Harvard University Press Blog

The Rise and Fall of Syria's President for Life?

Roger Owen writes in The Rise and Fall of Arab Presidents for Life that he became interested in the subject in the spring of 2009, and soon after decided to write a book. It was virtually completed by the end of December 2010, “just as the first rumblings of opposition to President Zein El Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia suggested that these systems of quasi-monarchical government were much more vulnerable to popular pressure than almost anyone had previously imagined.” Faced with the question of whether or not to amend his work to reflect the inchoate Arab Spring, Owen compromised: “I would adapt my manuscript to take account of the fall of two presidents, Ben Ali of Tunisia and Hosni Mubarak of Egypt; the tremendous pressure faced by three more, Bashar al-Asad of Syria, Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen, and Muammar Qaddafi of Libya; and the announcement by Omar al- Bashir of Sudan that he would not seek another term as president when his present term expired in 2015. This meant, in effect, the end of the system that my book seeks to explicate as a particular form of modern Arab political practice.” Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen and Muammar Qaddafi of Libya have of course since been removed from power. In Syria, however, Bashar al-Asad remains. With the massacre last week of over 100 villagers in central Syria ratcheting international outrage yet higher, an end to Asad’s reign may be growing closer. We offer below an excerpt from Owen’s book that outlines the common features of the system of Arab monarchical republics, which may also be seeing its end.

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The systems of Arab presidents for life were many decades in the making, having their origins with the (mostly military) leaders who came to power from the late 1960s onward and soon learned how to construct the coup-proof regimes that would allow them to remain in offi ce for as long as they lived. From then on, only one Arab republican president, Abdul Rahman al-Iryani of North Yemen, left office more or less of his own free will when his term expired in 1974. Other unusual exceptions were Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr of Iraq and Habib Bourguiba of Tunisia, who got pushed aside by ambitious subordinates, while two more, Gafar Nimeiri of Sudan and Chadli Bendjedid of Algeria, were removed by fellow military officers in 1985 and 1992, respectively.

As of 31 December 2010, the list of longtime presidential survivors included Muammar Qaddafi, who got rid of the Libyan monarchy in 1969; Ali Abdullah Saleh of North Yemen (1978–) and a United Yemen (1991–); Hosni Mubarak of Egypt (1981–); Zein El Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia (1987–); and Omar Hassan al-Bashir of Sudan (1993–). By then, just one—Hafiz al-Asad of Syria (1970–2000)—had managed to pass on power to his son, Bashar. But there was every reason to suppose that others, like Mubarak, Saleh, and Qaddafi, fully intended to try. Meanwhile, at least two of the Middle East’s remaining monarchies, Morocco and Jordan, had become significantly more presidential in their exercise of royal authoritarian power.

Perhaps this should come as no surprise to those who have read the long history of political republics, beginning with the emergence of powerful figures such as the Caesars of ancient Rome. Then, too, there are the cases of the two powerful leaders of the revived form of republicanism represented by the American and French revolutions, with George Washington fighting off the various influences suggesting that he become another type of monarch and Napoleon Bonaparte agreeing to become emperor in the interest of ensuring that the revolution could be continued on a permanent basis.

Nevertheless, it took some little time to understand how, in a roughly similar republican context, roughly similar pressures encouraged the leaders of the world’s newly independent states to take their first step in the process toward permanency by allowing themselves to serve on and on without thought of retirement. It remains true that, in the Arab world at least, the general rationale of such systems, their structures, their politics, and the ways in which they sought to legitimize themselves remain little researched and poorly understood. All this in spite of the work of a small group of academic researchers, mostly political scientists, who have begun either to explore the present political dynamics of individual Arab presidential security states such as Algeria, Egypt, Syria, and Tunisia or to look comparatively at certain aspects of these same dynamics either across the Middle East or, in a few cases, across all or most of the former colonial world.

Religious Freedom, Health Care, and Women in the Church

When then-candidate Rick Santorum declared in February that John F. Kennedy’s 1960 comments on the role of people of faith in the public square made him want to “throw up,” he merely presaged a showdown to come. After this week’s announcement of a lawsuit brought by Catholic groups upset with the Obama administration, HUP Publicity Assistant Bridget Martin turned to a few books for context, and offers the post below.

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This week, 43 Catholic organizations including schools and hospitals filed lawsuits against the Obama administration in response to the federal mandate that birth control coverage be included in health care plans. Though the Obama administration proposed a compromise by which the responsibility for payment could be shifted from employers to the insurance companies, those bringing suit characterize the mandate as an assault on religious liberty. The lawsuits have set off a maelstrom of responses, unveiling the political, ethical, and social complexities embedded in the issue.

In a Wall Street Journal opinion piece entitled “Why the Bishops Are Suing the U.S. Government,” Harvard Law School professor Mary Ann Glendon defends American bishops and their initiative to preserve the separation of Church and State. Glendon, whose HUP books include Abortion and Divorce in Western Law, argues that the health insurance mandate violates the Catholic Church’s constitutional liberty, ultimately demoting religion to a second-class right. She sees the debate not as an argument about contraception, but as a principle for preserving religious liberty, asserting, “The main goal of the mandate is not, as HHS claimed, to protect women’s health. It is rather a move to conscript religious organizations into a political agenda, forcing them to facilitate and fund services that violate their beliefs, within their own institutions.”

But what exactly did the founders intend when they included the separation of church and state clause in the US Constitution? In Religious Freedom and the Constitution, Christopher L. Eisgruber and Lawrence G. Sager caution us against imagining an impenetrable wall between church and state when we consider the ideal. Rather, they argue that while religious institutions and practitioners have the right to be free from governmental discrimination on account of religious beliefs, those religious beliefs do not on their own exempt institutions and practitioners from generally applicable laws. This interpretation sheds a different light on the relationship between church and state, especially as US bishops turn to the court in fear of being marginalized by the federal government.

Government influence is not the only social issue driving the contraception controversy. A day after Glendon’s piece was published, Maureen Dowd’s op-ed in the New York Times took an opposing stance. Dowd frankly rejects the position adopted by Glendon and others: “The church insists it’s an argument about religious freedom, not birth control. But, really it’s about birth control, and women’s lower caste in the church.”

Dowd’s argument is a window into the gender and power implications of this debate. As an institution dependent on male hierarchy, is the Church’s disapproval of contraception a tool to subordinate women? The struggles of women within the male power structure of the Church are chronicled in Jo Ann Kay McNamara’s Sisters in Arms, which traces the history of Catholic nuns in the Western world. McNamara shows that the earliest female converts were attracted to the Church by the proclamation of equality in the Kingdom of Heaven, a notion vastly different from the patriarchal societies of the Early Church. Yet since the establishment of female ministries, women have struggled to be recognized as equals in the church.

Garry Wills emphasized this subordination in an April post on the New York Review blog. Wills explains how the Vatican recently “stripped the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, representing most American nuns, of its powers of self-government, maintaining that its members have made statements that ‘disagree with or challenge the bishops, who are the church’s authentic teachers of faith and morals.’” Outraged by this blatant reduction of power for women in the Church, Wills calls attention to the nuns’ unwavering commitment to the social Gospel, aiding those suffering regardless of political implications involved, as in their response to the AIDS crisis, their facilitation of the spiritual needs of gay people, and their activism in the civil rights movement.

Debates over the politics of religious freedom and gender inequality seem certain to reach a fever pitch in this election year. The Catholic Church is planning a national campaign for their cause, “Fortnight for Freedom,” to run from June 21st through the symbolically chosen July 4th. The initiative, intended to encourage prayer, education, and public action about religious freedom, was created in direct response to the perceived threat posed by the Obama administration. With the Church seemingly demonstrating the primacy of a respect for life in its political motivations, it will be interesting to watch the extent to which American Catholics embrace Mitt Romney, even in light of his Mormonism, which some may still find unsettling.

Neoliberal Penality and the Chicago Police State

“The market is the best mechanism ever invented for efficiently allocating resources to maximize production . . . I also think that there is a connection between the freedom of the marketplace and freedom more generally.” As political scientist Bernard Harcourt notes, these are surprisingly not the words of Friedrich Hayek or Milton Friedman, but of then-candidate Barack Obama, in the summer of 2008. As Harcourt demonstrates in The Illusion of Free Markets: Punishment and the Myth of Natural Order, a clear relationship exists between the pervasive expectation that the federal government should (or at least could) stay out of market matters, on the one hand, and the public and political acceptance of the expansion and naturalization of government’s role in policing and incarceration, on the other.

Harcourt refers to this self-perpetuating schema—in which a belief in the government’s obligation to respect the illusory freedom of markets can thrive alongside an urge to continually restrict the freedom of people—as “neoliberal penality,” and details how it facilitates the expansion of the penal sphere. Most directly, he notes, the logic provides politicians with rhetorical tools with which to enact prison-packing tough-on-crime policies. Harcourt cites Katherine Beckett’s work in demonstrating Ronald Reagan’s advocacy of the paradoxical rubric by which public assistance can be deemed an illegitimate state function while policing and social control are its obligation. Here’s Reagan speaking at a fundraiser:

This is precisely what we’re trying to do to the bloated Federal Government today: remove it from interfering in areas where it doesn’t belong, but at the same time strengthen its ability to perform its constitutional and legitimate functions. . . . In the area of public order and law enforcement, for example, we’re reversing a dangerous trend of the last decade. While crime was steadily increasing, the Federal commitment in terms of personnel was steadily shrinking.

Harcourt characterizes this as the “core idea in neoliberal penality,” this notion that the government should respect the self-contained orderliness of the economic sphere, yet has a legitimate role to play outside that sphere, especially in law enforcement.

Cut to Chicago site of this week’s NATO summit, where world leaders discussed global issues of “security in an age of austerity.” Pictured at right are those very world leaders, posing together for a commemorative photograph. Below, in striking contrast, we see images of the security forces present in Chicago during the meeting.

The photos, taken by Harcourt’s daughter Isadora Ruyter-Harcourt, depict what Harcourt dubbed “the Chicago Police State 2012.”

Human Rights and the Glamour of Dissent

In a recent NYT opinion piece sparked by the now-resolved international episode of the blind Chinese activist Chen Guangcheng’s escape from house arrest to American protection, Samuel Moyn considers the evolving implications of “human rights.” Moyn is the author of The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History, in which he argues that the modern conception of human rights begins not with the UN’s 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but in the decade after 1968. In his op-ed, Moyn writes that what was initially an “uncontroversial effort to establish moral norms above the fray of the cold war’s ideological battles” has since become both more familiar and less clear-cut:

In reporting on Mr. Chen, most publications, including this newspaper, used the terms “dissident” and even “prisoner of conscience” to refer to him.

However, since the time Amnesty International and other groups popularized those phrases, human rights—a term that once meant the defense of individuals against the oppression of an unjust state—has come to imply other things, too.

Today, it is just as likely to be invoked by powerful states to wage war in distant corners of the globe, much to the chagrin of authoritarian leaders in wealthy rising powers like Russia and China, who see such “humanitarian interventions” as a violation of states’ sovereignty—not to mention a threat to their manner of rule.

Moyn goes on to detail how the concept of human rights has “lost some of its romantic appeal and moral purity” and become a political tool. Even still, he writes, human rights can be useful to “Chinese dissidents and their Western allies” just as they’d been to the “glamorous dissidents” who came before.

In describing Chen, Moyn knowingly evokes the codified concept of the dissident (“the lone icon speaking for moral principle against totalitarian rule, the anonymous but courageous network at home that sheltered him, the supporters abroad who rallied around his cause, and the governments that made their choices based on a difficult calculus of moral ideals and geopolitical interests”), but elsewhere uses “dissent” in a fairly straightforward fashion. A short op-ed can sustain only so much complication, to be sure, but it’s interesting to see the concept of dissent taken as stable in the course of a discussion of the evolution of human rights.

Jonathan Bolton’s Worlds of Dissent: Charter 77, The Plastic People of the Universe, and Czech Culture under Communism is another recent HUP book that deals with some of the same events and themes as does Moyn in The Last Utopia. Bolton’s book unpacks the myths and the glamour to show how the struggle against state repression was felt by those who lived it, making clear the messy humanity of dissent.

When Wal-Mart Went to Mexico

The front page of the April 21st New York Times carried a long investigative report detailing allegations of widespread bribery at Wal-Mart’s Mexican subsidiary. According to documents obtained by the Times, Wal-Mart de Mexico orchestrated a multi-year campaign of bribery to win market dominance, paying off officials in “virtually every corner of the country” in its rush to build stores. After being alerted of the pattern of wrongdoing in 2005, reports the Times, Wal-Mart’s leaders ordered that the internal investigation be shut down. The Times characterizes the entire affair as a prolonged struggle at Wal-Mart’s highest levels, pitting “the company’s much publicized commitment to the highest moral and ethical standards against its relentless pursuit of growth.”

With the company now in full damage control mode and watching its stock price fall, it’s worth reflecting on the origins of Wal-Mart’s expansion into Mexico, currently home to one in five Wal-Mart stores. In the text below, excerpted from her 2009 book To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise, Bethany Moreton details the crucial role that the company’s expansion into Mexico played in the U.S. debate over the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). “For a brief but decisive moment in U.S. politics,” she writes, “the key to imagining free trade was Wal-Mart in Mexico.” What follows is an early ’90s story of globalization, market deregulation, and what’s now alleged to be systematic law-breaking, with cameos from the likes of the Clintons, Ross Perot, Al Gore, and Newt Gingrich.

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In 1965, Mexico had begun experimenting with export-oriented maquiladoras [manufacturing operations] along its northern border, where some areas enjoyed duty-free status to entice manufacturers. Such efforts, however, did not attract much attention initially, nor were they meant to: Mexican policy from the 1940s to the 1980s remained committed to developing native industry for domestic consumption behind protective tariff walls, just as the United States and Britain had done in the nineteenth century.

Between 1940 and 1980, this strategy produced annual growth rates of over 6 percent and a steady rise in real wages. But the “Mexican Miracle” came at a price, one increasingly met through high-interest loans from American banks. In 1982, the Mexican finance minister was forced to go to Washington, hat in hand: the country could not honor its foreign payment schedule. In return for emergency loans, Mexico submitted to free-market restructuring, cutting social services, privatizing hundreds of state-owned enterprises, and joining the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. The buying power of the Mexican minimum wage dropped by almost 70 percent between 1982 and 1991. Industrial wages fell by almost half; per capita basic food consumption dropped 30 percent.

In early 1991, following announcements of negotiations for NAFTA, American investment in Mexico jumped to two and a half times its previous rate. In this context, then, Wal-Mart’s decision to enter Mexico’s retail market represented part of a larger shift underway to realign the post–Cold War global geography from NATO and the Warsaw Pact into competing free-trade areas. President George H. W. Bush negotiated the agreement with the help of the business-heavy Advisory Committee for Trade Policy and Negotiations. A business coalition of more than 500 corporations—“a virtual lobbying Who’s Who”—helped the administration secure Congressional approval for fast-tracking the treaty, or requiring an up-or-down vote without the possibility of amendments. The constitutional division of labor that had often stymied free traders—commercial regulation to Congress, but foreign policy to the executive branch—could thus be short-circuited: It was to be the trade agreement hammered out by President Bush, or no trade agreement at all.

But the old Cold Warrior was not the visionary who could see it through to ratification. That job fell to Arkansan Bill Clinton, whose wife resigned from Wal-Mart’s board to help her husband’s presidential campaign in 1992. Despite his party’s resolution against NAFTA in 1991 and his own ambivalence toward it during the campaign, the new president threw his support to the treaty in 1993. The key for business under the new administration was now to see the trade agreement through a scheduled vote in the House in mid-November. If they lost, and a new round of negotiations opened up, it might be years before they could muster the political will to pass another version, what with the recession and climbing unemployment.

The Business Roundtable swung into action. It organized 2,300 corporations into USA-NAFTA and assigned state captaincies to Roundtable members. The captains—all but four of whom had participated in the treaty negotiations through seats on the Bush-era advisory boards— mobilized unprecedented business unity in campaigning for public opinion through every conceivable media outlet, from op-eds to talking heads. “You may also want to consider involving employees in a company-wide letter-writing campaign,” suggested the Illinois NAFTA Coalition in a July 1993 memo to its members. Procter & Gamble, a major Wal-Mart vendor, promoted the treaty’s potential to double the company’s export market in a quarterly report to its 170,000 stockholders. Wal-Mart made early appearances as a symbol for this export potential. “Here’s a country with 86 million people, trying to grow and needing access to the kind of products we have here,” said a USA-NAFTA council member. “I’ve been told by the leadership of Wal-Mart that they can’t get enough American-made product into their stores they are now building in Mexico.”

“Warning: Black People at Leisure”

Andrew W. Kahrl is Assistant Professor of History at Marquette University and author of The Land Was Ours: African American Beaches from Jim Crow to the Sunbelt South. By exploring how beaches and waterfronts became sites of racial contest, The Land Was Ours gives us a deeper understanding of the mechanisms of racism and resistance. In the piece below, Kahrl looks to the history of segregated leisure in an effort to contextualize the nationwide discussion of race occasioned by the killing of African American teenager Trayvon Martin.

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Earlier this month, in the face of outrage over the killing of Trayvon Martin, the conservative columnist John Derbyshire penned a wide-ranging racist screed offered in the guise of “a talk that nonblack Americans have with their kids.” In the piece, which eventually led to his dismissal from the National Review, Derbyshire posited that nonblacks planning a trip to a beach or amusement park know to “find out whether it is likely to be swamped with blacks.” Those objecting to the implication of widely-held and casually blatant racism in Derbyshire’s remarks should look to the history of the urban island park Belle Isle, where we find evidence of white America’s strategic retreat from integrated public leisure spaces. Look also to Twin Lakes, the gated community where Martin was gunned down by a neighborhood watchman, and where we see the kind of space to which many whites retreated. Indeed, the historical forces that led to the tragic death of Martin and those that have steadily re-segregated and privatized America’s leisure spaces are deeply entwined.

It was perhaps fitting that, on the day after Derbyshire’s piece was published, the state of Michigan announced plans to charge entry fees to Belle Isle in order to fund improvements and eventually make the park an attractive place for “corporate outings” and other private events. Once considered one of the nation's finest urban parks, Belle Isle suffered serious budget cuts and deterioration after being mostly abandoned by whites. For, in the summer of 1943, Belle Isle provided the spark that lit one of the nation’s worst race riots. On a hot summer afternoon, an estimated crowd of one-hundred thousand whites and blacks jostled for space to picnic and swim on the island. Fights erupted and soon spilled over onto the mainland. When the dust settled two days later, twenty-five African American and nine white Detroiters were dead. It was neither the first nor the last time that an attempt to draw (or erase) a color line in the sand would descend into deadly violence.

While we tend to think of segregated beaches and public parks as among the most irrational excesses of the Jim Crow era (how absurd, after all, is the notion that one can demarcate a color line across a body of water), racialized leisure space served an important function in the maintenance of white supremacy. In Jim Crow America, working- and middle-class whites came to see public beaches and parks as their own private domain—a publicly funded “country club” for the common (white) folk—and understood desegregation as the theft of “their” beaches and parks at the hands of privileged white public officials. That these public officials were themselves often members of private swim clubs and owners of summer vacation homes, thus experiencing fewer direct effects of desegregation, served only to fuel white backlash against civil rights, and cynicism toward government in general.

But while some whites defended what they saw as their “rights” to segregated leisure by greeting African Americans at the park and on the shore with chains and baseball bats, those who could afford it instead retreated to new, commercial theme parks, safely located in remote outposts of suburbia, accessible only by automobile. Or, they implemented a host of racially laden but ostensibly color-blind measures of exclusion designed to make public beaches “public” in name only. During the years when African Americans stepped up demands for the right to enjoy public beaches, many wealthy shoreline municipalities, especially along the northeastern seaboard, adopted entry fees (with different rates for residents and non-residents), removed public locker rooms, or—in some cases—placed outright bans on non-resident access.

Meanwhile, towns with comparatively large numbers of poor and minorities steadily abandoned public beaches altogether and sold portions of their beachfront holdings to private developers. Other towns targeted by civil rights protests proposed designating certain days on the summer calendar when poor blacks from the inner city, under the auspices of the Fresh Air fund and other charitable organizations, could visit the beach—and, presumably, allowing locals to do as Derbyshire would later advise: make other plans. We see this form of strategic avoidance on display at public beaches and parks across the country today, where on certain holidays and pre-scheduled annual events, large crowds of African Americans and other minorities gather to enjoy a moment in the sun while whites retreat to their backyards and private clubs. Indeed, the irony of the outrage among white liberals over Derbyshire’s “talk” is that so many of them already teach those same lessons simply by virtue of their choices of where (and when) to take their children for pleasure and amusement each summer.

Budgets, Ethics, and Social Darwinism

In a speech widely considered to be his first blow in the general election campaign against likely Republican nominee Mitt Romney, President Obama last week denounced the budget proposal put forth by Republican Congressman Paul Ryan. Whereas Romney has described Ryan’s budget as “marvelous,” Obama made his own opinion of the budget clear:

Disguised as [a] deficit reduction plan, it’s really an attempt to impose a radical vision on our country. It’s nothing but thinly-veiled Social Darwinism. It’s antithetical to our entire history as a land of opportunity and upward mobility for everyone who's willing to work for it— a place where prosperity doesn’t trickle down from the top, but grows outward from the heart of the middle class. And by gutting the very things we need to grow an economy that's built to last—education and training; research and development—it’s a prescription for decline.

Those comments have been a hot topic on the news shows, with Ryan himself weighing in to describe Obama’s remarks as a “verbal tantrum” more petulant than presidential. “He’s trying to use this kind of rhetoric to distort away from his failed record,” Ryan told NBC.

Yet, writing at the NYT blog The Stone, philosopher Philip Kitcher notes that while the common conception of “Social Darwinism” actually has little to do with the ideas of Charles Darwin, the term as generally understood does, in fact, apply to this Republican budget proposal. He outlines the concept’s meaning:

The heart of social Darwinism is a pair of theses: first, people have intrinsic abilities and talents (and, correspondingly, intrinsic weaknesses), which will be expressed in their actions and achievements, independently of the social, economic and cultural environments in which they develop; second, intensifying competition enables the most talented to develop their potential to the full, and thereby to provide resources for a society that make life better for all. It is not entirely implausible to think that doctrines like these stand behind a vast swath of Republican proposals, including the recent budget, with its emphasis on providing greater economic benefits to the rich, transferring the burden to the middle-classes and poor, and especially in its proposals for reducing public services. Fuzzier versions of the theses have pervaded Republican rhetoric for the past decade (and even longer).

There are very good reasons to think both theses are false. Especially in the case of the Republican dynasties of our day, the Bushes and the Romneys, success has been facilitated by all kinds of social structures, by educational opportunities and legal restrictions, that were in place prior to and independently of their personal efforts or achievements. For those born into environments in which silver spoons rarely appear—Barack Obama, for instance—the contributions of the social environment are even more apparent. Without enormous support, access to inspiring teachers and skillful doctors, the backing of self-sacrificing relatives and a broader community, and without a fair bit of luck, the vast majority of people, not only in the United States but throughout the world, would never achieve the things of which they are, in principle, capable. In short, Horatio Alger needs lots of help, and a large thrust of contemporary Republican policy is dedicated to making sure he doesn’t get it.

Second, even if rigorous competition enables the talented — or, better, the lucky — to realize their goals, it is completely unwarranted to suppose that their accomplishments will translate into any increased benefit for the overwhelming majority of those who are less fortunate. The strenuous struggle social Darwinism envisages might select for something, but the most likely traits are a tendency to take whatever steps are necessary to achieve a foreseeable end, a sharp focus on narrowly individual goals and a corresponding disregard for others. We might reasonably expect that a world run on social Darwinist lines would generate a cadre of plutocrats, each resolutely concerned to establish a dynasty and to secure his favored branch of industry against future competition. In practical terms it would almost certainly yield a world in which the gap between rich and poor was even larger than it is now.

Hajj: Journey to the Heart of Islam

The British Museum’s major new exhibition, Hajj: Journey to the Heart of Islam, is being hailed as a milestone in the “public recognition and acceptance of Islam at the heart of British life.” As British Museum Director Neil MacGregor notes, the exhibition will “enable a global audience to deepen their understanding of the significance and history of the Hajj. In particular, it will allow non-Muslims to explore the one aspect of Islamic practice and faith which they are not able to witness, but which plays such a major part in forming a worldwide Islamic consciousness.”

As part of our ongoing relationship with the British Museum, we’ve just published the North American edition of the beautiful book designed to accompany the exhibition. Ventia Porter, the book’s editor and a Curator in the Museum’s Department of the Middle East, explains in her preface that the book is meant more as a companion to the exhibition than as a conventional catalogue:

Our intention has been to gather the history, the voices of pilgrims and the material culture associated with the Hajj together in one place. We felt this was greatly needed because the story of Hajj crosses so many very different disciplines, from religion, history and archaeology to anthropology, travel and art history, each of which often forms the subject of self-contained publications. We therefore brought together a group of distinguished scholars who themselves take us on a journey and help us delve deeper into the subject. Karen Armstrong invites us to look at Hajj within a broader context of pilgrimage; M.A.S. Abdel Haleem explains the rituals of Hajj and their meaning and also gives us an insight into the experience of a Hajj in rural Egypt. Hugh Kennedy explores the history of the Hajj in early Islam and then focuses on two key travellers. Nasir-i Khusraw and Ibn Jubayr, whose fascinating accounts provide such insight not only into the practicalities of the journey but the deeper meaning of why they undertook it. When you compare the writings of these early pilgrims with those of today it is clear that, although the method of travel and Mecca itself may have changed over time, the act of pilgrimage—that need to touch the holy place, the reactions to seeing the Ka‘ba at Mecca for the first time—have not changed at all. Robert Irwin picks up the history in the thirteenth century and, in a veritable tour d’horizon, he introduces us to more travellers and tells the story of Hajj during the Mamluk and Ottoman periods, though into colonial times and up to the twentieth century. It then falls to Ziauddin Sardar to bring us up to the present day: he looks at how the enormous growth in numbers has changed Hajj in the modern era and demonstrates how it is organized today.

Running in parallel with the history of Hajj is the story of the material culture that surrounds it, whether paintings evoking the journey; archaeological finds from the Hajj routes; manuscripts, historic photographs and tiles illustrating the holy sanctuaries at Mecca and Medina; certificates and pilgrim guides commemorating the direction of Mecca. In addition, there are the objects taken by pilgrims on Hajj or brought back as souvenirs, and the beautiful textiles made annually especially for the Ka‘ba. The works of photography, painting and sculpture by contemporary artists add a further dimension to the art of Hajj. All of these complement and personalize the history, allowing us to glimpse the experience through individuals, deepen our understanding and see how art has been used in the service of Islam. These objects, many of which are included in the exhibition, are illustrated throughout the book; some are highlighted in themed spreads on subjects such as “sacred geography,” the tiles of Mecca and Medina, the Futuh al-Haramayn manuscripts and the sacred textiles. There is also a focus on particular Hajj routes, with detailed maps: across Africa, from Syria and Cairo, and that remarkable endeavor, the Hijaz Railway.

You can get a sense of both the power and the beauty of the material included in the exhibition and book from this short video produced by the British Museum:

 

2011 National Humanities Medalists

We are very pleased to share the news that a number of authors whom we’ve been honored to publish over the years have been named recipients of the 2011 National Humanities Medal. The medals will be awarded by President Obama in a ceremony at the White House this afternoon, which will be streamed live at 1:45 ET. The medals, given since 1997, honor “individuals or groups whose work has deepened the nation’s understanding of the humanities, broadened our citizens’ engagement with the humanities, or helped preserve and expand Americans’ access to important resources in the humanities.”

One 2011 recipient with whom we’ve had a long relationship is Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen, author most recently of The Idea of Justice. The NEH has produced short bios of each recipient, and their coverage of Sen explains away the potential incongruity of seeing an economist awarded a medal for work in the humanities:

When Amartya Sen recounts his intellectual biography, he likes to emphasize different strands of his thought rather than present a unified narrative. “It has been clear from my childhood that I have a lot of curiosity,” he explains, “and unfortunately, or fortunately, it has not been limited to one subject.” This momentary indecision, this uncertainty about considering his diverse interests as good or bad luck, represents the glory and the paradox of his career… Sen’s early work focused on economics, but the social sciences and the humanities are not discontinuous for him. “I don’t really find the division between the subjects contrary to human understanding,” he says, “but if someone were to say to me, you’re an economist and you can’t study philosophy, that would be contrary to how the human mind works.” In the past three decades, he has written on violence, peace, development, equality, and cultural identity—a true marriage of economics and the humanities.

Also receiving the medal this year is the pianist and critic Charles Rosen, whose fourth HUP book will be published this spring. The book, a collection entitled Freedom and the Arts: Essays on Music and Literature, contains Rosen’s ruminations on everything and everyone from Mozart to melancholy, Adorno to opera, and the canon to California. From the NEH bio:

Charles Rosen, one of America’s great writers on music, began his writing career almost as an afterthought. In 1951, the year he turned twenty-four, Rosen earned his PhD in French literature from Princeton, made his New York performing debut, and recorded his first album. The native New Yorker quickly became one of America’s most renowned classical pianists, playing in recitals and as a soloist in orchestra concerts around the world. His career blossomed so rapidly that, by 1955, Rosen was able to leave his academic position teaching French at MIT after only two years, although he’s held many distinguished temporary academic positions since, including at Harvard, Oxford, and Chicago universities… Rosen’s career as one the country’s preeminent classical performers triggered his parallel vocation as a writer about music. He had shunned the subject while in college, where he majored in French literature. “I was too proud to take courses in music,” he recalls. “I don’t mean to sound snotty, but it’s true: I knew more about music than most of the music graduate students,” having studied piano since he was four years old and read much on his own. Unimpressed by the sleeve notes for one of his 1960 recordings, Rosen decided henceforth to write his own.

Andrew Delbanco is another medal recipient with an HUP book arriving this spring: The Abolitionist Imagination, which presents essays intended to give readers a sense of what it meant to be a thoughtful citizen in nineteenth-century America, appalled by slavery yet aware of the fragility of the republic and the high cost of radical action. This volume follows several other works of Delbanco’s that we’ve published, going all the way back to 1981. The NEH describes Delbanco as “the definition of a public intellectual,” and notes his “combination of deep learning, eloquence, and a deft, original way of considering our national history and literature.”

Robert Darnton, whose 2010 book Poetry and the Police: Communication Networks in Eighteenth-Century Paris represents only the most recent product of a long relationship with HUP, receives this medal in the midst of his rise to prominence as a driving force behind the creation of the Digital Public Library of America. He is being awarded the medal for his “determination to make knowledge accessible to everyone,” and, as the NEH notes, he is also known for helping to create the discipline of the history of the book:

“The basic idea is not to just assume that a book is a vehicle of ideas, but to understand how it’s a force in history,” Darnton explains. “To ask how is it produced, how is it diffused, how deeply did it penetrate into society, and then—this is tough—how was it read? What was its effect? Looking at the printed word makes you reassess some classical questions—in my case, questions about the origins of the French Revolution.”

And, finally, we’re pleased to note that Kwame Anthony Appiah is also among this year’s recipients. We had the pleasure of working with Appiah when we published his Mary Flexner Lectures in 2007 as Experiments in Ethics. The collection, noted for being clear, accessible, and funny, explored how the new scientifically-enabled research on empirical moral psychology relates to the age-old project of philosophical ethics. Appiah also delivered the 2010 W.E.B. Du Bois lectures, which we are slated to publish in expanded form in the near future. He receives the National Humanities Medal for “seeking eternal truths in the contemporary world” and for producing a body of work that sheds “moral and intellectual light on the individual in an era of globalization and evolving group identities.”

Our sincere congratulations to Sen, Rosen, Delbanco, Darnton, and Appiah, as well as to their co-recipients John Ashberry, Teofilo Ruiz, Ramón Saldívar, and National History Day.

The Digitus Impudicus, from Socrates to Super Bowl

Ever since Janet Jackson’s infamous “wardrobe malfunction,” the Super Bowl halftime show has been both the province of aged pop stars and a source of network official anxiety. This year’s epic spectacle starred Madonna, legions of acrobatic dancers, and the artists Nicki Minaj and M.I.A. It didn’t take much familiarity with that last duo to imagine that the NFL and NBC may soon have a bit of trouble on their hands.

And, indeed, from hands came trouble. One hand, actually, and one finger: M.I.A.’s left middle, which she flashed to the camera, scandalizing an entire nation on its most pure and sacred day. Just kidding, right? Not such a big deal. But the outcry was loud and righteous enough to make the BBC wonder when the middle finger became so offensive. As they note, it’s a salute with quite a lineage:

A public intellectual, expressing his contempt for a gas-bag politician, reaches for a familiar gesture. He extends his middle finger and declares: “This is the great demagogue.” 

The episode occurred not on a chat show nor in the salons of New York or London, but in 4th Century BC Athens, when the philosopher Diogenes told a group of visitors exactly what he thought about the orator Demosthenes, according to a later Greek historian.

The middle finger, extended with the other fingers held beneath the thumb, is thus documented to have expressed insult and belittlement for more than two millennia.

The article goes on to quote anthropologist Desmond Morris referring to the finger as “one of the most ancient insult gestures known,” and also lists several classic works that make reference to it. This caught our notice, of course, and sent us off to our Loeb Classical Library shelves. The BBC article notes the appearance of the middle finger in Aristophanes’s comedy The Clouds. Well, there’s a Loeb for that, Volume 488. The passage arrives in an exchange between Socrates and his inept pupil Strepsiades:

Socrates: Very well then, what would you begin learning now, of the subjects you were never taught anything about? Tell me, would it be measures, or rhythms, or words?

Strepsiades: I’ll take the measures: the other day a corn dealer shorted me two quarts.

Socrates: That’s not what I’m asking you; I’m asking what you consider to be the most beautiful measure, the three-measure or the four-measure?

Strepsiades: I say nothing beats the gallon.

Socrates: You’re making no sense, man!

Strepsiades: Bet me then, that a gallon isn’t a four-measure.

Socrates: To hell with you! You’re a stupid clod. No doubt you’d soon learn about rhythms!

Strepsiades: But how will these rhythms help me get my daily bread?

Socrates: To begin with, by making you smart in society, and enabling you to recognize which rhythms are shaped for marches, say, and which by the finger.

Strepsiades: By the finger? That one I know, by Zeus.

Socrates: Well, tell me then.

Strepsiades: What could it be but this finger here? (raising his middle finger to Socrates) In the old days, when I was a boy, it was this one.

Socrates: You’re a brainless lout!