by JOELLE ROLLO-KOSTER

In medieval Europe, views of women could often be summed up in two words: sinner or saint.

As a historian of the Middle Ages, I teach a course entitled Between Eve and Mary: the two biblical figures who sum up this binary view of half of humanity. In the Bible’s telling, Eve got humans expelled from the Garden of Eden, unable to resist biting into the forbidden fruit. Mary, meanwhile, conceived the Son of God without human intercourse.

Either way, they’re daunting models – and either way, patriarchy considered women in need of protection and control. But how can we know what medieval women thought? Did they really accept this vision of themselves?

I do not believe that we can totally understand someone who lived and died hundreds of years ago. However, we can try to somewhat reconstruct their frame of mind with the resources we have available.

Analysis of the world, from experts

Few documents that survive from medieval Europe were written by women or even dictated by women. Those that do are often formulaic, full of legal and religious language. Yet the wills and censuses that survive, and which I study, open a window into their lives and minds, even if not produced by women’s hands. These documents suggest that medieval women had at least some form of empowerment to define their lives – and deaths.

A centuries-old census

In 1371, the city of Avignon, in present-day France, organized a census. The resulting document is ripe with the names of more than 3,820 heads of household. Of these, 563 were female – women who were in charge of their own household and did not shy away from declaring it publicly.

These were not women of high social status but individuals scarcely remembered by history, who left only traces in these administrative documents. One-fifth of them declared an occupation, including both single and married women: from unskilled laborer or handmaid to innkeeper, bookseller or stonecutter.

Nearly 50% of the women declared a place of origin. The majority came from around Avignon and other parts of southern France, but some 30% came from what is now northern France, southwest Germany and Italy.

The Conversation for more

by MUHAMMAD ALI EHSAN

Pakistan clearly needs to decide how it wants to manage its relationship with both the US and China

Having correct notions and making correct assumptions are the essential gifts of a truly great strategist. Without them strategising no more remains an art, in fact it becomes a burden that the ungifted leader must carry. Notion is considered as a particular belief or understanding about something that a leader must carry whereas assumption is something that a leader assumes to be the case even without any proof. ‘The US is weak’ and ‘Europe is divided and dependent on Russian energy’ were the notions that guided President Vladimir Putin to strategise his special military operations in Ukraine. On the other hand, ‘Putin wants to conquer the entire Ukraine’ and ‘later move into Europe’ have remained the Western assumptions that have guided them to militarily support Ukraine. Putin’s notions have stood the test of time whereas the Western assumptions are falling flat in the face of current circumstances and conditions in the war zone.

Western Poland was invaded by Hitler and Nazi German with a ground force of 1.5 million in World War II. The other half, Eastern Poland, was taken over by Stalin’s Soviet Union under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Considering that Poland is half the size of Ukraine and it took Hitler 1.5 million ground troops to conquer it, how on earth will Putin conquer the entire Ukraine with 200,000 ground troops and later move into Eastern Europe and overrun other eastern European countries too? Judging from the lesson of history, Russia would require a ground force structure of no less than 3 million to not only conquer Ukraine but also hold and retain it. In view of this, the entire set of Western assumptions is based on a wrong premise and is a Western propaganda that is leading its grand strategy astray in case of war in Ukraine.

Two ongoing and two potential conflicts dominate the global agenda: in eastern Europe, the war in Ukraine; in Middle East, Israel’s military campaign in Gaza; in Eastern Pacific, the China-Taiwan conflict and in Gulf, the most recent attempts being made to draw Iran into a wider Middle Eastern conflict. All these conflicts are creating turbulences in an international system that is already anarchic. With every passing day these actual and potential conflicts create panic and fear as the surrounding states and the world in general gets busy and absorbed in whataboutism if these conflicts escalate.

Currently China is the main rival of the US; and just as what it did to the Soviet Union in cold war, the US strategy is to strangle the economic growth of China and contain it. In Cold War, we had two orders: a Western order and a Soviet order. After the end of the Soviet order, the Western order survived and that is not acceptable to China and Russia. In fact, China is in the process of creating its own order and the unfolding of BRI and China’s actions in South China Sea and Western Pacific are indications of emergence of this Chinese order. Therefore, there is an intense economic and security competition between these great powers; and given Pakistan’s history of close economic and military collaboration with China, we stand in the middle of this security and economic competition. Under the current conflictual regional and global environment, Pakistan clearly needs to decide how it wants to manage its relationship with both the US and China. Without deeply committing ourselves to take any side, we must carefully view our relationship with both the great powers, utilising the correct notions to button up, thread and zip our relationship under assumptions based on correct premises. We must weigh our relationship with these great powers after viewing it from all three dimensions: security (military), economic and ideological.

From the military or security point of view, the US is a distant power but it has a deep stated interest in not allowing Pakistan to harbour and develop common strategic interests with China. From the US perspective the attack on the Chinese engineers and the consequent Chinese rollback of its dam construction activities in Pakistan serve the larger US agenda of forcing Chinese to roll back their strategic interests in our country. Despite the US promises of economic and military aid and continuity of the IMF programme which Pakistan so desperately seeks, our military and economic intercourse with China is deeply embedded in our long historic friendly relations which are time tested and which can easily be termed as Pakistan’s lifeline given the threats we face on both our eastern and western frontiers.

Economically our biggest problem is the shortage of energy and it is up to our leadership to urgently decide from where to seek the solution to this problem. Both China and Russia have developed deep strategic engagements with Iran. Today the Iranian drones and other military equipment help Russia fight in Ukraine and China is pushing to develop deep security and economic relations with Iran with a promised investment of over $400 billion in the next 25 years. Can we afford to antagonise the US and can our foreign policy Iranianise?

Considering our geopolitical threats, ideologically we need to decide which side is good to develop relations with for the next 25 to 30 years. We must consider the degree of anti-Americanism versus the degree of anti-Chinianism in our country and allow our people and our parliament to decide which side that may be. Not necessarily take an absolute side but if we finally make our foreign policy basing on the true wishes of the people we may as a byproduct get rid of some of the other ambiguities that dominate our politics — ambiguities like how we view liberty and how much we want to liberalise and in which timeframe; how we want to proceed with our relationship with the third great power in the world i.e. Russia; and what should be our standing on our relationship with the state of Israel — especially after what it has done in Gaza.

The Express Tribune for more

by B. R. GOWANI

When to mourn & when to celebrate

Muslims (and non-Muslim victims) should follow some strict rules — always applicable when the US or Israel is teaching you a lesson by bombing the hell out of you: when to mourn and when to celebrate (or when not to mourn and not to celebrate).

• When the US (or Israel) kill Muslims, they are not to be mourned; they were “terrorists.” If you mourn, then you are one of them — a “terrorist.” (For non-Muslim victims, the labels vary: “communists” or “commies,” “Nazis,” “Hitler,” and so on.)
• When the US or Israel is celebrating the elimination of “terrorists” then you should join them because that’s the only time you are allowed to celebrate.
• When some underdog Muslims retaliate, sometimes in an equally gruesome manner, join the US or Israel in their mourning rituals and in condemning them.

The 1991 US war against Iraq resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths and destruction of Iraq’s infrastructure. It was followed by US sanctions which led to more deaths, including a half million children. US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was asked by CBS’s Lesley Stahl whether the “price was worth it?” Albright nonchalantly replied:

“I think this is a very hard choice, but the price – we think the price is worth it.”

Not to forget Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, one of the central characters in Obama administration who joined Britain and France in overthrowing Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi and pushing Libya into chaos. Hillary felt exhilarated at Gaddafi’s death and rephrased Roman Emperor Julius Caesar.

“We came, we saw, he died.”

When Secretary Albright says killing of 500,000 children through sanctions is worth it, you nod your head in agreement. When Secretary Clinton gleefully announces Gaddafi’s death, you too put a smiling face.

If you don’t, then you know what you’ll be called. The US, Israel, and India’s Hindu communalist government of Narendra Modi hold joint copyrights to the word “terrorist(s)”.

What to forget and what to remember

The mourning and celebration rules also apply to what to forget and what not to.

• When the US and Israel bomb and kill your people and destroy your infrastructure, you are supposed to forget — and most probably, they’ll help you in dis-remembering by bombing you again on some or other pretext. Forget 9/11, i.e., September 11, 1973, when the US supported Chile’s military headed by Augusto Pinochet overthrew the democratically elected government of Dr. Salvadore Allende. Pinochet’s horrific rule lasted till 1990.
• But you are obliged to remember 9/11, i.e., September 11, 2001, when the hijackers crashed two airplanes into Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York killing about 3,000 people, third plane hit the US Defense Department building, the Pentagon, and the fourth one crashed without hitting its target.

The United States only remembers the 9/11 attacks but has dementia when it comes to dozens of its own criminal and violent overt and covert wars with casualties numbering in millions. (See William Blum’s website.) Just the US “war on terror” killed about 1 million people with a cost of $8 trillion.

Nor could you remind Israel and her supporters that Israel is built on stolen Palestinian land. Israel’s first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion accepted the fact when he told Nahum Goldmann

“If I were an Arab leader, I would never sign an agreement with Israel. It is normal; we have taken their [Palestinians’] country. It is true God promised it to us, but how could that interest them? Our God [Yahweh] is not theirs [Allah]. There has been Anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They see but one thing: we have come and stolen their country [Palestine]. Why would they accept that?”

Goldmann, a leading Zionist and the founder of World Jewish Congress, lamented the Israeli intransigence when he wrote:

“In 30 years, Israel has never presented the Arabs with a single peace plan. She has rejected every settlement plan devised by her friends and by her enemies. She has seemingly no other object than to preserve the status quo while adding territory piece by piece.”

Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, has brought out hatred Jews and their supporters have for the Palestinians and it also displays their willful negation of historical events such as establishing Israel on Palestinian land, Nakba or catastrophe which resulted in forceful eviction and deportation of 700,000 Palestinians, not letting Palestinians to live in peace on the remaining 22% land but either creating settlements on West Bank or turning Gaza into an open air prison, and so on.

Gal Gadot, an Israeli actress, and US-Israeli filmmaker Guy Nattiv arranged a showing of a video (a compilation of raw footage by Israeli Defense Force of Hamas attacks) in Los Angeles and New York on November 8, a month and a day after the Hamas attack. By that time Israel had killed over 10,000 Palestinians, including more than 4,000 children. People like Gadot only remember 1,139 Israeli deaths but not Israel’s genocidal spree which had resulted in over eight fold Palestinian deaths, in one month! (The figure reached 33,301 on April 1, 2024, i.e., 30 times. On April 1, Israel killed 7 charity workers of the World Central Kitchen of Jose Andres who were delivering food supplies to Palestinians in Gaza. Andres has suspended the program.)

Bill Maher, an anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian, criticized Obama for “moral equivalency,” that is, Obama not only condemned Hamas but also blamed Israel (here, here, and here 19:42-25:47). In the US, most people are scared of the Israel Lobby and so reminding people of Israel’s crimes is a big no-no. Maher is one of those characters who willingly accepts ignorance because they can’t face reality of constant Israeli bombardment for weeks.

FOX (Farts of Xenophobes) TV had a hypocrite “plagiarist” (see Alexander Cockburn’s scathing letter) Alan Dershowitz on its show where the latter, out of contempt, accused Obama of hating Israel and inciting antisemitism. (Antisemitism has become a handy tool for people like Dershowitz to cover up all of Israel’s heinous crimes.)

Dershowitz assumes too much and blames Obama. He should instead be grateful to Obama, for at least two things, raising free US taxpayers money for Israel from $3.5 billion to $3.8 billion every year for 10 years before leaving office and Obama government’s stoppage of an annual military aid portion of $1.3 billion when Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood, was elected (30 June 2012 – 3 July 2013) as Egypt’s president. A year later, Egyptian military assisted protests removed him from power. Morsi died during a trial in 2019. By the way, the US government is supportive of the Egyptian military.

Imagine if Morsi was alive and in power today, there are chances he would have come to Gaza’s rescue — either through pressuring Israel for a ceasefire or opening another front and thus forcing Israel to halt the genocidal war.

Chris Cuomo and some of his team members felt December 14, was a “heavy day” because on that day they watched, in an Israeli consulate, a video of Hamas attack which took him “immediately and deeply into a past trauma” similar to the one he had when he “learned why 9/11 happened.” Cuomo felt more than 22 year old trauma but didn’t feel anything for the ongoing genocide of Palestinians. The day Cuomo relived the decades old trauma, 19,000 Palestinian lives lost had been lost on the 69th day of Israel’s atrocious war.

Shai Davidai, assistant professor at Columbia University, wrote about 1,300 words article on CNN site on November 3, 2023, about how he feels insecure for himself and his family due to protests in favor of the Palestinian people. The only mention in his article about Palestinians is the following:

“I feared not only for the future of innocent Israeli and Palestinian children, but for the future of my family here, in New York City.”

The day, the above article of Davidai was published, 9,000 Palestinians had been murdered, 41% or 3,700 of them were children.

In his article, he writes about the beheading of 40 Israeli babies, without any corroboration. It was not true. Israel and its friends doesn’t miss a chance to falsely malign Hamas or Palestinians.*

Atrocities by US and Israel are regularly given a false facade in the media yet the brutal reality continues to exist that sees the massacre of millions across the globe.

*(Dr. Cochav Elkayam-Levy, a lawyer and political science lecturer at the Hebrew University, the woman behind the false charges of rape against Hamas fighters has been exposed as a liar. In the US, some Republican politicians are being trained to portray Hamas as a “brutal and savage…organization of hate” which has “raped women,” while claiming Israel is fighting “a war for humanity.” Israel is also employing music to show Palestinians as less than human.)

B. R. Gowani can be reached at brgowani@hotmail.com

A powerful Western narrative holds the Shoah to be the incomparable crime of the modern era. But we find our moral and political consciousness profoundly altered when Israel, a country founded as a haven for the victims of genocidal racism, is itself charged with genocide. What is the fate of universal values after Israel’s collapse into violent nationalism?

Pankaj Mishra delivered his lecture as part of the LRB’s Winter Lecture series at St James’s Church, Clerkenwell, London on 28 February 2024.

Youtube for more

by HEIDI LEDFORD

Clues to a modern mystery could be lurking in information collected generations ago.

Of the many young people whom Cathy Eng has treated for cancer, the person who stood out the most was a young woman with a 65-year-old’s disease. The 16-year-old had flown from China to Texas to receive treatment for a gastrointestinal cancer that typically occurs in older adults. Her parents had sold their house to fund her care, but it was already too late. “She had such advanced disease, there was not much that I could do,” says Eng, now an oncologist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee.

Eng specializes in adult cancers. And although the teenager, who she saw about a decade ago, was Eng’s youngest patient, she was hardly the only one to seem too young and healthy for the kind of cancer that she had.

Thousands of miles away, in Mumbai, India, surgeon George Barreto had been noticing the same thing. The observations quickly became personal, he says. Friends and family members were also developing improbable forms of cancer. “And then I made a mistake people should never do,” says Barreto, now at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia. “I promised them I would get to the bottom of this.”

It took years to make headway on that promise, as oncologists such as Barreto and Eng gathered hard data. Statistics from around the world are now clear: the rates of more than a dozen cancers are increasing among adults under the age of 50. This rise varies from country to country and cancer to cancer, but models based on global data predict that the number of early-onset cancer cases will increase by around 30% between 2019 and 2030¹. In the United States, colorectal cancer — which typically strikes men in their mid-60s or older — has become the leading cause of cancer death among men under 50². In young women, it has become the second leading cause of cancer death.

As calls mount for better screening, awareness and treatments, investigators are scrambling to explain why rates are increasing. The most likely contributors — such as rising rates of obesity and early-cancer screening — do not fully account for the increase. Some are searching for answers in the gut microbiome or in the genomes of tumours themselves. But many think that the answers are still buried in studies that have tracked the lives and health of children born half a century ago. “If it had been a single smoking gun, our studies would have at least pointed to one factor,” says Sonia Kupfer, a gastroenterologist at the University of Chicago in Illinois. “But it doesn’t seem to be that — it seems to be a combination of many different factors.”

On the increase

In some countries, including the United States, deaths owing to cancer are declining thanks to increased screening, decreasing rates of smoking and new treatment options. Globally, however, cancer is on the rise (see ‘Rising rates’). Early-onset cancers — often defined as those that occur in adults under the age of 50 — still account for only a fraction of the total cases, but the incidence rate has been growing. This rise, coupled with an increase in global population, means that the number of deaths from early-onset cancers has risen by nearly 28% between 1990 and 2019 worldwide. Models also suggest that mortality could climb¹.

Nature for more

by FIZZA QURESHI

From hiring an Urdu-speaking dialogue coach to portraying the struggles faced by Pakistani migrants, director Lau Kok Rui made sure his film is authentic in its portrayal.

When I first arrived in Hong Kong as an international student, I was pleasantly surprised by signs of home dotted across the city. There were Pakistani grocery stores in every other neighbourhood; echoes of Urdu, Punjabi and Sindhi in various public spaces, and restaurants specialising in different South Asian cuisines that didn’t let me miss Karachi’s food scene.

Currently, Hong Kong is home to a large South Asian community that has had ties to the city since pre-colonial times. This demographic is true for other East Asian cities as well. But, generally speaking, these communities remain outside mainstream imaginations of what the South Asian ‘diaspora’ looks like.

These imaginings are often informed by big American productions such as Ms Marvel and Never Have I Ever. As a result, we often encounter representations of South Asian diaspora based in the West, but we rarely see the lives and experiences of those settled across East Asia.

Despite the prolific success of East Asian entertainment industries, production houses are seldom interested in telling non-East Asian stories. This blind spot exists in Hong Kong’s entertainment industry as well, which for decades was the third largest motion picture industry in the world.

Dawn for more

by SHAUN NARINE

Many observers of American politics are understandably terrified at the prospect of Donald Trump being re-elected president of the United States in November.

The U.S. is already showing signs of a failed democracy. Its government and politics are often dysfunctional and plagued with corruption.

A Trump victory would raise fears of a new level of decline into fascist authoritarianism. However, a second Trump presidency would not necessarily implement a foreign policy any more destructive than what is normal for the U.S.

Violence part of U.S. foreign policy

Since the start of the 21st century, the U.S. has unleashed enormous violence and instability on the global stage. This is a feature of American foreign policy, regardless of who’s president.

In 2001, in response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the U.S. launched its “war on terror.” It invaded and occupied Afghanistan, then illegally invaded and occupied Iraq.

These actions caused the deaths of 4.6 million people over the next 20 years, destabilized the Middle East and caused massive refugee migrations.

In 2007-2008, the under-regulated U.S. economy caused a global financial crisis. The associated political and economic fallout continues to resonate.

In 2011, the U.S. and its NATO allies intervened in Libya, collapsing that state, destabilizing northern Africa and creating more refugees.

The U.S. tried to consolidate its dominance in Europe by expanding NATO, despite Russia warning against this for decades. This strategy played a role in the Russia-Ukraine war in 2014 and the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

President Joe Biden’s administration has been accused both of helping to provoke the war in the hopes of permanently weakening Russia and of resisting peace negotiations.

Today, Ukraine appears to stand on the verge of defeat and territorial division, and U.S. Congress seems set to abandon it.

The Conversation for more

by KELSEY BORRESEN

Here’s what this generation is saying behind closed doors, according to therapists.

Recent data suggests that Generation Z, folks born between the years 1997 and 2012, are less sexually active than older generations. Why? Potential reasons include increased smartphone and social media use, high levels of stress, mental health struggles and effects of the COVID lockdowns and legislative restrictions on abortion rights, just to name a few.

According to a 2021 Kinsey Institute and Lovehoney survey, one in four Gen Z adults in the U.S. say they’ve never had partnered sex. However, 31% of people who have not had sex with a partner say they’ve engaged in virtual sex or sexting.

“So when young adults say they aren’t having sex, this does not necessarily mean that they are sexually inexperienced; rather, many of them seem to be expressing their sexuality in a different way — and, increasingly, that’s through an internet connection,” sex researcher Justin Lehmiller wrote in a blog post about the survey.

Still, statistics don’t paint the full picture. Therapists who work with Gen Z clientele are privy to their innermost thoughts, struggles and fears around sex. We asked these mental health professionals to share some of the sex-related concerns they hear most frequently from folks in this cohort.

1. Trouble communicating boundaries and desires with their partners.

While young folks tend to embrace values like consent, bodily autonomy and pleasure, New York City therapist Keanu Jackson said he sees a number of Gen Z clients who continue to struggle expressing their boundaries and desires in their relationships.

“I actually encounter a bunch of folks who seek support in learning how to advocate for themselves and to speak truth into their sexual and relational needs,” Jackson, who’s part of The Expansive Group therapy practice, told HuffPost.Advertisement

“There is a wide misconception that if you wish to have a long-term healthy relationship, that you need to be ready to meet 100% of your partner’s needs 100% of the time. Not only is this a wildly dangerous and unrealistic expectation, but it also teaches folks that your personal boundaries aren’t as important. This is especially the case when there are clear power differentials present in the relationship and controlling behaviors.”

Huffpost for more

by JONATHAN GORNALL

• Ramadan television series sheds light on iconic culture made famous by video game Assassin’s Creed
• Modern Nizari Ismailis ‘hate’ the misrepresented reputation of their forebears, says Islamic scholar

The sweeping period drama “Al-Hashasheen” — or “The Assassins” — is certain to be one of the big hits of the Ramadan TV season.

For many younger viewers, the story of the martial order founded by an enigmatic religious leader in 11th-century Iran will be familiar only through the distorting lens of the smash-hit video game franchise “Assassin’s Creed” — now available for the first time in a virtual-reality version compatible with Meta’s Quest headsets.

“Al-Hashasheen,” starring Karim Abdel Aziz, Fathy Abdel Wahab and Nicolas Mouawad, brings a somewhat more realistic version of the story to a wider audience as families across the region gather for traditional post-iftar TV viewing.

But neither the TV series nor the long-running video game franchise do justice to the true story of the Nizari Ismaili sect, the original “assassins,” according to an Iranian-British Islamic scholar.

Many of the myths and legends surrounding the Nizaris “are rooted in the imaginative ignorance of the Crusaders and their Western chroniclers who came to the Holy Land and conquered Jerusalem in 1099,” Farhad Daftary, a governor and director emeritus of the London-based Institute of Ismaili Studies, told Arab News.

The very word “assassin,” coined first by the Crusaders who encountered the Nizaris in Syria, derives from an etymological misunderstanding.

“At the time, the Nizaris, who were Shiite, had enemies among Sunni Muslims, who referred to them as hashshashin, which, if you take its literal meaning, means somebody who uses opium,” said Daftary.

“But it was not in that sense that the term was applied to the Nizari Ismailis of Syria. It was a term of abuse, meaning a people of low morality, people with no social standing. The term was picked up by the Crusaders and interpreted literally.”

Arab News for more