Per our discussion of Champollion and the deciphering of the Rosetta Stone, you can find a good description of the logic and process Champollion employed in getting the job done at the Schiller Institute.
Archive for the ‘History’ Category
The Rosetta Stone
Monday, September 6th, 2010Yemen’s Disappearing Jewish Arabs
Friday, August 27th, 2010Down to little more than a hundred, Yemen’s remaining Arabic speaking Jews are preparing to leave their homeland, helped along by Jewish groups in the U.S. and Israel.
Remembering “Little Syria” in Downtown Manhattan
Wednesday, August 25th, 2010Lost in the furor of the New York City Islamic Center debate is the fact that at one time the area near the proposed center was a thriving Arab neighborhood known as “Little Syria”:
David W. Dunlap, “When An Arab Enclave Thrived Downtown,” New York Times, Aug. 25, 2010
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
Sunday, August 22nd, 2010Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762) lived in Adrianople and Istanbul during which time her husband Edward served as British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. She stands out from much of Western travel literature for her sympathetic and admiring portraits of the people living in the places she visited.
Here is an excerpt:
To Lady Mar, Adrianople, 1 April, 1717
“I wish to God, dear sister, that you were as regular in letting me have the pleasure of knowing what passes on your side of the globe as I am careful in endeavoring to amuse you by the account of all I see that I think you care to hear of. You content yourself with telling me over and over that the town is very dull. It may possibly be dull to you when every day does not present you with something new, but for me that am in arrear at least two months news, all that seems very stale with you would be fresh and sweet here; pray let me into more particulars. I will try to awaken your gratitude by giving you a full and true relation of the novelties of this place, none of which would surprise you more than a sight of my person as I am now in my Turkish habit, though I believe you would be of my opinion that ’tis admirably becoming. I intend to send you my picture. In the mean time accept of it here…
As to their morality or good conduct, I can say like Harlequin, that ’tis just as ’tis with you, and the Turkish ladies don’t commit one sin the less for not being Christians. Now that I am a little acquainted with their ways, I cannot forbear admiring either the exemplary discretion or extreme stupidity of all the writers that have given accounts of them. ’Tis very easy to see they have more liberty than we have, no woman of what rank so ever being permitted to go in the streets without two muslins, one that covers her face all but her eyes and another that hides the whole dress of her head, and hangs half way down her back and their shapes are wholly concealed by a thing they call a ferace which no woman of any sort appears without. This has straight sleeves that reaches to their fingers ends and it laps all round em, not unlike a riding hood. In winter ’tis of cloth, and in summer plain stuff or silk. You may guess then how effectually this disguises them, that there is no distinguishing the great lady from her slave, and ’tis impossible for the most jealous husband to know his wife when he meets her, and no man dare either touch or follow a woman in the street.
This perpetual masquerade gives them entire liberty of following their inclinations without danger of discovery…Upon the whole, I look upon the Turkish women as the only free people in the Empire. The very Divan pays a respect to them, and the Grand Signor himself, when a pasha is executed, never violates the privileges of the harem(or women’s apartment) which remains unsearched entire to the widow. They are queens of their slaves, which the husband has no permission so much as to look upon, except it be an old woman or two that his lady chooses. ‘Tis true, their law permits them four wives, but there is no instance of a man of quality that makes use of this liberty, or of a woman of rank that would suffer it. When a husband happens to be inconstant, as those things will happen, he keeps his mistress in a house apart and visits her as privately as he can, just as ’tis with you. Amongst all the great men here I only know the tefterdar (i.e. treasurer) that keeps a number of she-slaves for his own use (that is, on his own side of the house, for a slave once given to serve a lady is entirely at her disposal) and he is spoke of as a libertine, or what we should call a rake, and his wife won’t see him, though she continues to live in his house.
Thus you see, dear sister, the manners of mankind do not differ so widely as our voyage writers would make us believe. Perhaps it would be more entertaining to add a few surprising customs of my own invention, but nothing seems to me so agreeable as truth, and I believe nothing so acceptable to you. I conclude with repeating the great Truth of my being, dear Sister, etc.”
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. The Turkish Embassy Letters. Malcolm Jack (ed.). London: Virago Press, 1994. pp. 69-72
Experiencing Past and Present in the Middle East
Sunday, August 15th, 2010Anthony Shadid (author of a book on the Iraq war used in this course in past years) writes in today’s New York Times about how Middle Easterners experience past and present:
“It is perhaps a cliché, the way the past intersects with the present in the Middle East, though not necessarily untrue.
In the serpentine alleys around the shrine of Kadhimiya in Baghdad, beside the tumult of Al Hussein in Cairo’s venerable old city and along the majesty of the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, what has been here is often more palpable than what is here now. For Arabs, the Crusades resonate in the creation of Israel. Wars in Iraq are cast in millennium-old narratives of suffering and martyrdom.
Perspective becomes politics. So does patience.”
Anthony Shadid, “In Iraq, Wester Clocks but Middle Eastern Time,” New York Times, Aug. 15, 2010
Where Does Middle Eastern Sectarian Intolerance Come From?
Wednesday, July 21st, 2010Sami Zubaida tells us that in the late Ottoman Empire (19th century), Jews, Christians, Freemasons, and Muslims lived together, with exceptions to be sure,in an atmosphere of harmonious cosmopolitanism. So, what went wrong? Zubaida blames Arab nationalism and a renewed sectarianism that accompanied it.
Stephen Kinzer Writing on Turkey’s Kurds
Monday, June 7th, 2010Stephen Kinzer, who lives in Turkey and is the author of Crescent and Star: Turkey Between Two Worlds (revised and expanded edition), one of the texts for the Fall, 2010 Islamic Middle East course, has an article on Turkey’s Kurds in the June 2010 issue of Smithsonian.
Excerpt:
“Still, everyone I met- even the most outspoken Kurdish nationalists- told me they wanted their homeland to remain part of Turkey Traveling across the country it’s easy to understand why Turkey is by most standards the most democratic Muslim country- a powerful, modern society with a vibrant economy and extensive ties to the international community. If the mainly Kurdish provinces of the southeast were to become independent, their state would be landlocked and weak in a highly volatile region- a tempting target for powers such as Iran, Iraq or Syria. ‘We don’t want an independence that would change borders,’ says Gulcihan Simsek, mayor of a sprawling, impoverished borough of Van called Bostanici. ‘Absolute independence is not a requirement today We want true regional autonomy to make our own decisions and use our own natural resources, but always within the Turkish nation and under the Turkish flag.’”
Go to article via ProQuest and the NMH Virtual Desktop
Study guide for Kinzer text (from the 2008 IME course syllabus)
Israel Intercepts Palestinian Militants Off Gaza Coast
Monday, June 7th, 2010Ross Douthat, writing on today’s New York Times Op-Ed page, sees parallels between Israel’s current condition and the Crusader kingdoms, which were known in those times by the French word “outre-mer” (“overseas”) (go to opinion piece).
On Nations and States
Wednesday, April 28th, 2010I was reminded during Peter Drench’s visit with us over the last few days of the following passage we read earlier in the course in Meyer and Brysac:
“Yet it is also a sad fact that almost all the world’s nations have been born in sin, and not one – certainly not the United States, Great Britain, France, Germany, Russia, China, India, Australia, Canada, Turkey or any African country – has been innocent of dispossession. It is another of the world’s lamentable truths: nationhood is rooted in rites of violence we all prefer to forget.”
Karl E. Meyer and Shareen Blair Brysac, Kingmakers: The Invention of the Modern Middle East. New York: Norton, 2008, p. 126
Yesterday, I referred to Benedict Anderson’s thesis that nations are “imagined communities.” Here is the info on his book:
Benedict Anderson. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. New York, Verso, 1983 (newer edition published in 2006).
It might also be well to remember here an observation made by Lord Acton (1834-1902): “The nation is not the cause but the result of the state.” (quoted by Rhoads Murphey, A History of Asia (fifth edition), New York: Pearson-Longman, 2006, 467).
Lebanon commemorates civil war outbreak through soccer
Wednesday, April 14th, 2010“Rival Lebanese politicians took their disputes to the playing fields with a friendly soccer match to mark the 35th anniversary of the outbreak of the country’s 1975-90 civil war,” according to Associated Press. The civil war began in 1975, instigated by “an ambush of Christian gunmen of a busload of Palestinians” and continued until 1990, resulting in 150,000 deaths and $25 billion in damage. 30 years later the nation “enjoys a precarious peace” but, as we know, Lebanon has many different religious sects, causing political rifts. To commemorate the war’s anniversary on Tuesday, government ministers and legislators played a match of soccer in the presence of the Lebanese president. Since, unfortunately, the Lebanese can’t be united by politics, “the message is that sports can unite the Lebanese.” Ali Ammar, one of two Hezbollah lawmakers taking part said, “I hope that this good sportsmanship will reflect itself on politics as well.” A 38-year-old Lebanese woman, however, commended the sentiment but was incredulous of any significant or long-term effects of unification through sport. Although this concept will most probably not be implemented in the US, a chuckle can still be garnered in imagining Obama, Bush, Clinton, and Palin playing soccer together…
Acknowledging that sports and politics are quite different concepts, how does this speak to, if at all, a Lebanese desire to alleviate sectarianism?
