Assault on the Freedom Flotilla

Israeli military forces have used lethal force against peaceful humanitarian activists in international waters:

"Israeli naval commandos shot dead at least 16 people and wounded over 30 on Monday morning, as they attacked an unarmed humanitarian and civilian flotilla - in international waters - trying to bring desperately needed aid to Gaza. The death toll was expected to rise.

"Chaos, confusion and outrage surround the exact circumstances under which the Free Gaza (FG) flotilla was stormed with live footage from a Turkish TV channel showing masked and heavily armed Israeli soldiers commandeering one of the six (FG) boats, the ‘Mavi Marmara’.

"An Al Jazeera correspondent who was on board, reported that Israeli troops used live ammunition during the operation. The Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) countered that some of those on board attacked soldiers with sharp objects, including knives.

"The organisers disputed this, saying the IDF opened fire as soon as they boarded the boats.

"It is uncertain how the Turkish channel managed to air the live footage. Israeli authorities had scrambled the boats’ communications system shortly before the commando raid in a bid to prevent the crews from using navigational equipment and contacting the crews on the other boats."

Juan Cole suggests that the shooting may have come when Israeli soldiers overreacted, but frankly any time you set up this sort of military encounter you have to expect the possibility for fatalities caused by the side with all the weapons. This was a brutal attempt to enforce a brutal and inhumane siege of one of the world's most impoverished patches of land.

(Crossposted to American Footprints)

Crimean Tartars

Ukraine is well off the path of my usual commentary, but I hadn't realized that the Crimean Tartars were the center of so much controversy:

"Oleg Rodivilov, a member of the Crimean parliament and the leader of Crimea's Russian bloc, told RFE/RL today that he considers the Crimean Tatars' Mejlis (parliament) and its Kurultai (congress) to be organized criminal groups and said their activities are unconstitutional...

"Other pro-Russia groups in Crimea, including the Russian Community of Crimea and the Tavria Union, have also sent open letters to Yanukovych urging him to ban the Mejlis and the Kurultai.

"The Crimean Tatars first established their own Mejlis and Kurultai in 1917. But they were abolished by Soviet leader Josef Stalin, who ordered the mass deportation of the Crimean Tatars to Central Asia in May 1944.

"In 1991, the Crimean Tatars received official permission to return to Crimea and the Mejlis-Kurultai structure was revived."

The Crimean Tartars tend to be staunchly opposed to Russian influence in Ukraine, which is probably especially important since I've learned that many in Russia don't believe Crimea should be part of Ukraine at all.

Away

So far this month I've had a conference beset with travel delays amidst the usual end of semester activities, which is why blogging has been so light. Now I'm in Ukraine playing tourist. I hope to put up some posts on that soon, but figured I should probably post an away message just in case I don't. I'll be back Memorial Day weekend.

Islamic Origins

Thanks to Chapati Mystery, I just found this article in which Fred Donner discusses his new book, Muhammad and the Believers: At the Origins of Islam. Here is the article author's summary:

"The first followers of Christ didn’t consider themselves ’’Christians’’; they were Jews who believed that a fellow Jew named Jesus Christ was the long-awaited messiah. It took centuries for Christianity to evolve and solidify as a distinct faith with its own doctrine and institutions.

"In 'Muhammad and the Believers: At the Origins of Islam,' University of Chicago historian Fred M. Donner wants to provide a similar back story for Islam — a religion which, in the popular imagination, sprang wholly formed from the seventh-century sands of Arabia. Mohammed preached at the juncture of the Roman and Sassanian empires, winning support from Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, and various deist polytheists. According to Donner, Mohammed built a movement of devout spiritualists from many faiths who shared a few core beliefs: God was one, the end of the world was near, and the truly religious had to live exemplary lives rather than merely pay lip service to God’s laws. It was only a century after Mohammed founded his 'community of believers' and launched the great Islamic conquest that his followers started to define their beliefs as a distinct religious faith."

For the past 30-40 years, Islamic origins has been perhaps the single most contentious area of Middle Eastern history. There is a very strong, internally coherent picture found in the Islamic historical tradition; however, this material probably dates from the late 8th century or later, and was written from the perspective of a learned class of Muslim religious specialists and functionaries in a government which legitimized itself on an Islamic basis. For these reasons, scholars have debated the degree to which it reflects what people would have thought or said during the early 7th century.

Some scholars have chosen to throw it out as unreliable, while others argue for its fundamental soundness. Donner fits into what I see as the fruitful middle ground of understanding the written sources as the products of a long period of transmitting information about the past and forming ideas that we might truly call historical. As I suggested back in this MESA post, these are the types of questions about which we've come to know a fair amount, perhaps enough to proceed on this thorniest of questions.

Historians of religion will not find Donner's work shocking, as religious leaders generally claim to be restoring the old rather than creating the new, purifying the impurities in or restoring the true message of whatever religious material is around them and serving as the context for their own ideas. In a point I've made before, Islam's DNA still points to the idea that it is the religion of Abraham, whose life is commemorated in the hajj. The prophet most frequently mentioned in the Qur'an is Moses. I won't be able to read it until June at the earliest, but Donner's work is definitely a milestone which historians 50 years from now will probably refer to as making important contributions even if they come to reject its overall argument.