Lecture Series Recordings

In the years 1921–1951, the Iraqi Jewish community thrived. Numbering around 150,000, this primarily urban community figured prominently in Iraq’s culture, literature and economy. Bashkin raises a few questions relating to the meanings of the Jewish sense of belonging to the Iraqi community through a reading of three poems written by Iraqi Jews. In doing so, I explore the ways in which Iraqi Jews wrote about modernity and secularism, and the manners in which their texts shed light on sociocultural processes occurring in Iraq at the time.

Prof. Crapanzano's paper is concerned with the role of narrative and silence in the passage of a wound – a trauma – from generation to generation. Specifically he looks at the way parental – in case in point, paternal – silence perpetuates the wound in children. Set stories, which inevitably lack particularity, seem incapable of “filling” that silence, fulfilling the children’s quest to know. They subsume what particulars are known in a generalized narrative that, repeated over and over again, loses vitality. Frozen, it intensifies the wound…. Prof. Crapanzano discusses this dynamic in terms of the Harkis – those Algerians who fought alongside the French, as auxiliary troops, during Algeria’s War of Independence. Between seventy and one hundred fifty thousand were slaughtered at the war’s end by the Algerian population at large. Those who managed to escape to France were incarcerated in camps and forestry hamlets, some for over sixteen years.

Beginning in December 2010, the suicide of a Tunisian street vender ignited protests and uprisings that spread throughout the Arab world. James L. Gelvin, Professor of History at UCLA and author of The Arab Uprisings: What Everyone Needs to Know(Oxford University Press, 2012), looks back at the first year of those protests and uprisings, exploring their causes, their trajectories, and the lessons we might learn from them.

Clifford Geertz famously described law as a form of “local knowledge.” In this lecture Prof. Messick examines the Islamic Shari'a as it was manifested in a system of local texts. He refers to a corpus of written work produced by a particular community of Muslim jurists and practitioners. Yemen, mountainous and agrarian, provides the setting; the Zaydis, rooted there for over a thousand years, the juridical community. Although his research in highland Yemen has spanned the last several decades, the readings he discusses focus upon a slightly earlier point in time--the first half of the twentieth century. Prof. Messick concentrates on this recent historical period to study a formation of Shari'a texts in the era of a classically styled Islamic polity.

With the rise of the Arab Spring of 2011, Turkey has been identified by many analysts and activities within and outside of the Middle East as a potential model for post-revolutionary states. Turkey's position as a mediator between the west and the Islamic world appears to be more critical than at any point in recent history. Join us for a forum and discussion with prominent Turkish journalist Abdülhamit Bilici about Turkey's role in shaping the future of the Middle East. Abdülhamit Bilici is General Manager of Cihan News Agency and columnist of both Zaman and Today's Zaman newspapers. He served as the Deputy Editor in Chief of Zaman daily, the largest circulated paper in Turkey. He also worked as the foreign news editor of Zaman and Aksiyon weekly news magazine. As a student of International Relations, Mr. Bilici writes mainly on Turkish foreign policy and world politics. He contributes to other papers on Turkish politics and appears on national and international TV programs to comment on political developments in Turkey.

In an infamous passage in his Letter to the Galatians (2:11-14), Paul called out Peter as a 'hypocrite.' This passage, especially when read in light of Paul's own appeal to himself as 'all things to all people' in 1 Corinthians 9:19-23, was to cause deep trouble for later Christian interpreters, who sought to defend their movement against charges from outsiders that it had a cracked and unstable foundation in dual 'hypocrites.' This lecture will introduce this 'pagan' critique and the cultural force it had, and the various solutions to the inherited dilemma from their scriptures that were offered by patristic authors (Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, Jerome and Augustine). In light of this context, turn to a sustained analysis of an untranslated homily by John Chrysostom, hom. in Gal 2:11 (In faciem ei restiti), which addresses not just the hypocrisy of Peter and Paul, but also the sticky problem of the hypocrisy of the Christian who reads this text approvingly as Paul's "in your face" to Peter. As we shall see, Chrysostom does this by engaging in a convoluted pretense of his own.