This chapter describes the case of Tariq Ramadan, the Swiss-born academic and commentator on Islamic matters, who was refused a non-immigrant visa in 2005 to enter the USA in order to accept a professorship in peace studies. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) took up his case. Though it is probable that the real reason for his exclusion was opposition to Ramadan’s political opinions, the reason given was that between 1998 and July 2002 he had made donations totalling the equivalent of US$940 to a charity registered in Switzerland (the Association de Secours aux Palestiniens). In August 2003 this charity was designated by the USA as a terrorist fundraising entity, on account of its alleged links to Hamas-linked Palestinian charities (including zakat committees). Eventually, after two court hearings, the State Department decided in January 2010, in a document signed by Secretary Clinton, to lift the ban against Ramadan’s entering the USA. This Chapter recounts the progress of the case, and reproduces a letter sent by Benthall to Secretary Clinton in October 2009 in support of the ACLU’s representation of Ramadan.

This chapter introduces the concept of the absurd, which is frequently used in literature and is defined as something applied to the modern sense of human purposelessness in a universe with no meaning or value. It studies the connections the absurd has to nihilism, existentialism and ontology, and then takes a look at ‘negative theology’, which is relevant to practitioners of the absurd. From there, the discussion considers the problems related to the perception of inherent absurdity and the deconstruction of a philosophical system into nonsense, contradiction and absurdity. The chapter also considers the concept of the socio-linguistic absurd, as well as the nature of jokes and humour.

This chapter presents an annotated translation of The Life of Pope Gregory VII written by Paul of Bernried.

This chapter looks closely at the final and crucial stage of the decision-making for Britain’s withdrawal from the Persian Gulf. After the devaluation of the pound in November 1967, the Treasury under Roy Jenkins needed to introduce large-scale cuts in social expenditure. Withdrawal from the Gulf was chosen as one of the means to justify the Labour government’s reversal of social policies. And the outright opposition from the US and the Persian Gulf states was almost ignored. Although the decision was taken in the context of the British Empire’s long-term economic retrenchment and military retreat, the actual process through which the Labour government reached the final decision was significantly affected at the last minute by domestic negotiations.

This chapter argues that the rise of Continental European powers after 1870 transformed the ways in which military administrators imagined the functions of the British and Indian armies. The conscript armies of Russia, France and Germany became the main measures against which the composition and efficiency of British imperial forces were evaluated. The reactions of the British and Indian armies to the European threat created the preconditions for the rise of martial race ideology and discourse. As a result of the European (Russian) threat to India, military administrators increasingly viewed the British and Indian armies in tandem, as different but complementary forces who might very possibly be called upon, together, to fight against a European enemy in the foreseeable future. The response in both the Indian and British armies to European competition was shaped by the legacy of the Rebellion.

This documents in this section focus on the buildings and their decoration, and urban 'social services'. In the period 1280 to 1340 a number of descriptions of Italian cities, Milan, Florence, Pavia, Padua, Genoa, were written which describe those cities at the height of their medieval development, before the crises of the mid-late fourteenth century. All of the aspects of city life were closely supervised, guided and controlled by city governments. Cities gave attention to all physical aspects. Italian cities were also full of images. Images of saints, especially the Virgin Mary, were dotted around the city 'like fountains' on the gates, at street corners, on the facades of churches. In late-medieval Italy 'a revolution was taking place in the way in which education was organised: state intervention was increasingly extended into this area'. Whether provision was public or private, education in Italy produced the most literate and numerate society in Medieval Europe.

This chapter presents an annotated translation of anonymous The Life of Pope Leo IX, the most extensive of the eleventh-century biographies of Pope Leo IX (1048–54). Written in Lotharingia, perhaps in the abbey of St-Evre in the diocese of Toul, before 1061.

From the second half of the nineteenth century on public spaces were subject to intense assault. This legal battle led to interior publicity, that is to say, the conditions needed to characterize as contempt of public decency a sexual act that took place in a private space, invisible and inaccessible from the outside. Resistance that opposed the Court of Cassation to defend the last strongholds of private space was robust, but it finally relented. It was not until the Ponce Case that the Supreme Court finally abandoned the restrictive doctrine of indecent exposure. To transform a confined space into a public space by access, the court demanded the presence of an exhibitionist in front of two individuals, one of whom had not consented to witness the act. Interior publicity indirectly created new rules for sex, the effects of which are still detectable throughout the law.