Ancient, medieval, Islamic and world history -- comments, resources and discussion.
Wednesday, October 26, 2011
A taste of Bollywood
I think I've posted this here before, but it is worth repeating. You may want to turn on the captions.
Friday, October 21, 2011
Will Mclean reports on Libya
Moamar Khaddafy is Dead
In related news, so is Gadhafi, Gaddafi, Qadhafi, Qaddafi, and el-Qaddafi.
Diversity
I think the next time I hear "Canada is becoming more diverse," I may scream.
Has there been a single week since 1763 when that was not true?
Image: Here they come -- whoever they are. :-)
Has there been a single week since 1763 when that was not true?
Image: Here they come -- whoever they are. :-)
Labels:
Canada,
immigration
Two optimistic views of the fall of Qaddafi
From Juan Cole:
And a more pessimistic view:
The last stand at Sirte was very like Jim Jones’s last stand in the jungles of Guyana. Jones was an American religious leader who gradually went mad, demanding more and more sacrifice and obedience from the members of his People’s Temple congregation, which then gradually became a cult. I define a cult as a group wherein the leader makes very high demands for obedience and self-sacrifice, and the values of which diverge from those of mainstream society. When the outside world seemed clearly to be pursuing the People’s Temple into Guyana, with a Congressmen showing up in Jonestown to rescue a handful of adherents who wanted to go home, Jones reacted with fury, first sending a militia to kill the congressman and the defectors, and then instructing his followers to drink poisoned Kool-Aid. Many were injected with cyanide laced with liquids or shot. Those who would not agree voluntarily to be “translated” to the next world together with their messianic leader would be subjected to the ultimate coercion.
Qaddafi’s stand at Sirte underlined the cultish character of his politics,...
The final defeat of Qaddafi and Qaddafism is a victory for the Fourth Wave of democratization that began in Tunisia and continued in Egypt. There is now a contiguous bloc of 100,000,000 Arabs in North Africa who have thrown off dictatorship and aspire to parliamentary government (Tunisia’s elections are coming up on Sunday). Those who dismiss this movement because Muslim religious forces will benefit are exhibiting a double standard. Roman Catholicism benefited from Third Wave democracy movements like those in Poland and Brazil, as did Eastern Orthodoxy. Were democracy to break out in Burma, Theravada Buddhism would benefit. So what?
The Arab League, President Obama and NATO have been vindicated in their decision to forestall the massacre of eastern Libyan cities such as Benghazi. The region’s remaining bloodthirsty tyrants, who have not scrupled to massacre non-combatants for exercising their right of peaceable assembly and protest, should take the lesson that mass murder is a one-way ticket for them to the sewage drain of history. As I told the NYT today, ““The real lesson here is that there is a new wave of popular politics in the Arab world… People are not in the mood to put up with semi-genocidal dictators.”
And at cbcnews.ca:
So if the Libyans themselves hadn’t risen up in the first place, NATO wouldn’t have considered intervening, and Gadhafi would almost certainly still be alive and in charge.
That’s the lesson the Arab world takes away from Gadhafi’s fall, and it’s a valuable one.
Many if not most in the Arab world likely believe it was the Libyans who “got” Gadhafi.
In those pictures he was surrounded by Libyan fighters, not foreign troops. It is precisely the image — if not the exact circumstances — that both the NTC and NATO wanted right from the start, to avoid the Iraq mistake and the baggage that came with that.
Among Arabs those nuances count for a lot. And so those images will undoubtedly breathe new life into the flagging uprisings in Syria and Yemen. They will also give pause to the autocrats who still rule them.
Arab editorials in today's papers openly wondered who would be next in what they now willingly call the Arab Spring, and what might be on the minds of the possible candidates as they watched Gadhafi’s final moments.
It is a very different Arab world than it was when Saddam was caught. This Arab Spring, sparked singlehandedly by a desperate Tunisian young man, is all about people, and therefore legitimate in the eyes of most of the region. The old rules lurk behind the scenes, but they are weakening as the people continue to press for substantive change.
Even in countries where there has been no large scale protest, old regimes have clamoured to introduce change. Saudi Arabia would not have given women the right to vote and run in municipal elections without the Arab revolts. Jordan has had two governments resign in the span of months in the name of introducing reform.
The Arab Spring has been a messy affair, and it will continue to be, and in some countries, spring may never come. But in each of those countries where it has or will, it unfolds differently — as evidenced by those affected so far — and with different speeds and efficacy.
Having world powers on your side certainly seems to help--whether it's moral or military. In future, other revolutions may or may not involve foreign intervention, and we may yet see an example that involves only regional intervention, without the involvement of Western powers.
But the one common, requisite ingredient in all of them has been a willing people. People who have broken the barrier of fear, who refuse to remain silent — even after they might have managed to fell longstanding regimes, as in Egypt's case.
After now watching three strongmen fall in successively higher degrees of humiliation, you can bet the continuing uprisings will have a renewed momentum.
And a more pessimistic view:
Arab Spring a failure so far
All in all, as noted above, a fine candidate for early departure from this life.
But that's as far as it goes. Other than that, Gadhafi's death demonstrates nothing more than the ability of Western militaries to cut down whomever they choose.
There will, no doubt, be attempts to portray his downfall and death as an example of what happens when a nation decides to rise up against tyranny and pursue its own destiny.
Americans, in particular, love that narrative, which is why the phrase "Arab Spring" is still so popular in the mainstream media here.
The fact is, the Arab Spring, if it even existed, has been a sputtering failure so far. It certainly didn't even threaten Gadhafi. He was hunted down by NATO military power, plain and simple.
Had it not been for NATO warplanes, Gadhafi would still be in command, violently persecuting his own people.Image: And the women?
Labels:
Arab Spring,
history of democracy,
Libya,
Qaddafi
Thursday, October 20, 2011
Polo in Kashmir
From the Big Picture. Click to see it bigger.
Labels:
horses,
Kashmir,
polo,
The Big Picture
Tuesday, October 18, 2011
The taking of Jerusalem, 1099
People often wonder how medieval Christians could have taken part in holy war, given Jesus's well-known pacifistic pronouncements. Here are excerpts from a lecture I gave yesterday on the taking of Jerusalem, which ended in a massacre, which touches on the issue:
Here’s what Tyerman (page 31) says about a famous Christian account of the massacre:
Raymond of Aguilers… who witnessed the fall of Jerusalem in 1099, described the ensuing massacre on the Temple Mount: "it is sufficient to relate that in the Temple of Solomon and the portico crusaders rode in blood to the knees and bridles of their horses." What ever the atrocities performed that day, Raymond was quoting Revelations 14:20 "and the winepress was trodden without the city and the blood came out of the winepress even to the horse bridles."
Two further points:Comments? [No comments from students.]
Here are my comments. Massacres of garrisons and the civil population of fortifications and cities that had resisted for a long time were pretty common in medieval times. According to the laws of war (or the customs of war) those who resisted, even if they were not armed and had no authority or say in the waging of war, brought the consequences of such resistance upon themselves. It was kind of a no-win situation because people who surrendered too quickly to a threat of siege might invite the revenge of their rulers if the rulers won the war eventually. But to focus on the other situation: we've already seen in this course that a siege was a hard task and a dangerous one even for the people outside. I sometimes joke that it is no real joke that sieges came down to who caught dysentery first, the people outside in their squalid camps, or the people inside crowded together in bad conditions. Besiegers died in significant numbers in a hard siege, and the numbers went up significantly if there were a number of unsuccessful assaults. Besiegers became targets for missiles thrown at them from above, and insults meant to break the morale and boost morale on the other side. When besiegers swarmed into a city through a gap in the walls or by the treachery of the tower commander, that they were not in a good mood all. All the anger fear and hardship came together in a murderous rage and perhaps a sudden feeling of invulnerability. Like hunters, they fell upon their prey, animate and inanimate.Further remark is necessary in the case of Jerusalem, however. Modern observers from the historically Christian environment often expressed wonder that the religion of peace and my kingdom is not of this world could have inspired warfare. Forgetting entirely about Muslim and Jewish accounts of the slaughter of Jerusalem, we can see just from Christian accounts that not only did nominal Christians take part in mass murder like anyone else, they felt more justified in doing so in this case because they had scriptural authority behind them. Those who took part and had read their Bible knew that this was God's will.
- Any important and popular religion contains a multitude of contradictory elements that can be used to justify all sorts of actions.
- People who study religion or are particularly pious or are opposed to some specific religion often act like a person or group can be completely characterized as "Christian" or "Muslim" or "Shiite" or whatever. Not so. Those Crusaders at Jerusalem liked to think of themselves as Christians, bound by the law of God, but also as warriors, subject to the customs of war. This should be obvious, but the way people talk, it clearly isn't.
Labels:
Crusades,
favorites 2011,
Middle Ages,
religion,
religious history,
war and peace
Monday, October 17, 2011
Big trouble in Egypt
Labels:
Arab Spring,
Egypt,
revolution
From a Facebook commentary
Thanks to the originators (kept anonymous)!
Labels:
historiography
Saturday, October 08, 2011
The sad historian thinks...
...That there are whole cultures that will never enjoy maple syrup.
But then he realizes that Ethiopian monks once said that about coffee...
Labels:
coffee,
maple syrup,
world history
Tuesday, October 04, 2011
Passed a million page views...
Sometime in the last two or three days this blog passed 1,000,000 page views. And that's just since I changed the name and hosting arrangements about three (?) years ago!
Huzzah!
Labels:
blogging
Sunday, October 02, 2011
Saturday, October 01, 2011
The threat of sectarian violence in Syria
From Foreign Policy, via Brian's Coffeehouse:
From the start of the Syrian revolution, the Assad regime's media have portrayed the overwhelmingly peaceful grassroots protest movement as a foreign-backed military assault. Its preferred catchall term to describe the tens of thousands of patriots it has kidnapped and tortured, as well as the thousands it has murdered, is "armed gangs." Despite a series of televised "confessions," the regime has not provided any serious proof of the supposed American-French-Qaeda-Israeli-Saudi-Qatari plot against the homeland. Nor has it explained the evident contradictions between its narrative and the thousands of YouTube videos and eyewitness accounts of security forces shooting rifles and artillery straight into unarmed crowds.
Of course it hasn't. Yet its propaganda is taken seriously by Russian and Chinese state media, certain infantile leftists, and a vaguely prominent American academic.
Tragically, the propaganda is also taken seriously by members of Syria's minority sects -- not by all of them by any stretch, but perhaps by a majority. It's tragic because perceived minority support for this sadistic regime will inevitably tarnish intersectarian relations in Syria in the future.
Those Sunni Syrians who are (understandably) enraged by the minorities' siding with the dictatorship should remember first that many Alawis and Christians, as well as many more Druze and Ismailis, have joined the revolution and that many have paid the price. Second, Sunnis should remember that Alawis and Christians have good reason to fear change, if not to believe the propaganda.
Alawis have a complex, esoteric religion that throughout history has been savagely denounced, and its adherents savagely oppressed. Ultimately it's a matter of political interpretation whether or not Alawis are to be considered Muslims. The Ottoman Empire didn't even consider them "People of the Book," which meant that unlike Christians, Jews, and mainstream Shiites, Alawis didn't enjoy any legal rights. The ravings of the influential medieval scholar Ibn Taymiyya (who thought Alawis were "greater disbelievers than the Jews, Christians, and Indian idol-worshipping Brahmans") contributed to their oppression and justified the theft of their lands around Aleppo and their forced retreat into the mountains. Until the 1920s, the Alawis were stuck in those mountains. Antakya (Antioch) was the only city where Alawis lived with Sunnis, and Antakya was gifted by France to Turkey before the independence of the modern Syrian state.
Most Alawis today are not particularly religious. Far from pushing Alawi tenets on the general populace, the Assads discouraged the study of the faith and repressed the traditional Alawi clerics. As a result, if individual Alawis do turn to religion, most tend to practice Sunni or mainstream Shiite rituals.
Of course, as far as the business of state is concerned, it should be entirely irrelevant whether or not Alawis are Muslims or even People of the Book. As Syrian citizens they should be guaranteed the same rights and the same access to political office as anyone else. It would help a great deal if revolutionary leaders and Sunni clerics were to state this as clearly and as often as possible. The blatant anti-Alawi sectarianism of Sheikh Adnan al-Arour (given prominence by Saudi Arabia) and Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi (given prominence by Al Jazeera), both supposed friends of the revolution, does not help at all. Speaking to "those [Alawis] who stood against us," Arour recently promised, "I swear by God we will mince them in grinders and feed their flesh to the dogs."
The one thing the regime has done intelligently in the last six months is to play on minorities' fears. ...
The two scenarios that most terrify the minorities (and almost everyone else) are, first, the rise of intolerant Islamism, and, second, sectarian civil war. Unfortunately, both scenarios become more likely with every moment the regime remains in power. The experience of being shot at, besieged, and tortured will inevitably drive some toward more extreme views. In addition, the military units slaughtering the people are overwhelmingly Alawi and commanded by Alawis. The regime's shabiha militias in Hama, Homs, and Latakia are Alawis recruited from the surrounding villages. These are the people torturing Sunni women and children to death, burning shops and cars, beating and humiliating old men. Their actions will have consequences. If the regime falls soon, the consequences will be legal and targeted solely at the guilty. If the regime doesn't fall soon, the consequences may be violent, generalized vigilante "justice." Then Iraq and Lebanon will become Syria's models.
Labels:
favorites 2011
Ontario election trivia--UFO and NOHP
Early in the 20th century, Ontario was governed by the UFO -- United Farmers of Ontario. Such a party would be a non-starter today.
Another probable non-starter is the Northern Ontario Heritage Party, which wants provincial status for the North. NOHP can't field candidates for more than 2 of the 11 northern ridings -- but somehow has a candidate in downtown Toronto. So if you live in the St. Paul riding and want to cast a real protest vote, NOHP is available...
Another probable non-starter is the Northern Ontario Heritage Party, which wants provincial status for the North. NOHP can't field candidates for more than 2 of the 11 northern ridings -- but somehow has a candidate in downtown Toronto. So if you live in the St. Paul riding and want to cast a real protest vote, NOHP is available...
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