Month: November 2015

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A Bibliography for the Missouri Statehouse

I sometimes worry that by teaching literature and cultural history in a university largely populated by students who will do okay in life regardless of what they get out of their college educations, I’m not doing anything meaningful in my own life.

And then elected representatives say things like this:

“The refugees [sic] we should be scrutinizing most is the one who professes the muslim [sic] faith. Unless I’m mistaken, a practicing muslim [sic] can do whatever is necessary for the ‘good’ of the faith — telling ‘fibs’ is a smallpart [sic] of what they might do. And from what I’ve seen, a practicing muslim [sic] comes in all flavors (black, white, brown, yellow — American, African, European, etc. etc.). A ‘white’ lie could allow an individual to pass through the vetting process.”

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And I am reminded that I can, once in a while, deploy my expertise for the public good.

So, Representative Moon, let me tell you that your information about Islam and Muslims is, in fact, incorrect. If you are interested in having a discussion about the possibility of accepting Muslim refugees that is based in a more accurate understanding of the many different ways they practice their faith (a different thing, rather, than suggesting that they can hide nefariously in any population because they “come in all flavors” — incidentally, are you a cannibal, sir? — with thinly disguised racialized rhetoric about the danger of “‘white’ lies”) I could suggest the following:

General introductions to Islam:

Allen, Roger and Shawkat Toorawa, eds. Islam: A Short Guide to the Faith. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011.

Endress, Gerhard. An Introduction to Islam. Columbia: UP, 1988.

Ruthven, Malise. Islam: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: UP, 2012.

Popular and accessible scholarly books on aspects of Islam and Islamic history:

Aslan, Reza. No god but God. New York: Random House, 2011.

Bennison, Amira. The Great Caliphs. New Haven: Yale UP, 2010.

Berkey, Jonathan. The Formation of Islam. Cambridge: UP, 2002.

Bowering, Gerhard. Islamic Political Thought. Princeton: UP, 2015.

Cook, Michael. Ancient Religions, Modern Politics. Princeton: UP, 2014.

Donner, Fred. Muhammad and the Believers. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2010.

Ghanea Bassiri, Kambiz. A History of Islam in America. Cambridge: UP, 2010.

Hoyland, Robert. In God’s Path: The Arab Conquests and the Creation of the Islamic Empire. Oxford: UP, 2014.

Kennedy, Hugh. Muslim Spain and Portugal. New York: Routledge, 1996.

—. The Prophet and the Age of the Caliphate. New York: Routledge, 2004.

Lewis, David Levering. God’s Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe. New York: Norton, 2009 reprint.

More specific and technical scholarly studies, with attention to race, ethnic identity, religion-and-state issues, and dissimulation:*

Crone, Patricia. God’s Rule: Government and Islam. New York: Columbia UP, 2005.

Daftary, Farhad. “Religious Identity, Dissimulation, and Assimilation,” in Living Islamic History, ed. Yasir Suleiman. Edinburgh: UP, 2010. 47-60.

García-Arenal, Mercedes, et al. “Taqiyya: Legal Dissimulation,” special issue of Al-Qantara 34:2 (2013).

Gordon, Cyrus. “The Substratum of Taqiyya in Iran,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 97:2 (1977: 192 and ff.

Kohlberg, Etan. A Medieval Muslim Scholar at Work. Leiden: Brill, 1992.

Lassner, Jacob. Islamic Revolution and Historical Memory. New Haven: American Oriental Society, 1986.

Lewis, Bernard. Race and Slavery in the Middle East. Oxford: UP, 1992.

Miller, Kathryn. Guardians of Islam: Religious Authority and Muslim Communities of Late Medieval Spain. New York: Columbia UP, 2008.

Monroe, James T. The Shu’ubiyya in al-Andalus. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970.

Mottahedeh, Roy P. “The Shu’ubiyyah Controversy and the Social History of Early Islamic Iran,” Journal of Middle East Studies 7 (1956) 161-82.

Perry, Mary Elizabeth. “Morisco Stories and the Complexities of Resistance and Assimilation,” in The Conversos and Moriscos in Late Medieval Spain and Beyond, ed. Kevin Ingram. Leiden: Brill, 2012. 161-85.

Ruggles, D.F. “Mothers of a Hybrid Dynasty: Race, Genealogy and Acculturation in al-Andalus,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 34:1 (2004): 65-94.

*I’m pulling this together on the fly, about to run off to an evening lecture. It is quite incomplete so far. I will try to add more later, but it would also be fantastic if readers wanted to add additional references in the comments section. The more minds the merrier, and we could put together a really useful resource, if not for the closed-minded legislators who are likely not to care, but for our fellow citizens who are not specialists and might be looking for information they can trust as they try to sort through all of the rhetoric.

 **ETA 11:30pm: I’ve added some more references but this is still far from comprehensive. Because of my own area of expertise, this list tilts heavily medieval and heavily Spain (and is still very selective even within those two categories). I’d still love it if other scholars were willing to contribute to this bibliography from their own intellectual points of view. Please leave other suggestions in the comments.

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As a Medievalist I Can’t Help You. Maybe Nobody Can. (Or, what I’m not going to tell my students after Paris)

[[[I wrote this all out as I was thinking about what I would say this evening to the students in my honors seminar. They’re a group of forty students whom I see once every other week for an hour to guide them in research fundamentals, loosely structured around the theme of Jews, Christians, and Muslims in Spain then and now. Because of the theme of the course and because we will be traveling as a group to Europe next month, I thought I had to say something to them about Paris; but the group was too large and too unfamiliar just for an informal debrief-chat. So I had to put some though into what I was going to say to them rather than how I might guide a conversation.]]]

I want to start out by talking about gargoyles. Gargoyles are one of the most iconic kinds of medieval art, but most of the ones that are still on buildings today are from the nineteenth century; they’re replicas and new inventions from a period when there was a renewed interest in the Middle Ages in Europe, and they became a way for people to articulate their own concerns and ideas without really claiming them. They couched their deepest, darkest secrets in neo-medieval art. But make no mistake about it; these are the monsters of modernity.

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Amongst the gargoyles of Notre Dame are very few human figures, and the ones that are there represent the racialist theories of the nineteenth century. One of the few medieval scenes that remains includes a group of people rising from the dead at the Apocalypse, and one of those is a representation of a black man; it is one of the earliest representations that we have of a black person in European art. It is sympathetic and unremarkable: a black person amongst the dead that shall be raised.

By contrast, the single human form on façade of Notre Dame as it was restored in the nineteenth century is known as the wandering Jew. There is nothing monstrous about this representation, but it is telling that the only human amongst all the monsters is a member of a religious minority, racialized into monstrosity in the nineteenth century. This gargoyle is telling the story not of medieval Jews but of modern race theory.

An apochryphal legend is that the wandering Jew chimera bears the likeness of an especially hated foreman on the restoration project. It’s not true, but the tale foreshadows a complete reversal in the modern period.

Gargoyles require periodic restoration, and just as was done for Notre Dame 150 years ago, the façade of the cathedral in Lyon was more recently restored. Rather than being hated, the stonemason’s foreman at the building site was respected by all of the craftsmen for his reasonable expectations and his fairness. And so one of the stone masons decided to honor him by carving a gargoyle in his likeness and giving it his name, Ahmed, and his piety as a Muslim by carving the phrase “Allahu akbar,” God is great, into the base of the figure.

TO GO WITH FRENCH PAPER : "LYON: LA GARG

Perhaps predictably, local religious conservatives kicked up a storm, complaining about the Islamization of their cathedral. To its eternal credit, the local church administration spoke out in favor of Ahmed the Gargoyle, pointing out that like Muslims, Catholics also believe that God is great and are willing to attest to that in any language. Gargoyles and chimeras just are a neo-medieval form for people to express their opinions, good and bad, about the modern world.

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God is great is what the attackers shouted out in Paris this weekend as they gunned down people in the dozens. But it is also what French Muslims called out when they prayed that night for their country. And it is the sentiment, inscribed in Arabic at the base of the Lyonnais gargoyle. If gargoyles are expressions of modernity, Ahmed more than most hearkens back to the Middle Ages, when educated, literate people knew that they could read in many language, accept many truths, and hold many contradicting ideas — sic et non — with no problem. Arabic was no contradiction to Europe, and the greatness of one unitary God was mutually acceptable.

Obviously I am starting out today talking about Jewish and Muslim gargoyles in France because in a seminar on Jews, Christians, and Muslims in the country just next door, I didn’t think I could leave this weekend’s events unremarked.

Spain’s Islamic history is different than France’s. And in part because of that difference, I can assure you that our trip will be okay. Besides that, universities are risk-averse; NYU would not send us if there were any hint of danger. Our activities are being planned by people who live and work in Madrid and know lay of the city and its rhythms and are arranging everything with a safety-first attitude.

[[[That last bit is a lie. I reasonably suspect it will be fine but I am terrified all the same. I will tell them this lie over, and over, and over again until they believe it and I do. The flowers and the candles will protect us and we will not be cowed by men with guns. Trust me. I am the one with the advanced degree and the authority. Trust me; this lie must be true.]]

But just like the gargoyles of an imagined medieval France, a lot of observers take medieval Spain as a vessel through which to express their modern ideas, monstrous or marvelous. They see it as a place where Jews, Christians, and Muslims created a productive, coherent artistic and literary culture together and ask why it cannot be so today; or they see a place in which law and politics vacillated between protective and repressive and deadly and remark that given our joint historical past, today could be no other way.

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[[[This is the part that I’m not going to tell them:]]]

There’s a sense that the Middle Ages, and the Spanish Middle Ages in particular, ought to have something to say to us at moments like this.

As a medievalist I can’t help you; and in darker moments I think that maybe nobody can. I can give you a framework in which you can hang your own ideas and aspirations and vision of the world. Sometimes it’s valuable to be able to talk about modern issues from behind the safety of a medieval guise. But conversely, maybe it’s not any better to imagine a medieval world in which coexistence figured differently than it is to imagine a superhero multiverse in which a man of steel will catch you when you fall and vanquish the bad guys who pushed you into the chasm.

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I don’t have answers anymore; maybe I never did. A few months ago, in one of the Republican presidential candidate debates, Carly Fiorina said she was prepared to tackle the ISIS problem because her bachelor’s degree is in medieval history and philosophy. Everyone in my line of work laughed because the Middle Ages cannot fix a world irredeemably changed by the Enlightenment and the rise of the nation-state and the fraternal-twin ideologies of imperialism and colonialism. But it gives us something to do as the world crumbles around us and, more importantly, a way to do it.

[[[I will pick up again here.]]]

Most of you are not going to write your senior honors theses on a medieval topic; a lot of you are not going to write in a humanities discipline at all; but you are all heirs to the Middle Ages by virtue of being here in a university. The idea of gathering together to pursue higher education, to ask great questions, and to hold many contradictory ideas all at once and have that be okay is an invention of thirteenth-century Paris.

So let’s get on with going all medieval on your book review assignment, asking good questions and holding two contradictory opinions — sic et non — at the same time without exploding into a fit of modern clarity.

[[[In the end, I skipped the gargoyles and told them only the part that I thought I would not; that was the heart of the matter.]]]

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Light for the City of Light

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Someday my neighborhood will cease to be an abbreviated, illuminated history of human brutality because there will be no more human brutality to illuminate, inshallah.

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Arabic Library Ephemera

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NYU has a campus in an Arabic speaking country, and so the library system has an Arabic-language interface on the self-checkout consoles. It seemed appropriate to use it while checking out books on Arabic Bible translations, and I got an Arabic-langauge confirmation slip.

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Race and Titles at Yale

This morning the Chronicle of Higher Education published an article on the simmering-to-a-boil race situation at Yale. It focuses partly on two administrators who have been the focus of much student ire, Nicholas Christakis, the Silliman master whose wife sent a mass email to students defending the wearing of offensive Halloween costumes; and Jonathan Holloway, the dean of Yale College and the first African-American person to hold that position. Students are angry at both of the Christakises over the email, and at Holloway for not doing enough generally to address a fraught racial climate in the college.

The article refers to Christakis as “Dr.” and to Holloway as “Mr.”

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The CHE’s policy on courtesy titles appears to be one out of the 1950s: It refers to medical doctors, but not to doctors of philosophy, by the title they earned. At Yale at mid-century, it was, indeed customary to do the same. The operating assumption was that anyone teaching had a PhD and anyone learning did not, and so everyone could be called Mr. just the same while everyone would still know his place in the pecking order.

It’s not like that at Yale anymore, nor should it be in the Chronicle. Faculty members at Yale and other universities are now customarily called “Prof.” or “Dr.” There is much more diversity of training and education and many more PhDs in non-professorial positions within the university (contingent faculty, student life, support services, and various other offices) who deserve the same respect as the faculty. People who have earned the title should be able to use it, especially in an academic universe in which not everyone with a PhD gets a professorial position anymore.

And, crucially, in an article on race it creates a terrible contrast to refer to a white administrator as “Dr.” and a black one as “Mr.” This isn’t an article that in any way has to do with Christakis as a physician or Holloway as a historian. In this context they both function as college administrators and so they should be treated equally when it comes to referring to them by title. If it were an article about Christakis saving Holloway’s life after he had been struck by a falling gargoyle on campus then it might be appropriate to refer to the two men as the CHE did here; I would still find the policy of MD = Dr., PhD = Mr. to be a silly one, but that would a matter on which people of good faith could disagree. In this case, in an article about race and how black people are treated and perceived in the academy, it creates an insidious optic. And the optic matters.

Yes, it is a slight in every sense of the word: An insult and a very small thing. However, in the current climate, the small things really do matter and not only because they are small-scale reflections of attitudes held on the grand scale. If all the participants in these conversations were to treat each other equally with the same common courtesies that would go a long way to at least creating a climate in which the bigger issues could begin to be addressed.

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Thinking About Academic Writing for #AcWriMo: Personal Writing vs. Academic Writing

With the end of my book manuscript mercifully closer on the horizon than it has ever been (despite being in a state that I could fairly describe as “done,” if not good, for almost a year now) I am beginning to think about the shape I want my work to take going forwards. I won’t ever stop doing proper research that the most stalwart of my colleagues would recognize as such. I do not expect I will ever stop publishing in academic venues. But finished proving myself to the academy, I do want to vary somewhat the form that research will take when I present it to the world. The more I realize that even when I do work that I consider to be meticulously documented and argued many of my colleagues will remain dismissive, the less I care about continuing to try to prove myself in the established academic forums. That’s all a very long-winded way of saying that would like to write for a wider and more general audience than the six people who will probably read the book I’m finishing now.

As a first step, I started out by writing a version of an academic article I had written but with a general audience in mind. It was originally destined for Believer Magazine after some correspondence with one of the editors there, but when she was furloughed (I don’t remember all the details now) and the periodical went from monthly to bimonthly, a bunch of her projects and others were shelved. Around that time, the journal Granta put out a call for open submissions, so I sent it there. It was rejected.

(Just as an aside, I infinitely prefer being rejected by normal-people presses and publications rather than academic ones. They tell you one or two key things that they think make your work unsuitable for them, wish you the best, and that’s that; there’s no masochistic evisceration of your work or denigration of your intellect and credentials all, disingenuously, in the name of helping you improve your work and uphold professional standards. It’s disappointing and it’s a pain, but it’s not actively destructive.)

I was expecting it to be rejected — Granta is a pretty high bar to clear — but I was surprised by one of the comments I got, that the piece “lacked a personal touch.” I don’t think that’s just a question of the misaligned expectations of an academic moving towards writing for a general audience, but rather a question of general readership being unused to writing that is not in a confessional mode.

Essayistic writing shouldn’t always be directly about the author, pace the column by the inimitable Rebecca Schuman in which she managed to take a news story about an alleged pedophile gymnastics coach killing himself in prison rather than facing justice and make it all about her. A recent think-piece explored how women, in particular, are expected to commodify their lives and the most horrifyingly degrading experiences of their lives just to get a break as a writer, in contrast to the good ol’ days when it used to be possible to make a living wage as a writer. Even though authors supposed to have been dead and buried by now, receptive readers are once again compelling them to insert themselves in the text.

Essayistic writing shouldn’t always be directly about the author, nor should it have to be.

Writing — good writing — is intensely personal even when it is not confessional. That everyone participates in the act of writing on a day-to-day basis makes it seem easy and seem like something that everyone can do, and so a general reading public doesn’t quite appreciate what goes into writing . It’s the same flaw as distinguishing between creative and academic writing, when the latter is intensely creative but hung up on a different kind of skeleton.

Taken to an extreme, academic writing is more about the author than the subject, but disguised in historical and disciplinary terms. The most famous example of this phenomenon is biographies of Alexander the Great, which are never just biographies about their subject but also autobiographies of their authors. To shamelessly steal a few sentences from an article I have forthcoming: For example, we hear echoes of Johann Gustav Droysen’s nineteenth-century advocacy for German unification under Prussian rule in his coining of the term “Hellenizing” to describe Alexander’s cultural influence over vast swaths of Asia. Parallels abound in the writing of the historians, travelers and bureaucrats of Victorian England who cast Alexander as the consummate colonial administrator. And in a more contemporary turn Rory Stewart, denizen of the recent Western military efforts in Afghanistan that were defined, at least in part, by a dramatic lack of knowledge of the local cultures, sums up the issue and creates one more example of it when he writes, “The more we produce about Alexander the less we seem to understand him.” Academic writing is the imposition of order upon chaos that refracts the scholar’s viewpoint as much as it is the product of her time and energies. It’s a thing that we don’t like to admit (just as so many academics are loathe to admit that they love their subject lest it compromise the scientific objectivity that we profess, impossibly, to value in the humanities) but by concealing it, we make it harder to share our work with a public that does want that personal touch.

Long-form journalism sometimes seeks a compromise by accompanying a particularly compelling or out-of-the-blue feature with a “how I got the story” featurette. It offers writerly and reporterly context, but crucially without replacing the story or inserting the reporter into it. On the one hand, a fascination with the skeleton of a piece of writing and the process goes a way to professionalizing it and combating the perception that writing is easy because you just sit down and do it like anybody does. But on the other hand, to cater only to that fascination with how the piece of writing came to be sells readers short by limiting their horizons to the world of writers, rather than the worlds that they write about. Confessional writing can help to show how personal other kinds of essayistic and long-form and creative non-fiction is, too, personal and creative; but it shouldn’t be the end of the story.

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#AcWriMo

Happy Academic Writing Month! (As opposed to the other eleven which are… oh, wait…) #AcWriMo is a massively-multiwriter mutual encouragement and accountability month-long writing session. Participants set writing goals and then try to complete them and keep people posted on social media, encouraging each other along the way. I don’t have the bandwidth to do the full-on social media version with people I don’t already interact with regularly, nor do I think that entering my writing goals into a Google Spreadsheet is a greater accountability measure than YOUR BOOK IS DUE TO THE PUBLISHER IN THREE MONTHS!, but since #AcWriMo coincides with the end of the blissful two-week break I gave myself from working on the book manuscript I’m going to play along a bit on the sidelines and use this as an opportunity to

  • Write shorter sentences. (See above.)
  • Finish fleshing out the Bible-in-Arabic chapter
  • Write the associated conference paper
  • Add additional context to the panorama of translators in the first chapter
  • Finish revising the libraries chapter
  • Start some of the reading for revising the last chapter in December
  • Last round of edits on the Thirteenth Century Chapter of Doom
  • Write at least one blog post about academic writing

Tedious updates will appear throughout the month below the jump.

Continue reading “#AcWriMo”