What the US Republican Party wants

It's not just spending cuts. See Salon's War Room.

Holy Ignorance

Keith Kahn-Harris at Times Higher Education summarizes the argument of Olivier Roy's new book:

Religion was supposed to fade away in a secularising, globalising modernity, and in the post-9/11 period, proponents of secularism are often angry and bewildered at the persistence of religion. For both militant Richard Dawkins-style atheists and the more cautious supporters of a strictly secular public sphere, responsibility for the failure to secularise is placed at the door of a sinister resurgent religious militancy and a failure of liberal nerve to resist this resurgence. Secularity itself is, it would seem, never the problem.
But as Olivier Roy argues in Holy Ignorance, religious fundamentalism and secularising modernity are much more closely linked than is often appreciated. In fact, it is not just that "secularization has not eradicated religion", he argues, but that secularisation has worked as "we are witnessing ... the militant reformulation of religion in a secularized space that has given religion its autonomy".
Roy's methodology relies on an investigation of the complex and changing relationship between culture and religion to produce a panoramic but subtle overview of the place of religion in a globalised world. His argument is that, whereas in the past there was a close, even symbiotic, connection between religion and culture, in modernity they become decoupled. This is not an inevitable and uniform process, and Roy draws on a vast number of examples and case studies that show how religion and culture interrelate. He is particularly interested in practices of conversion because as religions bring in new adherents they are forced to confront alien cultures...
Holy Ignorance does not rely on an essentialist view of particular religions, but on a wider argument about the place of religion in a secularising modernity. Secularisation denies and undermines religion's symbiotic connection to culture and in the process religions become "formatted" or standardised, so that they come to resemble each other. So, for example, the roles of Jewish rabbis, Catholic priests and Muslim imams become similar.
As religion breaks free from its local manifestations, it becomes more easily transplanted to other locations. Fundamentalist forms of religion do this most successfully. Unanchored in the constraints of tradition and local culture, fundamentalism recognises no limitation and hence comes to view everything outside itself as pagan and impure. This is the "holy ignorance" that Roy identifies and warns us of.
Holy Ignorance's modest length suggests that there is some over-simplification and Roy's thesis awaits and requires serious empirical examination. But, if nothing else, this extraordinary book's disturbing message - that secularism may be religious fundamentalism's best friend - is worth taking very seriously.

From Ephemeral New York: Spring Night, Greenwich Village

By Martin Lewis, 1930.  More here.

Canadian politics in a quip

Over at mightygodking.com:

"It is worth explaining that Jean Chretien embodied one of the central principles of Canadian politics, which is that for all that the world thinks of us as nice and polite, we inevitably vote for whichever political leader seems like the most capable bastard. Chretien was a ridiculously capable bastard."

Just one insight from  A Guide to the Upcoming Canadian Election for Foreigners.

Sign of the times

"The unrest in Syria came to a head after police detained more than a dozen schoolchildren for scrawling graffiti inspired by pro-democracy protests across the Arab world." (From Aljazeera English, in an article about Syria.)

The fearlessness of the young, bless them.

Rebecca Solnit's wise words, again

Panic, looting and other myths

In appreciation of my students HIST 3805 and 4505

Some weeks are better for a teacher's morale than others.

This last week or so has been one of the good ones.

The first big boost took place in my 4th-year seminar on Chivalry.  It has been going well, and my students seem to be pretty interested.   That's a big plus, but my 4th-year seminars are usually successful.

No, what caught my attention was that finally, finally not one but two students used French as though it were the most normal thing in the world.

Now given that Nipissing University is in a region with a large Francophone population, you might think this was no big deal.  However, it's been my experience over 20 years that students who might be Francophones, who have French last names, either have no French or no confidence about using it in a public space like a classroom.  It's not like we had an actual conversation in French, but the sheer undramatic normality -- ah! Maybe someday Northeastern Ontario, Ontario as a whole, might really start exploiting its potential linguistic advantages.

Now that's just crazy talk...but it's fun to dream.

The other thing was the reaction to Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Teheran in History of Islamic Civilization.  For a second term essay, I gave the class a choice of one of three books to evaluate as windows into the struggle of Middle Eastern societies with modernization.  One was Reading Lolita, about a university professor in Iran whose study of English literature affected her attitude to the Islamic Revolution and its aftermath.  Although it is beautifully and profoundly written, I thought my students might struggle with it -- especially if they weren't very familiar with the English novels discussed in the book.  But I offered it as a choice, with a warning as to its challenges, in the hopes that it might make a difference to one person.

Well, I got the papers back last week and...quite a few students got quite a bit out of the book.  I am glad that I took a little risk and that they did, too.

Made me smile. :-)

Image:  Azar Nafisi, smiling, from her website.

Maybe there's something to this "Arab Spring"

Al Jazeera English:

Syria will "study" ending an emerency rule in place since 1963 and look into licensing political parties, a presidential adviser has said, after a week of deadly protests in the country's south.
"I am happy to announce to you the decisions made today by the Arab Baath party under the auspices of President Bashar al-Assad ... which include ... studying the possibility of lifting the emergency law and licensing political parties," the president's media adviser Buthaina Shaaban said at a news conference on Thursday.

The current emergency law allows people to be arrested without warrants and imprisoned without trial.

The announcement came after one week of protests in the southern city of Daraa against Assad's government which has left scores dead.

Rula Amin, Al Jazeera's correspondent in the Syrian capital of Damascus, said many of the measures address demands Syrians are talking about.

Syria? SYRIA? How likely is this?

Salon on the illegitimacy of the Libyan War

An interesting take on both domestic and international Dimensions. Http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_room/2011/03/21/lind_libya_war

And the cry goes up, "Link to the primary sources!"

Bad Science shows the relevance of all our academic fussing about sources, by showing how journalists distort science stories.

That other globalization

Ideas and images whiz around the world, and the unexpected happens.  Rebecca Solnit at Tomgram:

There were three kinds of surprise about this year’s unfinished revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, and the rumblings elsewhere that have frightened the mighty from Saudi Arabia to China, Algeria to Bahrain. The West was surprised that the Arab world, which we have regularly been told is medieval, hierarchical, and undemocratic, was full of young men and women using their cell phones, their Internet access, and their bodies in streets and squares to foment change and temporarily live a miracle of direct democracy and people power. And then there is the surprise that the seemingly unshakeable regimes of the strongmen were shaken into pieces.
And finally, there is always the surprise of: Why now? Why did the crowd decide to storm the Bastille on July 14, 1789, and not any other day? The bread famine going on in France that year and the rising cost of food had something to do with it, as hunger and poverty does with many of the Middle Eastern uprisings today, but part of the explanation remains mysterious. Why this day and not a month earlier or a decade later? Or never instead of now?
Oscar Wilde once remarked, “To expect the unexpected shows a thoroughly modern intellect.” This profound uncertainty has been the grounds for my own hope.
Hindsight is 20/20, they say, and you can tell stories where it all makes sense. A young Tunisian college graduate, Mohammed Bouazizi, who could find no better work than selling produce from a cart on the street, was so upset by his treatment at the hands of a policewoman that he set himself afire on December 17, 2010. His death two weeks later became the match that lit the country afire -- but why that death? Or why the death of Khaled Said, an Egyptian youth who exposed police corruption and was beaten to death for it? He got a Facebook page that said “We are all Khaled Said,” and his death, too, was a factor in the uprisings to come.
But when exactly do the abuses that have been tolerated for so long become intolerable? When does the fear evaporate and the rage generate action that produces joy?  After all, Tunisia and Egypt were not short on intolerable situations and tragedies before Bouazizi’s self-immolation and Said’s murder.
Thich Quang Duc burned himself to death at an intersection in Saigon on June 11, 1963, to protest the treatment of Buddhists by the U.S.-backed government of South Vietnam. His stoic composure while in flames was widely seen and may have helped produce a military coup against the regime six months later -- a change, but not necessarily a liberation. In between that year and this one, many people have fasted, prayed, protested, gone to prison, and died to call attention to cruel regimes, with little or no measurable consequence.
Guns and Butterflies 
The boiling point of water is straightforward, but the boiling point of societies is mysterious. Bouazizi’s death became a catalyst, and at his funeral the 5,000 mourners chanted, "Farewell, Mohammed, we will avenge you. We weep for you today, we will make those who caused your death weep."
But his was not the first Tunisian gesture of denunciation. An even younger man, the rap artist who calls himself El General, uploaded a song about the horror of poverty and injustice in the country and, as the Guardian put it, “within hours, the song had lit up the bleak and fearful horizon like an incendiary bomb.” Or a new dawn. The artist was arrested and interrogated for three very long days, and then released thanks to widespread protest. And surely before him we could find another milestone. And another young man being subjected to inhuman conditions. And behind the uprising in Egypt are a panoply of union and human rights organizers as well as charismatic individuals.
This has been a great year for the power of the powerless and for the courage and determination of the young. A short, fair-haired, mild man even younger than Bouazizi has been held under extreme conditions in solitary confinement in a Marine brig in Quantico, Virginia, for the last several months.  He is charged with giving hundreds of thousands of secret U.S. documents to WikiLeaks and so unveiling some of the more compromised and unsavory operations of the American military and U.S. diplomacy. Bradley Manning was a 22-year-old soldier stationed in Iraq when he was arrested last spring.  The acts he’s charged with have changed the global political landscape and fed the outrage in the Middle East.
As Foreign Policy put it in a headline, “In one fell swoop, the candor of the cables released by WikiLeaks did more for Arab democracy than decades of backstage U.S. diplomacy.” The cables suggested, among other things, that the U.S. was not going to back Tunisian dictator Ben Ali to the bitter end, and that the regime’s corruption was common knowledge.
Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story, a 1958 comic book about the Civil Rights struggle in the American South and the power of nonviolence was translated and distributed by the American Islamic Council in the Arab world in 2008 and has been credited with influencing the insurgencies of 2011. So the American Islamic Council played a role, too -- a role definitely not being investigated by anti-Muslim Congressman Peter King in his hearings on the “radicalization of Muslims in America.” Behind King are the lessons he, in turn, learned from Mohandas Gandhi, whose movement liberated India from colonial rule 66 years ago, and so the story comes back to the east.
Causes are Russian dolls. You can keep opening each one up and find another one behind it. WikiLeaks and Facebook and Twitter and the new media helped in 2011, but new media had been around for years. Asmaa Mahfouz was a young Egyptian woman who had served time in prison for using the Internet to organize a protest on April 6, 2008, to support striking workers. With astonishing courage, she posted a video of herself on Facebook on January 18, 2011, in which she looked into the camera and said, with a voice of intense conviction:

“Four Egyptians have set themselves on fire to protest humiliation and hunger and poverty and degradation they had to live with for 30 years. Four Egyptians have set themselves on fire thinking maybe we can have a revolution like Tunisia, maybe we can have freedom, justice, honor, and human dignity. Today, one of these four has died, and I saw people commenting and saying, ‘May God forgive him. He committed a sin and killed himself for nothing.’ People, have some shame.”

She described an earlier demonstration at which few had shown up: “I posted that I, a girl, am going down to Tahrir Square, and I will stand alone. And I’ll hold up a banner. Perhaps people will show some honor. No one came except three guys -- three guys and three armored cars of riot police. And tens of hired thugs and officers came to terrorize us.”
Mahfouz called for the gathering in Tahrir Square on January 25th that became the Egyptian revolution.  The second time around she didn’t stand alone. Eighty-five thousand Egyptians pledged to attend, and soon enough, millions stood with her.
The revolution was called by a young woman with nothing more than a Facebook account and passionate conviction. They were enough. Often, revolution has had such modest starts.  On October 5, 1789, a girl took a drum to the central markets of Paris. The storming of the Bastille a few months before had started, but hardly completed, a revolution.  That drummer girl helped gather a mostly female crowd of thousands who marched to Versailles and seized the royal family. It was the end of the Bourbon monarchy.
Women often find great roles in revolution, simply because the rules fall apart and everyone has agency, anyone can act. As they did in Egypt, where liberty leading the masses was an earnest young woman in a black veil.
That the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil can shape the weather in Texas is a summation of chaos theory that is now an oft-repeated cliché. But there are billions of butterflies on earth, all flapping their wings. Why does one gesture matter more than another? Why this Facebook post, this girl with a drum?
Even to try to answer this you’d have to say that the butterfly is born aloft by a particular breeze that was shaped by the flap of the wing of, say, a sparrow, and so behind causes are causes, behind small agents are other small agents, inspirations, and role models, as well as outrages to react against. The point is not that causation is unpredictable and erratic. The point is that butterflies and sparrows and young women in veils and an unknown 20-year-old rapping in Arabic and you yourself, if you wanted it, sometimes have tremendous power, enough to bring down a dictator, enough to change the world.

Sherlock (2010)

About a quarter of a century ago, the BBC produced the best in-period, true to the text adaptation of the Conan Doyle stories ever done, the version starring Jeremy Brett.  Loathe to compete with themselves and lose, they are currently doing Sherlock Holmes as a contemporary piece:  Dr. Watson is back after being wounded in Afghanistan (!) and is rooming with this arrogant young snot who claims to be the world's only consulting detective. The setting and the modern characters made me rethink the originals.  It works, though a bit unevenly.  I just finished watching episode 3, The Great Game, where everything came together.  I gasped!

Image:  Benedict Cumberbatch as Holmes.

"This is what a real revolution looks like."

...as Al-Biruni said, citing this article at Al Masry Al Youm:

Voters kicked Cairo Governor Abdel Azim Wazeer out of a Cairo polling station when he insisted on casting his vote during Saturday's constitutional referendum out of turn.

The angry voters chanted against the governor saying, “Those times are past us!” adding that all Egyptians, be they ordinary citizens or officials, are now equal.

 

The voters said interim Prime Minister Essam Sharaf stood in line like any other Egyptian to cast his vote at the Gamal Abdel Nasser School in Dokki.

 

Politicians and intellectuals have cast their votes at several polling stations in Cairo and were not given any preferential treatment.

Equally revealing is this interview with two pro-Mubarak thugs:

Shokry Abdel Kader and Yasser Ashour are thugs. Of course, when conversing
with them, the term itself is carefully avoided, and the two remain
reluctant when it comes to confessing to the grislier side of thuggery
in the name of toppled President Hosni Mubarak and his cronies.

However, both Abdel Kader and Ashour are eager to discuss their role in the
recent revolution, not out of pride, but a yearning for “redemption.”

Abdel Kader and Ashour, neighbors in the Ezbet Abou Qarn district of Old
Cairo, were separately involved in the 25 January revolution--mainly, in
silencing protesters by “whatever means necessary,” as they were
repeatedly instructed to do by the National Democratic Party members
whom they claimed hired them.

For Ashour, the involvement was “minimal, but misguided.”

Ironically, for a man who openly admits to being previously employed as a
government henchman on numerous occasions, Ashour joined the ranks of
pro-Mubarak supporters of his own accord.

I was moved by the speech the president gave on 1 February,” he says.
Ashour missed the live broadcast, but watched a rerun on the following
morning’s newscast. “It brought tears to my eyes,” he says. “The man is a criminal, there’s no denying that. But what I saw on television that morning was a weak, old
man, who had been broken.

“What I saw during that first speech was a mourning grandfather, a fallen leader, and a truly tragic figure,” he recalls.

Deciding that the president had the right to a dignified exit, and that the
country would benefit from a more measured period of transition, Ashour
immediately made his way downtown to the State Television building,
where the mob of pro-Mubarak supporters had been rallying.

Although he intended to join their cause, Ashour began to hesitate shortly after
arriving at the demonstration. “There was a weird vibe among them [the
pro-Mubarak demonstrators],” he explains. “They were very aggressive,
even amongst each other. The first person I tried to talk to almost
attacked me, even though I was only trying to offer words of
encouragement.”

Chalking up their belligerence to fatigue and exhaustion, Ashour decided to lift
the protesters’ spirits--or at least numb their senses--by handing out
medicine. “I passed around a few strips of Tramadol; a lot of them
already had their own, but it seemed to break the ice, if only a
little.” Ashour spent the next few hours with the pro-Mubarak crowd,
before leaving with a bitter taste in his mouth, and a head full of
questions.

“When I realized the amount of people who had been paid by their
parliamentary representatives to be there, I felt…strange,” he says,
after a pause. Ashour was mulling this over on his way to Tahrir Square,
to supposedly “talk to the youth,” when he got a call from Magdy Allam,
the parliamentary representative of the Old Cairo district where Ashour
lives.

“He asked me where I was, and told me to come meet him at the Faten Hamama
cinema in Manial,” Ashour recalls. “He told me that there was a group of
pro-Mubarak supporters meeting there, and that they had signs, and
banners, and weapons.” It was the last word that stopped Ashour in his
tracks.

“I paused for a second,” he says, “and then hung up on him.”

Ashour then turned his phone off, and promptly returned home. “And that,” he
claims, “is how I know God loves me. I made the right choice.” Not only
did Ashour avoid implicating himself in what turned out to be one of the
most shameful chapters in the history of the nation, he also averted a
potentially devastating family tragedy. “I found out the next day that
my two younger brothers were in Tahrir Square that night, fighting for
their lives, and our freedom.”

Although less complicated, Abdel Kader’s role in violently suppressing
anti-regime protesters was far more direct. During the earliest stages
of the uprising, Abdel Kader (his name has been changed), was employed
in what he vaguely refers to as “intimidation tactics,” although he
admits to resorting to brute force on a few occasions.

“We would be told to go to certain areas, and attack anyone with a beard,
or any person or group of people’s chanting either for or against the
government,” he says. “Our orders were to break apart any type of
protest or demonstration, regardless of its cause.”

The intention, Abdel Kader explains, was to spread fear and internal
strife, particularly among the city’s poorer communities and
shantytowns. “Their [NDP members’] aim was to have people tear each
other apart. They wanted to prove that in their absence, we were all a
bunch of uncontrollable animals, desperate to kill each other.”

On the morning of 2 February, as Ashour was watching the president’s
speech with tearful eyes, Abdel Kader was already on his way to Manial.
As a resident of Ashour’s neighborhood, Abdel Kader had also received a
call from Allam, who informed him of the Faten Hamama meeting point, as
well as the fact that the gathering men would be given banners and
weapons--a statement that didn’t surprise Abdel Kader.

“I expected it,” he states. “I even had my own pocketknife with me.”

Upon arrival, Abdel Kader recalls, “We were all given black baseball caps or
ski-hats to wear, so we could recognize each other throughout the day.
Some people were given rifles and shotguns. Others, like me, were given
clubs, and sharpened sticks.”

These items, he says, were handed out by Allam and a few of his assistants.

After a brief congregation, the group set out, moving through the streets
chanting, intimidating others, and flexing their muscles for an imminent
and--they believed--final confrontation at Tahrir Square.
"We made a few minor strikes around the outskirts of the square,” says
Abdel Kader, before being rounded up again for further instructions. “We
were told to strike hard and fast, that the protesters were a bunch of
American University pansies who’d run away at the first gunshot.”

These instructions, Abdel Kader claims, came directly from Allam, who had
been accompanying his gang of thugs for most of the day.

The brutal attack came during the early hours of 3 February, and with it,
what Abdel Kader describes as “a wake-up call. I realized these weren’t a
bunch of sissy kids, and that they weren’t just having fun. They were
fighting for something, and they were putting up a brave fight.”

Abdel Kader pauses before continuing. “They were willing to die for what they
believed in, and I was fighting them because I had been paid LE200. The
thought of it broke my heart.”

Sick with guilt, Abdel Kader claims to have run away, able to escape in the
surrounding chaos. “Everyone was running all over the place,” he says,
describing the scene on the 6 October Bridge, where he and his group of
thugs were situated. “Even Magdy Allam, who was with us then, was
running around screaming like a little girl, but he’s always been a
coward.”

Along with a few other thugs, allegedly alarmed by the same realization,
Abdel Kader fled the scene and made his way home. “There were others who
stayed, of course,” he says of the thugs who refused to back down
during those violent early morning hours. “Some of them took it as a
personal offense that the people in Tahrir were fighting back. And
others really believed that they were doing the right thing. We were all
told a lot of lies.”

Which is partially why Abdel Kader believes he and the others who “had their
eyes opened by what happened that night,” are not entirely to blame for
the civil war that briefly raged in Tahrir Square.

“There were three people who orchestrated this, and three people to be held
responsible for all our sins,” Abdel Kader claims. “Zakariya Azmy,
Safwat al-Sherif, and Hussein Megawer were the ones who came up with the
plan, and they’re the ones who told the likes of Magdy Allam to contact
‘his people’ with specific instructions.”

These are the main perpetrators who, Abdel Kader believes, should “suffer the
wrath of a thousand Habib al-Adly’s,” a reference to the notoriously
vindictive former minister of interior, who is being tried for his
involvement in violence against the revolution, among other charges.

Apparently, not everyone involved shares Abdel Kader’s feelings. Many thugs have
since refused to return to their neighborhoods, and several have gone
into hiding, according to Abdel Kader. “There are a few people who left
from here that day, and still haven’t returned. In some cases, their
family members left shortly afterward, so we know they must be hiding
somewhere.”

On noting the irony of having both police forces and thugs retreating,
Abdel Kader remarks, “it’s not like there was ever much of a difference
between them.”

Yasser Ashour would undoubtedly agree. “I am a drug dealer,” he admits. “I am
not going to deny it. But I am only a drug dealer because the police
bullied me into becoming one.”

According to Ashour, local officers, wanting to profit from the confiscated drugs
stored in a police warehouse on the outskirts of Ezbet Abou Qarn,
forced neighborhood residents into trafficking. “They would give us
entire batches of marijuana, and replace the stores with molokheya,”
Ashour recalls with a bitter smile. “I even remember all the jokes they
would crack about it.”

“This was all happening according to Police Chief Sherif al-Awadi’s orders,”
says Ashour. “He was responsible for this district, and that man was a
criminal mastermind.”

At first, Ashour tried to resist the officers’ subversive commands, and as
a result, was briefly sent to prison on false allegations of,
ironically, drug-trafficking. “They threw me in jail to show me what it
would be like, and then took me back out so I could sell their drugs for
them.”

“They don’t give you a choice, and I learned that the hard way,” he says.

Police forces routinely relied on similarly twisted tactics, as they were also
strategic in keeping people like Ashour and Abdel Kader in their place.
“They made it so that if I did or said or was even suspected of doing
or saying anything that they didn’t like, they’d arrest me for being a
drug dealer--again.”

"The idea that there are people out there who want to be thugs and hired
killers is ignorant, and wrong. We are put in these positions and given
no way out of them,” Ashour says. “Of course there are always going to
be sociopaths and people who have crime running through their veins, but
I’m talking about normal people who are trying to lead normal lives.
Family men--men with values and reasonable demands.”

Shortly after the Day of Anger on 28 January, the Ezbet Abou Qarn warehouse was
raided, and Ashour watched as his neighbors made off with 7.5 tons of
marijuana, before setting fire to the building. Needless to say, this
came as a relief to him, but Ashour is still far from content. Besides
the fear and uncertainty shared by the rest of the population, Ashour is
worried about his cousin, who was recently arrested on what he insists
are phony arms possession charges.

“There’s always something. It never ends.” Ashour says.

“The former regime put a curse on all of us,” he sighs, “and we’re still not rid of it.”

The names of thugs have been altered to protect their identity

Do we still want to be fighting the Crusades?

Prominent American ex-Senator Rick Santorum made a speech recently in which he blamed "the American left" for its supposed hatred of "Christendom" (and "Western Civilization" which Santorum sees as the same thing.  He hung this argument on the fact that some (many?) people see the Crusades as "aggression on our part."

Notice that "our." As Brett Whalen, a historian at the University of North Carolina points out in the attached article, (hat-tip to Matt Gabriele) Santorum is basically saying that American politics, both domestic and international, should be an extension of the ecclesiastically shaped politics of the Middle Ages.  Note the sections I have bolded below:

BY BRETT WHALEN

CHAPEL HILL -- During a visit to the Oakbrook Preparatory School in South Carolina last month, Rick Santorum, the former U.S. senator from Pennsylvania and a 2012 Republican presidential hopeful, fired a salvo against "the American left," this time for its failure to understand the crusades and its hatred of Christendom.
"The idea that the crusades and the fight of Christendom against Islam is somehow an aggression on our part is absolutely anti-historical," Santorum is quoted as saying. "And that is what the perception is by the American left who hates Christendom. They hate Christendom. They hate Western civilization at the core. That's the problem."
The ridiculousness of playing the blame game for the crusades more than 1,000 years after the fact should speak for itself. Santorum, however, is not the first person to evoke medieval holy wars as part of a "Clash of Civilizations" between Islam and the West. Especially since 9/11, fear-mongers have darkly proclaimed that the crusades provide a history lesson about the age-old and inevitable struggle between Christians and Muslims.

Santorum's defense of the crusades echoes others who insist that Muslim aggression, including the seizure of Jerusalem in the seventh century, demanded an armed Christian response. By calling for the First Crusade in 1095, Pope Urban II declared a Just War for the protection of Christians and the recovery of what rightfully belonged to them. (Never mind the fact that Muslims had ruled over the Holy Land for more than 400 years by that point, longer than the United States has been in existence.)
It is hardly "anti-historical" to see that both Christians and Muslims perpetrated horrible acts of violence in God's name during the era of the crusades. Ironically, Santorum himself sounds like medieval popes who described the world as one of "Christendom versus Islam" to rally their supporters.
In his sermon that launched the crusades, Urban roused listeners to action by describing alleged crimes against Christians by Muslims, including the slaughter of pilgrims, the rape of virgins, the defilement of churches and other unspeakable acts - many of which were exaggerated or fabricated. One can almost hear him saying "you're either for us or against us."
Yet other popes maintained diplomatic relations with Muslim rulers. European merchants traded with Muslims in luxury goods and even weapons. Christian clerics engaged in religious debates with their Muslims counterparts. Crusaders negotiated truces with the so-called infidels, forging alliances with certain Muslim kingdoms against other ones.
Upon closer inspection, the world of the crusades, much like our own, breaks down into a constellation of individual and collective actions, political decisions and moral choices - relating to how people define themselves through their religious faith, as well as how they treat others who believe differently from them.
By accusing the American left of hating Christendom, moreover, Santorum identifies his real enemy, a fifth column who despise Christianity and Western civilization so much that they will even stoop to blaming Christian aggression for the crusades. In the same address, he also declared that the separation of church and state in the United States has had "disastrous consequences" for our nation.
Apparently, "the left" needs to realize that they are not living in a modern civil democracy, but in Christendom, facing the same enemies as the crusaders!
Here, we might draw a history lesson from the crusades. Despite their reputation for fighting Muslims, crusaders also turned their swords against other Christians, whom they defined as heretics. Santorum echoes these sentiments with his comments about the American left being the problem.
As the crusades teach us, when religion infuses politics, defining "us" and "them," swords (or in this case dangerous words) are invariably turned inward toward the enemy within.
Not to mention, implicit in Santorum's defense of the Christendom and the crusades is the sense that the crusaders left unfinished business for America to complete, a disturbing proposition that recalls the polemical language of the past that less responsible Christians and Muslims labored to create. That, Mr. Santorum, is "the problem."

In the light of recent developments, Santorum's priorities are (once again, he's done this before) amazingly misdirected.  Misdirected?  Rather, on target for a medieval holy warrior.

Image:  Pope Innocent III, who declared crusades on everyone he could think of, including Markward of Anweiler, "another Saladin" and "an infidel worse than the infidels."

A referendum in Egypt

Egyptians are voting on constitutional amendments the day after tomorrow.  The contents, the process and the timing -- the rush -- are all controversial.  Great public interest as a result.

I am told this is a line to get into a lecture on the amendments!

Dancing in the clouds with the gods

Bothy Band, 1976



There's that one catch where your heart just stops...

Even better -- Bothy Band, 1977

Preparation for St. Patrick's Day

The Bothy Band, 1977

No comment

From the Big Picture photo collection.

Benjamin Isakhan interview at the Journal of Democratic Theory

The Journal of Democratic Theory is a new web-based journal which is financing free distribution by charging authors a fee.  It will be interesting to see how scholars react -- though the charging of subsidies to the authors of books by academic presses is fairly common.

The first issue includes a quite interesting interview with the co-editor of The Secret History of Democracy, Benjamin Isakhan, both as a PDF and as a podcast.  I appreciated the podcast option -- nice to hear Benjamin's voice after only seeing his words.

A queen of Carnival

The Big Picture has a collection of striking pictures of Carnival celebrations in a number of places around the world. They are all worth looking at, but I was particularly taken by these two pictures of Carmen Eneida Carballo Rivero of Tenerife in the Canary Islands, featuring her costume Flashes of Atlantis:

For any of a number of reasons, wow.

Don't forget to click to see the pictures large size.

Huda Sha’rawi speaks

While we all marvel at the role women have taken in the recent Arab revolutions, especially in Egypt,Huda Sha’rawi, an early 20th-century Egyptian activist, reminds us that we've been here before:

Exceptional women appear at certain moments in history and are moved by special forces. Men view these women as supernatural beings and their deeds as miracles... In moments of danger, when women emerge by their side, men utter no protest. Yet women’s great acts and endless sacrifices do not change men’s views of women. Through their arrogance, men refuse to see the capabilities of women....

A relevant thought, if not a happy one, for International Women's Day #100.

Wow!

A "freeze-flash mob" in front of the Moroccan parliament as the February 20 Movement prepares for March 20, when...something...may happen.



Thanks to Issandr El Amrani at The Arabist.

Shell galaxies...

...in Pisces.  Read all about them at Astronomy Picture of the Day.

Click for a bigger picture.

A cheerful moment floating down the Nile

Thanks to The Big Picture.

A work of minor genius...

...but genius still.  King Philip IV signs autographs.

Congrats to Improv Everywhere and all involved in the project.  And thanks to Will McLean for the heads-up.

Women and the revolution

Naomi Wolf in Aljazeera English:

Among the most prevalent Western stereotypes about Muslim countries are those concerning Muslim women: doe-eyed, veiled, and submissive, exotically silent, gauzy inhabitants of imagined harems, closeted behind rigid gender roles. So where were these women in Tunisia and Egypt?
In both countries, women protesters were nothing like the Western stereotype: they were front and centre, in news clips and on Facebook forums, and even in the leadership. In Egypt's Tahrir Square, women volunteers, some accompanied by children, worked steadily to support the protests – helping with security, communications, and shelter. Many commentators credited the great numbers of women and children with the remarkable overall peacefulness of the protesters in the face of grave provocations.

Other citizen reporters in Tahrir Square – and virtually anyone with a cell phone could become one – noted that the masses of women involved in the protests were demographically inclusive. Many wore headscarves and other signs of religious conservatism, while others reveled in the freedom to kiss a friend or smoke a cigarette in public.

Supporters, leaders

But women were not serving only as support workers, the habitual role to which they are relegated in protest movements, from those of the 1960s to the recent student riots in the United Kingdom. Egyptian women also organised, strategised, and reported the events. Bloggers such as Leil Zahra Mortada took grave risks to keep the world informed daily of the scene in Tahrir Square and elsewhere.

The role of women in the great upheaval in the Middle East has been woefully under-analysed. Women in Egypt did not just "join" the protests – they were a leading force behind the cultural evolution that made the protests inevitable. And what is true for Egypt is true, to a greater and lesser extent, throughout the Arab world. When women change, everything changes - and women in the Muslim world are changing radically.

The greatest shift is educational. Two generations ago, only a small minority of the daughters of the elite received a university education. Today, women account for more than half of the students at Egyptian universities. They are being trained to use power in ways that their grandmothers could scarcely have imagined: publishing newspapers - as Sanaa el Seif did, in defiance of a government order to cease operating; campaigning for student leadership posts; fundraising for student organisations; and running meetings.

Indeed, a substantial minority of young women in Egypt and other Arab countries have now spent their formative years thinking critically in mixed-gender environments, and even publicly challenging male professors in the classroom. It is far easier to tyrannise a population when half are poorly educated and trained to be submissive. But, as Westerners should know from their own historical experience, once you educate women, democratic agitation is likely to accompany the massive cultural shift that follows.

The real (?) Ulrich von Liechtenstein

Dr. Beachcombing propounds:

Ulrich von Liechtenstein (obit 1278) was a standard thirteenth-century knight. He had castles (three of them). He fought – above all, in Eastern Germany. And he also dressed up as a woman and rode from Maestre (Venice) up to Vienna.

Yes, yes, Beachcombing stopped too when he first read this many years ago. But now he no longer even notices. This is what comes of spending half your life in the Middle Ages…

The root of Ulrich’s unlikely transvestism was courtly love. In his poetical ‘autobiography’ – a word Beachcombing will return to – Ulrich describes how he decided to undertake his quest as an act of homage to one lady, but also, by extension to all women. Indeed, his autobiographical work – ich comes up frequently – is entitled Frauendienst (Lady Service).

As Ulrich rode through the hinterland of hellish medieval Europe – spending half your life in the Middle Ages also makes Beachcombing all too honest about what kind of world theirs was – he challenged the knights he met to jousts and gave gifts to ladies.

By the end of his little jaunt Queen Venus (i.e. Ulrich in drag) had broken 307 spears, donated 271 rings and unhorsed four knights. Included among his honoured opponents was a knight dressed as a monk that Beachcombing will let go without any comments. But also interestingly another knight dressed as a woman. How Beachcombing would have liked to have seen that joust. [There's more...]

Me, too.

Image:  Yes, that's him, according to the Manesse Codex.

Bizarre news from the modern religion front

From the New York Times, news of an edition of the Bible annotated solely with C.S. Lewis quotations:

The Lewis Bible, available in cloth (18,000 copies sold since its November debut) or leather (6,000), shares a recycling genre with “A Year with C. S. Lewis,” a collection of 365 Lewis readings, which since 2003 has sold 200,000 copies.

The new Bible splices in quotations from Lewis’s books and unpublished papers. For example, in Genesis, next to the story of Noah’s drunkenness, appears an excerpt from a 1955 letter to one Mrs. Johnson. “One can understand,” it reads in part, “the bitterness of some ‘temperance’ fanatics if one has ever lived with a drunkard.” But, Lewis suggests, teetotalers are wrong if they write alcohol out of the Bible.

To the Book of Matthew, where Jesus denounces the outwardly but not truly religious, there is added a quotation from “Mere Christianity”: “How is it that people who are quite obviously eaten up with pride can say they believe in God and appear to themselves very religious?” They are “worshiping an imaginary God.”

Mr. Maudlin became an evangelical Protestant after reading Lewis in college. “But you meet Mormons or Catholics, and their favorite author might be C. S. Lewis,” he said.

One can understand Mr. Maudlin’s worries about marketing Lewis, who habitually overshadows books he loved, like the Bible. The problem will only grow in May, when Lewis’s unfinished translation of the “Aeneid” appears, or in 2012, when C.S. Lewis College opens in Northfield, Mass.
“He would be uncomfortable if it were sold as a personality cult, or him as mentor or guru,” Mr. Maudlin said of Lewis, whose name looms larger than the word “Bible” on the book’s cover. “So we had to make it dignified.”

Value judgments

I was rather taken by this summing-up of Warren Treadgold's review of A Companion to Byzantium (ed. Liz James), at The Medieval Review:

...After a period of decades when "value judgments" were often discarded out of hand, some scholars are again ready to say that some Byzantine art is poorly executed, although few seem to be equally comfortable with saying that some Byzantine literature is poorly written.  While this expansion of the discussion is good for art history, the absence of such an expansion is bad for literary history.
Serious literary criticism is impossible if we cannot consider whether Byzantine authors succeeded in what they set out to do, or whether what they set out to do was worth doing (at least for some purpose besides advancing themselves by vapid praise of the emperor), or whether even they believed that what they were doing was an inferior form of literature (as was the case for most works in "popular" Greek, including hagiography).  This point is obviously related to the question of historical decline: we need to entertain the possibility that in some periods the level of artistic or literary achievement was higher or lower than in others, just as in some periods the level of economic prosperity or military or administrative efficiency was higher or lower than in others.  Even if such conclusions remain controversial, they are apparently becoming harder to dismiss as "outdated" without reflection or discussion.

Some conference papers on formal deeds of arms

Much of my scholarly efforts over the past decade has been analyzing formal deeds of arms in the later Middle Ages. These efforts, as is usual in academia, have generated a certain number of conference papers.

Usually such papers are not published without being extensively rewritten and (usually) expanded. And in fact readers who own my book Deeds of Arms will have seen most of these ideas.  But for those whose interest in the topic is more casual, or who are just making some initial explorations of such subjects as 14th century chivalry, these papers may be of some use.

Conference Papers on Formal Deeds of Arms

We May Lose More Than We May Gain: Boldness and prudence among Froissart's warriors

Chivalric Deeds of Arms as Politics: Courtenay, Trémoille and Clary

The Moral Calculations behind Medieval Deeds of Arms

Non-noble deeds of arms in the Late Middle Ages

I hope you enjoy them!

Image:  Rod Walker preparing for a modern formal deed of arms.

This isn't good

From the Times of India:

Pak govt told to block anti-Islamic websites
PTI,Mar 1, 2011, 04.52pm IST

LAHORE: With Facebook and several other websites allegedly featuring blasphemous material against Prophet Mohammed and the Quran, the Pakistan government has informed a court here that all required steps are being taken to block objectionable and anti-Islamic portals.

The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) and Information Technology Ministry are blocking all internet websites that feature blasphemous material, Deputy Attorney General Naveed Inayat Malik told the Lahore High Court yesterday.

After Malik gave this assurance on behalf of the federal government, Chief Justice Ijaz Chaudhry disposed of petitions seeking a ban on Facebook and several other websites.

An inter-ministerial committee is screening websites to block access to blasphemous and anti-Islamic material, Malik said.

This on top of the assassination of the Minister of Minorities, a Christian who had opposed the use of blasphemy laws against non-Muslim Pakistanis.

You've gotta watch out -- don't even trust yourself

During a long car ride last weekend I was listening to CBC One. What should come on but a series of mini-interviews with young kids about how they would improve the world if they could.

One youngster said he/she would get rid of everything bad. How?

"Lots of cops and cameras everywhere."

From idealistic kid to Robespierre in about 15 seconds.

Image: St. Just, Robespierre's young sidekick.

A longer version of Loreena Mckennitt's Lady of Shalott

Big pile of books

Today I looked in my physical mailbox at the university and found it full of a big pile of physical books:

• A copy of one volume of a new edition of a world history text book that I used back when I taught world history.  It's big, heavy, and looks expensive.
• Dark Age Bodies:  Gender and monastic practice in the early medieval West.  Could be good, but why was it sent to me? (Mystery solved!  A colleague wandered by and it turned out to be meant for him.)
• A guide to writing, research and editing that I guess I asked for.  I rather like its approach to illustrating how references and formatting work.  But is it worth the department's time to change from our old faithful?  (Said colleague wonders the same.)

And then:

• The Secret History of Democracy, containing my article "Republics and Quasi-democratic Institutions in Ancient India." !!!

Do you think, just maybe, that Palgrave Macmillan is happy to have such a title coming out right now? They will be laughing all the way to the bank, not to mention the trade shows.