Most of us have had the experience of commenting to our friends about a movie, "Well, it was pretty good, but it wasn't as good as the book." Or sometimes we read historical fiction or see a movie based on a historical event and come away disappointed that the work played fast and loose with the known historical facts. Such experiences give the knowledgable reader or movie-goer a feeling of helplessness ("Why can't they get it right for once!") and increases one's skepticism about the entire genre of historical fiction. How can we trust what we read or see in movies?
Enter Paul L. Maier, professor of Ancient History at Western Michigan University, author of several scholarly books related to the religio-political history of the ancient world, who has created a genre of fiction that he calls the "documented novel." A documented novel can be defined as a work of historical fiction which includes notes directing the reader to the primary source material which corroborates the validity of the character or plot development.
In three novels about Christian history, Maier has employed footnotes to document the validity of his plot developments in much the same way that historians document their sources to ensure academic honesty and facilitate further research. Maier states in the preface to The Flames of Rome, "I have not tampered with known facts in retelling [the story]--unlike almost all historical novelists--nor invented characters that could never match the kind who actually lived in this era. The factual undergirding is documented in the Notes, some of which unveil new historical data."
In his devotion to historical fact, Maier has adopted three rules. First, all characters in the book are actual persons whose names appear in the written records of the era. Second, unless by an unintended error on his own part, the actions of persons (characters) in the book accord with the historical record of those deeds. Third, where evidence is lacking in the historical record, Maier, like any historian, makes an informed decision (an educated guess, if you will), which can be inferred from the facts on record.
One good example would be the reconstruction of the trial of Paul of Tarsus in The Flames of Rome, to which Maier accords a five-paragraph explanation in his Notes, saying, "On the basis of all scraps of evidence in the prison epistles (the above passages in which Paul looks forward to a positive resolution of his case), the political situation in both Palestine and Rome, and the known court procedure in appeals to the emperor, I have endeavored to reconstruct the trial as set forth in the text." Readers can make their own determination, as they do with all historical writing, as to whether the reconstruction holds water.
Maier has written three novels in this genre: Pontius Pilate (1968), The Flames of Rome (1981), and the best-selling novel A Skeleton in God's Closet (1993).
His sources include primary materials such as the writings of Tacitus, Suetonius, Dio Cassius, Livy, Josephus, Juvenal, Lucan, Lucian, Marital, Pliny, Plutarch, Seneca, Strabo, and Christian ancients such as Clement of Rome, Luke, Paul, Peter, Tertullian, and others. This is an enormous aid to the reader who might not otherwise know where to begin to track down features of the story in the works of the ancients.
Maier's expose of the distortions in novelist Dan Brown's The DaVinci Code was included in the well-known DVD The DaVinci Delusion, hosted by D. James Kennedy, Ph.D. His comments in that debate boost his credentials as a historian who values the fiction writer's devotion to historical accuracy--and one who is able and willing to expose nonsense masquerading as historically supported fiction when necessary. Unlike the rest of us, as a historian who deals with this source material on a daily basis, Dr. Maier has the ability to flip pages in Dan Brown's face, so to speak, in order to nail down his defense of historical accuracy.
Dr. Maier's documented novels are also a remarkable assist to students who become confused by all the different voices in the marketplace. How can one know whom to trust? Oh, that all writers of historical fiction would so document their work! Dr. Maier, do you have students who are willing to carry on this tradition in the twenty-first century?
Showing posts with label primary sources. Show all posts
Showing posts with label primary sources. Show all posts
Sunday, February 22, 2009
Monday, October 13, 2008
Is There an Antidote to Advocacy Journalism?
With the presidential election campaign in full swing, I have realized that not only readers of history, but also readers of the news need to seek out primary sources to verify the truth of what a candidate says. In recent years, various news media outlets have tried to assist us in this research with what have been called “reality checks” on various statements of the candidates. I’ve always found these useful, but now comes news that often the “reality checks” themselves are skewed by political bias. In terms of time available for research, it is virtually impossible for people to track down the facts for every statement that is made in a political campaign, and I realize that under the spotlights and the pressure of presidential and vice-presidential debates, no candidate could be blamed for making a slip here or there. Such slips alone would not disqualify a person for public office, in the opinion of most reasonable voters. But when there is a pattern of deception (or ignorance) with the apparent collusion of the media on whom we rely to do some of the “leg-work” for us, I think we find ourselves in the same situation as dear old Dorothy when she said: “Toto, I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore.” John R. Lott, Jr., has written a piece on Fox.news documenting this problem, which can be found at http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,433314,00.html . It does a good job of showing us very real consequences of “advocacy journalism,” which has been the direction schools of journalism have been taking in American universities since the 1980s. I am hopeful that with a heightened awareness of this trend we can amend the advice of our teachers and parents not to believe everything we read in the newspapers to say: “Don’t believe everything you find in the papers or on TV or online.” Intellectual vigilance is the order of the day.
Tuesday, August 26, 2008
Augustine, Aquinas, and Abortion
The recent controversy stirred up by Nancy Pelosi’s remarks on Meet the Press (August 24) that St. Augustine of Hippo (b. 354) would have permitted abortion up to three months has highlighted once again the necessity for citizens of a republic to have a working knowledge of primary sources and where to find them.
Tracking down the comments of Augustine (late fourth and early fifth century) and of Aquinas (thirteenth century) on the Internet is not an easy task, but it is important to realize that both of them were actually summarizing Aristotle’s theory about “ensoulment,” that is, the point of time in which the body joins the soul, which they tied to the appearance of fetal genitalia, perhaps because the ancients regarded the fetus at this stage to have the appearance of a human being.
Determining the moment of ensoulment is not the same as determining when life itself begins, so bringing ensoulment into a debate about abortion in postmodern America seems really to introduce a red herring into the argument. Moreover, if Senator Pelosi desires to rest her case on the ensoulment issue (90 days after conception as the outermost point), that certainly does not explain her voting record, which shows that Pelosi has even supported partial-birth abortion at full term.
Of interest on the Internet is an article entitled “Aquinas on Human Ensoulment, Abortion and the Value of Life” by John Haldane and Patrick Lee, which can be found at www2.franciscan.edu/plee/aquinas_on_human_ensoulment.htm. This article is a refutation of the views expressed by Robert Pasnau in his book Aquinas and Human Nature. Haldane and Lee do a good job of supporting their claims with quotations from Aquinas and references to where they can be found in the Summa Theologiae.
Also of interest is Chapter 17 in a work of Augustine entitled Marriage and Concupiscence, Book I, entitled “What is Sinless in the Use of Matrimony? What is Attended With Venial Sin, and What with Mortal?” Here Augustine makes clear his abhorrence of abortion in the context of his remarks concerning abortion of children conceived inside of marriage. Notably, he uses the term “cruel lust” to sum up his opinion of the practice. This writing can be found online at www.newadvent.org/fathers/15071.htm .
Tracking down the comments of Augustine (late fourth and early fifth century) and of Aquinas (thirteenth century) on the Internet is not an easy task, but it is important to realize that both of them were actually summarizing Aristotle’s theory about “ensoulment,” that is, the point of time in which the body joins the soul, which they tied to the appearance of fetal genitalia, perhaps because the ancients regarded the fetus at this stage to have the appearance of a human being.
Determining the moment of ensoulment is not the same as determining when life itself begins, so bringing ensoulment into a debate about abortion in postmodern America seems really to introduce a red herring into the argument. Moreover, if Senator Pelosi desires to rest her case on the ensoulment issue (90 days after conception as the outermost point), that certainly does not explain her voting record, which shows that Pelosi has even supported partial-birth abortion at full term.
Of interest on the Internet is an article entitled “Aquinas on Human Ensoulment, Abortion and the Value of Life” by John Haldane and Patrick Lee, which can be found at www2.franciscan.edu/plee/aquinas_on_human_ensoulment.htm. This article is a refutation of the views expressed by Robert Pasnau in his book Aquinas and Human Nature. Haldane and Lee do a good job of supporting their claims with quotations from Aquinas and references to where they can be found in the Summa Theologiae.
Also of interest is Chapter 17 in a work of Augustine entitled Marriage and Concupiscence, Book I, entitled “What is Sinless in the Use of Matrimony? What is Attended With Venial Sin, and What with Mortal?” Here Augustine makes clear his abhorrence of abortion in the context of his remarks concerning abortion of children conceived inside of marriage. Notably, he uses the term “cruel lust” to sum up his opinion of the practice. This writing can be found online at www.newadvent.org/fathers/15071.htm .
Monday, August 11, 2008
Why Primary Sources?
One of the frustrations of the Culture War in which we have been engaged in the United States since the 1960s is that publishers of history textbooks have been aggressively re-writing the history of western civilization. Unfortunately, the re-writing of history has had no wholesome precedent. Adolf Hitler, for example, commanded the re-writing of German history to fit with his vision of the destiny of the race, or the volk, as he would have put it. “The history textbook, like everything else in Hitler’s Germany,” writes Gilmer W. Blackburn, “was designed to serve a political end. The selection and arrangement of materials constituted a primary means by which the Nazis inculcated the belief in their own pattern of history” (36). At the other end of the political spectrum, Mao Zedong, Communist dictator in the People’s Republic of China, initiated what he called the Thought Reform Movement in 1950, a movement which required all university educators (and eventually all teachers) to “arm [themselves] with the thought of Marxism-Leninism” and “throw away the vulgar perspectives of individualism and liberalism….” (qtd. in Fu, 276).
Similar efforts in our own time have resulted in an exodus of Christian families from government schools with the concomitant expansion of home schools and private schools. In particular, the rapidly spreading classical modality of education presents a sound response to the issue of propaganda as history: an emphasis on the use of primary sources of history which put students in direct contact with sources that have not been elided, bowdlerized, or totally suppressed.
For the purposes of clarification, a couple of definitions might be in order before going further. The term primary source refers to the actual historical document itself as opposed to a secondary source, which is a book or article about that source. For example, the Declaration of Independence is a primary document of American history. Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong by leftist author James W. Loewen is a secondary source which showcases the author’s personal spin on history. I must hasten to add that not every secondary source in libraries and classrooms across the country is problematic or propagandistic. Most of them are quite good, and it never hurts to take a look at what the “other side” is saying even if it contains a distortion. Nonetheless, primary sources offer great advantages to students and should not be overlooked. Other examples of primary sources would be speeches, letters, papal bulls, government records, autobiographies, eyewitness accounts of historical events, biographies written by an acquaintance of the biographee, and primary works of philosophy or theology which might normally be only excerpted in a high school text. Just a few years ago, it would have been a laborious effort to dig much of this material out in a public library, but with the availability of virtually all historic documents on the Internet nowadays, the sources are literally at one's fingertips.
Other than the obvious motive of resisting propaganda, what are the advantages of primary sources? First and foremost is that reading eyewitness accounts of history is actually pleasurable. I often explain this type of reading to my students as the closest thing they have to a time machine. Reading the actual words Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence, studying his preliminary drafts and revisions, and digging out comments Jefferson made in his personal correspondence—all these activities create for students the sense that they are sitting in Monticello sipping tea and having conversation with the great man himself.
Secondly, primary sources give students the tools they need to engage the culture regarding current hot-button issues in our country. One example in the post-9/11 world has been the handling of material related to the religion of Islam. In 2002, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a state-funded university, attempted to require all incoming freshmen to read a book entitled Approaching the Qur’án: The Early Revelation, a collection of excerpts from the Muslim holy book with commentary provided by the translator, Michael Sells. University Chancellor James Moeser defended the decision, saying, “This was a book chosen in the wake of Sept. 11. A fifth of the world’s population subscribes to the Islamic religion and yet it’s not a well-understood religion. This is a great opportunity to have a conversation on the teachings of one of the world’s great religions” (Park). Though the Chancellor’s motives may have been altruistic, critics were not sure why his goal of “having a conversation” did not include requiring incoming Muslim students to read the Bible. Moreover, the problem with this particular translation of the Koran was that it contained, just as the title states, only the “early revelations,” those parts of the Koran that were written, as David Biema noted in Time magazine, “before the Prophet's takeover of the Arabian Peninsula, and so omits lines arguably forged in combat, like 9:5, the Sword Verse: ‘Then, when the sacred months have passed, slay the idolaters wherever ye find them.’ From such verses emerged the Muslim concept of holy war.” In other words, instead of simply requiring the students to purchase a copy of the complete Koran, the university was promoting what many conceived as a bowdlerized version of Muhammad’s teachings which, in effect, censored the very verses that would have helped people understand the motivation and the mindset of the terrorists. In contrast, students who make themselves aware of the complete primary version of a controversial work are in a far better position to engage in debate with those who have a hidden agenda or simply a lack of knowledge about the issue.
Thirdly, working with primary sources helps a student understand the complicated decisions involved in the writing of history, including the challenges that all historians face when deciding which of several accounts of a given historical event is the most reliable. A case in point involves the chronicles that recorded the events of the Wars of the Roses in England. This war, which extended from 1460 to 1485, was a dynastic struggle between two branches of the Plantagenet dynasty: the Lancastrians and the Yorkists. Chroniclers on both sides would write accounts of the various conflicts, manipulating the facts to put their own partisans in the best light possible. One example comes from the arrest and imprisonment of King Henry VI, a Lancastrian, by Edward IV, a Yorkist, an event which led eventually to Henry’s murder. The anonymous author of the Fleetwood manuscript, a Yorkist, clearly states that King Henry was handed over to Edward by the Archbishop of York (Chronicles 60) while John Warkworth, a Lancastrian, recorded that Edward seized and imprisoned both Henry and the Archbishop (Chronicles 123). The former account makes Edward’s action less extreme; the latter, more. Confronted with such divergent accounts, historians—and students reading the primary sources of the historians—must weigh the reliability of each account and look for additional material to corroborate one or the other, a valuable activity which heightens students’ awareness of how historians handle their sources. Such an awareness pays off not only in the study of history, but also in critical analysis of news articles, political debates, and legal arguments concerning the guilt or innocence of a crime suspect.
By reading contradictory accounts of events, students also come to realize the limits even of unbiased eyewitness accounts. In 1995, the University Press of Mississippi published a book entitled We Saw Lincoln Shot: One Hundred Eyewitness Accounts by Timothy S. Good. The accounts are arranged chronologically, beginning with those by persons who were present at Ford’s Theater on the evening of April 14, 1865, and witnessed the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. It concludes with accounts written down as late as 1954. Even among those earliest accounts the details diverge from each other. Most witnesses recalled that, after shooting Lincoln, John Wilkes Booth leaped onto the stage and yelled, “Sic semper tyrannis!” (“Thus always to tyrants!”), but they differed as to whether he yelled it before or after his leap from Lincoln’s box. Similarly, some said Booth limped off the stage, suggesting he broke his leg in his leap; others maintained he ran off the stage, leading to the conclusion that he must have broken his leg elsewhere after his escape. Though it may sound like an unimportant detail, it was nonetheless one that would have mattered very much to Dr. Samuel Mudd, the country doctor who treated Booth’s injury for which he was tried and found guilty of conspiring to assassinate the president. In a court of law today, attorneys for the prosecution and defense would, no doubt, consider the timeline of events key in convicting or acquitting Dr. Mudd. (By the way, he was eventually pardoned in 1869.) As in the case of deliberate distortions, these vague disagreements in the accounts of the assassination lead a student to understand why reputable historians employ tentative language, concluding that an event probably happened, seems likely to have happened, may well have happened, and so on. By becoming familiar with the disparity that can emerge from primary sources, young people are less likely to swallow an author’s interpretation hook, line, and sinker and to judge the acceptability of an account by seeing to what extent the information is presented in absolute or tentative language.
In short, then, much is to be gained from the reading of the primary sources of history. At one and the same time, they are capable of providing students with the facts and revealing the validity of the source—and ultimately the secondary accounts which depend on them. With primary sources, students become empowered to engage the culture, to expose editors who bowdlerize, and to challenge the smug. They also enhance the learning experience by allowing young people simply to enjoy a few hours in their own personal “time machine.” The primary source is a rich resource and worthy of being mined.
References
Blackburn, Gilmer W. Education in the Third Reich: Race and History in Nazi Textbooks. Albany: SUNY, 1985.
Chronicles of the White Rose of York. Reprint ed. Dursley, England: A. J. Sutton, 1974.
Fu, Zhengyuan. Autocratic Tradition and Chinese Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994. Available online at Google.com Books.www.books.google.com> Accessed 8 Aug. 2008.
Good, Timothy S., ed. We Saw Lincoln Shot: One Hundred Eyewitness Accounts. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1995.
Loewen, James W. Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong. New York: Touchstone, 1995.
Park, Michael Y. “University’s Quran Reading Stirs Controversy.” FoxNews.com. <http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,57205,00.html> 8 July 2002. Accessed 8 Aug. 2008.
Sells, Michael. Approaching the Qur’an: The Early Revelations. Ashland, Oregon: White Cloud, 1999.
Van Biema, David. “A Kinder, Gentler Koran.” Time. Online edition. <http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1003050-1,00.html > 19 Aug. 2002. Accessed 8 Aug. 2008.
Similar efforts in our own time have resulted in an exodus of Christian families from government schools with the concomitant expansion of home schools and private schools. In particular, the rapidly spreading classical modality of education presents a sound response to the issue of propaganda as history: an emphasis on the use of primary sources of history which put students in direct contact with sources that have not been elided, bowdlerized, or totally suppressed.
For the purposes of clarification, a couple of definitions might be in order before going further. The term primary source refers to the actual historical document itself as opposed to a secondary source, which is a book or article about that source. For example, the Declaration of Independence is a primary document of American history. Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong by leftist author James W. Loewen is a secondary source which showcases the author’s personal spin on history. I must hasten to add that not every secondary source in libraries and classrooms across the country is problematic or propagandistic. Most of them are quite good, and it never hurts to take a look at what the “other side” is saying even if it contains a distortion. Nonetheless, primary sources offer great advantages to students and should not be overlooked. Other examples of primary sources would be speeches, letters, papal bulls, government records, autobiographies, eyewitness accounts of historical events, biographies written by an acquaintance of the biographee, and primary works of philosophy or theology which might normally be only excerpted in a high school text. Just a few years ago, it would have been a laborious effort to dig much of this material out in a public library, but with the availability of virtually all historic documents on the Internet nowadays, the sources are literally at one's fingertips.
Other than the obvious motive of resisting propaganda, what are the advantages of primary sources? First and foremost is that reading eyewitness accounts of history is actually pleasurable. I often explain this type of reading to my students as the closest thing they have to a time machine. Reading the actual words Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence, studying his preliminary drafts and revisions, and digging out comments Jefferson made in his personal correspondence—all these activities create for students the sense that they are sitting in Monticello sipping tea and having conversation with the great man himself.
Secondly, primary sources give students the tools they need to engage the culture regarding current hot-button issues in our country. One example in the post-9/11 world has been the handling of material related to the religion of Islam. In 2002, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a state-funded university, attempted to require all incoming freshmen to read a book entitled Approaching the Qur’án: The Early Revelation, a collection of excerpts from the Muslim holy book with commentary provided by the translator, Michael Sells. University Chancellor James Moeser defended the decision, saying, “This was a book chosen in the wake of Sept. 11. A fifth of the world’s population subscribes to the Islamic religion and yet it’s not a well-understood religion. This is a great opportunity to have a conversation on the teachings of one of the world’s great religions” (Park). Though the Chancellor’s motives may have been altruistic, critics were not sure why his goal of “having a conversation” did not include requiring incoming Muslim students to read the Bible. Moreover, the problem with this particular translation of the Koran was that it contained, just as the title states, only the “early revelations,” those parts of the Koran that were written, as David Biema noted in Time magazine, “before the Prophet's takeover of the Arabian Peninsula, and so omits lines arguably forged in combat, like 9:5, the Sword Verse: ‘Then, when the sacred months have passed, slay the idolaters wherever ye find them.’ From such verses emerged the Muslim concept of holy war.” In other words, instead of simply requiring the students to purchase a copy of the complete Koran, the university was promoting what many conceived as a bowdlerized version of Muhammad’s teachings which, in effect, censored the very verses that would have helped people understand the motivation and the mindset of the terrorists. In contrast, students who make themselves aware of the complete primary version of a controversial work are in a far better position to engage in debate with those who have a hidden agenda or simply a lack of knowledge about the issue.
Thirdly, working with primary sources helps a student understand the complicated decisions involved in the writing of history, including the challenges that all historians face when deciding which of several accounts of a given historical event is the most reliable. A case in point involves the chronicles that recorded the events of the Wars of the Roses in England. This war, which extended from 1460 to 1485, was a dynastic struggle between two branches of the Plantagenet dynasty: the Lancastrians and the Yorkists. Chroniclers on both sides would write accounts of the various conflicts, manipulating the facts to put their own partisans in the best light possible. One example comes from the arrest and imprisonment of King Henry VI, a Lancastrian, by Edward IV, a Yorkist, an event which led eventually to Henry’s murder. The anonymous author of the Fleetwood manuscript, a Yorkist, clearly states that King Henry was handed over to Edward by the Archbishop of York (Chronicles 60) while John Warkworth, a Lancastrian, recorded that Edward seized and imprisoned both Henry and the Archbishop (Chronicles 123). The former account makes Edward’s action less extreme; the latter, more. Confronted with such divergent accounts, historians—and students reading the primary sources of the historians—must weigh the reliability of each account and look for additional material to corroborate one or the other, a valuable activity which heightens students’ awareness of how historians handle their sources. Such an awareness pays off not only in the study of history, but also in critical analysis of news articles, political debates, and legal arguments concerning the guilt or innocence of a crime suspect.
By reading contradictory accounts of events, students also come to realize the limits even of unbiased eyewitness accounts. In 1995, the University Press of Mississippi published a book entitled We Saw Lincoln Shot: One Hundred Eyewitness Accounts by Timothy S. Good. The accounts are arranged chronologically, beginning with those by persons who were present at Ford’s Theater on the evening of April 14, 1865, and witnessed the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. It concludes with accounts written down as late as 1954. Even among those earliest accounts the details diverge from each other. Most witnesses recalled that, after shooting Lincoln, John Wilkes Booth leaped onto the stage and yelled, “Sic semper tyrannis!” (“Thus always to tyrants!”), but they differed as to whether he yelled it before or after his leap from Lincoln’s box. Similarly, some said Booth limped off the stage, suggesting he broke his leg in his leap; others maintained he ran off the stage, leading to the conclusion that he must have broken his leg elsewhere after his escape. Though it may sound like an unimportant detail, it was nonetheless one that would have mattered very much to Dr. Samuel Mudd, the country doctor who treated Booth’s injury for which he was tried and found guilty of conspiring to assassinate the president. In a court of law today, attorneys for the prosecution and defense would, no doubt, consider the timeline of events key in convicting or acquitting Dr. Mudd. (By the way, he was eventually pardoned in 1869.) As in the case of deliberate distortions, these vague disagreements in the accounts of the assassination lead a student to understand why reputable historians employ tentative language, concluding that an event probably happened, seems likely to have happened, may well have happened, and so on. By becoming familiar with the disparity that can emerge from primary sources, young people are less likely to swallow an author’s interpretation hook, line, and sinker and to judge the acceptability of an account by seeing to what extent the information is presented in absolute or tentative language.
In short, then, much is to be gained from the reading of the primary sources of history. At one and the same time, they are capable of providing students with the facts and revealing the validity of the source—and ultimately the secondary accounts which depend on them. With primary sources, students become empowered to engage the culture, to expose editors who bowdlerize, and to challenge the smug. They also enhance the learning experience by allowing young people simply to enjoy a few hours in their own personal “time machine.” The primary source is a rich resource and worthy of being mined.
References
Blackburn, Gilmer W. Education in the Third Reich: Race and History in Nazi Textbooks. Albany: SUNY, 1985.
Chronicles of the White Rose of York. Reprint ed. Dursley, England: A. J. Sutton, 1974.
Fu, Zhengyuan. Autocratic Tradition and Chinese Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994. Available online at Google.com Books.
Good, Timothy S., ed. We Saw Lincoln Shot: One Hundred Eyewitness Accounts. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1995.
Loewen, James W. Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong. New York: Touchstone, 1995.
Park, Michael Y. “University’s Quran Reading Stirs Controversy.” FoxNews.com. <http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,57205,00.html> 8 July 2002. Accessed 8 Aug. 2008.
Sells, Michael. Approaching the Qur’an: The Early Revelations. Ashland, Oregon: White Cloud, 1999.
Van Biema, David. “A Kinder, Gentler Koran.” Time. Online edition. <http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1003050-1,00.html > 19 Aug. 2002. Accessed 8 Aug. 2008.
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