Truth?

I've been thinking a lot lately about the question of historical truth - and not just because of Dick Cheney's astonishing performance the other night!

Tim Burke had a fascinating post up the other day about the firing of Larry Bowa as the manager of the Phillies: "This being Philly, of course there are some fans whining that Bowa’s not at fault, presumably because they think Bowa’s a genuine South Philly kind of guy and he couldn’t possibly be responsible for the players failing to play up to their abilities or the front office making the wrong trades or deals. Not me. I’ve been sure Bowa was the big problem pretty much from the moment that the Phillies hired him, and I would think that anybody who had followed his career as a manager would recognize that as well. Then I asked myself when he got fired, “Why am I so sure? What’s my opinion based on?” I’m not in that clubhouse. I’m not a baseball player or a baseball manager or an ESPN anchor. I just watch the game and read the box scores. I don’t even play rotisserie any more—I just couldn’t spare the time in April and May in an ordinary academic year to do the dealing and preparation required. So how do I know, or think I know? The same way most of us know what we know: a combination of information, theory and intuition. I’ve read a decent number of press reports and interviews about Bowa and the Phillies (and about Bowa’s work with previous teams).... That’s not enough to come to a conclusion, however. Because it’s one thing to feel some confidence that this is the way things were on the inside of Bowa’s tenure, despite the fact that I’m sure Bowa himself and some of his players don’t see it quite that way, and another thing to see this pattern as explanatory. That involves not just information, but a theory of human relationships and even a kind of intuitive emotional intelligence about them. You don’t just have to know that this is how Bowa acted, you have to assume that the way he acted is a primary cause of the team’s underperformance. (Which, by the way, involves another complicated assumption, that the Phillies did indeed underperform, that they plausibly could have been much better than they were.) Here you can’t point to anything concrete. There’s no information that will factually confirm this argument. You can only say, “This is how I think human beings in general work, and how a bunch of male athletes between 18 and 40 in particular work”, to argue that Bowa’s style was very much the wrong kind of leadership. That either resonates with you or it doesn’t, and there’s not that much I can do to convince you if it doesn’t. I’m going on at length about this because it seems to me this is how a lot of what we know comes into being. There is really very little we know from direct or eyewitness experience. Nor is it clear that being a direct participant yields information or knowledge that absolutely trumps all other kinds of knowledge. We know very well from recent research, for example, that witnesses to crimes frequently get some very basic details of their experience wrong. Eyewitnessing is important, and there are things you can’t know if you’re not directly there. We have to make a lot of judgments every day, some of them of critical importance, based on indirect, reported information and intuition."

Okay, that's Tim Burke - go read the whole thing, it's that good. Then, last night I was having dinner with an Israeli historian who told this incredible story about how some 5000 Yemeni Jewish immigrant babies in the early 1950s simply disappeared - their families were informed that they were dead, but no bodies or records were ever offered to prove it. A conspiracy theory grew up among the Mizrahi community, according to this historian, that these Yemeni babies in fact did not die, but were instead kidnapped and sent off for adoption by wealthy Ashkenazi Jews. This historian actually had an aunt who was among the disappeared, and he says that he did some investigative work on his own and was able to discover that this girl - two years old at the time of her disappearance - had been issued a state identity number, which is the only documentary evidence that she ever existed... and more than the Israeli state had ever acknowledged. His take on the disappeared babies is less baroque, but in some ways more grim: the kids were simply casualties of an overwhelmed, somewhat racist, and overly callous immigration bureaucracy, which couldn't spare the time, resources, or effort to offer individual burials or information to the families. So what's true? I don't know. Neither does he, really. But the tenuous nature of facts, the stories woven around them, the contradictory - and deeply inflammatory - interpretations... this is familiar to me.

To bring it all back home, as regular readers here know I was quite taken aback at how the claim that Yusuf al Qaradawi issued a fatwa authorizing the killing of American civilians in Iraq became "the truth." Initially reported in the Arabic press, the original story was repeated and embellished by people with a wide array of political and personal interests: radicals wanted it to be true because it legitimated their use of violence, anti-Islamists wanted it to be true because it would allow them to attack one of the leading figures of moderate Islamism. One of those anti-Islamist critics, Abd al Rahman al Rashed, then had his essay attacking Qaradawi translated by MEMRI and picked up by dozens of American newspapers - and embraced by Americans understandably hungry for evidence that the Muslim world was turning against violence. Within a few weeks, the "fact" that he had issued this fatwa had become the jumping off point for dozens of essays, speeches, on-line polls ("do you agree with Shaykh Qaradawi's fatwa...?), and arguments. At the time, I was perplexed, because this sounded out of character for Qaradawi, so I made inquries to find out what had really happened. Based on some press reports and some conversations with people in a position to know, along with Qaradawi's own heated denials, I concluded that Qaradawi probably had not issued such a fatwa. But how could I be sure? Fahmy Huwaydi's reporting sealed it for me, when he claimed to have obtained a tape recording of the event in question which proved that Qaradawi had said something quite different. But once again: while I consider Huwaydi to be credible, this is still only another mediated access point to what "really" happened, and Huwaydi - a long time political ally and friend of Qaradawi's - could be portrayed as having a dog in the fight. In an article for al Hayat the other day, the liberal former dean of the College of Sharia Abd al Hamid al Ansari wrote a thoughtful history of the Qaradawi fatwa affair which cited almost two dozen different Arabic press accounts and op-eds... but failed to mention Huwaydi's intervention, despite Huwaydi's prominence, most likely because acknowledging Huwaydi's reporting would have severely undermined the point Ansari wanted to make about Arab public discourse. In other words, it is too useful to too many people for Qaradawi to have issued such a fatwa for any counter-evidence to gain traction. So at the end of the day, none of the evidentiary doubts matter, because it has now become a matter of historical "truth" that Qaradawi said it. An AP story today about Qaradawi issuing a fatwa forbidding the killing of hostages begins with this: "An influential Sunni Muslim cleric who once condoned attacks on U.S. civilians in Iraq has issued a religious edict saying it is permissible under Islam to kidnap in wartime - but not to kill the hostages." Does it matter that the initial premise probably is not true, if everybody has agreed to believe that it is? And this happened less than two months ago... what does that say about our interpretations of historical events?

Martin Kramer, with whom I have all kinds of political and methodological differences (but always enjoy debating!), did something back in July which I really respected. In the midst of the controversy over Qaradawi's visit to London, he wrote this (sorry, his permalinks don't seem to work): "I abhor the views of Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi (see posts from last week), but I'm not happy with what the London Telegraph did to him this morning. It attributed to Qaradawi an accusatory view of rape victims: "To be absolved from guilt, the raped woman must have shown some sort of good conduct." These words actually belong to someone else, a consultant to the website Islamonline. Even if Qaradawi is ostensible head of the committee that oversees this website, a Muslim jurist can only be deemed responsible for his own fatwas. Does Qaradawi share this view of rape victims? Someone should pop that question to him while he's in London, or dig the answer out of his past fatwas. Today's Telegraph article establishes nothing." What I've been arguing about Qaradawi is essentially the same as Kramer a few months ago: by all means criticize Qaradawi for what he does or says, but it does matter whether he really did it or said it. At the end of this long, long reflection, I can't say that I've actually come to any conclusions. But I at least find it interesting!