Harvard University Press Blog

Changes for the Church?

In a discussion of the process by which the Catholic Church will select a successor to Pope Benedict, the NPR correspondent Sylvia Poggioli (the real winner in this whole episode) raises the possibility that we may see serious changes to Church structure:

Can this global organization, the Catholic Church with 1.2 billion followers, continue to be governed by an absolute monarch, or is it time for a more collegial management, as it was in the early stages of the church and as was recommended by the Second Vatican Council? Some analysts say Benedict’s resignation has potentially opened the gates for a major overhaul of Church governance.

As Father John O’Malley explains in his definitive recounting of Vatican II, nothing on the council’s agenda was more contentious than the relationship of the bishops to the papacy:

The technical expression for the relationship the council advocated was “collegiality.” What kind of authority did the bishops have over the church at large when they acted collectively, that is, collegially; how was that authority exercised in relationship to the pope; and how was collegiality different from “Conciliarism” (supremacy of council over pope), a position condemned in the fifteenth century and repeatedly condemned thereafter? Closely connected with this issue was the more technical question of how bishops related to the sacrament of orders. Also implied was the question of what voice others in the church, including the laity, rightly have in decision-making.

O’Malley offers the proliferation of papal encyclicals from the mid-19th century on as evidence of the growing centrality of Rome, as more and more of the Catholic world learned to look to the Pope for the answers to all questions. Technology, too, played a role in this centralization, with the invention of the telephone and the telegraph only bolstering the Vatican’s ability to hold sway over its most far-flung constituents.

Interesting, then, to consider the fact that just two short months ago the Pope himself joined Twitter and invited the world to submit questions. Mind-numbing and time-sucking though it is, no one’s suggesting that tweeting’s to blame for Benedict’s abdication, though the timing is certainly curious. Could it be the case that the communication technology that once solidified the Pope’s centrality has now advanced so far as to render it untenable? At least for a man of 85?

Again from O’Malley:

The majority at the council certainly did not press for a statement on collegiality merely to make a theological point. They brought it to the fore, like other ressourcements, because it had practical ramifications. The bishops who promoted the doctrine and fought for it so passionately wanted to redress what they saw as the imbalance between the authority exercised especially by the Roman Congregations and their own authority as heads of “local churches.” Collegiality was the supreme instance in the council of the effort to moderate the centralizing tendencies of the ecclesiastical institution, of the effort to give those from the periphery a more authoritative voice not only back home but also in the center.

In our new world those distinctions collapse; the center now is back home, and vice versa. So, as Poggioli asks, is a single infallible figure still the answer for a world so over-connected? We’ll see.

Tracing the Ties that Bind Blacks and Jews in History and Myth

Tudor Parfitt, once described as “a sort of British Indiana Jones,” writes in Black Jews in Africa and the Americas that he first encountered black Jews “in any form” in late 1984, when he’d traveled to the Sudanese border with Ethiopia. He’d been sent to the border’s refugee camps to investigate reports that the Ethiopian Jews (Beta Israel) there were being mistreated by the Christian Ethiopians, all of whom were fleeing the year’s famine. Though their status as Jews was being contested, Parfitt was present for what he describes as “the first stages of the Israeli attempt to save thousands of these impoverished and desperate people from famine and persecution.”

Not long after, while speaking in South Africa about the Ethiopian Jews, Parfitt met another group of black Jews, this time from the Lemba tribe. The Lembas explained to Parfitt that they were blood relatives of the Ethiopian Jews, and that the Israeli acceptance of the Ethiopians should also legitimize their own Judaism, hitherto difficult to claim. Despite being intrigued by the notion that the people he’d met in the Sudan were now acting as a “proof community” for others, Parfitt found the idea of any connection between the Beta Israel and the Lemba of Soweto doubtful.

Out of curiosity he spent time with the Lemba, and while he came to consider it quite possible that their customs and traditions had something to do with the Semitic world he was unable to uncover any record of Jews having settled in southeastern or central Africa as far back as the Lemba’s oral tradition extended. Another year or two passed before, while researching a history of the Jews of the Yemen, Parfitt uncovered some evidence that could actually corroborate the Lemba’s story of their own heritage. “And it was at this point and rather out of frustration,” he writes in Black Jews in Africa and the Americas, “that I turned to genetics.”

In 1999 the findings of the Lemba’s genetic tests were front page news around the world, the subject of television documentaries such as NOVA’s The Lost Tribes of Israel, and even featured in a segment on 60 Minutes. As reported by the New York Times:

Several groups around the world practice Judaic rites or claim to be descended from biblical tribes without having any ancestral Jewish connection… But the remarkable thing about the Lemba tradition is that it may be exactly right. A team of geneticists has found that many Lemba men carry in their male chromosome a set of DNA sequences that is distinctive of the cohanim, the Jewish priests believed to be the descendants of Aaron. The genetic signature of priests—a hereditary caste, different from rabbis but with certain ritual roles—is particularly common among Lemba men who belong to the senior of their 12 groups, known as the Buba clan.

The discovery of the Lemba's Jewish ancestry has come about through the intertwining of two unusual strands of inquiry. One was developed by geneticists in the United States, Israel and England who wondered what truth there might be to the Jewish tradition that priests are the descendants of Aaron, the elder brother of Moses.

The other strand was provided by Dr. Tudor Parfitt, director of the Center for Jewish Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. Dr. Parfitt, who has done research among the Lemba for 10 years, says that he has discovered Senna—Lemba tradition maintains they came from that mysterious northern city—and that he can retrace their steps from Senna to Africa, maybe a thousand years ago.

Since that burst of coverage over a dozen years ago interest in the Lemba has been steady, and, coupled with the worldwide interest in the exodus of the Ethiopian Jews, there was evidence of an enduring fascination with the very idea of black Jews. For Parfitt, the intensity and duration of that fascination sparked a new series of questions:

Why did these stories generate such media interest? Was it because the stories were about Jews? Or because they were about blacks? Or both? Was it because, at some deep level in Western consciousness, Jews are actually assumed to be black and that therefore these stories about black Jews could be taken as a final vindication of an age-old presumption? Or was it that people believe that Jews are not black at all and cannot be black and therefore that the idea of black Jews appeared more than usually quixotic—and therefore good copy? Whatever the reason, this topic achieved worldwide coverage, and articles on the Lemba and Beta Israel have appeared in the world’s major newspapers with some regularity. The topic touched a nerve in a way that none of the work with which I had hitherto been engaged had done. Somewhere at the nexus of these issues of history, prejudice, and convention there seemed to me to nestle aspects of Jewish and black history that had not been fully studied before.

Black Jews in Africa and the Americas, our most thorough tracing of the ties that bind blacks and Jews in history and myth, is the result of Parfitt’s work to understand those histories.

The Pius War

In Soldier of Christ: The Life of Pope Pius XII, Robert A. Ventresca gives us an authoritative and even-handed portrait of one of the twentieth century’s most caricatured figures. In Ventresca’s telling we see the development of a flawed and gifted man whose pontificate was defined by the Cold War and the church’s engagement with the modern world, not his response to Nazism. In the passage below, excerpted from the Introduction to Soldier of Christ, Ventresca recounts the decades-long battles over the legacy of Pius XII.

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In death, much more so than in life, Pius XII has become an intensely polarizing figure—to some, he is a venerable saint, and to others he is a damnable silent witness to unimaginable atrocities in the heart of Christian Europe. The incessant partisanship of the so-called Pius War has consistently sacrificed historical interpretation for polemical and political purposes. This pattern is evident even within the Catholic world, where, from the time of the Second Vatican Council in the mid-1960s, the figure of Pius XII has served as a lightning rod for both nostalgic conservatives and disgruntled liberals. For the former, Pius XII was the last truly magisterial pontiff; for the latter, he embodied everything that was wrong with the Catholic Church before the affable John XXIII (Roncalli), the “good pope,” came to air out the static, stultifying atmosphere of the church before Vatican II. This elementary division was evident even at the time of the council when Pope Paul VI (Montini) officially began the process to bring beatification and perhaps eventually sainthood to both of his immediate predecessors. Recommending the causes of both Pius XII and John XXIII, Pope Paul VI reasoned, “will be in answer to the desire that has been expressed by innumerable voices in favor of each of these Popes. In this way, history will be assured the patrimony of their spiritual legacy.”

Montini, who worked side-by-side with Pius XII throughout the tumultuous war years, was keen to craft an alternative narrative to the one taking shape in people’s minds in the wake of Hochhuth’s controversial play [The Deputy, a highly influential 1963 drama about Pius XII’s wartime activities]. Tellingly, two years before he formally opened the cause to have Pius XII made a saint, when he was still the cardinal archbishop of Milan, Montini wrote to the British Catholic periodical The Tablet to challenge Hochhuth’s reading of a history Montini himself had lived. “History,” the future Paul VI wrote, “will vindicate the conduct of Pius XII when confronted by the criminal excesses of the Nazi regime.” For Montini, history would set the record straight; it was the only effective antidote to Hochhuth’s version, which amounted to little more than the “artificial manipulation of facts to fit a preconceived idea.”

Despite Paul VI’s belief that the path to sainthood for both popes would proceed “for no motive other than the cult of their holiness,” it was clear even to outside observers that internal church politics would come into play. Referring to Pius XII, the New York Times reported that the “austere, distant and intellectual Pope has become the focus of conservative admiration.” By contrast, his successor, John XXIII, who was described as “warmly human and simple,” was said to be the “favorite” of the so-called progressives, if only because he had convened the Second Vatican Council, at which the “progressive” views seem to have prevailed.

And so it has been, back and forth, for decades now. Despite occasional lulls in the Pius War, a dogged attachment to competing caricatures of Pius XII, to say nothing of the canonization cause, means that the war of words will persist, generating point and counterpoint ad infinitum. The tendency to see Pius XII as less a man than an institution has resulted in an abundant manipulation of facts—to borrow from Montini—arranged selectively to fit preconceived notions of what this pope did or did not do; what he said or did not say; what he could have or should have done. I leave it to the reader to decide whether history has vindicated Pius XII, whatever that means. It is to history, after all, that we must turn to find Eugenio Pacelli, the man, priest, diplomat, and pope.

The vast literature chronicling Pius XII’s long and eventful pontificate has mostly centered on his seeming failure to speak out clearly and firmly during World War II to defend European Jews facing systematic persecution and murder by the Nazis. The claim that he turned his back on the Jews, and the riposte it provoked, gave life and sustenance to the “Pius War.” Yet this war of words has done more harm than good to our understanding of this central figure of twentieth-century history. With very few exceptions, studies of Pius XII have offered a distorted or highly selective picture of the subject. We have become accustomed to reading interpretive leaps, which are grounded on counterfactual or normative claims about what the pope could have or should have done rather than a reasoned assessment of what he did or did not do—and why. This is to say nothing of the fact that, as understandable as it is, such a heavy focus on Pius XII’s wartime record has obscured our view of the entire span of his active life in the service of the papacy. It is easy to forget that Pacelli’s pontificate lasted for thirteen years after the end of World War II. We know comparatively little about the Cold War years and even less about Pius XII’s prodigious teachings, which sought to address internal and external realities of Catholicism in rapidly changing times. However we might assess it, there can be no doubt that Eugenio Pacelli’s pontificate left an indelible mark on the papacy and influenced the Catholic encounter with the modern world in ways we have scarcely begun to understand.

The Mighty, Majestic River of Persian Literature

We’ve just published Hamid Dabashi’s The World of Persian Literary Humanism, and write today to share news of a discussion of the book taking place this very evening at the Asia Society in New York. The event, which features Dabashi in conversation with Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet, the University of Pennsylvania’s Robert I. Williams Term Professor of History, will be streamed live at AsiaSociety.org beginning at 6:30pm ET, and viewers are encouraged to submit questions throughout the talk.

Dabashi’s book, one of the most ambitious on our docket this fall, presents an exploration of 1,400 years of Persian literature in order to reconceive the question of what it means to be human, which has so long been dominated by a Western perspective. He tracks the emergence and spread of Persian literary humanism (Adab) from Bengal to Istanbul, from central Asia to the eastern coasts of Africa, always with present-day Iran as its epicenter. In his own rich prose, Dabashi gives us Persian literature as a river, “mighty and majestic,” the navigation of which demands “a fluidity of narrative that comes to terms with its existential immediacy, as if it had no history, and yet is fully aware of the expansive history that it tacitly flaunts.” This river of Persian literature, he writes, is “flowing from an infinity of historical sources, comes to you with the massive volume of its abiding presence, and leads to the immortality of a yet-to-be-named sea.”

As Dabashi explains in the video below (after a long gaze on the book’s physical presentation), this is a story he’s always wanted to write:

We write the books we wish we had to read. This book, in particular, is in effect a love letter to the literary heritage that has made me—and millions of other people like me—possible. Possible, I say, in our language and diction, in the mode and abode of our being, but above all, in the cosmopolitan worldliness that is—and is made possible by—Persian literature. I have put everything I have in it. My defiance against European Orientalist traditions, against Iranian nativist historiography, and against North American comparative literary criticism, overcoming them all and thus reclaiming the magnificent worldliness of Persian literary humanism.

 

At the Asia Society’s website you can read an interview with Dabashi, and remember to tune in to AsiaSociety.org/Live this evening to join him and Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet as they ride the river of Adab.

Early Mormonism's Communitarian Values

To most outsiders with little actual knowledge of the faith or its history, the most distinctive feature of Mormonism is likely polygamy. Indeed, the practice of taking multiple wives is the most well-known casualty of Utah’s incorporation into the United States, and of Mormonism’s drift toward mainstream Christianity. But, as John Turner’s new biography of Brigham Young helps us to see, the most radical social experimentation of early Mormonism may have been its anti-capitalism, not its deregulation of the marriage market.

Writing at the LA Review of Books, Mike Davis (who knows from radical social movements), takes from Turner’s book the notion that Mormonism before Young’s death represented “the most ambitious” social experiment in American history, the creation of a society that “explicitly rejected the core values of Victorian capitalism.” As Davis highlights, exposure to the fallout of that Victorian capitalism during his missionary work in England may have helped to shape Young’s stance. From Turner:

Young had known grinding poverty and periodic hunger throughout much of his life, but the squalor of English cities still gave him pause. “I for get how menny bagers [beggars] I saw,” he told Mary Ann, “but enuph to take all the pennes [pennies] and copers I can get.” The United States had not yet recovered from the banking panic of 1837, but the English situation was far bleaker. “[W]hen I look at the difrents betwene poore People here and in America,” he concluded to Mary Ann, “I rejoice that you and the children are there.”

As Davis recounts, back across the Atlantic Brigham Young “tirelessly preached the impossibility of coexistence between the communitarian values of Zion and the greed-driven capitalism of Babylon (the United States).” What we have in Turner’s book, then, in addition to an even-handed account of Mormonism’s leading light, is a depiction of the Church’s mostly forgotten socialist past. And while much common skepticism of Mormonism focuses on the undergarments and the vague occultism, Davis dismisses all that as just so much “religious mumbo-jumbo,” a common mark of any secretive set. To Davis, “the real scandal” of Mormonism is how far its current believers have come from the fiery communitarian vision of Young.

In a long piece on Mormonism’s history and meanings, based on readings of Turner’s book and several others, the New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik characterizes the evolution of Mormonism as a “victory of Gilded Age capitalism over Great Awakening spiritualism,” a “squalid turn toward vulgar prosperity” that doubled as a “sane turn toward social peace” in its resolution of the conflict between Young’s Utah and the United States. As Gopnik puts it, “this sublimation of the energy of the faith into the energy of commerce seems always to have marked (Mormonism) afterward.”

Of course, the most famous of the latter-day Latter-Day Saints is presidential hopeful Mitt Romney, no one’s idea of a socialist. And so, in closing his piece, Gopnik asks the present vantage’s logical question: “To what degree is Mormonism responsible for Mitt Romney?”

(C)lass surely tells more than creed when it comes to American manners, and Romney is better understood as a late-twentieth-century American tycoon than as any kind of believer… In another way, though, this is precisely where faith really does walk in, since commerce and belief seem complementary in Romney’s tradition. It’s just that this tradition is not merely Mormon. Joseph Smith’s strange faith has become a denomination within the bigger creed of commerce… Then again, almost every American religion sooner or later becomes a Gospel of Wealth… this gospel of prosperity is the one American faith that will never fail, even when its promises seem ruined. Elsewhere among the Western democracies, the bursting of the last bubble has led to doubts about the system that blows them. Here the people who seem likely to inherit power are those who want to blow still bigger ones, who believe in the bubble even after it has burst, and who hold its perfection as a faith so gleaming and secure and unbreakable that it might once have been written down somewhere by angels, on solid-gold plates.

That a faith can paper over its roots and evolve to oppose the views of its pioneer prophet doesn’t mean its followers lose the will to believe.

Presidential Identity Politics

The American presidential election—taking place a mere three weeks from tomorrow—pits the country’s first African American president against the first Mormon to receive a major party’s nomination. This would seem to be but a restatement of widely recognized biographical detail, but for the fact that apparently 40% of Americans polled by Gallup this summer were unaware of Mitt Romney’s Mormonism. And so, in this cycle we’re seeming some commentary reflecting on the omission of race and religion in the campaign, rather than impact.

Earlier this month, for instance, John G. Turner wrote in the Washington Post about the “non-issue” of Romney’s Mormonism. Turner, the author of Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet (one of our most acclaimed fall books), compares the focus on JFK’s Catholicism in 1960 to the relative lack of concern with Romney’s religion this year:

Romney, by nearly any measuring stick, is much more devout as a Latter-day Saint than John F. Kennedy was as a Christian. Moreover, both Catholics and Mormons were religious outsiders in nineteenth-century America. Anti-Catholicism and anti-Mormonism were significant political movements, and both Catholics and Mormons suffered at the hands of violent mobs.

Anti-Catholicism remained significant through the 19th century, but it peaked during the pre-Civil War years. Mormonism, by contrast, continued to grow as an object of political concern through the 1880s. Mormons, unlike Catholics, occupied and controlled a huge chunk of real estate, nearly fought a war against the U.S. Army in 1857, and openly practiced polygamy until 1890.

Despite this shared history, there are obvious reasons why Kennedy’s faith was a much bigger concern in 1960. Catholics comprised around a quarter of the American population in 1960, as opposed to the nearly 2 percent of Americans who affiliate with the LDS Church today. Only the truly paranoid can foresee a Mormon takeover beyond the horizon of a Romney victory. Kennedy’s campaign and victory, moreover, smoothed the way for future religious outsiders like both George Romney (who ran in the 1968 Republican primaries) and his son Mitt.

Meanwhile, in an American Historical Association roundtable discussion of the first Obama-Romney debate, Khalil Gibran Muhammad, author of The Condemnation of Blackness, noted the complete absence of race from the night’s conversation:

Fifty Years of Vatican II

As John W. O’Malley notes in this morning’s NYT, the Second Vatican Council opened 50 years ago today. Vatican II, which O’Malley and others describe as the most important religious event of the 20th century, was an attempt to reconcile the Roman Catholic Church with a changed and still-changing world. Among the broad scope of issues debated at the council were the desire to recognize the dignity of lay men and women and to empower them to fulfill their vocation in the church, the place of Latin in the liturgy, the relationship of Tradition to Scripture, and the relationship of the church to the Jews and to other non-Christian religions.

As O’Malley’s piece today argues, the new course set by the council signaled a major turning point for the Church, even if recent history (notably Pope Benedict’s 2006 indictment of Islam, or the Church’s censuring of American nuns this summer) suggests that advances are now being scaled back. “The post-Vatican II church was not a different church,” he writes. “But if you take the long view, it seems to me incontestable that the turn was big, even if failures in implementation have made it less big in certain areas than the council intended.”

O’Malley’s 2008 book, What Happened at Vatican II, tells in a single volume the full story of the workings of the council, sessions of which he attended as a student. But in addition to relating the deliberations and decrees of Vatican II, the book is also a thorough consideration of the nature of authority more broadly, and particularly the friction between power and change. He notes three key “issues under the issues,” the questions that lay beneath the points of policy on which the council ostensibly focused, all of which relate to evolution within an authoritative structure:

• the circumstances under which change in the church is appropriate and the arguments with which it can be justified
• the relationship in the church of center to periphery, or, put more concretely, how authority is properly distributed between the papacy, including the Congregations (departments or bureaus) of the Vatican Curia, and the rest of the church
• the style or model according to which that authority should be exercised

These issues, O’Malley explains, are about identity: “how to maintain it while dealing with the inevitability of change, and then how to make it effective in new but recognizably authentic ways.” For the Church, whose authority is indexed to its infallibility, the problem of identity is that of evolution in “an institution that draws its lifeblood from a belief in the transcendent validity of the message it received from the past, which it is duty-bound to proclaim unadulterated.” That tension, which animates O’Malley’s elegant account of Vatican II, will resonate with anyone familiar with the dynamic of institutional entrenchment.

The History and Philosophy of Representational Art in Islam

There exists a widespread belief that Islam can countenance no representational religious art, that any depiction of religious figures will trip the wire of Newsweek’s “Muslim Rage.” Such a belief is so firmly held in the west that it easily underwrote the government-propagated claim that the attack on the US Consulate in Benghazi was a spontaneous reaction to the “Innocence of Muslims” film, rather than the premeditated assault it now appears to have been.

In fact, as those willing to grant the possibility of dissonance within a centuries-old religion understand, it is not actually the case that Islam so thoroughly outlaws representational art. What we’ve lacked, writes Jamal J. Elias, is a thorough understanding of the historical and philosophical origins of the contentious role of iconography in Islam. In the following excerpt from his forthcoming study, Aisha’s Cushion: Religious Art, Perception, and Practice in Islam, Elias explains his approach to filling this gap in our understanding.

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It is often claimed that Muslims do not have icons, idols, or pictures of God or religious heroes; indeed, in modern times, there undoubtedly appears to be a widespread Islamic cultural opposition to depicting human religious figures as well as God in visual form. One need only recall the publicity surrounding the making and release of The Message in 1976—a film about the birth of Islam in which none of the primary characters appears on screen out of concern for Muslim sensibilities. Similarly, one might look to the intermittent controversies over the American comedy cartoon South Park’s allusions to depicting Muhammad beginning in 2005 and culminating in threats against the makers of the series in 2010, causing them to self-censor airings of the relevant episodes. And although the Taliban do not represent a widespread Muslim ideal, their destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas in March 2001 was religiously motivated to some degree, and religiously justified to every extent. More recently, the (at times violent) indignation following the publication of caricatures of Muhammad in a Danish newspaper in 2005, and the reaction to instances, threats, and rumors of the desecration of the Qur’an in the United States or in U.S. detention centers in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Cuba, underscore the obvious fact that Muslims hold complex attitudes toward religious images and objects, and that these attitudes do not reflect worldviews that are either naively unaware of or religiously oblivious to the power of images.

In fact, Muslim attitudes toward religious images and objects display apparent contradictions that not only are shared with Islam’s sister religions of Christianity and Judaism, but also are apparent in the history of image-rich religions like Buddhism and Hinduism. On the one hand, Muslims display a widespread (though not comprehensive) taboo on religious depictions, and a narrower—but still prevalent—distrust of treating material objects as supernatural or divine. On the other, they embrace a religious culture that is rich in images, reacts to the images of others in complex ways, and is spatially focused around an object—the Ka‘ba building in Mecca—and its associated primary ritual of pilgrimage, which incorporates somatic engagement with material objects such as stones and pillars.

Big Sticks and American Values

As we’re all no doubt aware, this week the eleventh anniversary of the 9/11 attacks was marked by a new surge of violence and protest against Americans abroad, including the killing of J. Christopher Stevens, the U.S. ambassador to Libya. Embassies of the U.S. and its allies remain under siege across much of the Muslim world, in a process set in motion by the release of an apparently American-made film denigrating the prophet Muhammad. Since its very first spark, this round of violence has been made fodder for political dispute in the American presidential contest, and it’s bound to remain a focus in the weeks ahead.

Writing for Al Jazeera, Columbia University professor and HUP author Hamid Dabashi notes the parallels between these events and the Iranian Hostage Crisis of 1979, which also became a force in an American presidential election. Dabashi cautions against letting political pressures dictate American response:

The trigger-happy Republicans are pushing President Obama to do something rash. Presidential candidate Mitt Romany has accused President Obama of “sympathizing” with the attackers, as Aljazeera reports that “US warships steam towards Libya coast.” This is after Sarah Palin has criticised president Obama’s shortcoming and urged him “to grow a Big Stick.” The depth of this woman’s banality seems to have no limit.

The last thing that President Obama wants to do now is what President Carter did in 1979 and try something foolish like “Operation Eagle Claw.” If I were President Obama I would invite former President Carter to the White House and hang out with him for a weekend. President Obama must do absolutely nothing.

Dabashi is equally concerned with what he sees as a concerted effort by militant factions to take this offensive film as an opportunity to reverse the momentum of the Arab Spring and “derail a world historic succession of revolutions”:

Demonstrations in both Benghazi and Cairo have categorically denounced the violence that has resulted in the death of Ambassador Christopher Stevens. It is imperative that these denunciations be amply noted—as indeed President Morsi put it succinctly:  “We Egyptians reject any kind of assault or insult against our prophet. I condemn and oppose all who... insult our prophet. [But] it is our duty to protect our guests and visitors from abroad... I call on everyone to take that into consideration, to not violate Egyptian law... to not assault embassies.”

This is the difference between Khomeini n 1979 and Morsi in 2012. Beware the false fury. The US has done enough atrocities around the globe to be blamed for just about everything—but this is a different season—this is the season of the Green Movement and the Arab Spring—do not be fooled by these zealotries of the fanatics who are trying to steal the revolution. Diplomatic immunity of even a global hubris like the United States must remain sacrosanct for civilised life to be possible.

Dabashi calls on Obama to let the Muslim world itself denounce these attacks and restore order. “This is the season of the Arab Spring,” he writes, and “binary banalities of fanatics on both sides of the divide cannot derail the course of history anymore.”

Of course, clear-eyed observers of American politics have reason to worry that the aggression with which Mitt Romney has sought to employ these events to reverse Obama’s gains in the polls may yet ensure a wielding of the “big stick” that Palin calls for. Indeed, the contest has dramatically shifted from debating the economy to chest-thumping over the projection of “American values.” Jeremy Waldron, author of The Harm in Hate Speech, discussed the use of that phrase in diplomatic and political rhetoric since the attack in Libya with Brian Lehrer today:

 

As Waldron and Lehrer discuss, American law does not allow the prohibition of hateful and deliberately provocative speech like that of the anti-Islamic film at the heart of this week’s turmoil, but the American government and its citizens are nonetheless right to denounce and reject such speech in the most certain terms possible. Still, as Waldron highlights, while there are different views about the value of hate speech, violence is never an appropriate response.

The Politics of the Arab Spring Will Shape the Fate of Hezbollah

As escalating violence in Syria has captured the world’s attention, the role of Hezbollah in the conflict—and the organization’s position in the turbulent Middle East more broadly—has come under renewed scrutiny. Dominique Avon and Anaïs-Trissa Khatchadourian’s Hezbollah: A History of the “Party of God,” which we’ll publish later this month in Jane Marie Todd’s elegant translation, describes Hezbollah’s history from its 1982 founding to its inclusion in the 2008 Lebanese unity government, and provides a sourcebook of key documents, a lexicon of essential keywords, and a guide to organizational structure. Below, the authors discuss the insights their research provides on events now unfolding in the Middle East.

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We weren’t wrong when we underlined the religious dimensions of the 25 first years of the history of the “Party of God”: today, Sunni-Shiite tension is stronger than ever, and radical positions are now visible on both sides. In confronting the “complicated Middle East,” as General de Gaulle called it, we prefer to organize facts rather than to elaborate theories. Understanding the history of tensions in the Middle East can help us understand the climate today, and Hezbollah’s role in it.

Over the last fourteen centuries, confrontation with “unjust” authority has been a greater preoccupation among Shiites than among Sunnis. Sunnis have been more often in power and promoted the principle that Sheikh Abd al-Hamid al-Atrash, former president of the Al-Azhar Fatwa Committee, articulated at the beginning of the demonstrations in Egypt in January 2011: “give thanks if he who guides the community is just; be patient if he is not.” So, in keeping with its dual struggle—both “anti-imperialist” against Israel and in solidarity with “the poor” and the “disinherited” in the world—Hezbollah has applauded the revolutionary action against the dictatorial Tunisian regime. The “Party of God” has also praised the coup in Egypt, for those same reasons and also a specific one: the contentious matters between Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah and now-deposed Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak since the public disagreements during the Lebanon War in the summer 2006.

Hezbollah’s stance on the politics of Arab Spring uprisings beyond Tunisia and Egypt grew more complicated. When some Iranian people demonstrated in the street to refuse the results of the last presidential elections in Iran in 2009, the leaders of Hezbollah said first that this was an internal problem, then followed the lead of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei after he denounced the opposition. When a few months later some Bahrainis demonstrated against the Sunni power in Manama, this underlined the problems of inequality of civil rights between the majority of Shiites and the minority of Sunnis. And when, at the same time, Syrians decided to search for an alternative to the Assad regime, Hezbollah recognized the reality of protestors’ social and economic claims, but explained that willingness to overthrow the Syrian state was the expression of a US-Israeli plot with the help of Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Hezbollah thus urged an “internal” solution between the Syrian regime and the opposition, rejecting any “foreign interference.”