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العربية
Special issue · Closing

Closing: How Does the Victor Win?

Tarek Abou Ghazala — Editor

A tilted balance with two pans, beside fifty squares for the states, some of them lit

In our fourth issue we paused at a line of ʿAntara's — "I plunge into the fray, and hold back at the spoils" — and set against it, as a counter-model, ʿAmr ibn Kulthūm's "then we will be more ignorant than the ignorant." Both models met in a single night.

We saw a defeated man stand after sixteen minutes and say he would pray for his opponent to do well; a defeated woman concede before she was obliged to; and a senator discarded by his own party congratulate the man who beat its nominee. And we saw, on the other side, victors who closed their night mocking their opponents — one of them having complained, hours earlier, that his own name had been made material for mockery.

The point is not to award marks to individuals; that is not this magazine's work. The point is structural: a push does not repair the earth merely by succeeding, but by what the victor does the next morning. Victory bequeaths its instrument to whoever attains it, and whoever was pushed with contempt is apt to push with it in turn — so the instrument revolves and endures, and only its holders change.

When the Qur'an describes the servants of the Merciful, it does not describe them as people never addressed with abuse; it describes their answer when they are: "and when the ignorant address them, they say: peace" (al-Furqān 63; rendering of meaning). This is where the descriptive law parts from the normative principle: pushback tells us what will happen, and character alone decides whether what happened bears civilisation or ruin.

Whoever won this night will be asked about precisely that in two years' time — not about his seat count.

Limits and Sources

General limits for this issue

  • Counting is unfinished. The issue was written on the morning of 4 November and relies on agency and network projections; races including Alaska, Mississippi and a number of House districts remain uncalled, so the final sizes of both majorities are subject to change.
  • Describing the night as "a rebuke of the president" is a media and analytical description with evidence behind it, and it is not the only possible description; local factors, candidate quality and turnout all matter, and their weights are not yet clear.
  • Exit polls are preliminary, and the Pew Research Center warned before the election of unprecedented difficulties in this cycle's polling.
  • The issue is non-partisan: the figures were chosen for historical significance rather than any preference of one programme over another, which is why Florida is given a full article of its own.
  • Quotations from speeches are rendered by sense, not as authorised literal transcripts.
  • The verses: the issue's eight verses were matched against published text (quran.com, surahquran.com, and the King Saud University project), since api.alquran.cloud — used in previous issues — was unreachable in this session.
  • The images are drawn programmatically as the magazine does, and contain no faces resembling real people.

Sources

Issue contents: An American Night on the Scale of Pushback