Tea With Hezbollah by Ted Dekker & Carl Medearis

The spirit of reckless adventure animates Tea With Hezbollah, a tour of the Middle East guided by two Western authors who, driven by a need to understand hatred of America, set out to interview the region's key figures. Though some of their intended targets refuse to meet with them, they get surprisingly far in their quest, meeting with some of the Middle East's most reclusive powerbrokers and putting to them some basic queries about love, forgiveness, justice and brotherhood. Though this book will not re-shape the way the West views the Middle East, it is not without its fascinations and its revelations.

From Egyptian cabs to Saudi palaces, Mr. Dekker and Mr. Medearis give as much respect to the views of the average Arab as they do to the most powerful cleric. Once the religiosity has been parsed out, the interviews transcribed here reveal a universality of human wants and behaviors which span all ideologies, all faiths. All cultures have a tendency to gin up conspiracy theories to explain away defeats; they manifest belief in personal gods so that meaning can be applied to life; and they make important distinctions between the decency of regular citizens and the selfishness of governments who represent their interests. While These are all reassuringly human sentiments, it is this last which offered me the most comfort. Our governments may be the faces our nations put to the world, but they are hardly representative of us, of our sensitivities, our interests. They are snapshots of our emotions on election day and little else. And so, when the leading cleric of Hezbollah recognizes this distinction, choosing to focus his enmity on Western governments and not Western people, the reader is given a small but valuable glimpse into the rationales of men who are otherwise incomprehensible to us in the West.

This is far from a perfect book. Its portrait of the region is not only filtered through the conversations and the subjects Mr. Dekker and Mr. Medearis chose to include here, it is obscured by the agendas of the men with whom the authors spoke. But even if we must keep many grains of salt nearby while consuming this piece, there's value here. Humans are more or less the same, driven by the same goals, the same needs. Their circumstances are what make them different. We are all born into specific times, in specific places, with specific custom's, into specific traditions. These mores combine with our personalities to create our identities. But even if the finished products look, talk, act, and believe differently, the underlying software is still the same, urging us to seek out the same peace. Perhaps, if we all keep this in mind, West and East, the themes of brotherhood expressed in this book will be strong enough to quiet the hatred.

Interesting work. The interview with Nasrallah is captivating, but the tone here is ragged, veering between light-hearted and zealous. (3/5 Stars)