Alhassanain(p) Network for Heritage and Islamic Thought

Collective Speech Acts

Anthonie Meijers[1]

Table of Contents

Introduction 3

A note on groups 4

Speech acts as communicative acts 5

Are collective speech acts reducible? 7

The analysis of collective speech acts continued 12

Consequences for Searle’s taxonomy of speech acts 15

The construction of social reality 21

Conclusion 22

REFERENCES 23

Endnotes 25

Introduction

From its early development in the 1960’s, speech act theory always had an individualistic orientation. It focused exclusively on speech acts performed by individual agents. Paradigmatic examples are ‘I promise that p’, ‘I order that p’, and ‘I declare that p’. There is a single speaker and a single hearer involved. In his bookSpeech Acts, for example, Searle’s analysis of promising starts from the following description: “Given that a speaker S utters a sentence T in the presence of a hearer H, then, in the literal utterance of T, S sincerely and non-defectively promises that p to H if and only if the following conditions 1-9 obtain [etc.]” (Searle 1969: 57).Though this focus may initially have been due to Searle’s methodological approach of starting his analysis of speech acts with clear-cut examples, it has led in the end to an unnecessary and undesirable bias in speech act theory.

In this paper I will extend the traditional analysis of speech acts by focusing on collective speech acts. These are acts performed by collective agents or addressed to collective agents. Our language is full of collective speech acts. Examples are: “we promise to be back in time”, “we believe that this is the wrong approach”, “the Security Council appeals to Israel and Hezbollah to stop fighting”, “I want the orchestra to start with the first part”, “we urge the government to reconsider its policies”, and so on. Surprisingly, these collective speech acts have escaped the attention of almost all philosophers of language thus far.[2]

Collective speech acts are not just interesting in themselves because they are omnipresent in everyday language. They are also crucial for understanding an issue that belongs to the very core of Searle’s philosophical project: the nature of social reality. InThe Construction of Social Reality Searle defends the view that language is constitutive of social institutions. Institutional facts require symbolic representations that are publicly understand­able. I will argue that this claim can be made more precise using the concept of a collective speech act.

A note on groups

Groups do not form a single category. As a matter of fact, there are many types of groups: the fans in a soccer stadium, the team playing, the members of the club, the visitors older than 21 years, the executive committee of the club, a family attending the match, etc. There is also not one way of classifying groups. This can be done in terms of the physical and / or the intentional relationships between the members of the group. A family is bound by biological kinship, fans by the physical boundaries of the stadium and by their desire that their team will win, a team by their common goal and the arrangements that have been made for the match (their strategy, division of labour), an executive committee by the institutional rules of the club, and so on.

Rom Harré (1997: 200) makes a useful distinction between three types of groups, which I will follow roughly here:

taxonomic groups or classes. An example is the visitors in the stadium older than 21. Members of the group only share a particular characteristic, but they do not have ‘internal’ relations. If one of them drops out, it will not affect the others.

crowds. For example, the crowd entering the stadium. Members share a common goal, but do not have beliefs about each other given that common goal, or rights and obligations.

structured groups. Members are either physically or intentionally related. An example of the former is a family, of the latter a team playing soccer. Team members share a common goal, they have beliefs about each other, and they have rights and obligations. The members of structured groups are internally related, i.e., the loss of one of the members will affect the others.

For the purpose of this paper I will restrict most of the analysis of collective speech acts to structured groups of the intentional type. The main reason is that speech acts, beingacts , are performed byagents and if the notion of a collective agent makes sense it will refer to members of a group that are intentionally related. They share intentions, goals, beliefs, or desires. On the other hand, it is hard to understand how groups of the other types (family, crowd, taxonomic) could be characterized as collective agents at all, since they need not share any intentional states. Speech acts may beaddressed to those crowds or taxonomic groups, an issue to which I will come back when I discuss the reducibility of collective speech acts.

Speech acts as communicative acts

There is a sense in whichall speech acts are collective acts, and it is important to clarify this sense before starting the analysis of collective speech acts. Searle’s speech act theory and most subsequent theories conceive of speech acts as communicative acts. They are the minimal units of communication (Searle 1969: 16). The model of communication on which Searle’s theory is based is Grice’s model. According to Grice (1957, 1989), for the speaker to mean something by uttering X is to intend that the utterance of X willproduce some effect (belief, desire) in the audienceby means of the recognition of the speaker’s intention. Unlike Grice, Searle defines this effect as the hearer’s understanding of the utterance of the speaker. In doing so, he makes room for the well-known distinction between the illocutionary effect and the perlocutionary effect of speech acts.

The resulting account of communication shares with many other accounts - such as the traditional sender-receiver model, the information processing models in cognitive science, or the radical translation / interpretation model - the idea of communication as aone-way transfer between speaker and hearer. The speaker produces some effect in the hearer by means of his intentions, or sends a message via a communication channel that needs to be decoded by the hearer, or utters a sentence that needs to be interpreted from the hearer’s third person point of view. A dia­logue or conversation, then, is accounted for by applying this one-way model reci­procal­ly. It is a sequence of one-way transfers, where speaker and hearer change roles.

I have criticized this model for not being able to capture what is in my view essential for communication: that it is a form ofcooperation (Meijers 1994, 2002). Communication is not a series of mono­logical speech acts, where speaker and hearer act independently of one another. There are forms of communication that are like that (for example, advertisements). But even in these cases, the utterances make use of conventional means in order to be under­stood, where these conventions originate in prior cooperation or coordination. Communi­cation in a full sense, as in dialogue, is different from monological utterances. A single speech act is embedded here in a larger conversational framework, where speaker and hearer cooperate in order to reach understanding with respect to the matter being communicated. This understanding cannot simply be analyzed as thehearer’s under­standing of the speaker’s utterance. ­Grice’s theory is in that sense only part of the story. The result of dialogue is more properly described asshared understanding. If communi­cation is successful, speaker and hearer share understanding with respect to the speaker’s speech act. As Charles Taylor said, “Communication doesn’t just transmit information (...). It brings about the acknowledgement that some matter isentre nous, is between us” (Taylor 1980: 295).

This is obviously a large issue that needs careful discussion (see again Meijers 1994, 2002). But we need not go into the details of the analysis here. What is important for the discussion of collective speech acts is that there is a sense in whichall speech acts are collective acts. As communicative acts they are performed together, and require collective intentionality. The intention to perform a promise, a request or an order, is embedded in the collective intention ‘we intend to communicate’. In addition, a successful speech act requires ‘uptake’ or successful communication and the result, shared understanding, introduces again a collective dimension in the analysis.

In the discussion below I will take this collective dimension of speech acts for granted. It applies toall speech acts performed in dialogue, not to a particular type of speech act. My focus in this paper will instead be on a particular type of speech act, namely those speech acts which involve collective agents, either as speakers or as hearers. This type is different from speech acts which involve only individual agents, and which have been the exclusive focus of speech act theory thus far. I will call the latterindividual speech acts, to distinguish them fromcollective speech acts which involve collective agents. There are three forms of collective speech acts:

those in which a collective speaker addresses an individual hearer (for example, ‘we expect you to be in time’);

those in which an individual speaker addresses a collective hearer (for example, when the coach says to the team ‘play your own game and not your opponent’s’);

those in which a collective speaker addresses a collective hearer (for example, when the prime minister says to the secretary general of the UN: ‘we accept resolution 1701 and will respect a ceasefire’).

Collective speakers are restricted to structured groups of the intentional type. They have to be intentional agents. Collective hearers, on the other hand, can be either crowds or structured groups of the physical or intentional type. We may ask a crowd to disperse, tell the passengers waiting at an airport that all flights have been cancelled, or order an army to withdraw.

Are collective speech acts reducible?

It is a well-known fact that in uttering a particular sentence, more than one speech act may be performed. The assertion “it will be a formal dinner”, for example, may also be the directive speech act “don’t forget to dress properly”. Searle’s analysis of indirect speech acts has generated a lot of interest in this phenomenon. The fact that we can perform more than one speech act in uttering a single sentence, has relevance for the analysis of collective speech acts. It is an interesting question whether upon closer analysis collective speech acts are nothing but a collection of individual speech acts. The idea is that instead of performingone speech act, a collective speaker makes several speech acts, where the number will depend on the number of individuals making up the collective. The ‘we’ is conceived as a set of ‘I’s. Similarly, a speech act addressed to a collective hearer, for example a crowd, may be a set of speech acts, where the set is defined by the individuals making up the crowd. The obvious advantage of such a reductive strategy is that we don’t have to introduce a new category of speech acts, since the existing types can do the job. This is an issue that every account of collective speech acts will have to address. Are collective speech acts reducible?

Let me start with an example. Imagine a case in which the management team of NASA makes the following speech acts at a press conference: “we believe that the shuttle is safe enough to launch”, “we intend to launch the shuttle later today”, and “we will do everything possible to make sure that the shuttle returns safely”. A reductive approach will have to rewrite these collective speech acts as a combination of individual speech acts, where the ‘we’ is replaced by ‘I’s. One way to do this is to rewrite the speech act

(a)  we believe that the shuttle is safe enough to launch

as a conjunction of the speech acts

(b)  I believe that the shuttle is safe enough to launch &

(c)  I believe that the shuttle is safe enough to launch &

       and so on, for all the members of the management team.

The question, then, is: Is this conjunction of individual speech acts equivalent to the original collective speech act?

To understand why they are not equivalent we have to analyze the conditions of success of speech acts. Searle distinguishes four types of conditions of success: the propositional content condition, the preparatory condition, the sincerity condition and the essential condition (1969: 57ff, 64ff). The propositional content condition specifies conditions on the type of content that can be part of a particular type of speech act. As we will see, there are propositional content conditions that are specific to collective speech acts. This is a strong indication that the equivalence relation between collective speech acts and a conjunction of individual speech acts does not hold.

Imagine that there are dissenting opinions in the management team of NASA with respect to the safety of the shuttle (which in fact happened in the past). If the management team want to launch it, they will have to make up their mind with respect to the aircraft’s safety. In such a situation it can very well be that the management team as a collective body takes the position that the shuttle is safe, while there are members who do not share this view. These members, then, are not willing to perform the individual speech act “I believe that the shuttle is safe”, while they are willing to perform the collective speech act “we believe that the shuttle is safe”. More generally, collective speech acts involve collective intentional states (beliefs, desires, intentions), whose content cannot be unconditionally attributed to the participants outside the context of their collective action. As independent individuals, they may believe, desire or intend differently.

A further indication that the equivalence relation does not hold is that in the example “we intend to launch the shuttle today”, the reduction of the collective speech act to a conjunction of individual speech acts of the type “I intend to launch the shuttle today” does not make sense. The launching of the shuttle is a collective act which cannot be carried out individually and thus cannot be the content of an individual intention (similarly, I cannot have the individual intention to perform Monteverdi’s Vespers of St. Mary, since it takes a choir and basso continuo to do that). Here the individualist may argue that there are ways of rewriting the collective speech act that do not violate the propositional content condition. For example, one might rephrase the speech acts as a conjunction of individual speech acts of the type “I intend that we launch the shuttle today”, or “I intend to do my part in launching the shuttle”. Though this seems to avoid the problem in a number of cases, we will see below that such a reformulation violates other conditions of success of speech acts.

Both examples show that the propositional content condition makes a reduction of collective speech acts difficult and possibly restricted to cases where the propositional content of collective speech acts can satisfy the propositional content condition of individual speech acts. The other conditions for the success­ful performance of speech acts point in the same direction. Preparatory conditions are conditions that need to be fulfilled in order for the speech act to be performed properly. They concern, among other things, the physical, mental and social status of the speaker and the hearer. Collective speech acts obviously require a collective agent to be in place. A conjunction of individual speech acts, on the other hand, requires a number of individual agents to be in place. These require­ments are the sameonly if a collective agent can be conceived of as a summation of individual agents. Or, put differently, only if a straightforward reduction of collective agency is possible. I will address this issue below.

Searle’s third condition, the sincerity condition, specifies the psychological state expressed by a speech act. An assertion counts as the expression of the belief that the propositional content is true, a promise counts as the expression of the intention to do what is promised. The collective promise “we will do everything possible to make sure that the shuttle returns safely”, thus counts as the expression of a collective intention to do everything possible to makes sure that the shuttle returns safely. More generally, collective speech acts express collective intentional states, whereas individual speech acts express individual intentional states. The reductionist strategy works, then,only if collective intentional states can be reduced to (combinations of) individual intentional states (whatever their content is). I will argue below that such a reduction is not possible.

Finally, the essential condition specifies the illocutionary point of a speech act, i.e. what the speaker wants to accomplish in performing the act. The point of an order is to get the hearer to do what is ordered, the point of a promise is to place the speaker under the commitment to do what is promised. A collective speech act is in that sense is different from a collection of individual speech acts. Take again the case of the collective promise “we will do everything possible to make sure that the shuttle returns safely”. Here the manage­ment of NASA places itself under the commitment to do what is promised. They do this as a collective agent, even as an institutional body, andnot as a collection of individual persons. The commitment to carry out the promised action thus remains in place even if individual members of the management are replaced by others (unless the promise is explicitly withdrawn).

The attempt to reduce a collective promise to a conjunction of individual promises can only succeed if a collective agent is nothing more than a summation of individual agents and if a collective intention can be reduced to a collection of individual intentions. This was also the outcome of the discussion of the preparatory condition and of the sincerity condition. It is time now to address this issue directly: (i) Are collective agents nothing more than collections of individual agents and (ii) are collective intentional states nothing more than collections of individual intentional states? A negative answer will refute the reductive strategy, and will have the consequence that collective speech acts will have to be regarded assui generis acts. These questions are obviously large questions which have been discussed extensively in the literature. I believe that the second question is the more fundamental one. Collective intentional states already have a ‘we’ as a subject, and the minimal form of a collective agent is two individuals sharing an intentio­nal state (a physical or biological relation is not enough for agency, though it may result in a structured group).

That collective intentionality is an irreducible, primitive phenomenon has been argued by many philosophers, including Margaret Gilbert, Raimo Tuomela, and John Searle. In Searle’s view, there is a “deep reason” why collective intentionality cannot be reduced to individual inten­tio­nality. “No set of ‘I-Consciousnesses’, even supplemented with [mutual] beliefs, adds up to a ‘We-Consciousness’. The crucial element in collective intentionality is a sense of doing (wanting, believing, etc.) somethingtogether [my italics], and the individual intentionality that each person has is derivedfrom the collective intentionality that they share” (Searle 1995: 25). Many species of animals, according to Searle, have this “biologically primitive” capacity for collective intentionality, i.e., the capacity for cooperation andsharing intentional states.

I believe that Searle is right. The awareness of doing something together cannot be ‘synthesized’ out of the awareness of individual agents doing something individu­ally. Additional arguments can support the non-reductionist position. I have argued for the irreducibility of collec­tive intentio­nality on the basis of an analysis of the commit­ments involved (Meijers 2003). Take the example of the launching of the shuttle. Suppose that members of the management team agree to do this. Since launching the shuttle is a complicated affair, they will intend to do thistogether . Such an intention brings about commitments among the agents who make up the collective agent. There will be a division of labour in which they are committed to do their part. Not only that, they are also entitled toclaim that others do their part as well. The collective intention thus creates inter-individual commit­ments and normative relationships among the members of the team. The crucial point for the present discussion is that no set of individual intentions can ever generateinter-individual commitments. An individual inten­tion may eventually generate a commitment to oneself to do what one intends to do (but such a commitment may be nothing more than the original intention), but it can never generate commit­ments to others that I do that, let alone a claim by others that I do that. Collective intentions, on the other hand, create such inter-individual commit­ments and claims. From the fact thatwe intend to do something together, we are both committed towards each other to do our part and I can claim that you do your part and you can claim that I do mine. Seen from this perspective, then, the irreducibility of collective intentionality stems from the impossibility to generate inter-individual commitments on the basis of individual intentionality.

There is an ontological side to this as well. Though I agree with Searle that collective intentionality is irreducible, I find his conception of collective intentionality problematic from an ontological point of view. Let me explain. Searle formulates two conditions of adequacy for an account of collective intentionality: (i) it must be consistent with the fact that society con­sists of nothing but individuals, and (ii) it must be consistent with the fact that all intentio­nality, whether individual or collective, could be had by a brain in a vat (Searle 1990: 407). These two conditions, which state the obvious for Searle since they are presented as “facts”, result in an individualistic conception of collective intentionality. We-intentions are the intentions ofindividual agents. These agents are capable of individualand of collective intentionality. Ultimately, it is therefore possible that asingle individual agent has a collective we-intention, for example the intention “we intend to launch the shuttle today”.

This is a very unfortunate consequence of Searle’s theory in my view. As we have seen, inter-individual commit­ments are part and parcel of collective intentionality. These commitments existbetween individuals. They cannot be accounted for in terms of the intentional states of asingle individual, because that would effectively amount to the reduction of relations to the intrinsic properties of one of the relata. I take it to be evident that this cannot be done. The question, then, is: Can Searle’s theory be repaired to avoid this unacceptable consequence? I believe it cannot, because the consequence is strongly related to Searle’s internalist conception of the mind. It would mean, among other things, giving up the second condition mentioned above. This condition, however, is not a peripheral item of the theory, but one of the key tenets of Searle’s philosophy. As such it is a condition forall accounts of intentionality, including collective intentionality.

An externalist conception of collective intentionality, in which genuine relationsbetween individuals play an important role, avoids these problems.[3]In this conception collective intentions need to have a foundationin re . There has to be another agent ‘out there’, so to speak, for collective intentionality to be possible. If no other agent is in fact ‘out there’, there is no collective intentionality. Of course, individual agents may have the false belief that their intentions are shared and they may actas if there is such collective intentionality. But the beliefs and the intentionality in question will then be just that: false beliefs andas-if intentionality.

Whatever the outcome of the debate on the ontology of collective intentio­nality is, the main result of our discussion for this paper is that collective intentionality cannot be reduced to individual intentionality and that consequentlycollective speech acts are acts suis generis . They form a separate class of speech acts, and cannot be reduced to combinations of individual speech acts.[4]

The analysis of collective speech acts continued

The previous sections indicated already a number of ways in which collective speech acts are different from individual speech acts. In this section I will explore more differences between individual and collective speech acts and in the next section I will discuss the consequences for Searle’s taxonomy of speech acts.

As we have seen already, speech acts are communicative acts and as such they have certain characteristics. They are performedin the act of speaking, they are addressed to a hearer and they require uptake or understanding by the hearer in order to be successful. There is an important asymmetry between individual and collective speech acts in that a collective speaker (say the management of NASA) cannot literally utter sentences. Only indivi­du­als can do that. Collective speech acts are therefore performed by individual speakers on behalf of the group. The analysis of the intentions involved in collective speech acts has to reflect that.

In his pioneering article “Group Speech Acts”, Justin Hughes (1984) analyzed the intentions involved in collective speech acts and the conditions that have to be fulfilled for these speech acts to be successful:

“The conditions, then, of a group speech act are as follows [for a group G, speaker S and utterance X]:

there exists a group (G), this group has an illocutionary intention, and X conveys that illocutionary intention.

S (believes that he/she) knows the illocutionary intention of G and that X conveys this illocutionary intention.

G does not object to S uttering X on its behalf and if G intends for any specific individual(s) to utter X, it intends for S to utter X. S (believes that he/she) knows this.

#2 and #3 are (the) reasons S utters X.”(Hughes 1984: 388)

These conditions are preparatory conditions for collective speech acts. They concern the individual speaker who will speak or write on behalf of the group.

The first condition is obvious and simply states that there has to be a group, that the group has to have an illocutionary intention, and that the utterance has to convey this intention. The second condition, however, introduces a new element in the analysis of speech acts. There is an interesting asymmetry between individuals and groups in an epistemic sense. Individuals usually don’t have to make an extra effort to know their illocutionary intentions when performing a speech act. They just know it. Groups, on the other hand, do not have the type of epistemic access that individuals have. In order to know what a group’s intention is, a conscious effort need to be made by the speaker who acts on behalf of the group. Usually (s)he needs to consult other members and there has to be some procedure to decide on the group’s intention. The condition states that the speaker knows or believes to know what the intention of the group is, and also that (s)he knows that the utterance of X conveys this illocutionary intention. The third condition is about the delegation of the speech act. Notice that the actual speaker need not be a member of the group for the collective speech act to be successful. Hughes makes a useful distinction here between the ‘intender’ of the speech act (the group) and the actual speaker. In a collective speech act they may be different, while they are always the same in individual speech acts. The condition allows for the explicit delegation of the speech act, as well as for situations in which there is no such explicit delegation (for example, when all members can speak on behalf of the group). The final condition states that the reasons for performing a collective speech act should be internally related to the group’s illocutionary intentions. If it is done for other reasons, for example self-interest of the speaker, the speech act does not count as acollective speech act.

Hughes’ conditions contribute to the analysis of the complex phenomenon of a collective speech act. Most of them just add to the list of prepara­tory conditions that Searle already distinguished. There is one point that deserves special attention. It concerns the way in which groups develop their collective aims, beliefs, desires or intentions. For Hughes, “the ideal group is characterized by active, open, and free exchange among all members of the group. In this interchange the utterances of individuals are directed to all other persons of the group”; at the heart of such a group there is a “consensus mechanism” (1984: 385 and 384). This mechanism takes care of the formation of the group’s illocutionary intentions, or, more generally, its collective intentional states. Deviant cases are cases where the consensus mechanism is marginalized, usually because of urgent situations: an SOS message on behalf of the group without prior deliberation, or an offer for a cease-fire made by a gang leader during a fight between groups, without holding a referendum first. But even in these cases there may be a rudimentary consensus mechanism at work, for example based on body language. But it appears, according to Hughes, “that [in these cases] we recognize group speech acts as such if we believe that there is some other basis by which the utterer ‘knows’ (is justified in believing he knows) the group’s intention” (1984: 384).

Hughes’ analysis suffers, in my view, from taking a particular type of group, an ideal demo­cratic group, as the general paradigm for groups (pars pro toto ), thereby taking a particular type of mechanism for the formation of collective intentional states, the consensus mechanism, as a general mechanism. As a matter of fact, the situation of a really free exchange of ideas that leads to a consensus in which power relations among the members of the group do not play any role, seems to me rather exceptional. It is even doubtful whether this can be used as a paradigm on which real group processes can be modelled. As we have seen in Section 1, there are several types of groups, and probably several types of developing collective views. A family will be different in this respect from a company.

Groups in which agents are not only allowed to speak on behalf of the group, but are also authorized to act on behalf of the group, are especially interesting from the point of view of speech act theory. Imagine a structured group of the intentional type, in which the leader of the group has been authorized to do whatever (s)he thinks is necessary in a specific situation, for example a negotiation. The leader will utter speech acts such as “we believe the proposal is unacceptable, or “we will withdraw from the negotiations if the political situation does not improve”. Or, to take another example, imagine that president George Bush utters the speech act “the US government believes that the axis of evil includes stem cell biologists”, without consulting his ministers. His utterance is never­theless a collective speech act made by the government of the US, because it is not an option for the members of his government qua members to deny that this speech act expresses a collective belief of the US Government to that effect. Why is this so?

Contrary to Hughes’ idea, that in these cases we recognize group speech acts as such if we believe that there is some basis by which the uttererknows the group’s intentional states about the subject, I believe that we encounter here a phenomenon that is similar to the one Searle (1989) described in his analysis of performatives. In a performative, for example “I hereby promise you to come tomorrow”, the speaker makes it the case that s/he is promising bydeclaring that s/she is promising. Similarly, an authorized speaker can make it the case that his utterance expresses a group belief bydeclaring that it expresses that belief. When George Bush says that the US govern­ment believes that the evil of axis includes stem cell biologists, this belief hasde facto become the collective belief of the US government. In that respect these collective speech acts are declarations, just as performatives are declarations. They are declarations in addition to being assertives, directives, commissives, or expressives.

Acknowledgments and Observations

The present book is the first English edition of an article which was published in an academic journal in 1994 under the name “El Islām Ši'ita: ¿ortodoxia o heterodoxia?” [Shī'ite Islām: Orthodoxy or Heterodoxy?]. The article was well-received in academic circles and was soon widely circulated on various Islāmic sites on the Internet thanks to a digital edition published by the Biblioteca Islámica Ahlul Bayt in Sevilla, Spain.

Thereafter, in the year 2000, the article was published in three parts in Az-Zaqalain, a Spanish language academic journal published in Qum, Iran. In response to the interest received by the article, Dr. John A. Morrow decided to translate it, edit it, and turn it into a book. As often occurs in such cases, the challenge of turning an article into a book relates to its amplification. Dr. Morrow resolved this problem by including an exhaustive amount of notes and bibliographical information from Arabic and Persian sources which, due to their quantity and quality, should be seen as a notable contribution to the original work of the author.

For all intents and purposes, this book constitutes a slightly modified version of that article originally published in Epimelia: Revista de Estudios Sobre La Tradición. The journal in question is the official academic organ of the Center for Research into the Philosophy and History of Religion (CIFHIRE) [Centro de Investigaciones en Filosofía e Historia de Las Religiones] at the Department of Philosophy of the School of Graduate Studies at John F. Kennedy Argentine University.

The book, in its present form, contains nothing new with the exception of the valuable critical and biographical notes, the translator's preface, and the detailed index, provided by Dr. Morrow. It also contains a prologue by the author and an appendix in which we further expound upon our criticism of Orientalism, from the point of view of the philosophy of the history of religion, to the broader field of social studies. Besides these addendums, we have not modified the original text in any substantial fashion for obvious reasons.

For starters, it would be impossible to alter the sentences without changing their original intent. Furthermore, any such changes might arouse suspicion, leading some readers to believe that they were done for Editorial reasons. And finally, one of the main reasons for not making any changes, save those slight details brought to our attention by those who reviewed the original Spanish version or its English translation, is that the work was written with great haste in the space of two months.

It was produced with the specific purpose of responding to endless allegations of Orientalists who, unsatisfied with characterizing Shī'ism as a fundamentalist form of Islām, stubbornly insisted on labeling it as a heterodox sect. By doing so, these scholars were merely echoing old Orientalist prejudices and supporting Muslim reformists. This reformist sector was quickly embraced by Western Orientalists as proponents of “moderate” Islām” while the traditional sector was labeled as representatives of “extremist Islām,” dangerous “fundamentalists” who make militant and violent interpretations of faith based on the Qur'ān.

The purpose of the original study, which has now been converted into a book, was to address this conceptual error which is incessantly repeated, ad nauseam, in academic circles and which passes from textbook to textbook. However, when the time came to review the book for publication, we felt much less optimistic with regards to our goal of conveying to Western readers that Shī'ite Islām is not an extreme, heterodox, fundamentalist or fanatical sect.

Evidently, we never pretended to provide a definitive “solution” to such a complex problem. Any such effort would require broader and more detailed studies. We acknowledge that many of the issues related to the topic remained outside the scope of our study. Although we are most conscious of the gaps in our study, we would never even dream of trying to fill them in the space of this exposition. Such exclusion is the understandable result of the need to assume a determined perspective, forcing us to be selective in our choice of the material covered.

In order to avoid confusing or misleading our readers, we must point out that we never proposed to write an introduction to Shī'ite Islām. This book does not study certain aspects which are crucial in the understanding of the political and metaphysical thought of Twelver Shī'ism. It may touch upon them, it may gloss over them, but is certainly does not study them in depth. Although we have drawn from primary sources in Arabic and Persian, presenting various legal and theological views with respect to issues like consensus [ijmā'], as well as traditional exegesis, both ancient and contemporary, it was not the objective of this book to expound exhaustively upon the views of every school of thought.

Our immediate and most pressing goal was to demonstrate that Shī'ite Islām is a genuine, legal and spiritual expression of traditional Islām, both in orthodoxy and orthopraxy. In the same way that Sunnī Islām is based in doctrine and practice on the basic principles of the Qur'ān and prophetic tradition, so is Shī'ite Islām, which, in its traditional form, has the added advantage of having been preserved and reaffirmed by a continuous and direct line of successors, the Holy Imāms, the natural heirs of the wilāyah, the Cycle of Prophecy.

The goal of this book, then, is to demonstrate that, far from being a heretical schismatic sect or fundamentalist form of Islām, as one hears over and over again, and which is more or less groundless, Shī'ism is the living expression of original Muhammadan Islām, perfectly preserved by his successors, the Holy Imāms from the Prophetic Household [Ahlul Bayt].

It was for this reason, that we proposed, without any polemical or apologetic intent, to present the Shī'ite point of view, with the highest possible degree of objectivity, without any concession to influence by the prejudiced views of its detractors, be they Muslim or non-Muslim. We have presented Shī'ite Islām from a Shī'ite point of view. We made sure to put aside outside influences received during our academic formation for, as G. Bachelard has pointed out, these can turn into real epistemological obstacles which impede objectivity.

Readers should not be offended if, at given moments, they get the impression that they are reading a panegyric. This impression is to be expected as this work does not contain the redundant repetition of pejorative postulations presented in Orientalist works which claim to present Islām and the Arab world “objectively.” Despite the overt contempt its secular ideologists manifest towards Islām, the West remains cynically passive.

This attitude, however, can only be understood within its historical context. The Western animosity towards Islām forms part of a long history of cultural encounters through which the West attempted to impose its hegemony on the East. It should come as no surprise that the unrepressed hatred towards Islām and Arabs forms the very basis of much Western Orientalism.

In many cases, Orientalism has been more or less officially at the service of the intellectual self-satisfaction of secular illustrated despotism and the conservatism of Western imperialist authoritarianism. Be it politically, militarily or intellectually, Western imperialism rarely hides its overwhelming aversion towards those who resist being physically or economically annexed as colonies, and those who refuse to be assimilated culturally, linguistically, mentally and spiritually.

It should be known from the onset that we are not unaware of the various aspects which have fallen outside of the reach of our study. Despite shortcomings related to time and space, we have attempted to develop our arguments in the most satisfactory fashion, using all our abilities to help readers overcome their resistance to the topic, the result of heightened sensitivities caused by events of worldwide repercussions which, directly or indirectly, involve Shī'ite Islām.

Since this book was written so rapidly as a response to current events, it cannot be considered an introduction to Shī'ite Islām. Any such claim would do a grave injustice to Muslim scholars who have devoted their entire lives to the study of one of the many fields which this book has merely surveyed with a bird's eye view. We have merely shown some of the scenery of Shī'ism, not its depth and detail. However, in our own defense, the general overview we have provided may be justified by the fact that it is not the fruit of improvisation.

This book is the result of years of study on the origins of Shī'ite Islām. Even though the book was written during the first semester of the 1994 academic year, it should be mentioned that its final form was based on various preliminary versions and partial drafts from courses and lectures we delivered in the Seminarios de historia, pensamiento y cultura del mundo islámico [Lectures on the History, Thought, and Culture of the Islāmic World] between 1991 and 1992.

This series of lectures was organized by the Argentinean Institute for Islāmic Culture and the Cultural Bureau of the Iranian Embassy in Buenos Aires and took place in the Faculty of Social Sciences of the University of Buenos Aires. Any good which comes from this limited contribution to the topic of Shī'ite Islām is due, in great part, to the valuable critical interest displayed by colleagues, friends, and students, whose questions and observations contributed considerably to the preparation of the final version of the book.

The very idea of writing an article on the basis of those classes and lectures owes much to the guidance of Dr. Francisco García Bazán, Dean of the Department of Philosophy, and Director of the Center for Research into the History and Philosophy of Religion at John F. Kennedy Argentine University, as well as the Editor of the journal Epimeleia. Dr. García Bazán must be thanked, first and foremost, for encouraging me to write this article.

He deemed the article a necessary contribution to scholarship. He understood, much better than most Orientalists, that Shī'ism, although representing a minority tradition, represents a spiritual current of Gnostic illumination, law and theology, which is entirely Islāmic in orthodoxy and orthopraxy, to the same extent as mainstream and majority Sunnī Islām. To be sincere, we must recognize that it was our director, Dr. García Bazán, who revived our interest in writing that article which was always in an indefinite state and which we could never come around to completing.

Dr. García Bazán's constant encouragement gave us an almost journalistic rhythm of redaction and, in little time, he granted us the time and the confidence to transform those initial rough drafts into a completed work. We are greatly indebted to the generous spirit of Dr. F. García Bazán, who, besides always knowing how and when to help us, from start to finish, has been of great benefit due to his scholarly knowledge and experience, counseling and guiding us with mastery in many ways. We will always consider it a privilege and an honor to have worked besides this great master of philosophy and comparative religion. We also thank him for permitting us to republish our work.

We are equally grateful to Hujjat al-Islām wa al-Muslimīn Feisal Morhell of the World Center of Islāmic Sciences of the Hawzah 'Ilmiyyah from Qum in the Islāmic Republic of Iran, who also happens to be the Director of Cultural Affairs for the Fundación Cultural Oriente and Editor of the Spanish version of the academic journal Az-Zaqalain, for his interest in republishing the article which gave origin to this book.

Hujjat al-Islām wa al-Muslimīn Feisal Morhell is a young specialist in traditional Islāmic sciences who is not alien to this work since he proof-read our Arabic and Persian translations and, furthermore, provided us access to all of the primary Islāmic sources which appeared in the original article. The bibliography for the book, however, has been greatly amplified by Dr. John A. Morrow.

We would also like to thank Hujjat al-Islām wa al-Muslimīn Murtadā Beheshtī, General Director of the Islāmic Thought Foundation of Tehran, and the Editor-in-Chief of the Spanish version of the journal Az-Zaqalain; Hujjat al-Islām wa al-Muslimīn Sayyid Muhammad Rizvī, the resident 'ālim at the Ja'farī Islāmic Center in Toronto, Canada, and Dr. Liyakat 'Alī Takīm, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Denver, whom we thank especially for reviewing the doctrinal, juridical, and historical aspects dealt with in the present book, with truly limitless dedication, patience and generosity.

There is no doubt whatsoever that we would have faced many difficulties during the preparation of this work were it not for the constant advice and observations made by these great scholars and brilliant Muslim. Thanks to their help, however, we have overcome many obstacles and we will be certain to include their contributions in a future edition of the Spanish version of the book.

There are many people in Argentina, the United States, Canada, the U.K., Spain, and Iran, who collaborated with us during the preparing of this study, in its dissemination, and in its first English translation. In this sense, we are particularly grateful to Mrs. Sumeia Younes from the World Center of Islāmic Sciences of the Hawzah 'Ilmiyyah in Qum in the Islāmic Republic or Iran and Editorial Secretary for the journal Az-Zaqalain, for reading the manuscript of the first Spanish article, as well as the American linguist, Mrs. Barbara Castleton, from Ohio University, who had the kindness of proofreading the English translation and preparing a commendatory preface.

To Mrs. Rachīda Bejja for painstakingly correcting the Arabic transliteration and for Mr. Gustavo César Bize, Associate Professor of Arabic and Islāmic Thought in the Faculty of Social Sciences of the Universidad de Buenos Aires and at the Universidad Nacional de 3 de Febrero in Buenos Aires who was in charge of reviewing the English translation. We are also grateful to the following young Islāmologists, Mr. Ángel Horacio Molina and Mrs. María Eugenia Gantus, who read the final Spanish and English versions of the work.

They are both young research scholars at the Center for Oriental Studies, School of Letters, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, at the Universidad Nacional de Rosario, in Santa Fe, Argentina, an institution associated with the Mullā Sadrā Center for Islāmic Studies and Research (CEDIMS) [Centro de Estudios y Documentación Islámicos Mullā Sadrā] at the Universidad Católica Argentina de La Plata (Sede Bernal). We are particularly grateful to its General Coordinator, Dr. Horacio López Romano, for the generous institutional space he has provided to us, opening us the door to his installations and Dr. Sonia Yebara, Director of the Center for Oriental Studies of the School of Literature of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at the Universidad Nacional de Rosario for their unselfish institutional support.

Other friends and colleagues read fragments or complete version of my rough drafts, providing an impressive volume of critical observations and facts. It would be impossible to mention them all. Nevertheless, we would like to express our gratitude to the following persons, whose constant kindness and cooperation facilitated our task: Mr. Ángel Almazán de Gracia, the Spanish cultural journalist, writer, and historian, who specializes in Sorian culture and Numantine archeology, for enthusiastically reading this work and citing it in many of his articles and books, as well as his generous and selfless support.

To Mr. Mikail Álvarez Ruiz, Director of the Biblioteca Islámica Ahlul Bayt from Sevilla, Spain, to whom we owe the first digital version of the Spanish original, and which has been well-received and distributed over the Internet. He was the first to conceive of the idea of turning our article into a book and he is also one of the most energetic promoters of our work on the Internet.

It was on the basis of the digital edition that he prepared that Dr. John A. Morrow based his English version. The valuable collaboration of Mr. Héctor H. Manzolillo, one of the most prolific and recognized translators of Islāmic texts in Spanish, also stands out. He was kind enough to review the notes to the English translation, making corrections which were greatly appreciated by the translator and Editor.

Finally, we would like to express our endless gratitude to the Editor, Dr. John A. Morrow, Assistant Professor of Modern Languages at Northern State University in the United States, to whom we owe the first English edition of our work, as well as his scrupulous critical annotations.

The exchanges which resulted from his translation have allowed us to know a marvelous human being, wise yet humble, who honors us by his irreplaceable friendship. We would also like to thank our wife, Mónica Delia Pereiras, for supporting patiently and lovingly our domestic “absences” through all the time it took us to write and correct this book.

We would also like to thank our three daughters, Ruth Noemí, María Inés and María de los Ángeles, whose affectionate interruptions made the labor of this book both pleasant and possible; to our parents, Saturnino and Elvira; to our brothers, Daniel and Cristina; and to all our family and friends for standing by us, unconditionally, in a thousand and one ways. And, last but not least, we would like to thank Mr. Muhammad Taqī Ansariyan and Mawlanā Muhammad Rizvī for encouraging and supporting this academic endeavor.

Professor Luis Alberto VittorProfessor Luis Alberto Vittor

Center for Research into the Philosophy and History of Religion (CIFHIRE)

Department of Philosophy, School of Graduate Studies

John F. Kennedy Argentine University

Mullā Sadrā Center for Islāmic Studies and Research (CEDIMS)

Department of Social and Political Sciences in Africa and the Middle East

Catholic University of Argentina de la Plata (Sede Bernal)

Associated with the Center for Oriental Studies

Faculty of Arts and Sciences, National University of Rosario

Genesis of the Work

As a result of the popularity of Shī'ite Islām: Orthodoxy or Heterodoxy, many readers have inquired about its genesis. In light of such interest, we decided that it would be worthwhile to contextualize the historical moment in which the work was created as well as its ultimate objective. As a close friend and colleague of the author, it is our privilege to share our inner knowledge of the works origin.

Although some rough drafts had been presented in the course of classes and conferences, it was not until 1994 that Luis Alberto Vittor felt the need to complete Shī'ite Islām: Orthodoxy or Heterodoxy. The author's desire to finish the work was motivated by two violent events: the explosions of the Israeli Embassy and the Asociación Mutal Israeli-Argentina or AMIA which occurred in Buenos, Aires, Argentina on March 17th and July 18th, 1994, terrorist attacks which were both attributed arbitrarily to Shī'ite Muslims.

Due to the circumstances in which it was written, the work was redacted rapidly in response to an urgent need to confront journalists, specialists, and international observers who joined together to label Shī'ite Islām as a “sect” which was “heterodox” with respect to “orthodox” Sunnī Islām. The author was also responding to seditious attempts to separate the Sunnī and Shī'ite schools of thought, labeling Shī'ites a minority of hard-core religious fanatics with a history of violence.

The enemies of Islām rallied around the tragic events in Argentina denouncing Shī'ites as “fundamentalists” and “terrorists.” Their objective was clear: a callous attempt to isolate Shī'ite Muslims from the Islāmic Ummah as an unorthodox faction composed of radical extremists.

In an unparalleled fashion, many Argentinean and American Orientalists, made tabula rasa with everything written about Shī'ite Islām from Corbin to the present, and started to echo the most hostile attitudes towards Islām expressed by early Orientalists and which had long been rejected. It was evident from the onset that certain academics were benefiting from the terrorist attacks in Argentina to launch an ideological assault against Shī'ite Muslims.

In their zeal to prove that Shī'ite Muslims had been the instigators or perpetrators of the most serious criminal attacks ever suffered by Argentineans, Argentinean and American academics stressed the minority character of Shī'ite Muslims, characterizing them as a group of sectarian zealots who stood in clear contrast to the moderation and orthodoxy of the Sunnī majority. Academic specialists, journalists, international observers, so-called “experts” on the Middle East, along with ex-intelligence officers, and military envoys, stressed the minority status of Shī'ites in order to accentuate their sectarianism.

Like cockroaches crawling from the under the wood-work in the dark hours of night, these “experts” on Islām attempted to give the Shī'ah Ithnā 'Asharī traits which belonged to other Shī'ite schools like the Ismā'īliyyah or the Zaydiyyah. They associated Twelver Shī'ites with Zaydī revolutionaries, and the Ismā'īlī Hashashīn or Assassins, in order to establish that Shī'ites were historically a group of extremist rebels who never hesitated to use radically violent methods against their enemies. The enemies of Islām employed Iblīsī analogies to say that Shī'ite Muslims were all murderers. They argued that since the Hashashīn or Assassins were Ismā'īlis, and the Ismā'īlis were Shī'ites, then every Shī'ite was a potential assassin.

Evidently, both the premises and the conclusion were false. Nevertheless, this syllogism had the expected effect. The press and the airwaves were soon speaking about Shī'ite terrorism, Shī'ite fundamentalism, Shī'ite extremism, as if they were all synonyms. It was imperative for someone to come forward to demonstrate that these terms were the result of false logic or a false logical construct whose sole objective was to demean Shī'ite Muslims.

In an attempt to give credence to accusations against Shī'ite Muslims, there are those who continue to insist that the terrorist attacks which took place in 1992 and 1994 in the city of Buenos Aires were the work of Shī'ite Muslims. In effect, the majority of encyclopedias continue to attribute these crimes to Hizbullāh or the Islāmic Republic of Iran. Despite such stubbornness, nobody in Argentina believes in these accusations and Argentinean authorities are now exploring an Israeli trail. As a result, Washington is putting pressure on the Argentine government to put an end to its investigation which is starting to annoy the United States and Israel.

The Argentinean people, however, want the guilty parties brought to justice as the events were not without deadly consequence for Argentine society. On the 17th of March of 1992, a violent explosion destroyed the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aries and seriously damaged the adjacent Catholic Church and school. Twenty-nine people were killed and 242 were injured. The deaths were gruesome. Argentine television broadcasted streets littered with human remains and rubble, pieces of mutilated corpses, like the leg of a woman with a sock and shoe which was severed from her body.

In the early days of the investigation, efforts were directed towards the Islāmist trail. It was believed that the attack had been committed by a Palestinian suicide bomber who drove a mini-van full of explosives. It was suggested that he was a member of Islāmic Jihād who wanted to avenge the death of 'Abbās al-Mūsawī, the head of the Lebanese Hizbullāh, and his family. According to this version, the Buenos Aires operation had been prepared by a group of Pakistanis and coordinated by Mohsen Rabbanī, the Cultural Attaché from the Iranian Embassy. This later was even detained, one year later, while he was in Germany, only to be liberated later due to lack of evidence.

On July 18th, 1994, another explosion devastated the Buenos Aires building of the Asociación Mutual Israelita-Argentina (AMIA) resulting in 85 deaths and 300 injured. The investigation into this new terrorist bombing also attempted to uncover an Islāmist trail. The attack was attributed to a so-called Islāmic “kamikazi:” 29 year old Ibrāhīm Husein Berro who supposedly drove a vehicle full of explosives.

While it is true that Ibrāhīm Husein Berro existed, his brother demonstrated that he died in Lebanon several years before and not in the attack in Buenos Aires. Whoever drove the vehicle full of explosives, it could not have been Ibrāhīm Berro. Years later a warrant was released for the arrest of Imad Mughniyyah, a member of the Lebanese Hizbullāh. Later, the ex-Ambassador of Iran in Argentina, Hade Soleimanpur, was detained in the United Kingdom but had to be released due to lack of evidence.

All of these elements, which seem to be definitive conclusions, have been reflected for years in various encyclopedias, books, and journalistic articles, although nothing can confirm them. The most interesting thing is that with the passing of time some Argentinean investigative journalists have debunked the versions of events proposed by the Israelis and the Americans, developing their own hypothesis which is the exact opposite. According to investigations conducted in Argentina, the two attacks were committed by Israeli agents in order to counter the growing anti-Zionism of the Jewish community in Argentina. This discovery, however, took place after Vittor published his article in Epimelia.

At present, the supposed intellectual or material connection of Islāmists to the Buenos Aires attacks has largely lost credibility. The Islāmist trail is simply inconsistent with the facts and it for this reason that the American and Israeli government are pressuring the Argentineans to put an end to their investigation. While it is presently possible to speak about these events with hindsight and tranquility, the only individual who dared speak about such events, and defend Shī'ite Islām when it was being attacked by international public opinion, was Luis Alberto Vittor.

Like Prophet Yahyā, Luis Alberto Vittor was a voice in the wilderness, exposing himself to criticism, threats, and physical danger. Unlike some of the official Islāmic authorities who stood still, making themselves complicit through their silence, Vittor raised his voice and pen in defense of Shī'ite Islām at a time when doing so was associating oneself, explicitly or implicitly, to a Muslim minority of “extremists” and “terrorists.”

Putting his trust in Almighty Allāh and the solidarity of his fellow Muslims, all of whom were simple believers with no power or political influence, Vittor produced the present work which was viewed as a moral and intellectual duty. Surely, in this lies the greatest value of his work.Shī'ite Islām: Orthodoxy or Heterodoxy must be viewed as a work of service in defense of the followers of Ahlul Bayt. At the time it was written, there was not a single Orientalist, Arabist or Islāmologist, in Argentina or abroad, who was willing or capable of defending Shī'ite Islām.

While the Shī'ite community was being attacked from all sides, some Sunnī Muslims sought to separate themselves from the Shī'ites, echoing the arguments of the enemies of Islām who claimed that the followers of Ahlul Bayt were sectarian extremists (ghulāt).

As if that were not enough, Shī'ite convertswere accused of having links to so-called “Iranian-inspired Islāmic terrorism.” In order to divert attention from themselves, some sectors of the Sunnī community insisted on proving the Orientalists thesis correct, accusing the Shī'ite community of committing the terrorist bombings when the real perpetrators of the atrocities were not even Muslims.

As a result of these actions, many Shī'ites, both Iranians and Latinos, suffered from severe social discrimination. Many mu'minīn [believers] lost their jobs. Many mu'minīn [believers] were forced out of university, including a group of Iranian medical students. Being both Shī'ite and Iranian was seen as synonymous with terrorism and criminality. Fear ran so high during those days that, out of the entire community, only six or seven brothers, two of them converts, dared to attend the sole Shī'ite mosque in the city.

Rather than coming to the rescue of Shī'ite Muslims who were falsely accused of being violent sectarian terrorists, Orientalists like Bernard Lewis came forth to add fuel to the fire, arguing that there was a historic continuity and an ideological bond between medieval Muslims assassins, who were Ismā'īlīs, and contemporary Shī'ite fundamentalists or extremists, who were Ja'farīs. For those who dabble in academic dishonesty, they were one and the same: socially maladjusted minorities who resorted to violence and terrorism as their only means of expression.

When one reads Shī'ite Islām: Orthodoxy or Heterodoxy, it is important to remember the context in which it was created. At a moment in which the enemies of Islām were attempting to divide the Ummah, Luis Alberto Vittor pulled up his sleeves and pulled out his pen to demonstrate that Shī'ite Islām, despite being a minority, was as orthodoxy as the majority Sunnī Islām.

And not only that, the author demonstrated that Shī'ite Islām was the only group which remained faithful to the will of Allāh and the Prophet Muhammad: to hold fast to the Two Treasures, the Qur'ān and the Household of the Prophet.

Besides presenting the Shī'ite position, the author's goal was to reestablish the balance between Sunnism and Shī'ism which some sectors were attempting to destabilize, labeling one group as orthodox and another as sectarian, heterodox, extremist, and heretical. It is for this reason that the author devotes so much time to explaining why it is improper to label Muslims as “fundamentalists.”

Considering the context and extraordinary circumstances in which the book was written, completely changes one's critical appreciation of the work. Shī'ite Islām: Orthodoxy or Heterodoxy was a lone voice denouncing despots in the desert, a strident voice denouncing the indifference of academia and the vested interests of those who sought to define Shī'ite Islām as a radical, sectarian, heterodox form of Islām rather than a traditional expression of its orthodoxy and orthopraxis.

Although the author has accepted that his work to be annotated, he has always insisted that it remain intact as a reflection of the socio-historical context in which it was created. Attempting to modify certain concepts would undermine the very objective of the work, reducing it to a vain theoretical discussion. The author's goal, of course, was other: to demonstrate that the claims made by the detractors of Shī'ite Islām were false and illogical and that the fact that Shī'ite Islām has a minority status does not imply, from an Islāmic point of view, that it represents a sect in the sense in the Western Christian sense of the term.

The events of 1992 and 1994 which occurred in the city of Buenos Aires are not a thing of the past. Attempts to support the allegations made against the Shī'ite Muslims of Argentina continue to be made, accusing them of implication in the terrorist bombings. Despite the fact that thirteen years have passed since this work was originally published, it continues to be current. The enemies of Islām never sleep and nor do we.

15th of Sha'bān / August 28, 2007

Dr. John A. Morrow, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor of Modern Languages

Northern State University

Aberdeen, South Dakota