Stephen Frederic Dale

Religious Suicide in Islamic Asia

Most modern studies of terrorism have been synchronic or ahistorical, focusing on immediate problems and ignoring the more profound conflicts that give rise to terrorist attacks. This failure to take into account long-term conflicts that give rise to terrorist attacks is especially noticeable in the research on Middle Eastern terrorism, for most published studies ignore the shared historical experience of Muslims, especially their cultural memory of their centuries-long confrontation with the West. This article demonstrates that even the most intimidating form of modern terrorism, the suicidal attack, such as that which destroyed the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, has been used repeatedly over several centuries by Muslims in three Asian Muslim communities as a means of attacking militarily superior European and American colonial powers. A study of such incidents in Islamic Asia establishes a basis for understanding the attitudes of Middle Eastern Muslims, provides insights into the dynamics of terrorist attacks, and illustrates the necessity of political solutions to the problems of terrorism in both Asia and the Middle East.

Steppe Humanism: The Autobiographical Writings of Zahir al-Din Muhammad Babur, 1483–1530

In his essays on “Self-Expression” and “The Human Ideal” in the medieval Islamic world, the late Gustave E. von Grunebaum argued that both expressions and portrayals of individuality were a comparative rarity in the literature of pre-modern Islamic civilization. 1 Von Grunebaum concluded from reviewing both autobiographical and biographical works written by Muslims that the social customs, religious values, and literary conventions of premodern Islamic society combined to discourage evocations or depictions of idiosyncratic personalities in favor of representations of impersonal stereotypes.

Book Review: An Author's Response

In his generous review of my book, The Garden of the Eight Paradises . . . (Iranian Studies, volume 39, number 3, September 2006), Professor Robert McChesney raises some important issues—and omits others—which, I believe warrant further discussion. First of all, he asks why I should rely entirely on the text of Eiji Mano and do my own translations of Babur’s Turki autobiography when there are two good English translations (Beveridge and Wheeler Thackston) already available. My principal reasons for doing so are these: first, Eiji Mano’s Turki text is the definitive edition of Babur’s memoirs/autobiography. It is based on a collation of all the existing manuscripts, and the second volume, a comprehensive index of the vocabulary and phrases in the text, is the tool that made my biography and future analysis of Babur’s work, feasible. It does not add significant new “factual” material to the famous Hyderabad manuscript, but it is more reliable than any other text. Second, no one, I believe, would contemplate using translations, especially when, as in this case, the biography is so dependent on the autobiography. Let me give two examples to illustrate my point. When Babur discusses the maturation of one of his Mongol relatives, he uses the Turkic verb, olgaymak, but when he describes Husayn Bayqara’s maturity, he uses the Perso-Arabic phrase, nushu‘u nama‘. As I mentioned in the text, this is an important cultural distinction between Turco-Mongol steppe and Perso-Islamic urban culture. No one who relies on the translations could grasp this point. I could give dozens of similar examples to illustrate the importance of using the original Turki text to understand Babur’s attitudes and late Timurid culture. Then, to take a minor example, when Babur describes a monsoon storm in India, he uses a verb that means the clouds “boiled up,” a vivid image not found in either of the two English translations. Third, this leads me to mention that both English translations have their limitations—and this is not to imply that Beveridge’s work was not a remarkable achievement or that Wheeler Thackston, an experienced translator and superb Persian scholar, does not offer a more fluid English version than Beveridge’s. My own procedure was to translate Turki passages and then, when I was uncertain, to consult Arat’s “modern” Turkish translation of Babur’s Chaghatai Turkish. I fully expect my own translations to be critiqued, especially my translations of his Turki verse, but I would never have even contemplated writing a biography of Babur by relying on translations—whether English, Turkish or Russian. If I had done so, I would have expected scathing and dismissive criticism, and such criticism would have been justified. I did not discuss these questions in the book partly because I thought them unnecessary and partly because of my own distaste for scholarly books whose authors begin by criticizing their predecessors. This is also the explanation for why I did not discuss Wheeler Thackston’s derivation of the word “babur,” which Professor McChesney also mentions. I believe that I gave the most Iranian Studies, volume 40, number 1, February 2007