by Gerald Dworkin

In a talk given some years ago at the University of Illinois Urbana (UIUC), which is the object of a boycott protesting the Salaita decision, I described myself as a “first amendment fanatic.” Having grown up in the era of McCarthyism as the child of a member of the Communist Party, having endured a mild amount of FBI scrutiny of my travel and organizational affiliations, surely contributed to this bias in favor of freedom of speech. The text I most enjoyed teaching by the philosopher I admire most, John Stuart Mill, is his defense of freedom of speech in On Liberty.

I have always been suspicious of bans on “hate speech” and thought a bit about how it might or might not differ from crimes which created additional punishments for particular victims of assaults. I was inclined to favor such additional sanctions for, say, the elderly who were more likely to be seriously injured by such assaults, and to be more fearful of using the streets. But I was inclined to oppose such increases for those attacked because of their race or sexual orientation. It smacked too much of punishing not just the acts but hateful thoughts as well.

This is where I stood when considering the question of whether to sign on to a petition to the Chancellor of the University UIUC condemning her action of de-hiring, or not appointing, or firing –depending on arcane views about the nature of contract law — Steven Salaita. I assume that many of the readers of this blog are aware of the wide-spread controversy, and proposed boycott–refusing to speak at the campus– of UIUC, by the academic community. Philosophers have been particularly prominent in this effort. For those who are new to this issue, here is some basic information, a critique of the decision, and a defense of it:

1. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/08/25/u-illinois-officials-defend-decision-deny-job-scholar-documents-show-lobbying
2. https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2014/08/08/essay-criticizing-u-illinois-blocking-controversial-faculty-hire
3. https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2014/08/08/essay-defends-university-illinois-decision-not-hire-steven-salaita

The issue is, as a matter of law, very complicated. Experts in contract law–does he have a valid contract before the Board of Trustees approves the appointment?– are divided on the matter. The constitutional issue seems clearer. The First Amendment has been long interpreted as forbidding state agencies–including public universities– from punishing employees for the expression of political viewpoints. But this is consistent with such agencies being able to ensure they can discharge their legitimate functions. So there is room–given various empirical assumptions–for the decision being upheld. But, absent any evidence that Salaita has made his classroom a hostile one by his tweets, it is likely that he is protected by the First Amendment.

However, I think that there are moral, political and institutional issues that arise in this case , and which are invoked by the protesters and the defenders, that need to be discussed in isolation from the purely legal issues. These are my focus in this blog post.

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by Debra Morris

Along with thousands of others that day, I emerged from the South Tower of the World Trade Center with a crippling fatigue in my knees. Of the walk down, in my case from the 61^st floor, certain things stand out: the speed with which one can descend a flight of stairs and smoothly pivot on the ball of the left foot, to begin again; a few stray remarks from strangers (“I think something hit the North Tower.” “They're saying the building's safe and we can go back up.”); our slowing pace as we continued downward, to make room for those entering the stairwell at each floor. And this, of course: at a standstill, just outside the 18^th floor; a pause no more than a half minute but time enough for the second jet to slam through floors 78–84 above us, with a sound like a freight train, jolting us against the handrail and blurring the stairs at our feet. Seconds more, waiting—unaware, mercifully, that we were waiting—for the unmistakable sound of a building's slow, groaning collapse. Then someone saying quietly, “It's OK; let's go,” and we began the descent again, our steps suddenly desperate and clumsy.

And now, certain disclaimers, which are always on my mind on the rare occasion I relate any of the above. I, and thousands of others that day, emerged from the South Tower with no obvious wounds—no burns, no cuts, no eyes bloodied by pulverized glass and concrete. Because my floor was below the plane's point of impact, I always had hope of making it to safety, and hope is an especially precious and bounteous thing under certain circumstances. It's remarkable, too, how quickly a person can get down even 61 floors when she has been told to do so—meaning that I was outside and away from the tower with time to spare. Enough time to wonder: how different, really, was my experience from that of the millions traumatized by the televised accounts of the day?

Perhaps I recount it now with the hope that you will tell me where you were at that same moment—and confess: did the world blur before your eyes, too?

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GABRIEL AND SATAN

after Iqbal

Gabriel
All right, mate. Dish out the dirt.

Satan
Suffering, seeking, yearning, burning
I have the strength of hopelessness

Gabriel
Heavens! Will you ever return?

Satan
No bazaars, Jaguars, rouge et noir—
Bestow these gated lawns on the pious

Gabriel
Angels are bright still, after all.

Satan
From my despair: Gods’ fire.
I am the warp of wisdom’s robe.

by Rafiq Kathwari, the present winner of the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award.

by Ahmed Humayun

The 2013 elections in Pakistan gained the Pakistan Tehrik-e-Insaf (PTI) the government in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province as well as the third most prominent position in parliament. This striking success was a vindication of Imran Khan, PTI's leader, who had struggled for many years to break into a sclerotic system dominated by autocratic political parties organized around familial and financial interests.

But the results were a crushing disappointment for Khan and many of his supporters who became convinced that the elections had been rigged against them. Over the last several weeks, the country has become embroiled in a severe political crisis in which Khan and some of his followers are staging protests in Islamabad against last year's election results and the current government of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, the head of the Pakistan Muslim League (PML-N).

Some of Khan's arguments deserve to be taken seriously. There are undoubtedly deep flaws in an electoral system that is still nascent. Last year was the first time, after all, that one elected regime transferred power to another in Pakistan's history. To the extent that the PTI has elevated the issue of improving electoral accountability in the country's national debate, it deserves credit. Yet Khan has advanced a series of improbable, evidence-free conspiracy theories that have muddied rather than clarified the debate. Worse, by intriguing to overthrow Sharif's regime, he has damaged Pakistan's fragile democracy.

Khan's allegation that ‘rigging' took place is almost certainly true, but the assertion that a host of Pakistani institutions connived to rig elections in Sharif's favor is almost certainly false. Here are just a few reasons to be skeptical of Khan's sweeping claims. First, while claims about a stolen election have been asserted with great certitude, no evidence for a vast conspiracy has been provided. Khan has leveled highly specific allegations, incriminating the Chief Justice, the head of the election commission, and various others, without any proof. Second, consider the sheer improbability that some 70,000 polling stations, where perhaps 600,000 people worked, under the direction of a cabal consisting of the election commission, the superior judiciary, and Nawaz Sharif, worked in unison to deliver a result adverse to Khan. Third, at the time of the elections, the Pakistan People's Party (PPP) was in power and oversaw the holding of the elections. If such a vast conspiracy is possible, then why did the PPP suffer a drubbing, and why did it allow its political nemesis, the PML-N, to triumph? Fourth, why is only PTI and not the other political parties—who presumably would be equally suspicious of the adverse election results—protesting? Instead, while happy to see the Sharif government flounder, the parties have stood by the government. Fifth, if the election was stolen by the PML-N in order to prevent PTI's victory, it was done in a rather half-hearted manner – awarding the PTI rule in a province, and making it into the third largest party in the national assembly.

All independent observers, including international monitors, concede the flaws in the 2013 elections but aver that, nonetheless, these were the freest and fairest elections in Pakistani history. This is not a high bar to cross, but it suggests why all of Pakistan's parties accepted the results when they were announced and formed the government.

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by Ruchira Paul

“And suddenly I knew, as I touched the damp, grainy surface of the seawall, that I would always remember this night, that in years to come I would remember sitting here, swept with confused longing as I listened to the water lapping the giant boulders beneath the promenade … I wanted to come back tomorrow night, and the night after, and the one after that as well, sensing that what made leaving so fiercely painful was the knowledge that there would never be another night like this… not this year or any other year… I had caught myself longing for a city I never knew I loved.”

The city was Alexandria, Egypt, the year 1964 and the person thinking the thoughts, a thirteen year old boy whose family was about to depart from the city the next day – for ever. André Aciman’s Out of Egypt is an enchanting memoir that draws from history, childhood memories and probably a bit from the author’s imagination. I recently re-read the book after a gap of more than a decade and found it just as absorbing as it had been the first time.

Out of Egypt recounts the story of the author’s extended family, Sephardic Jews with their footprints in many parts of Europe and the Middle East – Italy, France, Germany, Syria, Turkey and finally, Egypt. The large, loud, colorful clan was polyglot (Aciman’s two grandmothers spoke to each other in six different languages), contentious, sharp of tongue and at times snobbish. Even after three generations in Egypt, they hadn’t learnt to speak Arabic well except to communicate with the baker, the butcher and the domestic help in a pidgin version. They considered themselves French, Italian and German although most arrived in Alexandria via Constantinople. Used to seeing their fortunes wax and wane, Aciman's great uncles were forever ambitious and optimistic that the next financial scheme was bound to strike gold. To that end they tirelessly utilized their social and political connections, a bit of chicanery and if the target was a family member with means, arm twisting. Their sisters and the women they married were by turn shrewd, neurotic, theatrical, acid tongued and in times of crises, generous and supportive. In the midst of many near disasters and real catastrophes, the whole family rallied to help each other. By the time the book ends, several older family members had died and others were scattered through Europe and America. The events after WWII and the burgeoning nationalistic fervor made Egypt an inhospitable place for its non-Muslim residents.

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by Lisa Lieberman

My favorite line from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966), spoken by the late, great Eli Wallach, captures the essence of the Spaghetti Western. Here's Tuco, the Mexican bandit played by Wallach, taking a bubble bath in some half-destroyed hotel room, when a one-armed bad guy barges in, holding a loaded revolver in his left hand. The last time we saw this guy, Tuco had left him for dead after a shoot-out. He's been thirsting for revenge ever since, he says, and in the time it's taken him to find Tuco, he's learned to shoot left-handed. Blam! Wallach's character blows him away. “When you have to shoot, shoot. Don't talk.”

Sergio Leone loved Westerns and the image of America they conveyed. You see this in his craftsmanship, the careful attention to detail, the gorgeous panoramas reminiscent of John Ford's best work. Even when Leone undercuts the conventions of the genre (as in the scene with Tuco and the one-armed bad guy), he pays them tribute, substituting his own, more nuanced myths for the old cowboy clichés. “Fairy tales for grown-ups,” he called them in an interview with Christopher Frayling.

Of course, Europeans are the grown-ups: worldly, cynical, not prudish about sex, more concerned with surface style, it must be said, than with the moral underpinnings of their heroes. Who is “Blondie,” Clint Eastwood's character in the film? We never learn his real name, where he came from, who his daddy was. A man of few words, he's unconcerned with social niceties, having no interest in women, good or otherwise, no long-range plans, dreams, or ambitions. He dresses well, however.

Clothes Make the Man

The trademark hat with tooled leather hat band. The poncho. In his later masterpiece, Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), Leone put all of his actors in dusters like the one Blondie wears when Tuco is forcing him across the desert, kicking off a fad for the long, fawn-colored coats among trendy Parisians. But those dusters are really dusty. Compare the nice, clean hero of an American Western to his sweaty counterpart in one of Leone's films. At the end of a hard day's ride in The Searchers (1956), John Wayne's horse is pretty sweaty, but apart from needing a shave, Wayne himself is fresh as a daisy.

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by Maniza Naqvi

Just Wow! At every turn, and corner in Istanbul—you are bound to say—Wow.

The obvious example is, of course, at the Basilica of Aya Sofiya—built by Emperor Justinian in 537 AD. Legend has it, that Justinian wanted this magnificent Eastern Orthodox Church, in its beauty and scale to rival Solomon's great Temple. So that even Solomon would have been Wowed. Whether, Solomon would have been Wowed, or not, subsequent emperors, certainly were—And in 1204, the Aya Sofiya, was converted to a Roman Catholic Church, and then in 1453 the Ottoman Emperor was certainly wowed, because he appropriated the Basilica, and converted it into a mosque,—which it remained till 1935, when it was turned into a museum, for a Basilica and a church and a mosque, by the State of Turkey. The histories of Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman empires, were now showcased, and encapsulated in one space. Istanbul, is afterall, just that kind of an ‘and-and' place. The word Aya, in Greek means holy, and Sofiya means wisdom. Aya Sofiya: Holy Wisdom.

When I visited, the Museum of Aya Sofiya, again this Spring, I moved away from the hordes of tourists, to a quieter corner, and found there a small display of calligraphy. Here, I saw depicted, in a single stroke of ink, the Arabic letter pronounced as wow. Letters of the Arabic alphabet are used as symbols in Sufism, to signify a greater meaning of perfection.

The letter Wow, shaped like a bowed head, like a tadpole—like an embryo like a germinating seed, like the sun's millions of warm smiles on the waves of the water, takes just one stroke to create: one stroke, in a swirl like a strand of honey, dripping or a whirl—like a whirling dervish. It caught my eye, and reminded me of itself, in the thriving, pulsating streets, and cafes and mosques and later even on a friend's posting on facebook. Wow, wow, wow.

This letter Wow, has the numerical value of six, which also symoblizes perfection and resembles the number six as written in English. The Arabic word Wadood which begins with the letter Wow means love and is—one of the attributes of God. Thus, the letter Wow is shorthand for aspects of loving, in Sufi Orders. It symbolizes the sense of being spiritually elevated. And, the letter Wow is the first letter of how the word ‘and' is spelt in Arabic—Wa. Several verses of the Quran extolling love begin with words starting with the letter Wow. And so many of the verses begin with the word Wa meaning and. For example in the Chapter Al Buruj ‘And He is the Forgiving, the Loving, Lord of the Throne of Glory, Doer of what He wills.

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