The Muslim Brotherhood, Islamist Politics, and the Quest for Democracy

My latest post, “The Muslim Brotherhood, Islamist Politics, and the Quest for Democracy,” is found at The Faculty Lounge.

Toward Teaching Prison Law…and Punishment & Prison: A Bibliography

My post, Toward Teaching Prison Law...and Punishment & Prison: A Bibliography, is found at The Faculty Lounge, where I’ve been guest blogging this month.

The Bard of Avon in Prison

Los Angeles Times, November 25, 2012

Reading “Hamlet” Behind Bars
By David Schalkwyk

It doesn’t look like much — just a tattered, 1970 edition of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. But inside, the book bears testament to an era.

Currently on display at the British Museum as part of an exhibition called “Shakespeare: Staging the World,” the book belongs to Sonny Venkatrathnam, who was incarcerated during the 1970s in South Africa’s apartheid-era political prison, Robben Island. Having convinced a warden that the volume was a Hindu religious text, Venkatrathnam was allowed to keep it with him in prison, where it was passed from prisoner to prisoner. At Venkatrathnam’s request, his comrades signed their names beside their favorite passages.

On Dec. 16, 1977, Nelson Mandela signed next to these lines: ‘Cowards die many times before their deaths; / The valiant never taste of death but once.’

Walter Sisulu, another African National Congress leader and close confidant of Mandela, put his name beside a passage in ‘The Merchant of Venice,’ in which Shylock talks about the abuse he has taken as a Jewish money-lender: ‘Still have I borne it with a patient shrug / For sufferance is the badge of all our tribe.’

And Billy Nair, who went on to become a member of Parliament in the new South Africa, chose Caliban’s challenge to Prospero from ‘The Tempest:’ ‘This island’s mine, by Sycorax my mother / Which thou tak’st from me.’

The Robben Island Shakespeare is the only book from the prison that records an act of personal literary appreciation by the major figures incarcerated at the time, many of whom went on to play major roles in post-apartheid South Africa. It is a kind of ‘guest book,’ bearing the signatures of 34 of the Robben Island prisoners. But is also more than that.

When they signed their names against Shakespeare’s text, each prisoner recognized something of himself and his relation to others in the words of a stranger. The Robben Island Shakespeare records that community of character and signature as an example of Shakespeare’s global reach and as a historically specific witness to a common human identity and shared experience.

It’s not at all clear how big a role the book played in the lives of prisoners other than Venkatrathnam. Not one of the memoirs written by inmates at Robben Island mentions the volume. And when the ANC was asked to comment on the significance of the book this year, its spokesman asked, ‘What is this “Robben Island Bible”?’ He denied that it had played any special role in the struggle against oppression.

Nevertheless, all the accounts of political imprisonment in South Africa during the apartheid era suggest that the humanities were central to the lives and needs of the prisoners. In an environment of extreme sensory deprivation, designed to deny people their affinity with others and to strip away humanity, the soul staked its claims with striking insistence. Music, some prisoners declared, was more important to them than food; many were prepared to suffer physical punishment for the sake of a book or a newspaper; and the cold of concrete and steel was turned into the warmth of community through common reading and shared education. Jacob Zuma, the current president of South Africa, has said he received his basic education at the ‘University of Robben Island.’ [….]

The rest of the article is here.

(David Schalkwyk is director of research at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington and editor of the Shakespeare Quarterly. He is the author of Hamlet’s Dreams: The Robben Island Shakespeare.)

Related Miscellany:

Here’s an inspirational story of an inmate “sentenced to 16 years for felony assault, a period extended by three years after an altercation with a guard in prison,” whose prison reading contributed to his becoming something of an expert on hieroglyphs: “Hieroglyphics Turn Prisoner Away from a Life of Crime.”

Duly inspired, here’s a link to the Prison Book Program.

And this may be a propitious occasion for those of us dispositionally inclined to read the likes of Aristotle, John Rawls, Robert Nozick, Michael Sandel, Iris Marion Young, G.A. Cohen, Thomas Pogge, and Amartya Sen on justice (distributive and otherwise), to be reminded of the relevance of Shakespeare, who also speaks to us about such things: A Thousand Times More Fair: What Shakespeare’s Plays Teach Us About Justice (2011).

Israel & Gaza

Here are some pieces I found useful for understanding the Palestinian struggle as incarnate in the latest conflict between Gaza and Israel:

Juan Cole, “Top Ten Myths about the Israeli Attack on Gaza”

Colin Dayan, “How Not to Talk about Gaza”

Richard Falk, “The Latest Gaza Catastrophe: Will They Ever Learn?”

Adam Goldberg, “Gilad Sharon, Son of Former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Writes Op-Ed: ‘We Need to Flatten Entire Neighborhoods in Gaza’”

Glenn Greenwald, “Stop pretending the US is an uninvolved, helpless party in the Israeli assault on Gaza”

Mehdi Hasan, “Ten Things You Need to Know About Gaza”

Nir Hasson, “Israeli peace activist: Hamas leader Jabari killed amid talks on long-term truce”

Meir Javendanfar, “A Gaza Ground Invasion Will End Badly”

Daoud Kuttab, “Israel’s Failed Strategy”

John Mearsheimer, “A Pillar Built on Sand”

Elizabeth Murray, “Likening Palestinians to Blades of Grass”

Vijay Prashad, “The Agonies of Susan Rice: Gaza and the Negroponte Doctrine”

Adam Shatz, “Why Israel Didn’t Win”

Robert Wright, “When Will the Economic Blockade of Gaza End?”

Picture—Columns of smoke rise following an Israeli air strike in Gaza City, Nov. 14, 2012. Image by Adel Hana/AP Photo. Courtesy of Jadaliyya.

Addendum: I’ve also posted the latest draft of my compilation on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at The Faculty Lounge.

To Barbeque or Not to Barbeque: Eating Our (nonhuman) Animal Brothers & Sisters

I can’t join Al Brophy at The Faculty Lounge (where I’m guest-blogging this month) in his celebration of barbeque, an enthusiasm for which I suspect is shared by not a few Faculty Lounge readers, barbeque being but the culmination of a barbaric ritual that commences with the industrialized slaughter and sacrifice of nonhuman animals. There are sundry religious, ethical, ecological, health, and economic arguments against the eating of animals and thus for adopting vegetarianism or veganism as an alternative diet (I’ll leave it to Professors Michael Dorf, Sherry Colb, and Neil Buchanan to argue for the merits of veganism over vegetarianism). A sample of some of the arguments are found below:

• Adams, Carol J. The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory. New York: Continuum, 1990.
• Adams, Carol J. Living Among Meat Eaters: The Vegetarian’s Survival Handbook. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2001.
• DeGrazia, David. Taking Animals Seriously: Mental Life and Moral Status. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
• Fox, Michael Allen. Deep Vegetarianism. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1999.
• Linzey, Andrew. Why Animal Suffering Matters: Philosophy, Theology, and Practical Ethics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
• Midgley, Mary. Animals and Why They Matter. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1983.
• Regan, Tom. The Case for Animal Rights. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2nd ed., 2004.
• Salt, Henry S. Animals’ Rights Considered in Relation to Social Progress. London: Centaur Press, 1980 (first published in 1892).
• Schwartz, Richard H. Judaism and Vegetarianism. New York: Lantern Books, revised ed., 2001.
• Singer, Peter. Animal Liberation. New York: The New York Review of Books, 2nd ed., 1990.
• Sunstein, Cass R. and Martha C. Nussbaum, eds. Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.

For Buddhist perspectives, see Shabkar.org, “a non-sectarian website dedicated to vegetarianism as a way of life for Buddhists of all schools. The site takes its name from Shabkar Tsodruk Rangdrol (1781-1851), the great Tibetan yogi who espoused the ideals of vegetarianism.”

For a Christian perspective, see the works of Andrew Linzey (above), the Director of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics.

For an Islamic perspective, see Islamic Concern.com.

One of my favorite blogs devoted to ethical and legal topics concerning nonhuman animals is Animal Blawg, “a blog [that] focuses on animal law, ethics and policy. It provides a forum for community and collegiality as well as debate and the exchange of ideas. Founded by Pace Law School professors, David N. Cassuto, Luis E. Chiesa and law student, Suzanne McMillan, the blog is now maintained by David Cassuto. Contributors include academics, practitioners, and law students, as well as other interested members of the animal advocacy community.”

An early version (2008) of my bibliography for “animal ethics, rights, and law” is found here.

Finally, I just read a compelling review in the Atlantic of Timothy Pachirat’s Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight (Yale University Press, 2011), a sample from which follows:

“The comprehensiveness of his [i.e., Pachirat’s] experience makes Every Twelve Seconds especially valuable, considering the meat industry’s campaign to stamp out precisely this sort of research. Iowa and Utah have already passed laws making it a crime to gain employment at a slaughterhouse for the purpose of documenting abuses and code violations; similar ‘ag gag’ bills [link added] have been proposed in other states. It is easy to imagine the uproar that would ensue if the restaurant industry, which is a model of hygiene in comparison, were to demand comparable protection from whistle-blowers. When it comes to the meat supply, however, America appears none too troubled by the prospect of its blindfolding; the nation would rather take its chances with E. coli than risk channel-surfing into a slaughterhouse. Though ‘foodie’ writers occasionally show interest in the act of slaughter, they prefer to witness it outdoors, on some idyllic farm, the better to stylize it into a time-hallowed, mutually respectful communing of man and beast. Readers are left to infer that their local meat factory is merely maximizing the number of communings per minute; the media fuss over Temple Grandin, a purportedly cow-loving consultant to Big Beef, has an obvious role to play here. But all this wishful thinking fails at the slaughterhouse door. Barring recourse to the inducements the animals get, it would be hard to coax average Americans inside even for a minute. As George Bataille once wrote, in a remark that leads off Pachirat’s first chapter: ‘The slaughterhouse is cursed and quarantined like a boat carrying cholera.’ [….]

The most interesting aspect of Pachirat’s book is its discovery that our slaughterhouse workers are themselves deeply uneasy about the cruelty they are forced to inflict. This runs counter to the PR line according to which everything runs wonderfully humanely except when some psychopath slips into the system. Evidently there is no uncruel way to kill a large and terrified animal every 12 seconds, the pace now set by industry greed. Just moving the cattle along the chutes leaves employees feeling shaken and ashamed.

The cow struggles to right itself, but with the narrow passageway and downward slope slick with feces and vomit, it cannot get up … Fernando inserts the rings through the cow’s nostrils, clamps them shut, and attaches them to a yellow rope, which he jerks heavily … Finally, the men pull so hard that they rip the cow’s nostrils and the nose rings fly out, hitting Juan in the hand. ‘Fuck!’ he screams … With electric prods Gilberto and Fernando push the remaining cattle over the downed cow, and they stomp on its neck and underbelly trying to escape the electric shock. Leaning against the wall, I look at Richard, who says shakily, ‘Man, this isn’t right, running them other cattle over this cow like that. I’m not going to take part in this. I’m not going to stand and watch this.’

Small wonder that some estimates put American slaughterhouses’ annual employee turnover rate at more than 100 percent, or that a high degree of euphemism characterizes even their internal communication. Live cattle are referred to as ‘beef,’ the animals as having ‘come in to die,’ while the employee who must fire the bolt into each quaking cow’s skull is a ‘knocker.’

Pachirat writes about how even abusive workers shrink from doing the ‘knocking.’ When Pachirat says he wants to try, a colleague replies, ‘Nobody wants to do that. You’ll have bad dreams.’ A woman in quality control feels the same: ‘I already feel guilty enough as it is … Especially when I go out there and see their cute little faces.’ Pachirat samples the work anyway, much to another colleague’s dismay:

When I tell Tyler I shot three animals with the knocking gun the day before, he urges me to stop.

‘Man, that will mess you up. Knockers have to see a psychologist or a psychiatrist or whatever they’re called every three months.’

‘Really? Why?’

‘Because, man, that’s killing,’ he says; ‘that shit will fuck you up for real.’” [….]

Addendum (4 November): I’m curious what readers think of this proposal by Jeffrey Leslie and Cass Sunstein: “Animal Rights without Controversy.”

Strictly Speaking, It’s Not Blaming the Victims for Our Economic Malaise, But Rather the Blaming of Those Who Support Public Policies that Help the Poor & Unemployed!

I admit to wondering if some arguments warrant any attention whatsoever, and not only because they emanate from the lofty perches of economics professors at the University of Chicago: “Casey Mulligan…claims that the continued weakness of employment in the US is due to policies introduced in 2008 and 2009, which ‘greatly enhanced the help given to the poor and unemployed — from expansion of food-stamp eligibility to enlargement of food-stamp benefits to payment of unemployment bonuses — sharply eroding (and, in some cases, fully eliminating) the incentives for workers to seek and retain jobs, and for employers to create jobs or avoid layoffs.’” This is actually a variation on an old and tired argument which rests on eminently arguable assumptions and silly but stubbornly persistent beliefs about human nature and moral psychology in the context of alleged “economic efficiency” (I happen to believe these are historically associated with the Christian doctrine of ‘original sin’), well-illustrated by an infamous proposition from Charles Murray’s influential book, Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980 (1984): “People are not inherently hard working or moral. In the absence of countervailing influences, people will avoid work and be amoral”(146).* Please see John Quiggin’s post at Crooked Timber.

* For a characteristically lucid discussion, see Robert E. Goodin’s chapter on “Efficiency” in his Reasons for Welfare: The Political Theory of the Welfare State (1988): 229-256. See too the section by Goodin, “The Morality of Incentives and Deterrence,” in David Schmidtz and Robert E. Goodin, Social Welfare and Individual Responsibility: For and Against (1998): 172-189. As to the pernicious influence of at least one strain of Christian moral psychology—that is, one of Puritan provenance—see “The new medicine for poverty,” in R.H. Tawney’s classic but somewhat neglected study (at least alongside Weber's better known The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism) Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926): 253-273.