Author: Andrew Sullivan

Carl Pyrdum fisks Newt Gingrich. It's a tour de force from an actual student of history:

Notice how carefully he's phrased his claim to give the impression that during the medieval conquest of Spain the Muslims charged into Cordoba and declared it the capital of a new Muslim empire, and in order to add insult to injury seized control of a Christian church and built the biggest mosque they could, right there in front of the Christians they'd just conquered, a big Muslim middle finger in the heart of medieval Christendom.  Essentially, they've done it before, they'll do it again, right there at Ground Zero, if all good Christians don't band together to stop them.

The problem is, in order to give that impression of immediacy, Newt elides three-hundred years of Christian and Muslim history.  Three-hundred years. The Muslims conquered Cordoba in 712.  The Christian church that was later transformed into the Great Mosque of Cordoba apparently** continued hosting Christian worship for at least a generation after that.  Work on the Mosque didn't actually begin until seventy-odd years leader in 784, and the mosque only became "the world's third-largest" late in the tenth century, after a series of expansions by much later rulers, probably around 987 or so…

So what should modern Christians think when they hear a Muslim use the word "Cordoba"?  Well, I know that Newt hasn't been a Catholic for very long now, but maybe his priest ought to direct him to read a little thing called "The Catholic Encyclopedia".  Allow me to quote from the 1917 edition (which has the virtue of being in the public domain and easily searchable) and its entry on Cordoba:

In 786 the Arab caliph, Abd-er Rahman I, began the construction of the great mosque of Cordova, now the cathedral, and compelled many Christians to take part in the preparation of the site and foundations. Though they suffered many vexations, the Christians continued to enjoy freedom of worship, and this tolerant attitude of the ameers seduced not a few Christians from their original allegiance. Both Christians and Arabs co-operated at this time to make Cordova a flourishing city, the elegant refinement of which was unequalled in Europe…

It's easy to see why a group of Muslims creating a community center in the heart of a majority Christian country in a city known for its large Jewish population might name it "The Cordoba House". They're not, as Gingrich hopes we would believe, discreetly laughing at us because "Cordoba" is some double-secret Islamist code for "conquest"; rather, they're hoping to associate themselves with a particular time in medieval history when the largest library in Western Europe was to be found in Cordoba, a city in which scholars of all three major Abrahamic religions were free to study side-by-side.

Read the whole thing.

Nerds get their thug on.

Paul A. Cantor raves about a recent biography of Charles Dickens:

True to his basic purpose, his is one of the best studies I know of the life of a professional writer precisely in his capacity as a professional writer. The book offers a minutely detailed, step-by-step account of Dickens's whole literary career, from his early and spectacular popular success with Pickwick Papers, to his establishment as a respectable man of letters, to his unprecedented and unparalleled domination of the literary scene, throughout the English-speaking world, for the rest of his life. Slater gives sales figures for almost everything Dickens wrote, circulation numbers for the periodicals he edited, the juicy financial details of the many contracts he made—and broke—with publishers on both sides of the Atlantic, and also attendance figures for the public readings Dickens started giving in the late 1850s. This book would be invaluable if it did nothing more than assemble all this vital data conveniently in one volume. What I would give to have comparable facts and figures for Shakespeare's literary career!

Slater provides an intimate portrait of a writer who flourished in the rough-and-tumble, topsy-turvy world of the Victorian publishing business. As such, his biography can help dispel a number of Romantic myths that have grown up about the nature of literature and art in general, myths that have distorted our understanding of creativity. Dickens is one of the supreme masters of the novel in the English—or any other—language. And yet he emerged right in the middle of the world of commercial publishing, and never left it for a moment throughout his literary career. As Slater documents, from the beginning to the end, Dickens wrote for a largely middle-class audience, and, far from denigrating the bourgeoisie in Romantic fashion, he embraced it and welcomed his role as its spokesman and champion.

(Painting: Dickens' Dream, by R W Buss.)

Jonah Lehrer explains how we rationalize:

Human reason has nothing to do with finding the truth, or locating the best alternative. Instead, it’s all about argumentation…So here’s my new metaphor for human reason: our rationality isn’t a scientist – it’s a talk radio host. That voice in your head spewing out eloquent reasons to do this or do that doesn’t actually know what’s going on, and it’s not particularly adept at getting you nearer to reality. Instead, it only cares about finding reasons that sound good, even if the reasons are actually irrelevant or false.

Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger points out the website’s essential flaw:

There’s a whole worldview that’s shared by many programmers – although not all of them, of course – and by many young intellectuals that I characterize as “epistemic egalitarianism.” They’re greatly offended by the idea that anyone might be regarded as more reliable on a given topic than everyone else. They feel that for everything to be as fair as possible and equal as possible, the only thing that ought to matter is the content [of a claim] itself, not its source.

This is a flaw? Give me epistemic egalitarianism over a propensity for authoritah.

(Hat tip: Leiter Reports)

In milkshake form. Mmmmm.

Yes, it's a movie.

Like Gingrich, Pawlenty has come out against the Islamic community center near ground zero. Writing at his new blog, Weigel sighs:

So he's in line with Sarah Palin, who wants "peace-seeking Muslims" to understand that the mosque is a "provocation." But Palin put it better, didn't she? The way she has it, there are good Muslims who should understand that mosques close to Ground Zero might offend people. The way Pawlenty has it, the very existence of a mosque would soil the "hallowed ground" of the Burlington Coat Factory-that's-near-Ground Zero. That's got to come as news to the families of Syed Fatha, Salman Hamdani, Sarah Khan, and the dozens of other Muslims who died on 9/11 totally unaware that they were ruining it for the rest of us.

I used to have hopes for Pawlenty. But he is becoming Romneyesque in his eagerness to please the most rancid parts of his base.