Sir Mark Sykes - Veertien Achttien

De laatste aflevering van de onvolprezen podcast Veertien Achttien heeft een onverwacht staartje. Sir Mark Sykes, bekend van het Sykes-Picot verdrag, is in 2008 opeens terug in het nieuws. Een ander verhaal van de Grote Oorlog dan dat van het geheime verdrag tussen de Fransen en de Britten is dat van de Spaanse Griep. Een van de meer dan 50 miljoen slachtoffers van de pandemie is de Britse diplomaat Sykes. Hij blijkt begraven in een met lood geisoleerde kist - zou men daar het virus uit op kunnen graven? Dat was de vraag in 2008.

In 1916 was de vraag wat er na het verscheiden van het Ottomaanse Rijk met het Midden-Oosten moest gebeuren. De Fransen en Britten lieten hun diplomaten Picot en Sykes in een geheim verdrag de boedel verdelen. Daarin werden voor het gemak de Arabieren, de Zionisten, de Italianen en wie er verder nog maar belang hadden, buiten beschouwing gelaten. De vredesverdragen in 1919, hebben een en ander nog wel enigszins proberen bij te stellen, maar veel van de hedendaagse problemen in het Midden-Oosten en in de problematische verhoudingen tussen de Arabische en de Westerse wereld vinden hier hun oorsprong.

Het zij nog maar weer eens gezegd: De grote kracht van Veertien Achttiens biografieën is dat deze verhalen belangrijke historische mijlpalen zoals het Sykes-Picot verdrag in historisch perspectief zetten en een buitengewoon inzicht in de geschiedenis van de Grote Oorlog geven. En in dit specifieke geval, ook verbanden zichtbaar maakt met het heden. Voeg daarbij het uitnemende, narratieve talent van de verteller Tom Tacken en je hebt een van de beste historische podcasts te pakken.

Meer Veertien Achttien:
De Eerste Wereldoorlog in podcast,
Ford en anderen,
Sigmund Freud,
Edith Cavell,
Rudyard Kipling. (speciaal aanbevolen)

Sati - British India UCLA

Sati is the Hindu practice of widow immolation. When the husband dies, the widow is burned with him on the cremation pyre. The practice was made illegal by the British rulers in India in the middle of the nineteenth century. Sati was considered barbaric and oppressive for women and therefore they felt they needed to put a stop to it. So far so good, you could hardly think of any argument against the ruling. Apart maybe from some pragmatic sense that the colonials better not interfere with local customs or some cultural relativism taken to the extreme. Or so it seems.

Without making any claims in favor of Sati, Professor Vinay Lal in his UCLA series History of British India (history 174c) in the lectures of 25 March and on, gives a very critical review of this piece of legislation. Of all the social problems in India they could have taken issue with, they chose exactly this one. Not by chance, as Lal argues, a practice that is so strange to them, there is no English parallel and therefore most easily be condemned, unlike other, and probably more harmful social circumstances and practices.

It is also interesting to see a quite sudden switch in attitude towards Sati, from a reverence to the noble savage, to the puritan outrage about barbarism. If that is not indicative for a kind of hypocrisy then maybe it should be observed that no women were asked what their stance on Sati was - even though they were the alleged victims to be protected. Deeper goes the problem that the English not only did not understand Sati, but also in their search for arguments against it, went to look in the Vedas which, in Lal's view, is a very anachronistic and unfit way to go. And here is by all means a lesson to learn, even if we have to be happy Sati was banned, it is easy to condemn that which you do not understand and in order to maintain the condemnation, understanding will be continuously avoided. It serves to make a very close self-criticism before one criticizes another.

More Vinay Lal:
History of British India,
History of India - the search goes on,
8 podcasts I listened to,
History of India or Europe?
History of India.

The Riddle of the Sands - Forgotten Classics

For the British, one of the shocks of the Great War was that they suddenly were pitted against Germany. The Germans and before them the Prussians had always been seen in a rather friendly light. The French had always been the enemy. When in 1871, after the Franco-Prussian war, Germany came into existence and developed into a great power, some saw the coming confrontation, but largely it had to take until 1914, until the Germans could really be broadly perceived as the real enemies. A 1871 invasion novel - The Battle of Dorking - which envisioned a German invasion of Britain was quickly forgotten.

Yet, by the early twentieth century the tide began to turn and a 1903 novel which describes how two English sailing tourists stumble upon a German invasion fleet not only marked a changing attitude, it even is acclaimed to have alerted the English to what was threatening them. This book, The Riddle of the Sands, featured as the conversation subject in an old issue of BBC's In Our Time (In Our Time on The Riddle of the Sands. Only available in stream). Melvyn Bragg and his guests hardly touch upon the novel and mainly speak of British attitudes towards Germany and vice versa.

If you want to hear the novel being read and find out a bit more, listen to Forgotten Classics. Host Julie gives a magnificent reading of the book (chapters 1-2, 3-5 and the just released 6-7) in which she captures the two main characters Carruthers and Davies each with their peculiarities. I was particularly delighted by the story as I have sailed the Frisian Islands some twenty years ago, as Carruthers and Davies do. That and the thought of the book's historical significance makes it a true delight.

More Forgotten Classics:
The message of Uncle Tom's Cabin,
Cooking with Forgotten Classics,
Forgotten Classics - podcast review.

More In Our Time:
Frankfurt School,
The history of the Royal Society,
The weekly treat,
New season of In Our Time,
St. Thomas Aquinas.

Diversity and sensitivities in Christianity

For the fourth post on a row, I will touch upon religion. It just so happened that yesterday's post triggered quite some discussion. It serves to take a look at the comments and follow the discussion around what is Catholic and what not. This digs into the history of Christianity and its many divisions (and the ensuing sensitivities). For that subject, I have many podcasts to direct you to. Let us start with one that I found recently.

The podcast series from Eastern Michigan University by Rick Rogers: World Religions (History 100) gives a general and easy to access introduction in the five major religions (feed). For the purpose of yesterday's discussion, and since I had come around those chapters anyway, I listened to the the six episodes about Christianity. Each is about 20 minutes long and one by one they set you up very neatly into Christian history, doctrine, church and holidays. Actually, I found the section about Christianity the best I have heard so far (with only Islam to go). You sense that this is Professor Rogers' own field of research.

Other podcasts that I can warmly recommend for getting up to date about the history of Christianity and its divisions are:
Phil Harland's Religions of the Ancient Mediterranean
UCSD's MMW3 The Medieval Heritage (Charles Chamberlain, Matthew Herbst) which runs this semester as well (with a.o. David Jordan).
Yale's New Testament History and Literature (Dale Martin)
Stanford's Historical Jesus (Thomas Sheehan)
LSE's Christianity's past and futures (Diarmaid MacCulloch)

Catholic Stuff - facts or doctrine

Catholic Stuff You Should Know is a podcast that was recently recommended to me. This came after I looked into and abandoned the Catholic Laboratory Podcast (Cathlab in short). Also The Pope Podcast is a Catholic podcast. What these have in common is that they take on their subject with an explicit Roman Catholic perspective. The issue that comes up is: does this turn up to be about facts or about doctrine?

Of course the two are in such a framework naturally intertwined, but when the doctrine part takes over, the facts tend to become stretched. Catholic Stuff You Should Know shows this in their issue about the Holy Sepulcher. The way they tell about this Jerusalem church makes it sound like it is an exclusively Catholic church and since they claim to have been there in actuality why would you check up on this? A peek at Wikipedia about the Holy Sepulcher already points in another direction. I have been to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher myself and I can see this from my own experience: what you run into in this Church is Armenian, Greek, Syriac, Coptic and only in a very limited way Roman Catholic - as opposed to many other famous churches in Israel, such as those in Nazareth, Capernaum and Mount Tabor.

More obvious is a small item about the etymology of Monday. (EDIT: I got this wrong. They discussed Maundy, not Monday) I thought: this is Moon-day and Wikipedia on Monday matches that expectation. However, this apparently is too pagan for the Catholic podcasters and so they propose two Latin, Biblical possibilities: Mandatum and Mendicare. Well, that is taking it very far from what would widely be considered factual and so, the conclusion must be: this podcast is about doctrine. As such, it is an interesting one. Find out about Arius, about the Ethiopian Church, Stylites, Indulgences and more. It is also short (no more than 10 minutes) and presented in a very free conversational style. (feed)

EDIT: As one of the readers pointed out in the comments below (thank God for comments); the issue was Maundy Thursday and where the addition Maundy comes from. Indeed Catholic stuff that I should know. Well maybe not absolutely have to, but it certainly helps to keep my feet out of my mouth.

Secularism - Thinking Allowed (BBC)

In conjunction with the last Philosophy Bites issue I wrote about (on Morality) I think it is a good idea to listen to a rather recent issue of BBC's Thinking Allowed. Laurie Taylor had a fascinating and spirited discussion with Rebecca Goldstein, Eric Kaufmann and Tariq Ramadan under the title Secularism under Threat?

Part of the problem is a confusion in terminology, which Tariq Ramadan takes on, by separating Secularism, from the modern ideological atheism that is heard from so often. Secularism, is a way of organizing society and political authority independent from organized religion and leaving place for all sorts of religious streams. And here it serves to keep Susan Neiman in mind as she spoke on Philosophy Bites and reformulated with the Enlightenment was all about secular society.

Once this is settled, it is relevant to view the non-fundamentalist religious, who are secularists in the political sense. And so, secularism under threat is an issue of secularism being challenged by the religious literalists. However, somehow, related but also different is the question of the rise of Islam in Europe. Both these are discussed. What is left out, is a rise of spiritualism, which, probably opposes the atheist kind of secularists.

More Thinking Allowed:
History and sociology,
Boffins and WW I,
Richard Hoggart,
Secular vs. Religious,
Renoir and Slumming.