Informed Comment Homepage

Thoughts on the Middle East, History and Religion

Header Right

Donate

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Google+
  • Email
  • RSS
  • Featured
  • US politics
  • Middle East
  • Environment
  • US Foreign Policy
  • Energy
  • Economy
  • Politics
  • About
  • Archives
  • Submissions

© 2023 Informed Comment

  • Skip to content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
Uncategorized

More On Hitchens And Cole Ive Now Seen

Juan Cole 09/18/2005

Tweet
Share
Reddit
Email
0 Shares

More on Hitchens and Cole

I’ve now seen a transcript showing that Christopher Hitchens in his debate with George Galloway said that I “claimed” to know “farsi” but had “never stepped foot in the region.” As I noted on Friday, these are bizarre things for him to say. To say that someone “claims” something, according to the Fowler usage manual, is to suggest that the assertion is open to question. And why is my knowledge of Persian (that is what it is called in English, Mr. Hitchens) an issue? I am seized with panic at the thought that Hitchens thinks they speak “farsi” in Iraq! Hitchens makes the remark with regard to Grand Ayatollah Sistani being the spiritual leader of the Iraqi Shiites. Aside from the scholarly writing of the late Linda Walbridge before the war, I happen to have been the first American observer to explain Sistani’s significance, at this weblog in April-July of 2003; go to the archives and do a keyword search. I was also one of the few American scholars publishing on the institution of the marja`-i taqlid or source for emulation among the Shiites, in the 1980s and 1990s. See my Sacred Space and Holy War. I guarantee you Hitchens did not know Sistani existed in February, 2003. As for Mr. Bremer, Hitchens’s hero, his response to Sistani’s fatwa was to ask, “can’t we get a fatwa from some other mulla?”

As’ad Abukhalil, a real Middle East expert, comments on Hitchens’s ridiculous comments about yours truly.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

About the Author

Juan Cole is the founder and chief editor of Informed Comment. He is Richard P. Mitchell Professor of History at the University of Michigan He is author of, among many other books, Muhammad: Prophet of Peace amid the Clash of Empires and The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Follow him on Twitter at @jricole or the Informed Comment Facebook Page

Primary Sidebar

STAY INFORMED

Join our newsletter and have sharp analysis delivered to your inbox every day.

Twitter

Follow Juan Cole @jricole or Informed Comment @infcomment on Twitter

Facebook



Sign up for our newsletter

Informed Comment © 2023 All Rights Reserved

Posting....