Juan Cole

* 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 […]

Palestinian Childrens’ Health Declines under Sharon According to Asharq al-Awsat, a just-released Palestinian study reports that 33% of Palestinian elementary school children in the Gaza Strip under Israeli occupation are suffering from anemia. This is a tripling of the rate from before the outbreak of the second Palestinian uprising two and a half years ago. […]

Did the Reagan Administration Give Saddam Smallpox Samples? I have a question for the biologically informed. We have all been scratching our heads for some time as to why exactly the hawks in the Bush administration have been so desperate to go to war with Iraq. Opinion polls show that a majority of the American […]

The Koran and Fighting Unbelievers Professor XXXXX wrote: “It is my turn to be astonished by Prof. Cole. The following link: http://www.geocities.com/pnoak/some.html includes 24 passages from the Koran enjoining believers to fight unbelievers. The one closest to the words I used is no. 21, although, to be completely accurate, it refers only to Jews and […]