AHR conversation: Religious identities and violence

American Historical Review

Volumn 112, Issue 5, 2007, Pages 1433-1481

  Benedict, Philip ^a   Berend, Nora ^b,c   Ellis, Stephen ^d,e   Kaplan, Jeffrey ^f,g   Makdisi, Ussama ^h,i,j   Miles, Jack ^k,l  

^a UNIVERSITY OF GENEVA   (Switzerland)

^b UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE   (United Kingdom)

^c St Catharine's College

^d LEIDEN UNIVERSITY   (Netherlands)

^e International Crisis Group

^f UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN OSHKOSH   (United States)

^g UW Oshkosh Institute for the Study of Religion

^h RICE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

ⁱ Arab American Educational Foundation

^j Department of Arab Studies ^*

^k UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

^l Religious Affairs with the Pacific Council on International Policy

more..

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 40949145232     PISSN: 00028762     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/ahr.112.5.1433     Document Type: Review

References (104)

1. Wilfred Cantwell Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion: A New Approach to the Religious Traditions of Mankind (New York, 1963);
2. Peter Biller, "Words and the Medieval Notion of 'Religion,' " Journal of Ecclesiastical History 36 (1985): 351-369.
3. See, e.g., Peter L. Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (1968; repr., New York, 1990).
4. James C. Russell, The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity: A Sociohistorical Approach to Religious Transformation (New York, 1994).
5. Robert Markus, The End of Ancient Christianity (1990; repr., Cambridge, 1997);
6. Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity, AD 200-1000 (Maiden, Mass., 1997).
7. Lester K. Little, Benedictine Maledictions: Liturgical Cursing in Romanesque France (Ithaca, N.Y., 1993);
8. Patrick Geary, "Humiliation of Saints," in Stephen Wilson, ed., Saints and Their Cults: Studies in Religious Sociology, Folklore and History (1983; repr., Cambridge, 1987), 123-140;
9. Patrick Nold, Pope John XXII and His Franciscan Cardinal: Bertrand de la Tour and the Apostolic Poverty Controversy (Oxford, 2003).
10. Jean-Claude Schmitt, "Religion, Folklore and Society in the Medieval West," in Lester K. Little and Barbara H. Rosenwein, eds., Debating the Middle Ages: Issues and Readings (Maiden, Mass., 1998), 376-387.
11. The chronology of the "invention" of the Reconquista and its equation with crusading is debated; see, e.g., Peter Linehan, History and the Historians of Medieval Spain (Oxford, 1993), chap. 4;
12. Joseph F. O'Callaghan, Reconquest and Cmsade in Medieval Spain (Philadelphia, Pa. 2003).
13. Nora Berend, "Défense de la Chrétienté et naissance d'une identité: Hongrie, Pologne et péninsule Ibérique au Moyen Âge" Annales HSS 5 (September-October 2003): 1009-1027.
14. Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages, rev. and expanded ed. (London, 1970).
15. Jalal Al-e Ahmad, Gharbzadegi [Weststuckness] (Costa Mesa, Calif., 1997).
16. Jeff Stein, "Can You Tell a Sunni from a Shiite?" New York Times, October 17, 2006.
17. Rodney Stark and William Sims Bainbridge, A Theory of Religion (New Brunswick, N.J., 1996).
18. Nora Berend, ed., Christianization and the Rise of Christian Monarchy: Scandinavia, Central Europe and Rus', c. 900-1200 (Cambridge, 2007).
19. Philip Benedict, "Religion and Politics in the European Struggle for Stability, 1500-1700," in Philip Benedict and Myron Gutmann, eds., Early Modern Europe: From Crisis to Stability (Newark, Del., 2005), 128.
20. Norman Housley, Religious Warfare in Europe, 1400-1536 (Oxford, 2002).
21. History and Theory: Studies in the Philosophy of History 45, no. 4 (December 2006).
22. Michael Burleigh, Earthly Powers: Religion and Politics in Europe from the French Revolution to the Great War (London, 2006);
23. John Gray, Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia (London, 2007).
24. David Rapoport, "Fear and Trembling: Terrorism in Three Religious Traditions," American Political Science Review 78, no. 3 (1984): 658-677.
25. Michael Barkun, Disaster and the Millennium (Syracuse, N.Y., 1986).
26. Anne Marie Oliver and Paul F. Steinberg, The Road to Martyrs' Square: A Journey into the World of the Suicide Bomber (New York, 2005).
27. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected. Essays (New York, 1973), 90.
28. "We don't discuss the frontier, we defend it."
29. "Sunni Insurgent Leader Paints Iran as 'Real Enemy,' " Washington Post, July 14, 2007.
30. A good one-stop source for these comparative histories would be the five-volume Fundamentalism Project, especially the first volume, Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby, eds., Fundamentalisms Observed (Chicago, 1991).
31. For a good insider view of the Iraqi occupation from the perspective of an Arab-American officer, see Ali A. Allawi, The Occupation of Iraq: Winning the War, Losing the Peace (New Haven, Conn., 2007).
32. Edward T. Linenthal, The Unfinished Bombing: Oklahoma City in American Memory (Oxford, 2001).
33. Jeffrey Kaplan, "Absolute Rescue: Absolutism, Defensive Action and the Resort to Force," Terrorism and Political Violence 1, no. 3 (1995): 128-163.
34. David Nirenberg, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (Princeton, N.J., 1996).
35. Miri Rubin, Gentile Tales: The Narrative Assault on Late Medieval Jews (New Haven, Conn., 1999).
36. Berend, Christianization, 27-28, 124, 187, 383.
37. Nora Berend, "Immigrants and Locals in Medieval Hungary: 11th-13th Centuries," in Klaus Herbers and Nikolas Jaspert, eds., Grenzräume und Grenzüberschreitungen im Vergleich: Der Osten und der Westen das mittelalterlichen Lateineuropa (Berlin, 2007), 205-217.
38. By far the best early work on Gush Emunim is Gideon Aran, "Jewish Zionist Fundamentalism: The Bloc of the Faithful in Israel (Gush Emunim)," in Marty and Appleby, Fundamentalisms Observed, 265-344.
39. For later developments, see Ehud Sprinzak, Brother against Brother: Violence and Extremism in Israeli Politics from Altalena to the Rabin Assassination (New York, 1999).
40. A good primer on this arcane world is Moojan Momen,An Introduction to Shii Islam: The History and Doctrines of Twelver Shiism (New Haven, Conn., 1985).
41. For the less committed, a much more enjoyable read would be Roy P. Mottahedeh, The Mantle of the Prophet: Religion and Politics in Iran (New York, 1986). A new One World edition of the latter was reprinted in 2004.
42. Angel Rabasa, Building Moderate Muslim Networks (Santa Monica, Calif., 2007).
43. For Khomeini's views on this and much more, see the indispensable Ruhollah Khomeini, Islam and Revolution: Writings and Declarations, trans. Hamid Algar (New York, 2002).
44. E.g., R. N. Bellah, "Religious Evolution," American Sociological Review 29 (1964): 358-374.
45. See, e.g., Anna Sapir Abulafia, Christians and Jews in Dispute: Disputational Literature and the Rise of Anti-Judaism in the West, c. 1000-1150 (Aldershot, 1998);
46. Mark R. Cohen, Under Crescent and Cross: Jews in the Middle Ages (Princeton, N.J., 1994).
47. Robert Chazan, European Jewry and the First Crusade (1987; repr., Berkeley, Calif., 1996).
48. David Berger, "The Attitude of St. Bernard of Clairvaux toward the Jews," Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 40 (1972): 89-108.
49. Dominique Iogna-Prat, Ordonner et exclure: Cluny et la société chrétienne face à l'hérésie, au judaïsme et à l'islam, 1000-1150 (Paris, 1998);
50. Gavin I. Langmuir, Toward a Definition of Antisemitism (1990; repr., Berkeley, Calif., 1996);
51. Jeremy Cohen, The Friars and the Jews: The Evolution of Medieval Anti-Judaism (Ithaca, N.Y., 1982);
52. Robert Chazan, Medieval Stereotypes and Modern Antisemitism (Berkeley, Calif., 1997).
53. Jonathan Riley-Smith, The Crusades: A Short History (1987; repr., London, 1996), is an excellent introduction.
54. C. J. Tyerman, "Were There Any Crusades in the Twelfth Century?" English Historical Review 110, no. 437 (1995): 553-577.
55. John V. Tolan, Saracens: Islam in the Medieval European Imagination (New York, 2002).
56. René Girard, La violence et le sacré (Paris, 1972).
57. David Sloan Wilson, Darwin's Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society (Chicago, 2002);
58. Wilson, Evolution for Everyone: How Darwin's Theory Can Change the Way We Think about Our Lives (New York, 2007), 56.
59. e siècle (Paris, 2007), 137.
60. I especially recommend Jean Flori, Guerre sainte, jihad, croisade: Violence et religion dans le christianisme et l'islam (Paris, 2002).
61. A. J. P. Taylor, The Course of German History: A Survey of the Development of Germany since 1815 (London, 1945), 68.
62. On Waco and the religious freedom questions it raised, see James D. Tabor and Eugene V. Gallagher, Why Waco? Cults and the Battle for Religious Freedom in America (Berkeley, Calif., 1995).
63. For a much wider-ranging consideration of the interactions of scholars, governments, and intelligence agencies, including primary source documents, see Jeffrey Kaplan, ed., Millennial Violence: Past, Present, and Future (London, 2002).
64. How this works in the lives of adherents of radical movements is fascinating. For a number of fieldwork-based examples, see Jeffrey Kaplan, Radical Religion in America: Millenarian Movements from the Far Right to the Children of Noah (Syracuse, N. Y., 1997).
65. Jonathan Z. Smith, "The Devil in Mr. Jones," in Smith, Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown (Chicago, 1982), 111-112.
66. For example, Bernard Lewis, What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response (Oxford, 2002).
67. Marc Bloch, Apologie pour l'histoire; ou, Métier d'historien (Paris, 1993), 95-96.
68. Eric Hobsbawm, On History (London, 1998), 164-185.
69. Thomas L. Haskell, "Objectivity Is Not Neutrality: Rhetoric versus Practice in Peter Novick's That Noble Dream," History and Theory 29 (1990): 129-157;
70. reprinted in Haskell, Objectivity Is Not Neutrality: Explanatory Schemes in History (Baltimore, Md., 1998).
71. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York, 1978).
72. Walter B. Edgar, ed., The Letterbook of Robert Pringle, 2 vols. (Columbia, S.C., 1972), 1: 284, 2: 684.
73. Henry Laurens, The Papers of Henry Laurens, ed. Philip M. Hamer, 16 vols. (Columbia, S.C., 1968-2003),
74. vol. 2: Nov. 1, 1755-Dec. 31, 1758, 358, 455.
75. Ibid, 2: 265;
76. vol. 1: Sept. 11, 1746-Oct. 31, 1755, 294-295; 2: 321.
77. Joyce E. Chaplin, An Anxious Pursuit: Agricultural Innovation and Modernity in the Lower South, 1730-1815 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1993), 227-276;
78. Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1998), 155-159;
79. cf. Jennifer L. Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia, Pa., 2004), 163.
80. Calculated from TSTD2. We have yet to discover any direct statements by Amazonian buyers of their preferences for slaves, but good data on slave arrivals exist. Indeed, Amazonia data on sex ratios of slave arrivals are even better than those for British North America. Table 7 reveals the male ratios for nearly 13,000 slaves who disembarked in Maranhão and Pará in the period when rice was expanding most rapidly. This sample constitutes about 20 percent of the slaves arriving in Amazonia from Africa in these years. It is compared with the equivalent ratios for 435,000 slaves carried across the Atlantic to all parts of the Americas in the same period. The information on girls comes from a sample of eighty-five vessels.
81. Hawthorne, Planting Rice and Harvesting Slaves, 4-15, 121, 137-138, 142, 152, 167-168;
82. Searing, West African Slavery and Atlantic Commerce, 53.
83. Laurens, The Papers of Henry Laurens, 2: 294-295, 455.
84. David Galenson, Traders, Planters and Slaves: Market Behavior in Early English America (Cambridge, 1986), 63. We have uncovered only two itemized accounts of sales of whole shiploads of slaves arriving in South Carolina in the mid-eighteenth century; one is from Sierra Leone, the other from Angola. In addition to these itemized accounts, however, there are reports of prices of prime male and female slaves sold from at least four other shiploads of slaves. Combining these sources produces the evidence on prime male and female price differentials shown in Table 8 (sterling conversions at the rate of £7 currency = £1 sterling).
85. Robert W. Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery, 2 vols. (Boston, 1974), 1: 75-77;
86. Manuel Moreno Fraginals, Herbert S. Klein, and Stanley L. Engerman, "The Level and Structure of Slave Prices on Cuban Plantations in the Mid-Nineteenth Century: Some Comparative Perspectives," American Historical Review 88, no. 5 (December 1983): 1201-1218.
87. Edelson, Plantation Enterprise, 56.
88. His chapter 2 is the most thorough and persuasive account of the varied origins of rice production in the lowcountry. Peter Coclanis also made suggestions along these lines to us. Angela Lakwete's Inventing the Cotton Gin: Machine and Myth in Antebellum America (Baltimore, Md., 2003), esp. 1-46, provides a good model of the complex origins and varied roots of both cotton cultivation and the gin. Technological transfers regarding rice cultivation and processing can be seen as analogous to those described by Lakwete.
89. Carney, Black Rice, 105, 140, 154.
90. R. C. Nash, "South Carolina and the Atlantic Economy in the Late Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries," Economic History Review, n.s., 45 (1992): 677-702, esp. 682;
91. Russell R. Menard, "Transport Costs and Long Range Trade, 1300-1800: Was There a European 'Transport Revolution' in the Early Modern Era?" in James D. Tracy, ed., The Political Economy of Merchant Empires (Cambridge, 1991), 268-271;
92. and Kenneth Morgan, "The Organization of the Colonial American Rice Trade," WMQ, 3rd ser., 52 (1995): 433-452, esp. 435.
93. See also Peter A. Coclanis, "Distant Thunder: The Creation of a World Market in Rice and the Transformation It Wrought," American Historical Review 98, no. 4 (October 1993): 1050-1078,
94. for further confirmation on the nature of European demand for rice in this period, and Coclanis, The Shadow of a Dream: Economic Life and Death in the South Carolina Low Country, 1670-1920 (New York, 1989).
95. See esp. Nash, "South Carolina and the Atlantic Economy," 677-702.
96. For more on the South Carolina rice industry, see Henry C. Dethloff, A History of the American Rice Industry, 1685-1985 (College Station, Tex., 1988),
97. and James M. Clifton, "The Rice Industry in Colonial America," Agricultural History 55 (1981): 266-283.
98. For productivity gains in the eighteenth century, see David Eltis, Frank D. Lewis, and David Richardson, "Slave Prices, the African Slave Trade and Productivity Growth in Eighteenth Century South Carolina," Journal of Economic History 66 (2006): 1054-1065.
99. For an alternative view, see Peter Mancall, John L. Rosenbloom, and Thomas Weiss, "Slave Prices and the South Carolina Economy, 1722-1809," Journal of Economic History 61 (2001): 616-639.
100. For Senegambia's commodity trade throughout the slave trade era, see both volumes of Philip Curtin's Economic Change in Precolonial Africa: Senegambia in the Era of the Slave Trade (Madison, Wis., 1975). The history of the dyewood trade in the Sierra Leone and Sherboro region has yet to be written, but for the importance of camwood, see the early T70 volumes, which include correspondence from the RAC factor at Bance Island and Sherboro.
101. The example of sorghum, about which Africans had much more exclusive knowledge than they did about rice, is also relevant. The reason sorghum did not take off as an Atlantic crop had nothing to do with African knowledge and everything to do with Euro-American entrepreneurialism. Sorghum did not command the interest among Euro-Americans that rice did.
102. Carney, Black Rice, 98 (quote), 99-101.
103. Peter A. Coclanis, "How the Low Country was Taken to Task: Slave-Labor Organization in Coastal South Carolina and Georgia," in Robert Louis Paquette and Louis Ferleger, eds., Slavery, Secession, and Southern History (Charlottesville, Va., 2000), 59-78, which, in addition to crediting rice planters as the primary actors in the origins of the task system, also surveys previous explanations for its development.
104. Carney, Black Rice, 167.