proposed a different model based on a Metropolitan Thesis which
understood the development of the Canadian nation-state as a function of the
interconnections between metropolitan centres and their regional
hinterlands. Under this model for understanding Canadian history, the
contours of the country’s expansion were determined not by a continuous line
of frontier settlement but instead by the radial expansion of urban
influence on rural hinterlands.

As such, metropolitanism as an approach to understanding the interconnection
between cities and hinterlands has been quite influential in environmental
history. On this episode of the podcast, three prominent Canadian
environmental history scholars debate the role of metropolitanism in
environmental history research.

To download this episode:
http://niche-canada.org/naturespast

To subscribe through iTunes:
http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=300588593

Follow the Nature's Past Podcast on Twitter:
http://twitter.com/naturespast

Send your feedback to:
http://seankheraj.com

A review of Deeds of Arms in The Medieval Review

Muhlberger, Steven. Deeds of Arms: Formal Combats in the Late
Fourteenth Century. Highland Village, Texas: The Chivalry
Bookshelf, 2005. Pp xiii, 247. ISBN: 1-891448-44-7.

 Reviewed by Donald J. Kagay
      Albany State University
      dkagay1@netzero.net


Like it or not, one of the major factors in maintaining the importance
of medieval studies to the modern world has been the study of late-
medieval war and research concerning its honored but sometimes
uncontrollable child, chivalry. One of the unfortunate offshoots of
this popularity has been a basic misunderstanding of the medieval
martial ethic by those who unabashedly serve the code of creative
anachronism and by an ill-informed general public that looks on
medieval warfare as a mild game always conducted according to
gentlemanly rules. To offset these misconceptions that have more in
common with the theme park's view of history than any realistic
historical record, Steven Muhlberger sets out in this book to explain
the context of the organized combats that were firmly tied to the
realm of warfare, but eventually found a life of its own within the
orbit of the tournament. To carry out this ambitious project, he
struggles to demonstrate that these bloody exchanges existed within an
evolving code of chivalry that attempted to establish at least a
modicum of order for battlefield and jousting ground alike.

The focus of this work--the late-fourteenth century--is largely
directed toward the era of the Hundred Years War (1337-1453). It is
built on the extensive use of the primary sources of the period (many
of which have been translated into English in the last century). These
include the chronicles of Jean Froissart, Jean Le Bel, Gutierre Diaz
de Gomez, Christine de Pizan, and Thomas Walsingham as well as
document collections associated with great chivalric figures as Edward
the Black Prince, Geoffrey de Charny, and Jean II le Meingre
(Boucicaut the younger). Muhlberger's initial direction with the use
of these sources is to demonstrate that the deeds of arms were firmly
connected to the brutal realities of medieval warfare, but also
personified humanizing theories such as just war that the mediator of
medieval society, the Church, had itself attempted to impose on human
conflict. By a minute study of both individual and group combat
sparking into existence inside and outside organized military
campaigns, Muhlberger shows that such contests were every bit as
dangerous as the melée that inundated the battlefield. He also reviews
the quite meticulous rules set up for fairness and the maintenance of
personal honor that came into being for the regulation of such
combats. From his extensive reading of the sources, Muhlberger
concludes that the evolving codes of martial rules did not come from
the jousting arena, but sprang from the impromptu conflicts carried
out by small groups of combatants serving in campaigns of much larger
armies. From this ever-shifting environment came both the regulations
and the larger-than-life heroes who were judged by them.

Much of the remainder of Muhlbereger's book centers on how the
emerging "industry" of individual and group conflicts were carried out
between French, English, Spanish, and Flemish participants. He follows
in great detail the challenge, the conduct of the resulting fight, and
the means by which fair play was supposed to prevent such conflicts
from lapsing into vendettas pure and simple. The highlight of this
discussion is Muhlberger's meticulous review of the Combat of Thirty
Against Thirty, a conflict of French and British knights in Brittany
during 1351. This encounter occurring in a backwater of the Hundred
Years War seemed to stir the imagination of European authors for next
few decades who viewed the small skirmish as a halfway-house of sorts
between the bloodiest aspects of actual warfare and the humane rules
of the tournament. From his discussion of this crucially important
incident of group conflict, Muhlberger moves to trace the influence of
such fighting on fourteenth-century societies. With the great interest
that deeds of arms caused, the chivalric fighter and the painful duty
of honor he swore to uphold became a regular topos in chronicles and
romances down to the sixteenth century. This chivalric imprint on
late-medieval society shaped reality--at least among upper-class
circles--when kings tied tournaments to marriage celebrations and
other episodes of high-level negotiation. The most important of these
public combats occurred in 1390 at St. Inglevert near Calais when
three French knights challenged and bested all comers from the ranks
of the English invaders. Though originally a private enterprise, the
St. Inglevert jousts became a source of French pride and established
the model for "national tournaments" down to the sixteenth century.
These popular chivalric norms that eventually became anachronistic in
the face of European warfare increasingly marked by the use of
gunpowder weaponry provided lucrative careers both on the tournament
circuit and in royal service to many a fourteenth-century warrior.
Muhlberger discusses these super-stars in his last chapter.

In all of his chapters, Muhlberger follows the well-trod path of
chivalric authors led by Jean Froissart. The inclusion of large
passages from their works in English translation (a feat which
Muhlberger has already duplicated online) is helpful to the general
reader as well as to the military and social historians whose study
focuses on the later Middle Ages. Muhlberger's greatest contribution
in this work, however, is the skillful inclusion of the realm of
faits d'armes into a military spectrum that effectively
stretched from the tournament to the battlefield. In some ways, then,
Muhlberger deserves to be placed in the company of the greatest modern
expert on individual and group combat of the later Middle Ages, Sydney
Anglo.

1968

It looks like I will miss this.  But then, I actually remember 1968...

"Farewell my country that never was"

  Ali Belail, a southern northern Sudanese, gives his explanation of why the country is splitting.

MY COUNTRY Sudan has failed.

It is sad but it is not shocking. The failure was always inevitable but you had to be a southerner to know that. It is hard to resist the urge to blame; to think of all the years and opportunities that were squandered and blame even more. Perhaps it was a country that never made sense. For it to have made any sense required us all Sudanese to swear allegiance to something bigger and more important. It couldn't be the tribe because there are so many. It couldn't be the race because there are so many. It couldn't be religion because there are so many. It could only be an idea that would encompass all those things.

A conundrum, but one that other nations like India, Brazil and Malaysia faced and -- fundamentally-solved.

A multitude of ethnic groups, tribes, religions and languages, the largest country in Africa and the potential to be one of the richest countries in the region. More than that: to be the country where all this worked. But not Sudan. For that the blame must rest on the north: the so- called Arab Muslim North. More specifically, the elite who have ruled Sudan since independence and squandered every opportunity to challenge and address Sudan's (or rather the north's) overriding condition: a type of racism that is unique to Sudan.

Contrary to what many in Western media will tell you: religion was not a factor in the north's dispute with the south until 1983 and only became a major factor when the current regime in Khartoum came to power in 1989 and thrust Islam as the central force in Sudanese politics. In political terms: it was a dispute about an elite that never devolved power nor seriously sought to develop any region of Sudan save a very small core. And therein lay Sudan's ailment: an ethno-centric elite that was and remains ill at ease with its mixed African Arab heritage.
Picture this: it is sometime in the 1970s and I am at some family event in Khartoum. My aunt (who is quite dark herself) who is the keeper of my family's heritage whispers in my ear and points to a very dark man in the crowd. "He was one of your grandfather's 'Farkh' " (slave). He is Muslim too. He eats with my family, jokes and talks and visits with them. But he would probably never be able to marry from them. Why? Because he is not pure; he has slave blood. Should I generalise? I shall and not even cautiously.

The Northern (Muslim Arab) population is predominantly "dark" by any and all standards. To deflect from that fact, northerners conjured a system that calibrates colour so that it was not -- and is not -- uncommon to hear people describing other people as "Blueish [black]", [Greenish [Black], Redish (to refer to someone with fairly fair skin colour), Halabi (derived from Laban (milk) or possibly the Syrian city of Halab) to refer to those who are fair (probably of Egyptian, Syrian or other light skinned stock) and the second worst of all gradations: "slave" which could describe any of the hues of black. A southerner was simply called a "southerner". You needn't bother which ethnic group: Dinka, Nuer or Sholuk or any other. They were outside the range of the calibration system. They almost didn't exist -- one saw right through them.
For the so called Arabs, they vied for the closest link to an ancestor from the Arabian Peninsula. The closer, the purer, the better. Yet we are all mostly shades of black or dark brown at best. Where that came from is never explored.

 This obsession with lineage and race could only be challenged through a comprehensive vision: education, media and development. The 1970s during Numeiri's rule was a hopeful time when there was peace with the South and the beginnings of a social, cultural and political integration between the two sides but it did not last. In 1983 Numeiri reneged on the 1972 peace agreement and its core condition of decentralization and kicked off Sudan's adventure with political Islam. And the war commenced.

It is hard to think of any other elite that failed so consistently and decisively. Not the great statesmen at independence (Azhari and Mahjoub); not Aboud; not Sadeg Al-Mahdi; not Numeiri who squandered his regime's potential; not Sadeg Al-Mahdi again (miraculously) and certainly not the neo fascist so called Islamic regime of Bashir; none of them recognized that Sudan's diversity was the clue that would bind it all together. Meanwhile, the Sudanese people and more specifically the Northerners were left without a vision of a country which they would share with other Sudanese. Instead, they all reveled in their abject tribalism and ethnocentrism and without doubt racism.

More here.

Image:  a street crowd in Khartoum.

Christine de Pisan and formal deeds of arms

She wrote about them, just as she wrote about military reform.  Will McLean directs us to her chivalric accounts.

Image:  The Book of the Duke of True Lovers, at Google Books.

Official announcement for HIST 3805--due date for second essay!

On Wednesday the class voted solidly for the post-Study Week date of March 2nd. If you were really hoping for the earlier date, well, early papers will be accepted!

New blog for HIST 3805

Course teaching assistant Matthew Laur has started a new blog for discussion of the three books you will be writing on this term. The blog is called History Nerd and can be found at http://givecaesarhisdue.tumblr.com/. Go have a look.

Tunisia's revolution

Juan Cole comments on The First Middle Eastern Revolution since 1979:

Tunisian President Zine al-Abidin Bin Ali has fled the country before the advancing crowds pouring in to the capital’s center. A French eye-witness said of the masses thronging Bourguiba Avenue that “it was black with people.” The Speaker of Parliament is caretaker leader of the country, though Aljazeera is reporting that there are already demonstrations in the southern town of Qabis rejecting him, as well. The dramatic events in Tunisia yesterday and today may shake the Middle East, as my colleague Marc Lynch suggested. As usual, the important news from the region is being ignored by US television news. (Here is an English-language eyewitness blog from one corner of the country).

In some ways, the Tunisian Revolution is potentially more consequential for the Middle East than had been the Iranian one. In Iran, Shiite ayatollahs came to power on the back of a similar set of popular protests, establishing a theocracy. That model appealed to almost nobody in the Middle East, with the exception of Shiites in Iraqi and Lebanese slums; and theocratic Shiite Arabs were a minority even in their own ethnic group. Proud Sunni Arab nationalists, in Egypt, Syria, and elsewhere, saw nothing to like there, even though they were saddled with a motley assortment of authoritarian presidents for life, military dictators, kings and emirs. Iranian leaders were shocked and dismayed to find that they had made a ‘revolution in one country.’ [emphasis SM] Their influence would come from championing the (Sunni) Palestinians and supporting Lebanon when it was attacked by Israel, not from their form of government. Iran was not like the French revolutionary republic, which really did become a model over time for much of Europe. It was an odd man out.

...

Revolutions are always multiple revolutions happening simultaneously. In Tunisia, there was first of all a revolution of the blocked, educated middle class. The unemployment rate for the college-educated is 20%. The protests late last December were kicked off by the self-immolation of a college graduate who had been reduced to peddling vegetables, and then who lost his license from the government even to do that. [emphasis SM] The French eyewitness to the massive demonstrations downtown Tunis spoke of seeing ‘entrepreneurs, attorneys, physicians in smocks, students… in short, it was the population in general…” But of course he hasn’t described the general population, he has described the middle classes.

...

But it would be wrong to see the revolution only as a middle class movement against corruption and nepotism, fueled by facebook status updates and youth activism. The trade unions (al-niqabat) played an essential role, and were among those demanding the departure of the president. You don’t get massive crowds like the one in Tunis without a lot of workers joining in. There are few labor correspondents any longer, and the press downplays the role of workers as a result of neither having good sources among them nor an adequate understanding of the importance of labor mobilization.

 ...

The rural areas should also not be underestimated. The protests began in a small rural town, and have been nation-wide, not just in the capital. The role of rural workers is clearly important, and likely rather more important than Facebook.

The political parties in Tunisia are weak, but they did play a role, with everyone from progressives, to liberals, to the an-Nahdah Muslim party mobilizing and making demands.

Likewise, there is evidence of a classic revolutionary situation insofar as the armed forces split. Ben Ali angrily removed his army chief of staff recently on discovering that the army was confining itself to defending government buildings but declining to fire on the demonstrators.
The big questions are what comes next and how influential it will be.

Tunisia has had only two dictator-leaders since independence in the mid-60s.

Image:  Trouble in Tunisia.  Next?

Football fans of London

I know people who will enjoy this map of London showing what districts support which teams.  Click on the map for a better view, and comment away!

Everything you know is wrong

Thanks to WJBD Radio's site, via Explorator, we hear news of a, uh, counter-intuitive discovery:

An Iuka man who believes the lost Tomb of Alexander the Great may be located in Romine Township in extreme southeast Marion County encouraged the county board's Community Relations Committee Tuesday night to pursue development of the site a tourist attraction.

Harry Hubbard, presented artifacts he said were earlier looted and sold from the underground cave, along with a number of books and maps that he says confirm the location of the cave.  "The county could be rolling in revenues coming in from the outside.  Any country in the world would love to have this repository within their boundaries.  Any state, any municipality.  The county has it within its boundaries and it can be exploited," Hubbard explained.  He believes there are still gold and riches buried in the cave, even after what he calculated was the removal of over five thousand pieces and over six-million dollars in gold by Russell Burrows.  Hubbard believes Burrows was led to the site with the help of local residents in 1982. 

Hubbard outlined how the artifacts were sold through Olney antique dealer Thelma McClain and Museum Curator Jack Ward of Vincennes, Indiana, both of whom have passed  away.  Hubbard had the opportunity to go through a filing cabinet where Ward had kept an extensive record of the sales of items taken from the cave as well as photographs.   He also showed a listing of items he believes were taken from the cave sold at McClain's estate auction.  Hubbard says authenticity of some of the artifacts has been confirmed by a Forensic Lab in Sante Fe, New Mexico.

Hubbard says even with all the information he has not been able to get any state historic officials interested.  As a result, he used his own money to pay for geological equipment that was used to pinpoint the location of the man made cave.    He believes he has found the location, but feels the opening was sealed by Burrows or the entrance collapsed on its own.  Hubbard says the current property owner is from Belleville and has not expressed interest in helping with the investigation.

Hubbard feels the county can act because of the historical significance as well as reports of skeletal remains in the cave.  "There is eminent domain.  There was a crime committed.  If I had the second Burrows book, which my burned up, and even in the red book he talks about finding skeletons.  Well, that's a crime.  You can rope the whole thing off with police tape for that matter and say 'okay, we want to get to the bottom of this crime'.  Our thing is if someone went to Burrows that had a badge and said 'hey you're coming with me, show us where these things came from'." Hubbard suggested.  He says Burrows has never been cooperative in showing the location of the cave.   Burroughs has since moved to Colorado....

More at the site.

This must have been the most interesting meeting those county councillors had experienced in a long time.  And the reporter, too.

A new era?

Brazil and China strike a huge energy deal and...Doug Saunders in the Globe and Mail comments:

Brazil saw the swearing-in of a new president, Dilma Rousseff, who is best known for being a former guerrilla rebel against Brazil’s military dictatorship. That was all in the past – a time when the politics and economics of Brazil, and most non-wealthy countries, were entirely defined by relations with the great former colonial powers to the north and west.

In those days, countries like Brazil had a choice: They either sold raw materials and cheap goods at low cost to the Yankees and Europeans and played by their rules, or resisted them with closed borders, Kalashnikovs and command economies.


This was 2011, though, not 1981, so Ms. Rousseff had no need for such a choice. After her inauguration, she immediately set to work boosting export investments in value-added industries and cutting government spending to keep the Brazilian currency from inflating.

She also, tellingly, authorized a deal in which the huge Chinese company State Grid purchased seven of Brazil’s electrical-transmission utilities for $1-billion, essentially putting the country’s electrical-distribution grid under Chinese ownership, even though her government had weeks earlier placed import tariffs on Chinese toys during the Christmas season in order to avoid hurting her country’s trade surplus. In the poor half of the world, trade relations are not a matter of simple tit-for-tat retaliations.

...

I believe we are witnessing the end of the post-colonial era in politics and economics. In China, Brazil and a dozen other countries, the type of thinking known as “post-colonial” – defined as a stark choice between angry resistance or humiliating subservience – has simply ceased to matter in political and business relations.

The post-colonial era began in earnest in the years after the Second World War, when Britain, France and the United States ceased to be formal colonizers, allowing southern and eastern countries to have their own governments (in places like Brazil, it had begun decades earlier). The end of the Cold War and the Soviet empire kicked it into high gear.

Post-colonial governments had responded to the external, commercial and globalized nature of their erstwhile colonial rulers very often by becoming nationalist, closed to trade and investment. Sometimes they were opposed to capitalism itself – witness the waves of Marxist and Maoist regimes that swept across Africa and South America, without Soviet prodding, during the postwar decades. Or they were dictatorial and violent and co-operative with the industries of their former empires.

While post-colonialism clings on in Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea, Zimbabwe and a handful of other places, it has vanished from most of the world with amazing speed.

Hilary Earl of Nipissing University's History Department wins the Hans Rosenberg Book Prize

Hilary Earl's book The Nuremberg SS-Einsatzgruppen Trial, 1945-58: Atrocity, Law, and History has been awarded the prestigious Hans Rosenberg Book Prize for the best book in 2009 by the Conference Group for Central European History.

The award committee had the following things to say about her book:

Hilary Earl has written an original and masterful account of what was described at the time as "the biggest murder trial in history," the trial of two dozen leaders of the SS Einzatzgruppen at Nuremberg in 1947/48...The Nuremberg SS-Einsatzgruppen Trial, 1945-58: Atrocity, Law, and History is a deep and richly documented analysis of this neglected chapter in the history of transitional justice...[that] combines the life stories and crimes of the defendants with cogent analysis of the motivation and meaning of their actions, of trends in Holocaust historiography, and of the tensions between law and history. Earl's study is based on voluminous research in both Amercian and German archives. It is essential reading for historians of Germany, the Holocaust, and transitional justice, and an inspiring model of ethical scholarship on war crimes and their aftermath.

William Morris' Order of Chivalry

An on-line edition of William Morris' 1893 Order of Chivalry can be found here.

We have an outfit called Sovereign Press Canada, down the road from me in Barrie, Ontario to thank for this reproduction.

It contains Caxton's translation of Ramon Lull's Book of the Order of Chivalry, the Old French L'Ordene de Chevalerie, and Morris' translation of the Ordene, The Ordination of Knighthood.

It also includes some famous examples of Morris' woodcuts, most notably the one above.

The debate over Islamic law in Pakistan

Juan Cole hosts an excellent discussion by Aadil Wainwright about the issues at stake in the blasphemy issue, which led to the recent assassination of an important provincial governor.  An excerpt:

The assassination of Punjab Governor Salman Taseer has laid bare a crucial debate within the Pakistani public over the nature of Islam and the place of Islamic law in national affairs. That it is a debate among Muslims with more than one side is a point that sometimes gets lost in Western discussions of Pakistan.

An investigation into the assassination of Punjab governor Salman Taseer, killed Wednesday 4th January, has been opened. According to Stratfor, it will try to identify why Malik Qadri, the assassin, was able to fire two magazines full of bullets before being apprehended, as well as how Qadri (who was already considered suspicious because of his religious views) was allowed to become part of the personal security detail of a politician whose secular positions had aroused much ire.

Despite confusion over the extent of organisation and the number of individuals involved, the motive of the assassin himself appears clear. Qadri told photographers as he was led away that he was proud to have killed a ‘blasphemer’. It was through actively defending Aasia Bibi, a Christian woman sentenced to death under the blasphemy law in November 2010, that Taseer had became infamous.
...
Like many others, Taseer had insisted Aasia Bibi was innocent. The claim was brought against Bibi six days after a spat with two Muslim women of her village refused to drink water from a glass she had touched because they said it had been defiled due to her Christian faith. Six days after the argument, her accusers said she had insulted the Prophet Muhammed (peace be upon him), Bibi said they were merely trying to settle an old score.
Taseer became a campaigner for Bibi and for reform of the blasphemy law, attracting approbation. Despite threats, he continued to be vocal on the issues he cared about, pointing to the way the blasphemy law is abused as a political tool against minorities and the vulnerable. In a recent interview he said, “This is a man-made law, not a God-made one.”
Looking in to the historical origins of the blasphemy law is beyond the scope of this article, here we merely seek to identify the parameters of the debate.
It will be useful to quote two different authorities interviewed recently about the blasphemy law. Dr. Khalid Zaheer of the University of Central Punjab is against the death penalty for blasphemy and says: “One must concede that there are a few instances that have been mentioned in Hadith literature where the death punishment was apparently inflicted upon people who were involved in the act of blasphemy. However, if you look at these instances and then study the Quranic text, it seems there is a conflict or contradiction.”
By comparison, the leader of the well-established conservative movement Jamaat e Islaami in Karachi, Miraij ul Huda Siddiqui, said of the blasphemy law, “It has been derived from the Quran and Hadith and there is unanimous consensus on this by scholars of varying sects and they also agree with the death penalty.”
Effectively Dr. Zaheer is saying that, though there may be examples of it being implemented in the Hadith, we do not need to consider these because they disagree with what can be described as the humanistic spirit of the Qur’an. Mr. Siddiqui’s argument, on the other hand, is based purely on the legal texts of the Islamic tradition and does not explicitly mention a role for human reason.

Though these are merely quotes from newspaper interviews and the interviewees don’t go into detail, these words illustrate some of the fundamental issues at play here.

Lots more substantial analysis where that came from.

The hysterics bash Batman's Parisian partner

A friend sent a link to this story about hostile reviews of the new comic character, the Batman de Paris, Nightrunner. It seems that Nightrunner is a Muslim kid of Algerian background, and some people find this inherently wrong. Andy Khouri at comicsalliance.com takes this attitude on.

Green's hideous remarks convey incredulity as to the crime fighting qualifications of Muslims, but Huston doubles down on the disgust and writes that a Muslim hero is patently ludicrous because Muslims are apparently congenitally terrorists.

...in this age of international Muslim terrorism assaulting the whole world, Batman's readers will be confused by what is really going on in the world. Through it all DC makes a Muslim in France a hero when French Muslims are at the center of some of the worst violence in the country's recent memory.

The true cause of the riots and violence between Frenchmen of European stock and that of immigrant Muslim stock is glossed over as if it doesn't even exist. DC Comics makes the whole problem as simplistic as mere racism as if that is all there is to it ignoring the fact that Islam is the single most important factor in the strife.

Huston refers to the civil unrest France saw in late 2005, when a state of emergency was declared after Muslim youths began rioting in Paris and other cities, burning thousands of cars and several buildings. Huston, Green and other bigots in the conservative media read the tragic situation as an expression of nefarious Islamic purpose, but most commentators and reporters who followed the event described a matter having more to do with social inequality than religion. As is the case in America, where there have also been riots, the economic and social underclass of France is populated largely by minorities and immigrants, and many of those immigrants are Muslims.

Contrary to Huston's claims that DC whitewashed (heh) the sociopolitical realities of France, the story of Nightrunner -- which we strongly suspect Huston didn't actually read [my emphasis -- SM] -- begins in the Clichy-sous-Bois area of Paris, accurately depicted by writer Kyle Higgins and artist Trevor McCarthy as a hotbed of immigrant frustration. The young Bilal Asselah tells us he can't remember a time when people weren't rioting and setting fires, but his pious Muslim mother has obviously kept the boy on the straight and narrow path. Unfortunately, 16-year-old Bilal and his best friend accidentally run afoul of some police officers who confuse the young men for rioters, and Bilal ends up in the hospital. His mother manages to talk Bilal down from the ledge of revenge, but his friend is not satisfied and is killed by French cops after burning down a police station. It's this event that opens Bilal's eyes to the terrible cycle of violence his mother had tried to protect him from, and he weeps.

As he grows older, Bilal's instincts are to take some kind of action, but he can't think of what to do that won't cause more violence in his community. Instead, he teaches himself parkour, which beyond calming him down also gives the neighborhood something to talk about besides riots. But when a series of high profile murders appears ready to claim an inspirational Muslim musician and ignite the ghetto once again, Bilal puts on a mask and sets out to stop the unthinkable from happening.

What Huston calls "PCism run amok," we in the business call an awesome superhero origin story about adversity and character. What's more, it is not at all incongruous with reality, as Huston claims. Like a lot of young men in France, Bilal Asselah was one pissed off Muslim. His best friend burned down a building! He's witnessed firsthand what the cycle of prejudice and violence can do to his city, but rather than give in to hate and fear, he's literally rising above it -- just as Batman swore to make his city safer for innocent people and just as Spider-Man swore to use his abilities for good.

Khouri's guess that Huston didn't actually read the comic corresponds with my sense of reality.

Image: "It's my turn." Read the comicsalliance.com article for how this scene fits into the Nightrunner origin story.

Students: you can do this too

 From the Chronicle of Higher Education, The Writing Group of Two.

An excerpt:

I've written in this space before about the usefulness of a "writing date." You buy a kind of accountability when you're with someone and you're both supposed to be working....

Last summer I got an astonishing amount of writing done, as did Nancy and Jeff; we all suffered together, over endless cups of coffee and an occasional scone.

But Nancy and I did something else, too. When one of us got stuck, we asked the other for help. And by stuck, I don't mean when you have to stop looking at the page for a while and go out for a run, bake a cake, or do whatever you do when your brain needs to be reset to start working again. I mean stuck as in paralyzed. You know what you need to do, but you just can't get there.

Maybe that doesn't happen to everyone. But it happens to me. And it happens to Nancy. It's easier for me when it happens to Nancy. And that's when we move from having a regular writing date to being members of the Writing Group of Two.

Here's how it works. Nancy will say something like, "I have to put this book proposal together." And then she will stare into space for three hours. Or start working on a syllabus for some course she might teach someday. Or search for an apartment to rent in Paris.
That's when I say, "OK, let's get to work." I make her think out loud and interrupt her with a stream of questions. I ask her what the argument is, and make her articulate the question she is trying to answer. I ask her why she is the right person to write the book. I tell her she has to come up with a table of contents. Nancy is a slow typist, so usually I grab her laptop and curse that rainbow-striped Apple when I can't find the right keys and make stupid mistakes. But I type as she talks.

Everything is already in her head. It's not that she's stuck on the thinking part. It's that she finds it difficult to get her thoughts onto the page. So, like a translator, or a secretary, I listen to what she's saying and I record. I don't worry much about getting things right—that's her job. What I do is help her produce that first impossible draft.

Then it's my turn. My problem is different. I can write a first draft. But often, while I suspect it's crap, I can't figure out where it's gone wrong. The language is generally fine. Sometimes, in fact, it's too good; fluid prose can hide hideous flaws of thought—at least from the author. If you get a draft that you like, you tend to memorize it; the sentences start to seem inevitable and unchangeable. I know that once it's out there in the world, there will be people quick to point out my inadequacies, my glibness, my habit of skimming along the shiny surface.

So Nancy reads my embarrassing first draft and says, usually, "I think it's more complicated." Then we discuss. She forces me to refine my thinking...

German fibula, c. 1000 A.D.

From Genevra Kornbluth's amazing photography collection.

Agora (2009)

This is a seriously good movie.

I haven't heard much unmixed praise for this film, not a lot of commentary at all, and I think it deserves better. So here are my observations.

You should know that the story concerns the 4th century Alexandrian philosopher Hypatia. As a woman philosopher she was an oddity, as an educated pagan she lived in an increasingly hostile environment. Alexandria was a major center for both Christians and pagans, and the two groups were competing for control of the city. The Christians were winning -- they had the support of Theodosius, the eastern emperor who eventually banned pagan observances. The conflict in Alexandria was quite violent at times. This is one of the times that the Library of Alexandria, a pagan institution, is supposed to have been destroyed. More certain is that Hypatia attracted the hostility of the Christian party, and was killed by a mob. It's a depressing story, and one that could easily be butchered.

There are three important aspects to the movie. One is its degree of success in evoking late fourth-century Alexandria. I give Agora very high marks indeed on this. Visually, the evocation of the city, with its mixture of Greek and Egyptian elements, is stunning and flawless. The dialogue likewise does nothing to throw the viewer back into the 21st century, while avoiding pseudo-historical cuteness. That is a harder trick than the mere statement might indicate.

Second is the depiction of the religious conflict between Christians on one hand and Jews and pagans on the other. This is certainly what has made distributors very reluctant to show Agora in most of North America, because the Christians don't come out of it looking good. I, however, have read a lot of late ancient ecclesiastical history, some fair amount of it on the turbulent Alexandrian developments of the era, and I found this account believable. Rioting monks were a staple of Alexandrian religious life, even in purely intra-Christian disputes.

Third is the scientific story. The film proposes that Hypatia came to reject the Ptolemaic view of an earth-centered universe, with the complex series of epicycles to make planetary movements correspond to the predictions of Ptolemy's theory. Instead, says the movie, she became convinced that a more elegant solution was possible, a heliocentric one. Because predictions based on circular orbits won't work, she, like Kepler, comes up with the notion that planets moved on elliptical orbits.

I don't think that there is any evidence that Hypatia did any of this, but that doesn't bother me. But I was sure before I saw Agora that the filmmakers would do a terrible job of this part of the film.

They didn't. Indeed, that part of the plot works very well indeed. Hats off to them. And particularly to the bright guy or gal who suggested intercutting images of the Earth from space in a few appropriate places.

This is a serious, good movie.

Favorite posts, 2010

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