Juan Cole

New Bin Laden Letter? Muhammad al-Shafi`i reports in Asharq al-Awsat today that the newspaper has acquired a copy of a letter purported to be from Usama Bin Laden and signed by him via an Islamic institute in Pakistan. The letter is a call by Bin Laden for an end to factionalism among (hardline) Muslims, especially […]

French President Jacques Chirac issued a blunt and forceful warning today to the Bush administration that for it to launch a unilateral attack on Iraq without a second, explicit UN Security Council resolution would constitute a breach of international law. Too right! It is absolutely unacceptable that the Bush administration should act in such a […]

[published from Cole’s private email archives, 6/30/12] Sat Jan 18 02:34:32 2003 To: infoco@yahoogroups.com From: Juan Cole Subject: Chirac warns on Iraq French President Jacques Chirac issued a blunt and forceful warning today to the Bush administration that for it to launch a unilateral attack on Iraq without a second, explicit UN Security Council resolution […]

* President Bush yesterday came out against the University of Michigan’s admissions process, calling it a quota system because it takes race into account. What a crock. Obviously quotas are bad, but the U-M system doesn’t employ them, and Bush knows it. He has just concluded that playing the race card two years before the […]

From: H-LEVANT Editor Subject: Cole on Lewis, _What Went Wrong?_ To: H-LEVANT@H-NET.MSU.EDU Bernard Lewis. What Went Wrong: Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. 172 pp. Index to 180. Hard covers, $23. Reviewed by Juan R. I. Cole, Department of History, University of Michigan Bernard Lewis’s What Went Wrong? is […]

Egypt’s president Husni Mubarak yesterday conducted a summit with Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia in Riyad, in part over the looming Iraq war. Both expressed grave concerns about the current situation, and called on all sides to exercise restraint and to avoid resorting to a military solution to the crisis. They called on Iraq […]

[published from Cole’s private email archives, 6/30/12] From ???@??? Wed Jan 15 02:14:21 2003 X-Sender: jrcole@j.imap.itd.umich.edu X-Mailer: QUALCOMM Windows Eudora Version 4.3 To: XXXXX@yahoogroups.com In-Reply-To: From: Juan Cole Date: Wed, 15 Jan 2003 01:49:03 -0500 Subject: Re: Iraq I don’t think there is much doubt that the US will go to war against Iraq this […]

Thanks to [MM] and others for reactions to this posting on the UAE Islamic law conference and the issue of suicide bombings. War is a very messy thing, and attempts to think about it in terms of legalities have been dogged by inconsistencies and difficulties of implementation. Nevertheless, war crimes are recognized as a legal […]

Asharq al-Awsat reports today that a contentious debate broke out in the UAE at the 14th Annual conference of the International Congress for Islamic Law concerning the permissibility of suicide bombings. A scholar named Hasan Safar argued that while individual efforts against an enemy army are approved by medieval jurists, the Islamic legal tradition condemns […]