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Burke in the 21st century: another Age of Revolution? Michael Ignatieff gives the first Trinity Long Room Hub Edmund Burke Lecture since 2019 October saw the return of the annual Edmund Burke Lecture for the first time in three years. Many of Trinity’s annual events and lectures went online during the pandemic and lockdown but the Edmund Burke Lecture demands to be given in the eponymous theatre, the largest in college, to an enormous audience. It’s the most prestigious humanities lecture in the Trinity calendar - all the speakers, since the launch of the series in 2014, have been leading public intellectuals: Baroness Onora O’Neill, Paul Muldoon, Margaret Macmillan, Robert Fisk, Roy Foster, Mary MacAleese and this year’s speaker, Michael Ignatieff, a historian who served as leader of the Liberal Party of Canada and Leader of the Official Opposition from 2008 to 2011. The lecture was established by the Fallon family in honour of Trinity graduate Padraic Fallon (1946- 2012) who pioneered a new type of financial journalism. The remit of the lecture is to keep Burke’s astonishing intellectual legacy alive by providing a forum for distinguished thinkers to engage with challenging contemporary issues, explicitly recalling Burke’s deep engagement with the issues of revolution and empire that dominated his day. Burke, whose statue flanks Front Arch, has the distinction, as a political thinker, of being claimed by all sides - conservatives and liberals, Republicans and Democrats - and not because he was ‘all things to all men’ but because of his exceptional independence of mind and clarity of thought. Everyone wants Burke on their side but he cannot be easily shoe-horned. In an interview with the Irish Times ahead of his lecture, this year’s speaker, Michael Ignatieff got across Burke’s subtlety: ‘He is the greatest 18th century thinker about the problem of political violence because he supports the Glorious Revolution of 1688 [in England] and he approves of the 1776 Revolution [in America] but he thinks of the French Revolution of 1789 and the revolt of the United Irishman in 1790s as an abomination. How do you explain that?’ The Edmund Burke Lecture is always compelling, often provocative. One recalls Roy Foster giving the 2018 lecture, comparing the 1916 revolutionaries to jihadists. For this year’s lecture, titled ‘Democracy and the Legacy of Revolutionary Violence’, Ignatieff tackled the question of how democracies with a revolutionary heritage manage their historical memory of foundational violence. Noting that ‘Revolutions have given us the democracies we cherish, but their birth was always bloody’, he observed that ‘Revolutions, then and now, may also be unavoidable, even necessary - a last resort when all else fails, especially when democratic leadership fails to respond to the challenges of change.’ Professor Eve Patton, Director of the Trinity Long Room Hub which manages the Edmund Burke Lecture, noted that ‘Michael Ignatieff’s chosen topic for the Burke Lecture was entirely apposite for an Ireland currently reflecting on the violent cradling of the modern Irish state a century ago, and pertinent to numerous crises across the contemporary world landscape.’ Ignatieff ended on a question, asking whether we are, once again, as Burke was in his lifetime, in an Age of Revolution?
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Demons and Prophets Zohar Hadromi Allouche, assistant professor in Trinity’s School of Religion, Theology and Peace Studies, looks at depictions of femininity, liminality, and evil in the Islamic tradition Is Satan the embodiment of evil and is Eve the wicked temptress who got humankind banished from Paradise? The Christian tradition says an unequivocal yes; the Islamic tradition says well, maybe, but… Where Christianity tends to employ decisive terms of good and evil, angels and demons, Islam allows for more liminal, complex and ambiguous interpretations. Satan, for instance, is perceived in Christianity as unequivocally evil, the ultimate enemy of God. The Qur’an, too, refers to Satan (Iblīs, al- Shayṭān) as a rebel against God, and enemy to humans, whom he lures away from the divine path. However, Islamic tradition, while depicting Satan as the enemy of God, also portrays him as acknowledging the authority of God. A saying that is ascribed to the Prophet Muhammad quotes Satan himself as vowing ‘by the power of God’ to lead humans astray. Satan holds religious knowledge, too, which could, under specific circumstances, benefit humans. Sometimes, Satan is depicted as a believer. According to the Qur’an, following the creation of Adam, God commanded the angels to bow before the new creature. All angels obeyed, but Iblīs. God, therefore, banished the proud, disobedient Iblīs, and turned him into Satan. Mystical Islam (Sufism) interprets Satan’s (Iblīs) disobedience as an expresion of ultimate monotheism. The command to prostrate before a creature (Adam), it indicates, contrasts the earlier divine command to only worship God. Through his disobedience Iblīs was at once a rebellious Satan and a faithful follower of God. The complex character of Satan and demons in the Islamic tradition is evident also through their identification with liminal times (dusk), spaces (the marketplace; the area between sunlight and shadow), and substances (abiding between the milk and the froth). Satan is also depicted as an ambivalent, hermaphrodite being, who impregnates himself in order to self-generates demons. Eve, too, is largely perceived in early Jewish and Christian sources as ultimately guilty of the transgression in Paradise, for which all other women must be punished. Her portrayal in Islam, however, is more complex. In the Qur’an, the Paradise transgression is narrated three times. In two of these Satan concurrently tempts Adam and his wife (who is unnamed, yet clearly identifiable with the biblical Eve) to eat the forbidden fruit. In a third narration Satan tempts Adam alone; later, Adam and his wife transgress together, and are expelled from the Garden. Later Islamic sources - such as commentaries to the Qur’an or compilations of sayings ascribed to Muhammad - often echo the more negative view of Eve, prevalent in Christian and Jewish sources. Alongside these, however, there are also positive references to Eve. For example, her feminine traits are presented as a blessing, and she is at times acknowledged as a prophet (seeing that God has spoken to her). Although this latter point has been rejected by most Islamic theologians, it is still evident to this day in online discussions. It has also found its way into Islamic art, for example a 17th century Ottoman painting, which depicts the expulsion from Paradise. We can see that both Eve and Adam have a halo – which in Islamic art characterises prophets. Notably, Adam is illustrated here as having a belly button, whereas Eve has none. This indicates the artist’s subversive suggestion that Eve, indeed, was mother of ALL beings - including Adam himself. Such composite perspectives as we find in medieval Islamic sources echo ancient near eastern, pre-Christian perceptions of demons. In the Ancient Near East demons were perceived as supernatural beings whose actions could be benevolent or malevolent. Angels, too, would have been capable of destructive actions, for example in the biblical stories of Sodom, or Balaam. Early Islamic sources depict angel Gabriel, who communicated the Qur’an to Muhammad, as so fierce that during their first encounter, Muhammad feared the angel would kill him. In later periods we find that these ambiguities were often overcome by more binary tendencies as we find in Christianity. A binary approach simplifies organising the human experience according to clearly-defined categories of good and bad, darkness and light, us and them. Many later sources re-tell the qur’anic Paradise story in a way that holds Eve ultimately
