In a letter to the editor published by the Wall Street Journal, conservative academic John Eastman attempts to defend his advice to Vice President Mike Pence, which was at the heart of the scheme to overturn the 2020 election. Reacting to the January 6th committee hearings, Eastman objects to those who’ve described his theories about the vice president’s powers as historically and constitutionally baseless. He claims that instead, his advice was actually grounded in historical precedents and previously published scholarship. 



Eastman’s historical claims are seriously inflated and offer no persuasive precedent in support of his position. The Constitution assigns the vice president no job other than to open the envelopes received from the Electoral College. It does not even say that vice presidents are necessarily supposed to preside over the joint session, though Congress has by tradition and statute assigned that role to them.


The various minor incidents Eastman mentions, such as Thomas Jefferson handling electoral votes that hadn’t strictly complied with the forms required by the Twelfth Amendment, were never understood to amount to a vice presidential power to defy Congress during the count. At best, they show that vice presidents have, in a few instances, glossed over harmless errors without serious controversy. 



Eastman cites some examples of scholars who had previously entertained the idea that the vice president, if presented with a genuinely uncertain controversy or facially defective votes, might be called upon to exercise some independent judgment. But that is a moot point, because no such controversy or uncertainty existed as to any state’s votes in the 2020 election. Every state had submitted only a single, duly certified set of votes with no apparent defects. The scholarly articles he cites were thus irrelevant and inapplicable to the 2020 election even if taken on their own terms.



More importantly, Eastman emphasizes that he did not advise Vice President Pence to simply decide which votes to count. Though that theory is widely rejected, he’s not wrong to note it had at least been discussed by some experts as something that might apply in some narrow circumstances. But Eastman can offer no such defense for what he urged Pence to do instead, and he does not even attempt to.


Eastman’s preferred plan was for Pence to instead halt the count and demand that the states somehow confirm or reconsider their votes over a ten day period. There’s no basis for this idea in any law or in any legal scholar’s previously published writings. Eastman’s suggestion was that Pence could simply make it up on the spot, concocting the whole procedure out of thin air. 



Even if the vice president did have some substantive, limited authority in presiding over the count, there is no basis whatsoever for the vice president to unilaterally halt the joint session, “send the votes back” to the states, demand that state legislatures somehow act on his instructions, and set a later date for Congress to reconvene. This would involve the vice president usurping Congress’s power to determine its own rules, and it would mean instructing the state legislatures to do something they have no constitutional power to do.


Eastman also points to how some state legislators supported overturning the election. Among the thousands of state legislators across the country, there were a smattering who bought into Trump’s wild conspiracy theories. But the reality is that no state legislature had taken any official action in support of rescinding their state’s duly cast electoral votes. Due to the opposition of principled Republicans like Arizona House speaker Rusty Bowers, there was not a single upper or lower house in the entire country where a majority was willing to do what Eastman proposed. 



Eastman presents this send-it-back-to-the-states scenario as a more restrained option, because it would have attempted to enlist state legislatures to legitimize a vice-presidential power grab. But it is actually much less defensible as a legal theory. Nobody had ever heard of or suggested such a thing before. No law or provision of the Constitution envisions anything like it. It had no history, no scholarship, no statute, and no constitutional basis to support it. Simply put, he made it up, and his critics are entirely correct to say so.


We’re lucky Pence saw through the absurdity of Eastman’s idea. Congress should reform the Electoral Count Act to make sure there’s no doubt about that in the future. 

The Food and Drug Administration has dealt two deadly blows to tobacco harm reduction in the past two days. Yesterday the Biden Administration announced that the FDA will publish a proposed rule next year requiring tobacco companies to gradually eliminate practically all of the nicotine in cigarettes. Today, the Wall Street Journal reports the FDA plans to order all Juul menthol and tobacco flavored e‑cigarettes off the market in the U.S..

Juul has been the market leader in vaping products, but in recent years has slipped to number two, behind Vuse brand, marketed by tobacco maker Reynolds American. The FDA cleared e‑cigarettes made by tobacco makers Reynolds American and NJOY Holdings, who now don’t have to worry about competing with Juul. Cynics might think today’s move reeks of cronyism. But those of us concerned with reducing the harms from tobacco smoking can only conclude that the past two days’ moves signify the FDA is completely abandoning harm reduction.

First, consider the idea of reducing the nicotine in tobacco smoke. It is true that nicotine is the substance in tobacco to which one can become addicted, while the other components of tobacco smoke are responsible for smoking’s organic harms—from cancer to cardiovascular disease. But, aside from its addictive potential, nicotine is, according to Public Health England, “relatively harmless.” This is from Britain’s National Health Service “NHS Inform” website:

Although nicotine is a very addictive substance it’s relatively harmless. It’s the carbon monoxide, tar and other toxic chemicals in tobacco smoke that will cause serious damage to your health. Clean forms of nicotine are licensed to help smokers quit. These are much safer than smoking as they’re nicotine only, don’t have other additives or toxic chemicals, and are proven to be safe and effective.

Nicotine, like caffeine, is a stimulant that improves focus. Unlike caffeine, nicotine increases production of beta‐​endorphins that relieve anxiety, which may explain why some tobacco smokers light up when they want to calm down. Furthermore, nicotine might reduce the incidence of Parkinson’s Disease and has stimulated research into its potential therapeutic applications for this affliction. It also may be potentially useful to treat depression, Tourette’s Syndrome, Alzheimer’s’ Disease, and schizophrenia.

What’s more, many tobacco smokers mainly smoke to enjoy the nicotine effects more than the flavor of tobacco, much like drinkers of alcoholic beverages often enjoy the relaxing feeling and “buzz’ from the drink even more than its flavor. This explains why the government-funded research that led to the FDA’s nicotine-cutting decision found, “if cigarettes’ nicotine strength was reduced moderately, smokers would inhale more deeply or smoke more cigarettes to compensate and satisfy their nicotine cravings.” (Similarly, an alcohol drinker might consume more alcohol to achieve the desired effect if the alcohol content of the beverage is reduced.)

The research found that when the nicotine content of cigarettes was reduced by more than 95 percent, the smokers would tend cut back or quit—but the subjects were confined to hotel rooms, hardly a real-world experience. The real world, where black markets exist, might have many unintended consequences. And the researchers acknowledge that many of the study’s participants cheated by smoking regular cigarettes when they were only supposed to be smoking low-nicotine cigarettes. These stipulations to the study’s significant limitations apparently haven’t deterred the Biden Administration’s FDA from proceeding with plans to eliminate nicotine from cigarettes. A policy aimed at getting smokers to quit might easily wind up increasing tobacco consumption.

Next consider the FDA’s war on e‑cigarettes. Begun in the Trump Administration, the FDA has increasingly restricted the availability of this proven tobacco harm reduction tool. In the United Kingdom, Public Health England tells primary care practitioners to suggest e‑cigarettes to their tobacco‐​smoking patients as a cessation aid. PHE claims vaping is 95 per cent less harmful than smoking tobacco. Britain’s Royal College of Physicians advocates e‑cigarettes for nicotine replacement therapy (NRT), stating:

In the interests of public health it is important to promote the use of e‑cigarettes, NRT and other non‐​tobacco nicotine products as widely as possible as a substitute for smoking in the UK.

Randomized controlled trials in the UK have demonstrated that e‑cigarettes are “significantly more effective” than other forms of nicotine replacement therapy, such as nicotine patches or nicotine gum.

The Trump Administration FDA started by banning flavored vaping products other than menthol and tobacco flavor, even while surveys repeatedly show that anywhere from 92% to 94% of former smokers who switched to vaping preferred the fruit‑, candy‐ or menthol‐​flavored forms.

The ban on flavored vaping is rooted in the fact that teen vapers seem to prefer the fruit, candy or menthol flavors over the tobacco flavor. But e‑cigarette sales to those under 18 have been prohibited since 2016, so the teens are already tapping the black or grey market in order to vape. And while teen vaping has been surging, teen tobacco smoking is at an all‐​time low. Yet research shows that fruit or candy flavored e‑cigarettes are not determinants of teen vapers moving on to tobacco. And a study published in the May 2021 issue of Nicotine and Tobacco Research by researchers at Brown and Harvard Universities finds, “E‑cigarette use is largely concentrated among youth who share characteristics with smokers of the pre‐​vaping era, suggesting e‑cigarettes may have replaced cigarette smoking.” Dr. Natasha Sokol, once of the study’s authors, told Filter journalist Alex Norcia, “The decline in youth smoking really accelerated after the availability of e‑cigarettes.”

Efforts to reduce teen vaping deprive adult tobacco smokers of a proven harm reduction strategy. It turns out that most adult tobacco smokers who wish to quit prefer flavored and menthol e‑cigarettes as more effective substitutes. The FDA has not yet decided if it will ban menthol flavored e‑cigarettes, which would further undermine tobacco smokers’ efforts to quit. A policy intended for minors is hurting adults. Now there is evidence that many who had switched from tobacco to e‑cigarettes are switching back to tobacco.

I have often said that Democrats think government prohibition works when it comes to cigarettes but not other drugs, while Republicans think government prohibition works for other drugs but not cigarettes. Sadly, the war on tobacco harm-reduction has been bipartisan, spanning Democratic and Republican administrations. We should not be surprised to see teen and adult smoking rates start back up, after years of decline.

The Federal Reserve used to focus on holding down “core” personal consumption expenditure (PCE) inflation. The median FOMC projection of core PCE inflation at the June meeting was 4.3% for this year, for example. But the last three reports were well below the FOMC’s expected norm for 2022. Core PCE prices rose at an annual rate of only 3% in February, 3.3% in March and 3.4% in April.

A comparable core PCE figure for May will not be out until June 30. But impatient Fed officials have moved on to new games with new and mysterious rules –such as “find and seek the Quixotic neutral rate.”

Meanwhile, Fed Chairman Jerome Powell has been busily changing the subject and hiding or moving the goal posts.

The Wall Street Journal reports, “While the Fed typically pays greater attention to core prices, which exclude volatile food and energy prices, Mr. Powell has said the central bank must place more focus for now on overall inflation [he explicitly mentioned ‘spikes in commodity prices’] because of concerns that consumers and businesses are anticipating price pressures to continue. Fed officials believe expectations of future inflation can be self-fulfilling. If those expectations are rising, the Fed could be required to lift rates to levels that push even harder on the monetary brakes.”

Raising central bank interest rates in response to spikes in commodity prices is certainly not a new idea. As I recently documented, every recession since 1957 was preceded by a dangerous mix of rising oil prices and a rising federal fund rate. Few economists believe oil price spikes alone would have sufficed to knock down the agile U.S. economy; the Fed’s assistance was required.

Always ready to help, the Fed Chairman is now redefining what he might be willing to consider as unmistakable evidence of slowing inflation. Such evidence apparently now excludes any good news from Core PCE inflation in favor of “spikes in commodity prices.” Such spikes are, he acknowledges, “beyond our control” yet they somehow justify all interest rates hikes. Why? Because they might affect expectations about future inflation.

So, there it is. The target seems to have shifted, for the moment, from actual core PCE inflation to estimates of expected future inflation.

But why? Expected inflation does not cause or predict actual future inflation, nor does it explain past inflation. To see why, look first at the Cleveland Fed’s sophisticated estimate of the inflation estimated five years ahead. Recent 5‑year expectations have not yet reached 2.5% inflation. And the estimates are so obviously cyclical that they have no predictive value at all. If rising oil prices and interest rates create yet another recession as in 2007-09, then expected inflation will indeed fall amazingly fast until the recession is over but no longer.

The second graph shows the University of Michigan monthly survey of expected inflation one year ahead. How much inflation people expect a year from now depends on what they have recently read in newspaper headlines or experienced at the supermarket or gas station. In fact, as the red line shows, next year’s expected inflation clearly rises and falls with today’s price of gasoline.

Another good reason to discard these inflation expectations surveys as a rationale for so-called “above neutral” fed funds rate schemes is that linking interest rates to gasoline prices can be highly inflammable.

Every lawyer remembers the unpleasant rite of passage that is taking the LSAT, the standardized test for law school admissions. The most distinctive component of the LSAT is known colloquially as the “logic games” section (though its formal name is “analytical reasoning”). This section, full of hypothetical dinner parties with picky guests and distinctive seating requirements, is meant to test the ability of future lawyers to apply the types of overlapping and interacting rules that we often must untangle to apply the law.

A much-simplified version of the type of question one might see in the logic games section is as follows: A restaurant calls its happy hour menu the “5:00 PM and after” menu, but the menu is actually available up to an hour before 5:00 pm as well as up to an hour after 5:00 PM. Yesterday, John ordered off the “5:00 PM and after” menu. Today, John ordered at the same restaurant an hour earlier than he did yesterday. Was the happy hour menu necessarily available when John ordered today?

If you answered “no,” you just successfully avoided a logical fallacy that multiple federal courts of appeals had fallen victim to, before finally being corrected by the Supreme Court yesterday. The history of these decisions is a case study in how flimsy logic and basic errors can be perpetuated by too much deference to precedent, as well as (perhaps) some motivated reasoning.

Yesterday’s decision in United States v. Taylor concerned whether attempted robbery under federal law qualifies as a “crime of violence.” If it does, then using a gun during that attempted robbery can result in a second conviction and a longer sentence.

The relevant law defines a “crime of violence” as a crime that “has as an element the use, attempted use, or threatened use of physical force.” Because the law’s text requires that at least one of these three options must be “an element” of the crime, the Supreme Court has previously held that a “crime of violence” must be a crime that involves at least one of these options in every single case. This approach, known as the “categorical approach,” asks whether conviction of a crime necessarily requires that the defendant must have performed at least one of these options. In other words, if it is logically possible to be convicted of a crime without using, attempting to use, or threatening to use physical force, then that crime is not a “crime of violence.”

The defendant in yesterday’s case had been convicted of attempting to commit robbery under a federal law called the Hobbs Act (references to “robbery” in the remainder of this piece will mean robbery as defined in the Hobbs Act). That law defines completed robbery as unlawfully taking personal property “by means of actual or threatened force.” There is thus little doubt that completed robbery qualifies as a crime of violence: to be convicted of robbery, a person must either use or threaten force. Thus, it is logically certain that every person convicted of completed robbery must have been found to have committed at least one of the three options for a “crime of violence.”

But what about a person only convicted of attempted robbery? Such a person, under the relevant law, has intended to commit robbery and taken a substantial step toward committing robbery, but failed to complete the robbery. And since robbery itself can be accomplished by either “actual” or “threatened” force, attempted robbery can be accomplished by attempting to commit either “actual” or “threatened” force.

In those cases where the attempted robbery consists of an attempt to commit actual force, the crime of course involves the attempted use of physical force, which is one of the three options for a crime of violence. But what about the other possibility, those cases where the attempted robbery consists of an attempt to commit threatened force? As the Supreme Court explained yesterday, that possibility does not entail any of the three options for a “crime of violence,” which means attempted robbery itself cannot qualify as a crime of violence.

Justice Neil Gorsuch, writing the opinion of the Court and joined by six other justices, laid out a simple hypothetical to show why:

Suppose Adam tells a friend that he is planning to rob a particular store on a particular date. He then sets about researching the business’s security measures, layout, and the time of day when its cash registers are at their fullest. He buys a ski mask, plots his escape route, and recruits his brother to drive the getaway car. Finally, he drafts a note—“Your money or your life”—that he plans to pass to the cashier. The note is a bluff, but Adam hopes its implication that he is armed and dangerous will elicit a compliant response. When the day finally comes and Adam crosses the threshold into the store, the police immediately arrest him. It turns out Adam’s friend tipped them off.

In such a case, Adam is guilty of attempted robbery because he attempted to threaten the cashier for money. But “Adam did not ‘use’ physical force. He did not ‘attempt’ to use such force—his note was a bluff and never delivered. And he never even got to the point of threatening the use of force against anyone or anything. He may have intended and attempted to do just that, but he failed.”

Put simply, a failed attempt to threaten force is itself neither an attempt to use force nor a threat to use force. And so attempted robbery cannot be a crime of violence under the categorical approach. Indeed, even the two dissenting justices, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, did not dispute this point. Rather, they each contested the premise as to whether the categorical approach (as currently defined) is in fact the best approach to applying the statute. None of the nine justices disputed that under the categorical approach as it has been previously defined, attempted robbery cannot qualify as a crime of violence.

Yet remarkably, three federal appellate courts in a row had held just the opposite, until the Fourth Circuit finally became the first federal appellate court to reach the same conclusion that the Supreme Court would later affirm. Each of those three appellate courts, the Eleventh, Seventh, and Ninth Circuits, had held that because completed robbery itself is a crime of violence, attempted robbery must entail the attempted use of force. The Eleventh Circuit, the first to reach this conclusion, reasoned that “a completed Hobbs Act robbery itself qualifies as a crime of violence … and, therefore, attempt to commit Hobbs Act robbery requires that [the defendant] intended to commit every element of Hobbs Act robbery, including the taking of property in a forcible manner.” The Seventh and Ninth Circuits later followed this reasoning to reach the same result.

This is an error as basic as failing the logic puzzle at the start of this piece. Even though the happy hour menu is called the “5:00 PM and after” menu, it is available as early as 4:00. Its mere name does not mean John actually ordered at 5:00 PM or later yesterday. And since John might have ordered as early as 4:00 yesterday, he might have ordered as early as 3:00 today, before the happy hour menu was available.

Similarly, despite the name, not every crime of violence actually involves the use of violence. Indeed, courts know that crimes of violence don’t necessarily entail the use of violence when they perform the categorical approach and apply its three-pronged definition. Yet immediately after performing this test, the same court can seemingly forget this definition and act as if, based on the name, all crimes of violence must entail the actual use of violence (and thus that all attempted crimes of violence must entail the attempted use of violence). The possibility of an attempt to threaten is completely overlooked, just like overlooking the possibility that yesterday’s happy hour order was itself in the earliest possible hour.

The fact that three consecutive panels of intelligent jurists confidently made such a basic error is a reminder to be wary of reflexive deference to precedent. Perhaps it seemed to these judges that attempted robbery must be a crime of violence, and this intuition led them to excuse less-than-rigorous logic. And perhaps these judges believed that ruling the other way would have been viewed as unorthodox, counterintuitive, and more likely to be reversed. When all these factors point toward the same “safe” answer, those forces can be difficult to overcome.

Both the Fourth Circuit and the lawyers for the defendant Taylor should thus be praised for sticking with their conviction that their logic was simply correct and would win out in the end. As the Fourth Circuit succinctly put it, the premise that an attempted crime of violence must itself be a crime of violence “simply is not so.” Had the Fourth Circuit not bucked the trend of decisions holding otherwise, it may have taken much longer for the question to reach the Supreme Court and for the error in those other circuits to be corrected.

Justice Scalia used to award an “E pur si muove” prize to district judges whose opinions were finally vindicated at the Supreme Court despite being erroneously reversed by an appellate court. A new award may be in order for appellate panels willing to reject unanimous sister-circuit precedents who later find themselves similarly vindicated.

Even as many developing countries conserve their foreign exchange reserves to guard against a nasty worsening of the economic environment, the Reserve Bank of India—the country’s central bank—has sold more than $40 billion from its reserves in the last nine months to prevent the rupee from weakening further. India’s exchange rate has gone from Rs 70 to the dollar in 2018 to Rs 78 today, and threatens to cross the Rs 80 mark. That would draw jeers from the Opposition, which would accuse Prime Minister Modi of tarnishing India’s image as India nears its next general election in 2024. However, spending the country’s reserves to avoid a purely cosmetic threshold of Rs 80 makes no sense. India’s current account deficit has soared with the high price of oil and may double to 3 percent of GDP this year. The need of the hour is a competitive exchange rate, not an inflated one.

The rupee has weakened by 5 percent against the dollar over the last year. Opposition politicians say India’s prestige is being depreciated. They seem unaware that the US dollar has strengthened substantially in the last two years with global money cascading into that country. The cascade first represented a flight from risky emerging markets to the safe haven of the dollar after Covid created huge uncertainties. More recently global money has flooded into the USA because the Fed has raised interest rates to attractive levels.

Too many Indians mistake a strong dollar for a weak rupee. Even as the rupee has depreciated 5 percent against the dollar, it has risen 7 percent against the euro and 14 percent against the yen over the last year. It has risen slightly even against the Chinese RMB.

Artificially propping up the rupee will tend to make India’s exports uncompetitive even as the current account deficit widens. If markets push the exchange rate to Rs 80 to the dollar, so be it. The Reserve Bank of India should not resist.

As Colleen Hroncich and Solomon Chen have observed nearby, the Supreme Court yesterday ruled that the state of Maine violated the Constitution when it excluded schools that engage in religious instruction from an otherwise generally available program of tuition assistance payments to parents. That is the outcome the Cato Institute urged in our Carson v. Makin amicus brief last fall, written by Ilya Shapiro and Trevor Burrus. For more on the ruling and on the distinctive features of the Maine program, which assists parents who live in remote areas without a public secondary school, see also Neal McCluskey’s new Cato Podcast with Caleb Brown and Ilya Somin’s opinion piece for NBC.

It’s been widely observed that religious-liberty litigators have been on a winning streak lately, but it is worth noting specifically how many of those cases have been won by framing each dispute in terms of anti-discrimination principles. Masterpiece Cakeshop and Fulton v. Philadelphia come to mind, but also the Court’s string of rulings in favor of churches against local COVID restrictions on grounds that they were not treated as well as one or another secular institution.

To some extent this must reflect the simple truth that anti-discrimination principles have become a ruling theme both in law and in public life generally, exceedingly hard to argue against. If you can successfully invoke them you’re well on the way to winning an argument.

Examples from the progressive side are legion. But conservatives too are now apt to couch gripes about, say, social media moderation in terms of discrimination. Companies with a no-guns-on-premises rule are “discriminating” against gun-owning employees, we’ve heard.

And so on. Why, it was asked, should cruise ship lines or nurse staffing agencies be permitted to engage in “discrimination” toward the unvaccinated?

Now, most of us would rather win arguments than lose them, and it is only natural to gravitate toward whichever framing is most likely to do that. Compare “freedom to marry” (for the record, the phrase I favor) to the more widely employed “marriage equality.” I’d argue, though, that something is often lost in the pressure to re-couch claims as equality claims. Sometimes what’s really on our mind is something else — individual liberty, rights of self-defense or bodily integrity, fair process, institutions that work.

In the religious freedom context, there is a strong logic to the idea that the Free Exercise Clause implies a robust principle that churches and their institutions may not be singled out for worse treatment as against otherwise comparable entities. But that’s just one component of free exercise; there have to be others. In Cato’s brief, for example, Ilya and Trevor point out that parents’ right to direct the religious upbringing of their children is a basic component of free exercise encroached upon by the Maine law. To take a different example, the Court has recognized in the Hosanna-Tabor line of cases that free exercise requires the state to respect churches’ internal autonomy, quite aside from equality concerns about whether it treats secular institutions the same way. 

Maybe churchgoers want freedom of worship for its own sake, not because they want to ensure churches are treated at least as well as drugstores in COVID regulations. Maybe fairness and benefit to kids are even better arguments for school choice in Maine than equality! But — in today’s climate of jurisprudence — we may not get a chance to find out any time soon. 

In the past few weeks, some Britons had a sense of déjà vu, reminding them the censorship campaign against Salman Rushdie’s blasphemous novel “The Satanic Verses” some thirty-five years ago. This time, the center of angst was a movie titled, “Lady of Heaven,” which glorified the story of Lady Fatima, the daughter of the Prophet Muhammad. Yet, in an unmistakably sectarian tone, the movie also demonized some of the most revered figures of Sunni Islam.

Hence came protests organized by some Sunni groups, from Bradford to London, in front of movie theaters. There was no violence, but the heated rhetoric seems to have caused worries. Hence, Cineworld, the UK’s greatest movie chain, pulled the film back “to ensure the safety of our staff and customers.” Another chain, Showcase, soon followed.

The result, as British writer Kenan Malik noted, was “a win for self-appointed gatekeepers of Islam.” UK’s Health Minister Sajid Javid also saw it as a bad sign of growing “cancel culture in the UK.”

Meanwhile, the film has already been banned by various Muslim-majority nations: Egypt, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, and Morocco.

All these bans are indeed examples of “cancel culture,” which does not even have a name for it in many parts of the world, for the alternative, freedom of speech, is not appreciated in the first place. In much of Muslim world, in particular, any verdict that a book, a film, or an idea is “against Islam,” or even just an orthodoxy with it, often comes with the presumption that it should be banned.

The tragic result, which goes unnoticed, is intellectual ossification. Orthodoxies, unchallenged by alternatives, just keep reiterating themselves.

Which, of course, doesn’t mean that challengers of orthodoxies are always wise, accurate, and constructive.

This can well be said for the movie, “Lady of Heaven.” Its writer, Shiite cleric Yasser al-Habib, was jailed in his home country Kuwait for his anti-Sunni sermons. He ultimately found asylum in the UK, where he founded The Mahdi Servants Organization, whose website proudly says that they seek “achieving the Shia civilizational dominance.” Another website of the group, Rafi​da​.org, uses the term “Sunni” only in quotations, and repeatedly condemns their “heresies.” They seem to be the mirror image of some bigoted Sunnis who see Shiites outside of the pale of Islam.

This sectarian spirit is unmistakable throughout the movie, which begins with the recent horrors of the “caliphate” of the Islamic State — which was condemned by virtually all Sunni authorities — only to project it back to the very first caliphate of Islam, led by Abu Bakr (d. 634) and later Umar (d. 644), both of whom are deeply respected by Sunnis.

It is well known that the political leadership of these two close companions of the Prophet Muhammad wasn’t wholeheartedly accepted by the Prophet’s family, in particular his daughter Fatima (d. 632) and the latter’s husband Ali (d. 661). Yet still, Sunnis and Shiites have radically different versions of what really happened between these founding figures of Islam.

Sunnis believe that the political tension was soon resolved, and Fatima died at a very young age just because of the heartbreak of losing her father. Shiite sources, in contrast, tell the story of a shrewd usurpation of Ali’s legitimate right to succession. They also tell a tragic story about Fatima: believing that her house had become a center of opposition, Umar raided the house with a group of angry men, who, while breaking in, physically injured the Prophet’s daughter, caused her a miscarriage, and ultimately caused her death.

No wonder this story is one of the most dramatic scenes in the “Lady of Heaven” — amplified and sensationalized. The movie also depicts a conspiracy by Abu Bakr’s daughter Aisha to poison the Prophet, which even most Shiites don’t believe in. (Critics also note that all bad characters were presented by actors with dark skin, revealing racist prejudice.)

In fact, such reports from this sect-making moment in Islam could be handled with much more prudence, as American academic Hassan Abbas offers in his recent book, The Prophet’s Heir: The Life of Ali ibn Abi Talib. Himself from the Shiite tradition, Dr. Abbas, eruditely compares Sunni and Shia narratives, and suggests that at times the truth could be somewhere in between. For example, the injury of Fatima during the raid on her house “could have possibly been an accident, unintentional in its very nature.”

As a Muslim from Sunni tradition, I think the same way: the truth could be somewhere between the two opposite narratives. I also think that none of us were eyewitnesses to these fourteen-century old events in Arabia, so we can all use some healthy dose of doubt.

I also see a broader lesson in early Islam that all Muslims should consider today.

This great religion of ours found political power too early in its making — and this has been not a blessing, as many think, but a curse. Political power, infused with religion, came with the abuse of power, and bitter struggles around it, which caused two bloody civil wars between the first Muslims, and the Sunni-Shia split that still causes bloodshed in our day and age.

That ancient split requires healing today, not hate mongering. And while “Lady of Heaven” was not helpful to that goal, neither was the fury of the protestors who forced the film to be pulled back, some while also chanting anti-Shia tropes.

Luckily there have also been sober statements from Muslim leaders in the US or UK, who criticized the film with scholarly arguments — like the Sunni and Shiite imams who released a joint declaration at the Al-Mahdi Institute in Birmingham on June 10. One of them, Shiite scholar Shaykh Arif, also called for “mature engagement” among Muslims about their differences, “to resolve them, or to agree to live by them.”

This was a wise call, and it reminded an ever-valid lesson: maturity is the best response to any provocative speech, book, or film — from “The Satanic Verses” to “Lady of Heaven.”