In Conversation: An OUP Podcast

In the popular imagination, heresy belongs to the Christian Middle Ages in much the way that the Crusades or courtly culture do. Non-specialists in the medieval field may assume that the problem of heresy always existed, uniformly, throughout the period. But as Matthew Gillis shows in Heresy and Dissent in the Carolingian Empire: The Case of Gottschalk of Orbais (Oxford University Press, 2017), in the age of Charlemagne and his descendants, heretics were largely “seen as either distant foreign dangers or the legendary villains of ancient church lore.” That is, until around 840 CE, when one Gottschalk of Orbais began preaching what he called twin predestination. Gottschalk was heavily influenced by Augustine, who had argued that long before time began, God already ordained who would be among the elect and who among the damned. Gottschalk’s twin predestination theology made him into a figure Professor Gillis refers to as a “religious outlaw,” a “heretic in the flesh,” the Carolingian Empire’s foremost religious dissenter. Heresy & Dissent in the Carolingian Empire is a fascinating study of a figure whose meaning has been debated for centuries, but whose own moment in the 840s reveals a world beset with fears of sin and pollution. Matthew Gillis is Assistant Professor of history at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

What does it mean to interpret the Qur’an? What kinds of literary genres have produced and continue to produce such inquiry? Is tafsir only a line-by-line commentary or could it be something broader, blended with genres of law, storytelling, or translation? Whose authority counts and why? Tafsir and Islamic Intellectual History: Exploring the Boundaries of a Genre (Oxford University Press, 2015) aims to address these questions in its ambitious agenda. Johanna Pink and Andreas Gorke have provided a great service to the field of Qur’anic studies by compiling this fine volume, penned by fifteen established as well as rising scholars in the field. The book is conveniently organized according to five sections, which explore the challenges of Qur’anic exegesis in modern and premodern contexts. The authors also explore a number of languages and geographical regions, which showcases the diverse expressions of exegesis that Muslims have produced over the centuries. Pink’s own chapter in the volume, for example, analyzes the exegetical works of Yemeni scholar, Muhammad al-Shawkani (d. 1835) and provocatively argues that labels (e.g., modern or Salafi) have their uses but can nonetheless introduce other problematics, and readers should be careful before assuming an easy fit. In addition to appealing to Qur’anic studies scholars of many stripes the edited volume also presents itself as a reference work, given its broad scope, meticulous notes, and extensive bibliography and should appeal to diverse readers accordingly. Elliott Bazzano is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Le Moyne College. His research and teaching interests include theory and methodology in the study of religion, Islamic studies, Qur’anic studies, mysticism, religion and media, and religion and drugs. His academic publications are available here. He can be reached at (bazzanea@lemoyne.edu). Listener feedback is most welcome.

The title of Isabella Ginor and Gideon Remez‘s The Soviet-Israeli War, 1967-1973: The USSR’s Intervention in the Egyptian-Israeli Conflict (Oxford University Press/Hurst, 2017), tells you that this is a revisionist history, which argues that the Six Day War (1967) and the Yom Kippur War (1973) were not merely brief explosions of Arab-Israeli violence but part of longer sustained conflict between Israel and the Soviet Union. The role of Soviet “advisors” in Egypt in the period is well known. Using memoirs and testimony of Soviet veterans, Ginor and Remez show that the Soviet involvement was much more direct and provocative than previously understood. In addition, the authors significantly change our understanding of the eventual rapprochement between Egypt and the United States. The usual story relies heavily on the memoirs of Henry Kissinger, who naturally takes much of the credit for the supposed “expulsion” of Soviet advisors and the decision by Sadat after the war to move closer to the American camp. The problem is, as Ginor and Remez show, the advisors (and other military personnel) never left. Rather, they were shuffled around for the benefit of news people and foreign agents, then returned to their units. Crucially, these Soviet units advanced the air defense network to cover the Suez Canal– itself the prerequisite for any Egyptian attack. For these reasons and more, this book is well worth your attention. Enjoy the interview. Because this is an ongoing project, the authors are eager to collect more information. If there are veterans, diplomats, or others with some involvement in these conflicts who would be willing to share their stories, please contact Ginor and Remez at the Truman Institute: truman@savion.huji.ac.il.

The term ‘sectarianism’ has dominated much of the discourse on the Middle East and dictates that much of the unrest in the region is due to religious and cultural differences stemming back centuries. However, with Sectarianization:Mapping the New Politics of the Middle East (Oxford University Press, 2017), Nader Hashimi and Danny Postel have sought to redefine the term, locating the manifestation of sectarian differences in sectarianization, a process utilized by a variety of regional actors in political power plays. Featuring a host of historians, anthropologists, and political scientists, the edited volume intends to push back against careless usage of the term and redefine the histories of sectarian violence in the Middle East. NA Mansour is a graduate student at Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies working on the global intellectual history of the Arabic-language press. She tweets @NAMansour26 and produces another Middle-East and North Africa-related podcast: Reintroducing.  

The Peloponnesian War was one of the first subjects of historical inquiry, and one that has been the subject of many works ever since Thucydides wrote his famous account of the conflict. Yet these works typically focus just on the decades when Sparta’s Peloponnesian League fought against the Athenian empire. In The Plague of War: Athens, Sparta, and the Struggle for Ancient Greece (Oxford University Press, 2017), Jennifer T. Roberts sets the war within the broader context of inter-state hostilities in 5th and 4th century Greece. As she explains, fighting between the two sides did not begin in 431, nor did it really end in 404. Instead the Peloponnesian War was just one of a series of conflicts that stretched throughout the Hellenic era, in which victories often simply set the stage for the next round of battles. Though Sparta may have defeated Athens in 404, by continuing the story beyond then Roberts shows how the new alignments that resulted transformed the city states in ways that led to Sparta’s own defeat in 371, making her triumph in the war only a fleeting one.

Leigh Fought is an assistant professor of history at Le Moyne College. Her book Women in the World of Frederick Douglass (Oxford University Press, 2017) offers a detailed and rich portrait of Frederick Douglass’ private and public life and his many relationships with women. From his enslaved mother Harriet, Sophia Auld the slave mistress that sparked his interest in reading, to his wife of forty-four years Anna Murray, daughter Rosetta and his white second wife Helen Pitts; these were the women who populated his private world. From each he learned lessons about the workings of race, gender and class in America and prepared him to collaborate with many antislavery women including Julia Griffiths, Maria Weston Chapman and Amy Post. He saw his fight for abolition as part of “woman’s cause” bringing him into contact with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. Seeing himself as “woman’s rights man,” who had attended the Seneca Falls Woman’s Rights Convention in 1848, he was perplexed by the betrayal of many woman’s rights advocates. Fought fills in much of what is lacking in the female “empty space” in the study of Douglass allowing a fuller understanding of his life and ideas. This is an invaluable contribution to Douglass studies. Lilian Calles Barger, www.lilianbarger.com, is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her current book project is tentatively entitled The World Come of Age: Religion, Intellectuals and the Challenge of Human Liberation is forthcoming from Oxford University Press in 2018.

A popular way of thinking about the mind and its relation to physical stuff is in terms of computation. This general information-processing approach to solving the mind-body problem admits of a number of different, often incompatible, elaborations. In Physical Computation: A Mechanistic Account (Oxford University Press, 2016), Gualtiero Piccinini integrates research in mechanistic and psychological explanation, computability theory, and other areas to provide a detailed account of the sense in which some, but not all, physical systems compute, and in which genuine computing systems need not be defined in terms of semantic or representational properties. Piccinini, a professor of philosophy at University of Missouri St. Louis, also argues that the mind is not strongly autonomous from its physical implementation but it is not thereby reduceable to physical mechanisms.

When we are thinking about what we ought to do, we are nearly always deciding among options. And we often talk in ways that reflect this; statement about what one ought to do are frequently explicitly statements that identify some act as the one to be performed from a broader set of alternatives. Accordingly, we recognize that a consideration which favors some act among one set of options might favor a different act among a different set of options. This has led some to think that normative reasons are fundamentally contrastive in structure. This is to say that a reason to perform some act is always a reason to perform that act rather than some other act. Contrastivism about normative reasons is the view according to which there is no reason simpliciter to perform a given act; a reason to perform some act A is always a reason to A given some background of alternatives. As it captures the general structure of normative reasoning, contrastivism sounds intuitive. But a lot of work needs doing in order to flesh out the details. In Contrastive Reasons (Oxford University Press, 2017), Justin Snedegar develops and defends a novel version of contrastivism about moral reasons. He then extends the view to normative reasons of other kinds by offering an analysis of when it is rational to withhold belief.

Not quite a colony, not quite independent, fiercely nationalist, what is Puerto Rico’s status, exactly? Jorge Duany‘s Puerto Rico: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, 2017) offers clear answers to complicated questions about Puerto Rico’s politics and history, as well as accounting for many phenomena that characterize the island today; migration to and from the island, the state of its economy, the role of language in shaping Puerto Rican identities. Whether you know nothing or a great deal, this book is sure to surprise and inform you.  

Rajan Gurukkal‘s Rethinking Classical Indo-Roman Trade: Political Economy of Eastern Mediterranean Exchange Relations (Oxford University Press, 2016) casts a critical eye over the exchanges, usually and problematically termed trade, between the eastern Mediterranean and coastal India in the classical period. Using insights from economic anthropology to recast the standard narrative of the time, the study explores ports and polity in south India as well as the different types of exchange relations in both the eastern Mediterranean and the subcontinent. A provocative, fascinating and deeply detailed study, the book is sure the shake up existing scholarship on the topic.